Dalai Lama's Birth Place

choi

Andrew Jacobs, An Ambivalent China Affirms the Charisma of the Dalai Lama; At a shrine to Tibet's spiritual leader, rules stir earthly anxiety. New York Times, Feb 19, 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/1 ... mas-popularity.html
(the house where the 14th Dalai Lama was born 76 years ago is now a state-financed shrine to the Dalai Lama; at Hong’Ai, or Taktser as it is known in Tibetan)

Quote:

"In the mid-1980s, when talks were proceeding reasonably well, the government rebuilt the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, which had been destroyed during the antireligious fervor of the Cultural Revolution. In 2010, the local Communist Party poured 2.6 million renminbi, or about $410,000, into Hong’Ai, upgrading the town’s 54 residences, including the Dalai Lama’s homestead, with the aim of turning the place into a lucrative tourist attraction. * * * In an article about the town in 2010, the official Xinhua news agency boasted that the improvements to each house had cost more than 10 times as much as the average villager’s annual income.

"According to official figures, a majority of the town’s 274 residents are Han, and even those who describe themselves as Tibetan cannot speak their ancestral tongue. In his 1990 autobiography, “Freedom in Exile,” the Dalai Lama said his family spoke no Tibetan, only a dialect of Mandarin. It was only when he and his family moved to Lhasa — after high-ranking lamas identified him as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama — that he learned the language.

"Most of the two-story house is off limits to visitors, and the only nod to the Dalai Lama is a small painting of him on the ceiling. Photographs [taking] are forbidden.

Note:
(a) Hong’Ai
(b) Mr Tashi, the caretaker, made out particularly well
(c) drop cloth. Wikitionary.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drop_cloth
("An impermeable sheet of material meant to catch paint or other hard-to-clean substances")drop cloth
(d) Li Na and Yu Zheng, The Dalai Lama myth discovery. Xinhua, Jun2 23, 2011.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/englis ... 23/c_13946382_4.htm