This book looks at a particular type of indigenous architecture that has developed in the Tibetan capital Lhasa. The focus is not on the relatively well documented monastic architecture, but rather on the vernacular residential architecture in the form of the historic Lhasa Town House, as it was built and lived in from the mid-17th to mid-20th century. The book defines the Lhasa House as a distinct variety of traditional Tibetan architecture by providing a technical analysis and discussing the cultural framework and the development of this endangered typology.

This book looks at a particular type of indigenous architecture that has developed in the city of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. The focus is on the vernacular residential architecture in the form of the historic Lhasa Town House, as it was built and lived in from the mid-17th to mid-20th century. The book defines the Lhasa House as a distinct variety of traditional Tibetan architecture by providing a technical analysis and discussing the cultural framework and the development of a typology. (Series: HABITAT - INTERNATIONAL: Articles on International Urban Development / Schriften zur internationalen Stadtentwicklung - Vol. 18)

Lhasa, the ancient capital of Tibet, is the most impressive of the few surviving traditional towns. This guide presents its unique architecture and building culture, topography, environment, historical development and townscape, as well as introducing future plans and issues concerning the safeguarding of Lhasa in the face of urban development.

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.

Diana Lange has solved the mysteries of six panoramic maps of 19th c. Tibet and the Himalayas, known as the British Library's Wise Collection. The result is both a spectacular illustrated ethnographic atlas and a unique compendium of knowledge concerning the mid-19th century Tibetan world, as well as a remarkable account of an academic journey of discovery.This large format book is lavishly illustrated in colour and includes four separate large foldout maps.

Recent donations to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK, of vintage photos and films by British travelers to Tibet, prompted an exhibit and this book; which discusses the unique visual record of Tibet's capital city in a bygone era, complemented by watercolors by an Indian artist, of the 1940 installation of the 14th Dalai Lama.

The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet, Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how the transformation of the material landscape of Tibet between the 1950s and the first decade of the twenty-first century has often been enacted through the labor of Tibetans themselves. Focusing on Lhasa, Yeh shows how attempts to foster and improve Tibetan livelihoods through the expansion of markets and the subsidized building of new houses, the control over movement and space, and the education of Tibetan desires for development have worked together at different times and how they are experienced in everyday life. The master narrative of the PRC stresses generosity: the state and Han migrants selflessly provide development to the supposedly backward Tibetans, raising the living standards of the Han's "little brothers." Arguing that development is in this context a form of "indebtedness engineering," Yeh depicts development as a hegemonic project that simultaneously recruits Tibetans to participate in their own marginalization while entrapping them in gratitude to the Chinese state. The resulting transformations of the material landscape advance the project of state territorialization. Exploring the complexity of the Tibetan response to—and negotiations with—development, Taming Tibet focuses on three key aspects of China's modernization: agrarian change, Chinese migration, and urbanization. Yeh presents a wealth of ethnographic data and suggests fresh approaches that illuminate the Tibet Question.

Introduction -- The return of polyandry -- Trajectories into houses -- Fraternal relations -- Female roles -- The house as ritual space -- Moral networks and enduring hierarchies -- Conclusion -- Epilogue -- Appendix. Timeline -- Glossary of Tibetan terms.

An artist in every sense of the word, Lhasa de Sela wowed audiences around the globe with her multilingual songs and spellbinding performances, mixing together everything from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana and jazz, chanson française, and South American folk melodies. In Canada, her album La Llorona won the Juno Award and went gold, and its follow-up, The Living Road, won a BBC World Music Award. Tragically, de Sela succumbed to breast cancer in 2010 at the age of thirty-seven after recording her final album, Lhasa. Tracing de Sela’s unconventional life and introducing her to a new generation, Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the first biography of this sophisticated creative icon. Raised in a hippie family traveling between the United States and Mexico in a converted school bus, de Sela developed an unquenchable curiosity, with equal affinities for the romantic, mystic, and cerebral. Becoming a sensation in Montreal and Europe, the trilingual singer rejected a conventional path to fame, joining her sisters’ circus troupe in France. Revealing the details of these and other experiences that inspired de Sela to write such vibrant, otherworldly music, Why Lhasa de Sela Matters sings with the spirit of this gifted firebrand.

The 1959 Chinese military takeover of Tibet brought an end to a unique way of life in which Buddhism provided legitimacy to political and social authority in Tibet and served as value system, cultural bond, philosophy of life, and framework for a complex political and social order. The religious-political system of Tibet now exists only in the memories of those who experienced it. This book documents the human heritage and cultural traditions of Tibet's singular society as they developed and existed during a period of several hundred years. Using Max Weber's framework of the interrelationship between religious ideologies and the emergence of social, economic, and political systems, Franz Michael and his colleagues analyze the concepts that are central to Tibetan Buddhism and apply them to the Tibetan people, their social and political order, and their way of life. Much of the study is based on interviews with Tibetans in exile-from incarnations and highly placed ecclesiastical and secular government leaders to farmers, herdsmen, and housewives. The result is important not only as the record of a culture, but also as it is related by the authors to the broader issue of the modernization of non-Western traditional societies.