With a landscape as beautiful as it is forbidding and a unique Buddhist culture that remained largely intact for over a thousand years, Tibet has long seemed more of a dreamland than a real place. Its strangeness provoked in Europeans at once a sense of awe and a desire to grasp.
The British loved it so much that they launched a brief but brutal invasion in 1903 in order to establish friendly relations at gunpoint. The Nazis imagined Tibet as the home of the original Aryan race and Heinrich Himmler sent an expedition in 1938 to investigate the racial characteristics of the Tibetan people. The supposedly unsullied purity of the place has never been enough to persuade outsiders to leave it alone.
Tragically for Tibet, that often hypocritical western interest provoked in the emergent People's Republic of China, which occupied the region in 1950, an equal and opposite reaction. Against western romanticism, China posed a harsh and often brutal pragmatism. Tibet was not unique, it was just another part of China. Its Buddhist theocracy was not a rich if problematic civilisation, it was a false ideology to be crushed in the name of liberation. After the flight into exile in 1959 of Tibet's spiritual and political leader the Dalai Lama, the exigencies of the cold war ensured that the two rather crude competing versions of Tibet hardened into dogmas. On the one hand, some Tibetan nationalists continued to imagine that some form of feudal theocracy could be restored. On the other, China viewed legitimate expressions of Tibet's indigenous culture as nothing more than foreign-inspired plots and reacted to them with fierce repression.
However, as Fintan O'Toole reports in a three-part series starting today, circumstances have changed. China's ties with the rest of the world mean that there is now no serious international support for Tibetan separatism, especially of the violent kind. At the same time, the easing of repression and the restoration of Tibet's monasteries have made it clear that most Tibetans still place enormous value on their Buddhist traditions. The Dalai Lama remains a deeply revered symbol of Tibetan identity and, as he ages, has both the authority and the incentive to seek a lasting solution. With the launch of the extraordinary Tibet-Qinghai railway last month, China has opened Tibet to many more Chinese and foreign visitors.
These changes create the opportunity for a fresh look at the Tibet question. There is no realistic prospect of Tibetan independence (a reality reluctantly accepted by the Dalai Lama). But there is an evident and undeniable sense in which Tibet is culturally and environmentally unique, in ways that have real value for China and for the world. An autonomy that does not compromise Chinese sovereignty would be a genuine expression of that uniqueness. The self-confidence that China showed in building a railway over the high, arid plateaux of Tibet would be shown even more convincingly by building a bridge to a decent compromise.