By Simon Denyer

MCLEODGANJ, India - Three years ago, at the tender age of 17, Metok Lhazey sat in solitary confinement in a pitch dark, filthy and horribly cramped Chinese prison cell in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

This weekend, the nervous 20-year-old is dreaming about being crowned Miss Tibet in a small but controversial beauty pageant held by Tibetan refugees in northern India.

"My main motive is to push the Tibetan cause all over the world, because I know what is going on in Tibet," she told Reuters in her hotel room as she prepared for the contest, plastic beads in her hair and blue bangles on her wrists.

The Miss Tibet beauty pageant is in its fifth year, a budget contest in small town of McLeodganj that attracts only a handful of contestants but plenty of controversy.

This year, a cosmeticist from Toronto in Canada, two students from India and one from Nepal make up the field.

Not surprisingly, the contest has irritated the Chinese, whose troops entered Tibet in 1950 and abhor the refugees' "splittist" agenda.

The reigning Miss Tibet was forced to withdraw from medium-level beauty pageants in Zimbabwe and Malaysia last year after objections from the Chinese, organisers say.

It has also irked conservative Tibetan Buddhists -- the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile here once famously called it "un-Tibetan" and "aping Western culture".

This year it even managed to irritate the Indians -- one young woman serving with a high-altitude Tibetan unit in the Indian army was forced to withdraw on the eve of the contest.

In an attempt to generate a little more publicity, the organisers threw the controversial "swimwear round" open for public viewing for the first time this year.

The Tibetan Womens Association expresses the ambivalence of many older Tibetans.

Anything that promotes the Tibetan cause is worth supporting, says president B. Tsering, even if she draws the line at Tibetan girls parading around in bikinis to a crowd of leering men.

"There are a few things we can take from other cultures, and some we can make do without," she said.

In truth, the girls looked a bit uncomfortable as they came on stage in bikinis on Friday and were then presented with a microphone to talk politics and Tibet. But they all insist they are happy to demonstrate they have the body of a beauty queen.

TIBETAN CULTURE CHANGING

"Culture is not like stagnant water that remains in a pool," Lhazey said. "It is like a flowing river, it keeps on evolving, and Tibetan women should go along with this."

Lhazey first fled Tibet in 1999, making the gruelling trek across the Himalayas near the route where at least one refugee girl was reportedly shot by Chinese border guards last month.

She returned to Lhasa when her father grew ill, but did not make it in time to see him before he died. Instead she says she spent three weeks in small jails at Chinese checkpoints on the road to Lhasa, often beaten as she was interrogated about her links to the government-in-exile in India.

Later she was jailed for more than a month in Lhasa before escaping again two years ago.

With her solid cheekbones and rosy cheeks she seems the most "Tibetan" of the girls. She is the only one who does not speak English, and the only one who has experienced what Tibetans call "the atrocities of Chinese rule" at first hand.

But this might not be enough to secure the title, against more polished entrants who grew up abroad and who knew better how to get a rowdy, mainly male audience on their sides.

Still, she says she is having the time of her life.

"When I was a child I learnt so much about happiness and sadness," she said. "It is very important to experience everything. Today I am very happy."