Desperate Devotion

Hostilities have also simmered between the Tibetans, who make up over more than 70 percent of the county's population, and minority Hui Muslims. Late last year Tibetan and Muslim families outside the town got entangled in a land dispute over a Muslim burial mound. Last month a skirmish broke out between a Hui vendor and a Tibetan over the price of balloons. That spat ended in a night of rioting that pitted partly Tibetan police squads against Tibetan residents and monks. As many as 200 people were arrested, leading to demonstrations for their release the next day.

Police and paramilitary forces in Tongren have been beefing up their presence ever since. For the last two weeks schools in town have been in session without a break to prevent Tibetan students joining the fray. Authorities have mounted extra surveillance cameras to electricity poles to keep lookout over the monastery. Government officials make more frequent visits to the prayer halls, where tourists often see large portraits of the Dalai Lama hanging front and center. An acolyte in the main prayer hall says of the Dalai picture, "We take it down when officials come and put it back up when they leave."

On Sunday, one Tibetan witness says, some monks hurled stones before heading back into the monastery; riot police countered with tear gas. After security forces stopped the monks from leading Tuesday's incense offering, the rest of the Tibetan community continued neighborhood rituals of their own. On the incense pyres fathers burned branches of highland barley, spooned rice and wheat flour on top, then drizzled on Chinese moonshine. Young men strung up colorful streamers imprinted with sutra verses. They scattered paper money like tickertape, lit firecrackers, blew conch shells and howled out to the sky. When a police van on patrol drove by, they howled even harder—then quieted down when two plainclothes minders from the district government turned up.

The leading monks known as living Buddhas (tulku, in Tibetan) have tried to negotiate with the authorities to relax the ghetto-style controls on their movements. After the three young monks administered their self-inflicted wounds, though, elders sounded shaken and worried about the future. "I guess," said one living Buddha, "the trouble will continue." With hundreds more paramilitary trucks seen on the road to Lhasa, though, Beijing doubtless hopes that "trouble" will be quashed—at least for the time being.

© 2008