Absurdity, Allegory and China

Below find several photos from my good friend, Karamibu, who has traveled back to Jiegu (Gyegu, Jyekundu). Click on the photos for a larger version. I would encourage you to also check out the Yushu Earthquake Response team, a coalition of Tibetan NGOs who are frantically busy on the ground in Yushu and coordinating relief [...]

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I have a television, but it stopped working a year ago, and it had probably stopped working long before that. I wouldn’t have known since I’d rarely turned it on. Discovering that it was broken was a mei banfa (what are you gonna do!) moment, the thought of getting it fixed never considered. I am [...]

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Now that the media have their story in Jyekundu (aka Jiegu and Gyegu), the county seat of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAR), the real work of material relief, emotional support and infrastructure rebuilding is shifting into gear. This is the hard, everyday grind of post-disaster work, which is usually not deemed newsworthy unless it involves [...]

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I have a good friend, a young Tibetan man, who has traveled to Jyekundu (Jiegu) – the center of the Yushu earthquake devastation – to distribute relief aid. He is also a fair hand with a camera. His photos are starting to come in now, and they can be found at Karamibu’s Flickr site. He [...]

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Over the last 24-hours I have been contacted several times by friends who are aware of my work in Qinghai province, asking if I have any more information than is available through the news orgs. Unfortunately, I do not. Though I know several people from the Yushu area, my involvement is in a Tibetan area [...]

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I have taken to reading Ben Schott’s column in the NYT called Schott’s Vocab, “a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles — some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy.” It is hard not to love our words, since they are at the center of how we tell our stories. How they evolve is always [...]

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Here’s the latest on spring tourism opportunities in large and beautiful areas of Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai provinces: Official: Tibetan areas closed to foreigners An official at the tourism office of northwestern Gansu province’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, home to a major monastery and large Tibetan communities, said the region was closed to foreigners and [...]

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Just when I was wondering what had happened to the world’s most expensive train, this shows up. (h/t to Danwei). And at a great deal, too – 50% off. Twenty-one days as an extravagantly pampered tourist in one of the world’s most fragile environments on a train that is “normally reserved for celebrities and government [...]

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Recently I visited Gangca Tibetan Primary School (elevation 3292 meters, 10, 800 feet) to view a local style of stone architecture called  rDo sBis (in the local Tibetan dialect it is pronounced do we, as in “Do we know where we are?” – accent on the we. This is one of the three styles characteristic [...]

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I’ve just returned from an all-too-short trip to Qinghai where the weather was a little cooler than Tianjin and Beijing. There was snow on Laji Shan (3820 meters) and cold rain in the lower valleys on several days. On a trip into a nomadic region to visit a water project I climbed the slippery muddy [...]

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