The wrong side of the mountains

摘要

"We are facing our own extinction," the 14th Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, warns an audience of 450 of his compatriots, before cheering them up with his habitual, chuckling, hopefulness. Most of the listeners have newly arrived in his seat in exile in Dharamsala in northern India, on the other side of the Himalayas from his homeland. Almost ever since he fled Tibet with some 80,000 followers, after China put down an uprising in 1959, he has been worrying about the threat to the existence of Tibetan civilisation. Every year it looms larger.