There are many Lhasas. One is a grid of uniform boulevards lined with
plush hotels, all-night bars, and blue-glass-fronted offices. Another is
a warren of alleyways that surround a seventh-century temple built to
pin down a supine demoness. A web of Stalinist, rectangular blocks
houses the new nomenklatura. Crumbling mansions, once home to noble
ministers, famous lovers, nationalist spies, and covert revolutionaries,
now serve as shopping malls and faux-antique hotels. Each embodiment
of the city partakes of the others' memories, whispered across time and
along the city streets.
In this imaginative new work, Robert Barnett offers a powerful and
lyrical exploration of a city long idealized, disregarded, or
misunderstood by outsiders. Looking to its streets and stone, Robert
Barnett presents a searching and unforgettable portrait of Lhasa, its
history, and its illegibility. His book not only offers itself as a
manual for thinking about contemporary Tibet but also questions our ways
of thinking about foreign places.
Barnett juxtaposes contemporary accounts of Tibet, architectural
observations, and descriptions by foreign observers to describe Lhasa
and its current status as both an ancient city and a modern Chinese
provincial capital. His narrative reveals how historical layering,
popular memory, symbolism, and mythology constitute the story of a city.
Besides the ancient Buddhist temples and former picnic gardens of the
Tibetan capital, Lhasa describes the urban sprawl, the harsh
rectangular structures, and the geometric blue-glass tower blocks that
speak of the anxieties of successive regimes intent upon improving on
the past. In Barnett's excavation of the city's past, the buildings and
the city streets, interwoven with his own recollections of unrest and
resistance, recount the story of Tibet's complex transition from
tradition to modernity and its painful history of foreign encounters and
political experiment.
