Monasteries into Motorways

Isabel Hilton

  • Lhasa: Streets with Memories by Robert Barnett
    Columbia, 219 pp, £16.00, March 2006, ISBN 0 231 13680 3

If the Dalai Lama ever makes it back to Lhasa, as excited press reports have suggested he might, he won’t recognise the place. The city that he left in 1959 had fewer than 30,000 inhabitants; it is now six times the size. In 1951 it covered one square mile; now it sprawls over twenty. The original city – a warren of low-rise Tibetan houses with their distinctive tapering shape, proof against earthquakes; their double brick walls, proof against Tibet’s winters; and their austere white façades decorated with black-painted window frames and enlivened by fluttering pelmets – has largely been bulldozed. The remnants are now known as the Tibetan city, a small island in the sea of the new Chinese city.

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[*] Reaktion, 256 pp., £19.95, August 2005, 1 86189 235 7. Andrew Nathan will write about Beijing and Shanghai in a future issue.

Vol. 28 No. 17 · 7 September 2006 » Isabel Hilton » Monasteries into Motorways (print version)
Pages 25-27 | 3166 words