By Tenzin Choephel
Phayul Correspondent
The Temples of Lhasa is a book containing a comprehensive survey of historic Buddhist sites in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The study is based on the Tibet Heritage Fund’s official five-year architectural conservation project in Tibet, during which the author and his team had unlimited access to the buildings studied. I had an opportunity to talk to one of the founding and active members of the Fund, Mr. Mathew Akester. We, Tibetans, should applaud, appreciate and thank the efforts of these respectable people in helping preserve our culture. The following is the account of their work in Tibet from Mathew Akester.
“It started out as a documentation process in 1993 but in 1995-96 it really got going. It was the time when the old city was being destroyed very fast. Our objective was to document all the old buildings before they were destroyed because at that time nobody really thought that we would ever get permission to do actual restoration work because of the political situation and because this organization was basically all foreigners started by a German and a Portuguese. We were all spending time together in Lhasa. This went on for a few years.
Tibet Heritage Fund (THF), as it is now called, started doing actual restoration work in the summer of 1998. Somehow, contrary to what everyone expected, the city government gave us permission to mark all the buildings which deserved restoration, which were somehow historic or should be counted as heritage and I think it was summer of ‘98 that we put blue plaques outside those buildings as it’s done in the west to show that they were preserved and could not be demolished. We had seventy something houses marked like that. At that time, we were negotiating funding and the main people of the project were able to raise enough funds to start working on one or two houses. To this day, I don’t know if anyone really knows why we got the permission. It was very surprising.
I think the first houses restored were Drapchi Shak and another, just on the north side of Tsuklakhang right in the Barkor. For the next year and a half, work went from strength to strength. Probably five or six large houses, former mansions of aristocratic families within the Barkor, most of which were in an area called Ludepu which is in the inner Barkor around the Tsuklakhang, were either completely or more than half way restored in that period. We built up a work force and by the year 2000, we had more than 200 people working on the project, most of them laborers, many of them were women who stamped arka, which is a special skill. These women came from the villages. There were two or three master craftsmen, carpenters and masons, people who had been in Dope Lekhung before 1950 and had real construction experiences from the old society but who were now unemployed or underemployed. These were the main people and they trained younger workers in their crafts and also oversaw larger projects.
Religious buildings were a sensitive issue. A part of the understanding between the government and us was that we would be restoring houses but in the course of one and a half years of working in Lhasa, we also managed to restore Merunyingpa which is a large temple building immediately behind the Tsuklakhang. It was the former residence of the Nechung oracle in Lhasa. As with most places the former residences of the monks around the temple have been given to public housing during the Mao period and it was in a terrible state. The monastery was under the care of Drepung Monastery monks. The restoration work there was completed in 1999. There were even a couple of projects outside of Lhasa, religious stupas here and there. In that period, quite a lot was done under the name of THF.
We had funding from various sources but mainly from the European embassies in China and an American NGO called Trace Foundation, which is still active in Tibet. In the summer of 2000, quite suddenly, the main foreigners leading the project were summoned for a meeting by the government and we had to leave immediately. No particular reason was given. It was a confusing situation. From one day to the next, we were kicked out and the project directors moved to Beijing. There was a change in leadership of the Lhasa city government and the TAR region at that time, so it was probably a political decision. The project leaders stayed in Beijing for the time being. They tried to come back to Lhasa with the help of the Archeological Department in Beijing, which was more liberal and supportive than anyone in TAR, but it never happened. From 2001 onwards, THF continued work from Beijing. It was never allowed back into Lhasa or TAR. The THF did restorative works in Kandze, Sichuan and Amdo. It is still working on restoration of the Rajok monastery in Golog and work is still continuous in Outer Mongolia and Ladakh.
The Temples of Lhasa is the first volume. I have worked informally as the research person for THF for five or six years. We did what we could. Andre Alexander, the author of the book, and I were interested in doing whatever we could in terms of historical research and in particular documenting buildings and the local history of Lhasa in that period. In five or six years, we accumulated a certain amount of material. This book is the first formal product of our research and it is dedicated to the temples. The second volume is expected to be much bigger, more extensive and will be dedicated to the houses and the landscape of the city.
For this volume, I advised a lot on the historical aspect of the documentations. I also contributed to translations of texts, most of which have not been translated before. These texts are the main Tibetan texts that we have about the temples of Lhasa, primarily three karchag or temple inventories that were written by the Dalai Lamas and never translated before. These are the main sources Tibetans have used for the last 300 or 400 years when writing about Tsuklakhang and so, they were absolutely our main sources. I also put together a collection of materials on what happened in Lhasa after 1959 and the history of the destruction of the Tsuklakhang. Not much has been written about that so whatever I found about that was also translated.
Up to the mid and late nineties, there was no idea about restoration of buildings in Tibet. The Chinese Communist Party in general and, in particular, the authorities in Tibet regarded anything old as something to be got rid of and replaced with new. They didn’t put any value at all to the old constructions. There were even propagandas declaring how badly the old houses affected people’s health and how lucky people are to live in new houses. Following THF’s example, this kind of restorative re-constructive work using traditional materials and skills was initiated by two or three new local Lhasa construction companies, probably not to the same quality, but to show that this kind of work was continued even after THF was expelled. A few buildings, like Trijang Labrang and Shide Gonpa in the Barkor has been restored that way and very well restored.
The impact THF’s initiative and work, apart from the buildings that it restored, was to set an example of a different type of construction work even though it is accepted by the local authorities to a very minimal degree, and we can understand this in the context of the rising Tibet tourism since the year 2000. Of visitors to Lhasa, 90% of the tourists are Mainland Chinese who want to see something exotic and different. There are all sorts of tourists, you cannot generalize, but there is a sort of spirit in China today looking for the past, trying to understand the past, Buddhism and so on. So I suppose that there is a realization in some official quarters that this is a popular social movement, that people have genuine interest in this kind of thing and if you get over 2 million tourists coming to Lhasa to see something which they can’t see in Shanghai or Beijing or Wuhan or whatever, then it must be something to be preserved. I feel that preservation work has been put on agenda for just that reason. However and to whatever small extent it is being applied, the fact that preservation of old buildings have been put on the agenda is basically a credit to the initial works of THF.
We would never know the reason why THF was expelled. One important point that I would make is that the restoration work in Tibet and other Asian countries generally tend to be very museum-ized. People tend to focus on a particular monument and turn it into a museum or, whatever is being restored is not necessarily connected to social life and events of the place where they are working. In the case of a politically sensitive place like Tibet such restoration work is much more acceptable to the authorities if there are foreign tourists interested in visiting Tibet. Then, they work on a temple and make of it something that can be sold as a tourist attraction.
THF, while it was there, was working in a living neighborhood and apart from restoring old buildings, it did a lot of work on sanitation. Lhasa was disgusting under the impact of so many people living there. All kinds of modern waste and water usage which did not exist before being imposed on the same infrastructure of the pre-modern city made for an absolute environmental disaster in terms of sanitation, disease spread and so on. Sanitation was a big priority and in order to initiate things like that you really have to work on the fabric of the city. Ordinary people were, therefore, involved as much as possible. We consulted them about what they thought and this was far more dangerous than restoring a temple or a house. This was intervening in the lives of the society and probably it was that which was not acceptable to the authorities and which really upset them, more than anything else. If there is one thing which isn’t allowed in socialist China, it is public participation in decision making, so that probably upset them.”
For more details about Tibet Heritage Fund, log on to www.tibetheritagefund.org.
