Tibet may have been encroached upon by crass modernity,but only in the towns. Elsewhere, it is essentially unchanged, and remains a deeply mysterious, still forbidding land.
We were close to the sacred city of Lhasa when finally I saw it: the legendary Potala with its golden domes and white and deep-red palaces. Here, at last, was the holy of holies; the fabled Shangri-la that was for so long off-limits to travellers from the West.
A rather surprising announcement was made recently by Zhuang Cong Sheng, a senior official of the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
If you are a Buddhist you may want to try this, but you would be wise to exercise a degree of caution. Jump from an aircraft at 12,000 feet and adopt the Lotus position. Make sure you have a parachute on.
Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about international affairs is aware of the inordinate skills of China's diplomats to further the interests of the Middle Kingdom.
Karmapa Urgyen Trinley - also sometimes spelt as Orgyen Trinley - has a term for what is holding him back from taking up his seat as head of his Tibetan Buddhist lineage at Rumtek monastery in Sikkim - "environmental problems".
If you are seeking the old, magical Tibet, now trampled by Chinese rule and depredations, venture to this pine-green, far-flung valley guarded by snowy Himalayan peaks and peopled by lamas and pious laity.
Dharamsala, India and Kathmandu, Nepal - When astronaut Yang Liwei rocketed into space on China's first manned spaceflight, he carried with him the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games banner and China's national flag.
Sherlock Holmes in one of his pithier stories remarks on the singular incident of the dog in the night time: which was that the dog did not bark when a crime was committed. Holmes concluded that the dog did not bark because it knew the criminal
The big question is whether today’s cooperation between China and the US will prove to be no more than a diversion from Asia’s enduring strategic reality — China’s emergence as the region’s dominant power
