The Riots in Lhasa
by Eirik Granqvist, a foreign expert in Shanghai who visited Tibet in
2006
"The western medias announced that China had cut all information and
that articles about the riots could not be sent out! I got mad about all the
apparently incorrect information and wrote this article and two other
similar ones although I am not a journalist but just because I could not
stand all the bad things about China that was told. I sent them by e-mail
without problems and they arrived well but two newspapers did neither
respond neither publish what I had written. The third answered and wanted a
shorter version that was published many days later as a normal 'readers
voice'. What Dalai Lama had said was largely published every day together
with a real anti-China propaganda. What I had written was apparently too
China friendly for the 'free press'."
I was very shocked by what I had seen in the television and been reading
in China daily about the riots in Lhasa. The most that shocked me was
anyhow may be not the cruel events by themselves but how the medias in my
country of origin, Finland, reported the events. A friend has scanned and
sent me articles and I have checked also myself what can be found at
Internet.
Very few Finnish people have ever visited Tibet, but I was there
together with my wife in 2006. This was private persons and not as a part of
a group-travel. I have seen Lhasa with my own eyes. I have been talking and
chatting with people there. This was without any restrictions. Okay, we had
a lovely and very competent guide that helped us much and took us where we
wanted to go in the mornings but in the afternoons we were alone. Therefore
I think that I have something to tell.
I am also interested in history and know more than people in general.
When writing this, I do not have any reference books so I write out of my
memory. If I do a small mistake somewhere, I beg your pardon. Anyhow, I
think that this gives my writing an objectivity. I am well aware of that I
will be accused for this and that for writing what I think is the truth. I
will be accused by those who think that they know but do not know and by
those that haven't seen by their own eyes.
Tibet was for centuries an autonomous concordat between Nepal and China.
Sometimes China ruled Nepal as well. The king of Tibet used therefore to
have one Chinese wife and one Nepalese and then a number of Tibetan ones.
With the fifth Dalai Lama, the religious and the political power were
unified under the rule of one person, The Dalai Lama. Tibet became a
theocratic dictatorship and closed itself for the rest of the world. No
foreigners were anymore allowed in.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the famous Swedish traveller Sven
Hedin made an attempt to reach Lhasa but was sent politely back, out of
Tibet by Dalai Lama.
A French woman, Alexandra David-Néel was more successful. She visited
Lhasa dressed as a Tibetan pilgrim and she was fluent in the Tibetan
language. She told how she was afraid many times that she should be
discovered and then she knew that she like other suspects or opponents
should "happen to fall down" from the walls of the Potala palace.
Tibet was not a paradise. Tibet was an inhuman dictatorship!
The weakened Chinese Qing Dynasty had more and more lost its influence
in Tibet. Tibet became more and more interesting for the Russian empire in
the north and the British in the south.
In 1903 a British army expedition directed by the colonel Younghusband
reached Lhasa. The British lost 4 soldiers but slaughtered more the 700
Tibetans that tryed to stop them, mainly by magic. The British installed "a
commercial representation" in Lhasa. The Chinese evacuated Dalai Lama to the
Qinghai plateau where he hade limited rights of move, probably for
preventing him from having contacts with the British occupants.
The Finnish national hero, Marshal Mannerheim, visited him there in 1907
during his famous horseback trip through central Asia. He was then a
colonel in the Tsar Russian army and his trip was in reality a spy trip.
Therefore the 13th Dalai Lama was interesting.
The power of Dalai Lama was weakened. In 1950 the PLA marched in to
Tibet without war. The 14th Dalai Lama seems at the beginning to have
accepted this just as a security for his power as the theocratic dictator he
was. He enlarged and restructured the Norbulingka Summer Palace in a luxury
way in 1954.
by Eirik Granqvist, a foreign expert in Shanghai who visited Tibet in
2006
"The western medias announced that China had cut all information and
that articles about the riots could not be sent out! I got mad about all the
apparently incorrect information and wrote this article and two other
similar ones although I am not a journalist but just because I could not
stand all the bad things about China that was told. I sent them by e-mail
without problems and they arrived well but two newspapers did neither
respond neither publish what I had written. The third answered and wanted a
shorter version that was published many days later as a normal 'readers
voice'. What Dalai Lama had said was largely published every day together
with a real anti-China propaganda. What I had written was apparently too
China friendly for the 'free press'."
I was very shocked by what I had seen in the television and been reading
in China daily about the riots in Lhasa. The most that shocked me was
anyhow may be not the cruel events by themselves but how the medias in my
country of origin, Finland, reported the events. A friend has scanned and
sent me articles and I have checked also myself what can be found at
Internet.
Very few Finnish people have ever visited Tibet, but I was there
together with my wife in 2006. This was private persons and not as a part of
a group-travel. I have seen Lhasa with my own eyes. I have been talking and
chatting with people there. This was without any restrictions. Okay, we had
a lovely and very competent guide that helped us much and took us where we
wanted to go in the mornings but in the afternoons we were alone. Therefore
I think that I have something to tell.
I am also interested in history and know more than people in general.
When writing this, I do not have any reference books so I write out of my
memory. If I do a small mistake somewhere, I beg your pardon. Anyhow, I
think that this gives my writing an objectivity. I am well aware of that I
will be accused for this and that for writing what I think is the truth. I
will be accused by those who think that they know but do not know and by
those that haven't seen by their own eyes.
Tibet was for centuries an autonomous concordat between Nepal and China.
Sometimes China ruled Nepal as well. The king of Tibet used therefore to
have one Chinese wife and one Nepalese and then a number of Tibetan ones.
With the fifth Dalai Lama, the religious and the political power were
unified under the rule of one person, The Dalai Lama. Tibet became a
theocratic dictatorship and closed itself for the rest of the world. No
foreigners were anymore allowed in.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the famous Swedish traveller Sven
Hedin made an attempt to reach Lhasa but was sent politely back, out of
Tibet by Dalai Lama.
A French woman, Alexandra David-Néel was more successful. She visited
Lhasa dressed as a Tibetan pilgrim and she was fluent in the Tibetan
language. She told how she was afraid many times that she should be
discovered and then she knew that she like other suspects or opponents
should "happen to fall down" from the walls of the Potala palace.
Tibet was not a paradise. Tibet was an inhuman dictatorship!
The weakened Chinese Qing Dynasty had more and more lost its influence
in Tibet. Tibet became more and more interesting for the Russian empire in
the north and the British in the south.
In 1903 a British army expedition directed by the colonel Younghusband
reached Lhasa. The British lost 4 soldiers but slaughtered more the 700
Tibetans that tryed to stop them, mainly by magic. The British installed "a
commercial representation" in Lhasa. The Chinese evacuated Dalai Lama to the
Qinghai plateau where he hade limited rights of move, probably for
preventing him from having contacts with the British occupants.
The Finnish national hero, Marshal Mannerheim, visited him there in 1907
during his famous horseback trip through central Asia. He was then a
colonel in the Tsar Russian army and his trip was in reality a spy trip.
Therefore the 13th Dalai Lama was interesting.
The power of Dalai Lama was weakened. In 1950 the PLA marched in to
Tibet without war. The 14th Dalai Lama seems at the beginning to have
accepted this just as a security for his power as the theocratic dictator he
was. He enlarged and restructured the Norbulingka Summer Palace in a luxury
way in 1954.