“From Xizang and Qinghai.”
Guy Mettan’s travels in Tibet.
Guy Mettan, the distinguished Swiss journalist, memorably reported for The Floutist, here and here, from the Donbas, formerly the eastern provinces of Ukraine and now incorporated into the Russian Federation. Mettan was and remains one of the few correspondents to travel in these regions since the Russian military’s intervention three years ago. We were impressed not only with his initiative, his eye, and his reportage; we appreciated as much or more Mettan’s faculties of discernment and his independence of mind.
Now Mettan takes us to Tibet. And again we are keeping company with an accomplished correspondent who is working at the height of his powers while insisting on thinking for himself and remaining true to what he sees. As Mettan acknowledges, his Tibet reportage may land hard among some Western readers for the extent to which it contradicts prevailing orthodoxies. In just this way we value this report in part because it requires us to think.
The Floutist is pleased to welcome Guy Mettan once again into its pages.
— The Editors.
Guy Mettan
Next time you’re in Lhasa, don’t forget to visit the Museum of Modern Art. Climb the often steep and narrow stairs of the White and Red Palaces of the Potala, burn a candle made of yak butter in front of one of the thousands of painted Buddhas of the Jokhang. They are to Lhasa what Versailles and Notre–Dame are to Paris. But don’t overlook the brand-new art museum, opened in December 2023. It is in a former cement factory masterfully transformed and restored by designers and architects from Shanghai’s Tongji University. Here you’ll discover a radically new facet of the autonomous province of Tibet, or rather Xizang, as it’s officially called.
I dare to make this recommendation because I am confident visitors won’t be disappointed by either the container or the content of this remarkable museum: The converted edifice and what is in it are both rich and visually innovative. I read it as a very successful mix of industrial history and cultural modernity.
As I describe the Museum of Modern Art, and in all of what follows, I know I’m taking the risk of being scorned as a «useful idiot of the Beijing regime,» so enduring are the widely accepted accounts of Tibetans as a people invaded and oppressed by the Chinese. No, this is not an investigative report featuring systematic inquiries into different layers of Tibetan society—I hadn’t the time or the linguistic capacities for such a project. I offer here a more impressionistic account based on my travels and talks with people I met: engineers, scholars, gallerists, teachers, monks, shopkeepers. The risk I mention is one I accept: I am simply recounting what I’ve seen. The truth of what I saw, of Tibet and its people, will sooner or later impose itself upon our consciences. Of this I am confident.
Over the course of a fortnight last autumn I surveyed the provinces of Qinghai (and the area around its capital, Xining) and Xizang, from the Lhasa valley to Nyingchi prefecture. The two provinces are very similar. Mountainous, semi-desert, with a harsh climate and a population of around ten million in a territory four times the size of France, they form the heartland of the Tibetan high plateau and of Tibetan Buddhism.
Contrary to the prevalent assumption that the Dalai Lama is the sole spiritual and political authority in Tibet, it is home to Buddhist sects of various persuasions and numerous religious and ethnic minorities, including Muslims, Christians, Taoists, Han, Hui, Tu, Salar, and Mongols. Rising 2,600 to 8,000 meters above sea level, the region effectively serves as Asia’s water tower; it is the source of the great rivers that irrigate the Chinese plains, notably the Yellow and the Yangtze.
To put it simply, Tibetan Buddhism derives from the ancient texts and practices of Tantrism and is divided into four main schools. Here I identify these very briefly:
¶ Gelug, the most recent school, known as the Yellow Hat School. The 14th Dalai Lama, who has taken refuge in India since 1959, and the 11th Panchen Lama, who lives between Beijing and Shigatse, are followers.
¶ Nyingma, the oldest of the schools, is known as the Red Hat Sect. It is closer to the indigenous Tibetan religion and is centered around six large monasteries.
¶ Kagyu, known as the White Sect because of the white stripes adorning the monks’ robes.
¶ Sakya, the «Grey Earth School,» is the smallest of the four and is named for the grey-white rocks on the hillside where its ancestral monastery is located.
Each of these four schools has its own traditions, doctrine, and practices. These are more or less rigorous, one school to another, and they do not always mix well. Taken together, some 46,000 monks follow these various orders.
So much for the general context.
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In Xining, our program included a visit to the Ta’er monastery complex, one of the oldest and largest in the country, with dozens of buildings and almost ten thousand monks. We also saw the Qinghai Salt Lake Biological Reserve, one of the largest and highest in continental Asia (3000 meters above sea level), the village of Deji, home to some 250 families from the most isolated regions of the province, and the town of Tongren, a historic commercial and cultural center. Then it was on to the famous Regong Art School, in Longshu (known for traditional thangka painting, frescoes, and patchwork), and the Golog Ethnic High School, a provincial, tuition-free boarding school for 800 students from the region’s various ethnic minorities.
The most spectacular of our visits was undoubtedly to the energy complex in Hainan prefecture. We are still in Qinghai province. China has invested $20 billion here to build, as far as the eye can see, the world's largest solar-energy farm, 600 square kilometers of photovoltaic panels, more than twice the size of Geneva. These are connected with concentrated solar power towers and vast wind farms over an area larger than the Canton of Vaud (4,000 sq. km), all coupled with hydroelectric dams on the Yellow River. With 1,200 gigawatts of solar and wind power installed to date, China has become by far the world's leading producer of these forms of renewable energy.
