For 20 years, I've wanted to visit Tibet. And after almost a decade of reporting from across mainland China, this was the moment I had been waiting for. Before me, a dozen canvas tents are staked near a large white stupa
I first met the Dalai Lama almost 20 years ago when I was a teenager studying at a college run by Roman Catholic monks. He had come to see a Christian monastery in action. Although the Dalai Lama was not a globally famous figure at that time
Tibet has a powerful allure for people from all over the world. Even though travelling in the country is restricted and visitors need permits to go anywhere, Tibet is a popular destination.
The Dalai Lama landed in America to the usual swirl of praise and protest. After receiving an honorary degree from UC San Francisco last Friday, he is scheduled to meet with George Bush, attend a reception on Capitol Hill and
China occupied Tibet and East Turkestan by force with no right as soon as the communists had taken over the leadership in Beijing in 1949. As a result of this enforced occupation, Tibet not only lost one fifth (more than 1,200,000) of all Tibetans by violence
Not far from Potala Palace, the hilltop fortress once home to Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and still a symbol of Tibetan culture, the main commercial boulevard here has become a very different symbol, of how Tibet is inexorably becoming more Chinese.
In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson's office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.
