There are many Lhasas. One is a grid of uniform boulevards lined
with plush hotels, all-night bars, and blue-glass-fronted offices.
Another is a warren of alleyways that surround a seventh-century
temple built to pin down a supine demoness. A web of Stalinist,
rectangular blocks houses the new "nomenklatura." Crumbling
mansions, once home to noble ministers, famous lovers, nationalist
spies, and covert revolutionaries, now serve as shopping malls and
"faux"-antique hotels. Each embodiment of the city partakes of the
others' memories, whispered across time and along the city
streets.
In this imaginative new work, Robert Barnett offers a powerful
and lyrical exploration of a city long idealized, disregarded, or
misunderstood by outsiders. Looking to its streets and stone,
Robert Barnett presents a searching and unforgettable portrait of
Lhasa, its history, and its illegibility. His book not only offers
itself as a manual for thinking about contemporary Tibet but also
questions our ways of thinking about foreign places.
Barnett juxtaposes contemporary accounts of Tibet, architectural
observations, and descriptions by foreign observers to describe
Lhasa and its current status as both an ancient city and a modern
Chinese provincial capital. His narrative reveals how historical
layering, popular memory, symbolism, and mythology constitute the
story of a city. Besides the ancient Buddhist temples and former
picnic gardens of the Tibetan capital, "Lhasa" describes the urban
sprawl, the harsh rectangular structures, and the geometric
blue-glass tower blocks that speak of the anxieties of successive
regimes intent upon improving on the past. In Barnett's excavation
of the city's past, the buildings and the city streets, interwoven
with his own recollections of unrest and resistance, recount the
story of Tibet's complex transition from tradition to modernity and
its painful history of foreign encounters and political
experiment.
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