Tibet in translation: how the capital metropolis of Lhasa has been reshaped, and rewritten

The modifications in Tibet’s Lhasa are maybe most evident within the coronary heart of the outdated metropolis, Barkhor Square, the place the revered Jokhang Temple stands. Built in 639 CE by the “first king of unified Tibet”, Songtsen Gampo, the deities of the Buddha had been introduced by his two wives, Tang Dynasty’s Princess Wencheng and Princess Bhrikuti from Nepal.

Built round this temple, the place Buddhists would do a every day parikrama, was a bustling market. In 2007, it was filled with stalls promoting jewelry, handicrafts, wood bowls, prayer flags, incense and meals. Today, Barkhor stands as an empty piazza, with outlets on the far ends of the sq..

Decades-long transformation

In 2012, as a part of a drive to present Lhasa a facelift, the stalls had been cleared, and avenue distributors moved from exterior the Jokhang temple, and alongside the primary Youthok Lam (avenue) that results in the Potala Palace. The signage is now virtually fully in Chinese, and the shopkeepers belong to China’s Han ethnic majority in contrast to previously, once they had been principally Tibetan.

Many of these moved out are actually housed in a multi-story concrete mall, Tibet Market. On the bottom flooring, the primary hall has extra Han shopkeepers, with Tibetans relegated to the traces behind or flooring above. Inside the Jokhang Temple, and on the opera, Princess Wencheng, which has been carried out in Lhasa and different components of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) for greater than a decade, the Chinese queen, and hyperlink to Buddhism are performed up over the ties to Nepal and India. This summer season, Lhasa hosted one other opera — a mix of a neighborhood epic, King Gesar, with the Confucian Shi Jing (Book of Poems).

The three most seen modifications at Barkhor Square — infrastructural, demographic and cultural — characterize the transformation of Tibet over the previous few a long time. As a member of three Indian journalist delegations invited to Lhasa by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I’ve witnessed these modifications throughout visits in 2007, 2014 and June 2025.

Infrastructural modifications

After annexing Tibet in 1950, many of the Chinese authorities’s planning centered on safety, particularly regarding Tibetan Buddhism and monks. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Jokhang Temple was closed for worship. But, by the flip of the century, there was a shift in direction of controlling the area by means of a blitzkrieg of funding. China’s tenth Five-Year Plan (2001-2005), cleared by the National People’s Congress, allotted over $4 billion for infrastructure growth in Tibet, which rose to $21 billion within the eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006-10), for growing expressways, a high-speed rail mission, and greater than 300 key tasks.

The launch of the Beijing-Lhasa prepare in 2006, which defied the steep climb to the Qinghai plateau, was hailed as an engineering marvel however speeded the inflow of mainland Chinese to the area. The drive from the airport to Lhasa metropolis, which as soon as took virtually three hours, now takes simply 45 minutes attributable to tunnels bored by means of the mountains, and photo voltaic panels all over the place point out a renewable power transition. Experts and Tibetan activists say that the speedy building of roads, tunnels, airports, and concrete cities like New Lhasa, throughout the Kyichu (Lhasa River) from Old Lhasa, has brought on environmental injury, speeded world warming, and melted glaciers in a land that cradles the world’s highest mountains and is the supply of lots of Asia’s rivers. According to our tour-guides, rising temperatures in Lhasa and disappearing snow, even over Mount Kailash, are palpable.

The building, mining and malls mandated by the Chinese authorities’s growth plans have introduced many employees and mainland Chinese in search of jobs. We meet many within the buying areas in addition to the federal government places of work we go to. From 2010 to 2020, the inhabitants of Tibet (or Xizang, because the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) mandated the area’s six prefectures be known as in official paperwork) grew from about 2.7 million to three.1 million. But the share of Tibetans or ethnic minorities dropped from almost 90% to 86%, indicating a demographic change.

Linguistic politics

The language in Lhasa has shifted — Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua) is taught in faculties to inculcate “nationwide unification and strengthen ethnic unity” by means of a “fashionable schooling” in line with a 2023 CPC paper. All official paperwork and signage now use the Chinese title ‘Xizang’ and never Tibet.

At Lhasa’s School Number 8 — the place many worldwide delegations are introduced — the primary language of instruction seems to be Mandarin, although we had been taken to a category the place college students had been chanting in Tibetan, and one other the place a scholar was practising the Tibetan script. This is a delicate topic for the Chinese authorities, amid UN Special Rapporteurs’ criticism that about 1 million Tibetan youngsters had been “separated from households” and pushed into faculties that sought to “assimilate Tibetans into majority Han tradition”. While the CPC paper particulars measures to proceed the research of Tibetan Buddhism “tailored to China’s actuality”, it additionally lists cultural modifications which might be extra apparent to the attention in Lhasa.

Relocation tasks for poorer and rural Tibetans resemble Beijing hutongs (alleyways lined with homes) slightly than smaller, vibrant Tibetan houses seen within the countryside. There, we meet Tibetan households in a room the place pictures of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Chairman Mao are prominently displayed. Security forces, that we noticed frequently in 2007, patrolling Lhasa streets with riot management gear and cattle-prongs to cope with self-immolation protests, are much less seen. In busy areas, we see high-tech police surveillance vans, nonetheless.

The disappearance of hyperlinks to India, an everyday journey vacation spot for Tibetans now extra restricted by a closely managed Nepal-Tibet border, is clear. In 2007, stalls at Barkhor bought Bollywood DVDs, outlets stocked Indian merchandise, and monks at Jokhang and the Potala Palace spoke to us in Hindi. Two a long time later, only a few converse, or admit to talking, Hindi in any respect.

Erasing the Dalai Lama

The largest change centres on erasing any reference to the 14th Dalai Lama, now 90 years outdated. He escaped from Lhasa 65 years in the past, however his affect stays a priority for the Chinese authorities. All pictures of him are banned, and worshipping him is illegitimate. However, in 2007, I met Tibetans who, recognising me as an Indian, requested about him and confirmed images hid of their jackets, or behind store counters.

In 2014, throughout a short interval of openness following Chinese authorities talks with Dalai Lama representatives, we visited his summer season house in Norbulingka, the place Tibetans thronged to supply khadas (silk scarves) to his belongings — furnishings, a hi fi, even a towel rack.

This time, we’re advised Norbulingka is closed. I ask a younger man in Barkhor if he’s following the Dalai Lama’s birthday celebrations in Dharamshala. “Yes,” he says, pointing to his chest as he seems round furtively, and provides, “however solely inside my coronary heart.”

suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in