In late 1949 and 1950, troops of the People’s Liberation Army entered the eastern areas of Tibet and quickly solidified Communist control of the region. During the mid-1950s, Mao Zedong imposed radical reforms across the Tibetan plateau, famously declaring to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1953 that “religion is poison.” By 1959, much of Lhasa’s population assembled in resistance to the Chinese occupation of their capital. On March 10 of that year, just a few days before the PLA bombed the summer palace, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet to India, where he remains in exile to this day. In the decades that followed, especially during the years of the Cultural Revolution documented by Tsering Dorje, Chinese authorities carried out the widespread imprisonment and execution of religious leaders, the eradication of “old society,” and the destruction and desecration of religious sites on a mass scale. Lhasa, like the rest of Tibet, remains firmly under the control of Chinese authorities and its residents are subject to fluctuating degrees of social, cultural, economic, and religious repression. Tsering Woeser bears witness to these struggles in her work.



Prior to 1949, few Europeans or North Americans had set foot in Lhasa. Several, mainly British diplomats and civil servants such as Hugh Richardson and Frederick Spencer Chapman, produced photographic records of life prior to the Communist takeover of Tibet. They present life in the capital city largely free of Chinese political influence, albeit with a sharply colonial eye.