In Xizang (Tibet Autonomous Province), our official program—as arranged by Beijing authorities—was just as focused. We visited Potala Palace, with its walls bleached with yak milk; Jokhang Temple, a major pilgrimage site; the Jieguan Museum of Modern Art and Gallery of Contemporary Art, with works worth millions of dollars; the Center of Tibetan Medicine; the University of Tibet; the Academy of Tibetan Buddhism (a vast theological campus accommodating 700 monks and a hundred nuns from the various schools), and even a factory making high-tech titanium-based pots and pans.
The end of our trip was devoted to the natural beauty of Nyingchi prefecture («the Throne of the Sun» for Tibetans, «the Switzerland of Tibet» for tourists). These sites are reached by a brand-new freeway that rises to an altitude of 5,000 meters. This city, also named Nyingchi, of 500,000 inhabitants is set in the heart of wooded valleys bordered by lakes and high peaks, such as the spectacular Namcha Barwa massif, which rises to 7,782 meters and is Tibet's holiest mountain, along with Mount Kailash.
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What can we learn from a journey such as mine? First, it yielded a surprising impression of modernity and economic development. As sleepy, dusty, and slightly depressing as Lhasa and its environs had seemed to me on my first visit, in 2003, it now seems vigorously active, lively, and energetic today. Freeways, high-speed rail lines (the Beijing–Xian–Lhasa line and the Chengdu–Nyingchi line), impeccable airports, as well as apartment blocks, heritage buildings and a fully restored old town, asphalt roads and electric cars, high-voltage power lines, tourist infrastructure, schools, colleges, hospitals, small and large businesses: This is the Tibet I saw.
Since the 2012 decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to develop Tibet’s eastern provinces, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in infrastructure development. It shows. Tibet is becoming a popular destination for Chinese and Asian tourists. Growth has exceeded 10 percent per year for several years. To achieve this result, Beijing has mobilized the entire country on a grand scale, with a rather original policy: It has engaged financial, entrepreneurial, and social resources of China’s wealthy coastal provinces. Energy production is being developed by consortia in central and western China, while Shanghai and Guangzhou, the notably wealthy coastal cities, are building roads, schools, hospitals and factories. These areas are providing not only material resources but also human and technical resources: They send executives, teachers, managers, and civil servants to train the local workforce.
Western propaganda has put this across as a guardianship Beijing has imposed on Tibetans. But in my view it amounts to a form of mentoring that has the advantage of making both all participants in this project, including Tibetans, responsible for the Autonomous Province’s development. The results have been spectacular. In less than ten years, extreme poverty and illiteracy have been eradicated. Let’s not forget that until the 1950s, 90 percent of the Tibetan population lived in serfdom and could neither read nor write.
Another observation: Tibetan culture and Buddhism did not seem to me to be under threat—quite the contrary. Twenty years ago, the walls of some temples still bore the intentionally defacing marks Red Guards made during the Cultural Revolution, while greedy monks grasped in their fat fingers bundles of banknotes entrusted to them by pilgrims who entered the temple on their stomachs through the mud. Today, this is no longer the case. Offerings are deposited in designated chests. The halls, filled with paintings and statues of Buddhas, Boddhisattvas, and other maitreyas, have been restored and illuminated. Red-robed monks abound in the streets, temples, and monastic schools. Many monasteries have been renovated and equipped with heating, access roads, and internet connections.
The Potala and Tibetan culture altogether are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, as is Tibetan medicine. The Tibetan language is taught in schools and appears on public monuments and official documents alongside ordinary Chinese. Numerous museums and libraries collect, conserve, transcribe, comment on, and digitize the sacred texts of Tibetan Buddhism, making them available to monks and the public via the internet in an unprecedented effort to archive and preserve documents sometimes forgotten in monastery archives. More than 200 researchers are dedicated to this work, conducted at Xizang University and at the Tibetology Research Center in Beijing.
On the government website, you can find even an official document extolling the virtues of freedom of worship and religion in Tibet. It’s true that in the temples, it’s easier to find the portrait of the Panchen Lama, the second leader of Tibetan Buddhism, than that of the Dalai Lama, discredited since his flight to Dharamshala and strongly suspected of having supported resistance movements and riots that disrupted Lhasa in 2008. It may seem a contradiction to a Westerner, but in Lhasa and Xining, Tibetan tradition and religion seem far more alive than Christian tradition and worship in much of the West.
China launched the campaign to modernize and integrate historic Tibet into modern China under the slogan: «Tibet is our home, China is our homeland.» It’s safe to say that the gamble is about to pay off. With a new agreement with India on joint border control, reached just before the BRICS summit in Kazan last October, the West’s last hope of separating Tibet from China has vanished.
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Guy Mettan is an independent journalist in Geneva and a member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva. He has previously worked at the Journal de Genève, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, and Le Nouveau Quotidien. He subsequently served as director and editor-in-chief of Tribune de Genève. In 1996, Mettan founded Le Club suisse de la presse, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019.
Two of Mettan’s books, Europe’s Existential Dilemma: To be or not to be an American vassal, and Creating Russophobia: From the Great Schism to anti–Putin hysteria, are available in English from Clarity Press.
Thank you for this illuminating travel account. It is very different from the usual China bashing mainstream journalism that we are being fed all the time.