It is easy to get very starry eyed about Tibet: a peaceful deeply religious counyrt invaded and suppressed by a brutal Chinese regime. Reality is more than alittle nuanced. Tibetan history is long and complicated. The parallels between Tibetan Buddhism and mediaeval Christendom are striking, not least the political domination and wealth of religious orders. Vast numbers of monks had fled Tibet in 1959 and Mao's Cultural Revolution of the mid 1960s had destroyed much of the ancient monastic systems but the plantation of vast numbers of ethnic Han people had not yet begun. Photography inside the monasteries was either forbidden or prohibitively expensive.
