Tsering Dorje was born in 1937 to a Tibetan mother and Han Chinese father in the Eastern Tibetan town of Derge, in the present-day Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province. At the age of thirteen, as Mao Zedong’s forces were entering Tibet, he joined the People’s Liberation Army at the urging of his father. He would remain a soldier for the rest of his life. He acquired a Zeiss Ikon camera in his late teens and became an enthusiastic photographer.



Stationed in Lhasa in 1966, he used his camera to record the arrival of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. His black and white images provide the only known visual account of the revolutionary zeal and political violence aimed at the Tibetan people during that period in Lhasa. His photographs document the mass rallies, political parades, and struggle sessions aimed at religious officials, government workers, landlords, shopkeepers.



Tsering Dorje died in 1991 while serving as a deputy commander of the PLA forces in Lhasa.  His work was first published in Taiwan under the title Shajie (殺劫) (Locus, 2006) which presented some 300 of his photographs with accompanying text by his daughter Tsering Woeser. It later appeared in English as Forbidden Memory (Potomic Books, 2020).