Illustration by MC
I think I have cracked what China wants out of the 14th Dalai Lama. They want his celebrity without its corporeal casing. If there was some way of distilling his enormous global celebrity and bottling it as a fragrance, they would happily do so. The might simply call it “The 14th—A Whiff of Impermanence”.
It seems to me that Beijing understands the market potential of the brand Dalai Lama. They want the brand and not the man. As The New York Times’ Andrew Jacobs reports, the Dalai Lama’s ancestral home, the place where he was born on July 6, 1935, has been upgraded in recent times along with the rest of 53 homes in Tengster village in northeastern Tibet, which is now known as Hong’ai.
Jacobs reports that the Chinese authorities spent 1.6 million renminbi (about $410,000) for the makeover to turn it into “a lucrative tourist attraction.” It is obvious that the compelling reason why Beijing has spent money on the village is because it is the Dalai Lama’s birthplace and can draw a large number of tourists.
When Lhamo Thondup left Tengster as a barely three-year-old boy on the verge of becoming the 14th Dalai Lama, the village was no more than a collection of very modest dwellings at the foot of Mount Kyeri. Here is how I describe his birthplace of Tengster in my book ‘Man Monk Mystic.’ Rather than using the text, I have used below an audio clip brilliantly narrated by Australian actor Paul English for the audio edition of the boom published by Bolinda.(What a swift segue and plug!)
