Xiahe

I'm sure you're all aware of the major protests that have taken place in Tibetan cities inside and outside of China. A lot of the footage I've seen has been from Xiahe (Xiàhé 夏河). It's not in Tibet proper, but in China's Gansu province. There's a major Tibetan monastery there, its name usually romanized as Labrang or Blabrang, where thousands of monks live, and it's an important center of Tibetan Buddhist worship for the Yellow Hat sect (of which the Dalai Lama is the head).

I spent four days in Xiahe in 1999 -- it's an amazing place. I gave a photograph of the Dalai Lama that I'd smuggled into the country to one of the young monks I met there. The town is remote, peaceful, and lovely, which is why it's became a destination for backpackers as well as Tibetan pilgrims.

The personal connection makes it especially distressing for me to see the violence going on there.

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This is a rather clever editorial cartoon that appeared in the March 18 issue of The Daily Focus, a local free paper.


The logo of the Beijing Olympics is a stylized version of the Chinese character 京. It is pronounced jīng in Chinese (gyeong 경 in Korean) and means 'capital city'. It is the second character writing the city name Beijing 北京, which literally means 'Northern capital'. (And, just in case you are interested in such things, it is pronounced kyō in Japanese, and is the second character writing the city name Tokyo, which literally means 'Eastern capital'.) For the Olympics logo, the character has been stylized in such a way that it resembles a running athlete. Here the cartoonist has re-imagined the figure as a bloodied body lying on the ground. The caption reads "Ah ... Tibet!"