By Rashme Sehgal
Lhasa, Sept. 21: The Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace may continue to dominate Lhasa’s skyline, but the city’s reputation of being the centre of religious activity has taken a beating. During the last decade, Tibet’s premier town has acquired the dubious distinction of having been turned into the sleaze capital of China with a booming sex industry catering to thousands of military personnel and construction workers stationed there.
There are some streets in Lhasa which are known to have more than 30 to 40 hairdressing salons and massage parlours. Each of these is manned by attractive young girls who are known to provide more than just a haircut. A conservative count within the Lhasa municipality alone showed over 1,000 brothels, according to the Tibetan Information Network.
Lhasa’s beautiful old city, called Barkhor, is the nerve centre of this activity. An elderly Tibetan woman who runs a restaurant perched between two massage parlours and who has visited Dharamsala told this reporter in broken Hindi, “Our culture has been completely destroyed. The kind of promiscuity being openly indulged in by our young girls is to be seen to be believed.” The sex trade in Lhasa, locals pointed out, is in the hands of Chinese gangs who receive political protection. Even on Pilgrims’ Street, where this reporter was staying, and which had maroon-robed monks sitting on the roadside every afternoon chanting hymns and begging for money, there were any number of karaoke bars where girls played interchangeable roles of hostess and prostitute.
Lhasa’s red light district, however, is Lingkhor. It has a string of beautiful shrines and temples with pilgrims doing the rounds during the day. But alongside these temples are hundreds of brothels where Chinese prostitutes have migrated from Sichuan and Qinhai. The Tibetan women have been driven into prostitution out of sheer poverty with many of them being migrants from the agricultural area of Kham. They first work in Lhasa as domestic servants after which they find themselves sucked into this profession.
The clients are known to be largely truck drivers and Armymen. The truck drivers are often driving in from Lanzhou of Chamdo town on their way to western Tibet.
Young Chinese men are known to drive around in swank cars picking up Tibetan girls from outside supermarkets. This reporter happened to witness two such encounters where swank SUVs driven by young Chinese men stopped outside a supermarket as early as 9 pm. The men stepped out of their cars and were soon joined by young women. A short conversation took place between the two sides after which the girls agreed to step into their cars to be driven away to a convenient destination.
The Delhi-based writer activist Tenzin Tsundue, who visited Lhasa in 1997 and who works closely with the organisation Friends of Tibet, describes the young Tibetan as being trapped between two dichotomous world views. “There is the traditional Tibetan world view where people are expected to lead lives of compassion and simplicity. The Chinese emphasis has been on a market-driven economy where only money talks.”
The problem for the Tibetans is compounded by the fact that despite being two million strong in the city, they remain a marginalised community with few employment avenues open to them. They are clearly discriminated against. An indication of their status was a comment made by a British historian, who said, “You will find hardly any Tibetan names in the Lhasa telephone directory.”
Tsundue says, “This has driven them to gambling, prostitution, drug-peddling and, of course, gang fights. Cultural resistance remains our only hope.”
With Tibetan being taught as a second language after Chinese in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), and most of their text books remaining little more than translations of Chinese text books, a large number of Tibetan families are sending their children to India in order that they receive a Tibetan education. “Parents are keen their children receive a proper education in Tibetan-run institutes functioning out of Dharamsala, Dehra Dun and Bangalore. Richer families apply for a Nepali visa after which their children are sent to India. The poorer families just smuggle their kids out of Tibet. Bringing them back is not an easy task because the Chinese embassy in Nepal reportedly issues a one-time visa on their return,” some Lhasa-based parents pointed out.
Older Tibetans have found a unique way of offsetting these problems. Every morning, hundreds of them, prayer wheels in hand and wearing traditional clothes, perform a morning parikrama of the Potala Palace. Many more flock on a daily basis to the 7th-century Jokhang temple, considered the holiest shrine of the Buddhists. The idea is to show the young that they have a great deal to remain proud of despite their difficult circumstances.
Determined to have the last word, the Chinese have built a monument to commemorate the peaceful liberation of Tibet and a People’s Park reminiscent of the Tiananmen Square bang opposite the Potala Palace. It was obviously done to thumb a nose at the local population, which has no choice but to endure it.
