A young woman wearing an elaborate brocade dress gazes up at the Jokhang Temple, the oldest and holiest pilgrimage site in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. Surrounding her is an array of people in colorful ensembles. Women with braided hair spin hand-held prayer wheels. Couples in matching traditional chuba robes lovingly look into each other’s eyes. Men in fur-lined nomad coats stride through the alleys, swords strapped to their sides—seeming remnants from an idyllic past.
But upon closer inspection, cracks appear in the facade. The jewelry is fake. The braids are hair extensions. The chubas are rented. Many of the women are spinning their prayer wheels the wrong way. The young woman in the brocade dress is not, in fact, a pilgrim, but a Chinese tourist posing for a professional photographer. As she angles her face for the perfect shot, an actual pilgrim impatiently walks through the frame, glaring at the people blocking his way along the prayer path.
Tourists spin a giant prayer wheel in Shangri-La City in October 2023. The prayer wheel is inscribed with quotes, translated into Tibetan, from communist leaders such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
Since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, Tibetans have resisted becoming part of Communist China. Tibetan guerrillas fought the People’s Liberation Army until the early 1960s, but even after military defeat, they remained overwhelmingly loyal to their former political leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled to India in exile in 1959. To suppress dissent, Beijing has since maintained a large military presence in Tibet. But during the first decades of the annexation, the number of Chinese civilians in the region was limited. Most Chinese workers considered it a hardship to be stationed in Tibet—a sparsely populated, culturally distinct region sheltered behind formidable mountain ranges—and had to be incentivized with special benefits to travel there.
For a long time, Chinese tended to dismiss Tibet as a remote, backward place indebted to China for liberating it from feudal theocracy. But in recent years, that narrative has changed.
After decades of trying to subsume this once independent country through force, Beijing may finally have found a way to effectively make Tibet an inseparable part of the Chinese nation: by turning it into a tourist destination.
Tibetan pilgrims walk along the circumambulation route around the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa in July 2019. Lhasa’s old city, which used to be a center of Tibetan culture, is now dominated by shops where tourists can rent Tibetan-style outfits and pose for portraits.
Mass travel to Tibet became possible in 2006 with the completion of a railroad to Lhasa. That same year was also declared by Chinese authorities as “the year of rural tourism,” promoted as a plan to bring prosperity to impoverished rural regions like Tibet. Three years later, tourism was elevated to a “strategic pillar industry” of the national economy, and it has grown at breakneck pace ever since.
In 2023 alone, over 55 million tourists were reported to have visited Tibet—more than 15 times the Tibetan population. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) latest five-year plan for the region promises to expand tourism even further. Tibet is now seen in the Chinese popular imagination as the spiritual and ecological heart of the country, even if many Tibetans still object to China’s presence and strive for Tibetan self-governance.
Researcher Emily Yeh from the University of Colorado Boulder uses the term “Shangrilazation” to describe the ways Tibet’s culture and landscape have been commodified for Chinese needs. The term was inspired by the Shangri-La tourism zone, a Tibetan border region in northern Yunnan singled out for tourism development in the early 2000s. The county capital, which had been known by the Tibetan name Gyalthang, was renamed Shangri-La City after the popularization of Lost Horizon, a 1933 novel by British writer James Hilton that idealized Tibet as a timeless utopia.
In the ensuing decade, Shangri-La City transformed from a bland, neglected provincial town into a tourist paradise. An artificial old city was constructed after the original town center burned down in 2014, complete with reimagined town squares, cobblestone alleys, ancient-looking stupas, storefronts decorated with fake Tibetan script, and bronze statues of Tibetans performing supposedly traditional activities such as dancing, playing music, and throwing dice. The development was a massive success, and Shangri-La City now attracts millions of tourists each year.
A bus stop displays a slogan attributed to Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Clear waters and green mountains are mountains of gold and silver” in Shangri-La City in October 2023. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology for sustainable economic development was enshrined in the constitution. Tibet is now being promoted for ecological tourism.
It was so successful, in fact, that Beijing exported this model throughout Tibet, turning the region into something of a theme park for the Chinese nation.
Large swaths of the Tibetan plateau—once grazing grounds to sheep and yak herders—were fenced off as “nature reserves” from which the original inhabitants have been removed. Formerly impassible mountain ranges were cut through with tunnels and highways promoted as “scenic routes” that now attract millions of Chinese motorists each year. Along these routes, “scenic towns” were developed from scratch to showcase “traditional” Tibetan culture and crafts. Monasteries were renovated as tourist attractions, and, along highways, fake nomad encampments were set up as photo ops.
For China’s over-burdened, economically anxious middle class living in crowded and polluted coastal cities, Tibet offers the draw of unspoiled nature and a slower pace of living—a place where people gladly share their land and wisdom with visitors from the “motherland.” It’s a destination where tourists—almost all of them Chinese, since foreign entry into Tibet is limited—can come for road trips, photography, pilgrimages, and outdoor adventures.
Tourists walk at Sumtseling Monastery in Shangri-La City in October 2023.
Tourists take photos at a scenic spot in the Sangdui Valley Red Grass area on Oct. 18, 2023.
A group of tourists pose for a photo in front of Potala Palace in Lhasa on July 3, 2019.
In the newly constructed old town of Shangri-La, I met Jing Zheng, a graphic designer from Hangzhou who was spending the last evening of her vacation at a thangka workshop to learn traditional Tibetan painting techniques. She carefully traced the lines of a stylized lotus flower, still wearing a colorful robe from her photoshoot earlier that afternoon, her face decorated with glitter and tiny plastic flowers.
“Sometimes, I just want to be someone else,” she said, when I asked why she had chosen to dress up this way. She complained that life in Hangzhou was stressful and competitive. “But today I am Drolma,” she said, “a Tibetan girl who is free and joyful and lives without care.”
A significant part of Tibet’s appeal for urban Chinese is spiritual. As Communist ideology has lost its luster and decades of anti-religion policies have created a spiritual vacuum, many Han Chinese expect Tibetan Buddhism to offer them a pure wisdom that has been otherwise lost.
In Daocheng, located in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, I met Xiao Liu, an entrepreneur from the coastal city of Shenzhen. Until the early 2000s, Daocheng was an isolated nomad village without any paved roads. But when a high-altitude airport opened there in 2013, it became inundated with tourists.
Xiao was one of many who had flown into this official scenic area for a spiritual recharge. Back in Shenzhen, he was going through a stressful period at work; he told me he had traveled to Daocheng on an impulse, hoping to find some peace of mind. He was planning to visit monks at a local monastery to ask if they could help him find clarity. “Tibetan people are so wise and pure,” he said.
View of a “red tourism” site near Shangri-La City on Oct. 12, 2023. The site commemorates the Red Army crossing the Jinsha River on its way to “liberate” Tibet.
In most contexts, tourism promotion is unremarkable, a routine task of governments hoping to stimulate their countries’ economies and share their cultural heritage. But Beijing’s herculean investments in Tibetan tourism bely an uglier, more political reality and reveal a great deal about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s national ambitions.
In official policies, Beijing claims to make efforts to protect Tibet’s traditional cultural heritage and environment.
In practice, however, Tibetan land, language, and tradition are under threat.
“Tibetan culture is being romanticized as pure, spiritual, and attuned to nature,” said Yeh. “But at the same time, Tibetan people are being removed from the landscape because the Tibetan Plateau is expected to serve as an ecological resource that provides clean water and air to the Chinese nation.”
As nomads are forcefully resettled, at least 800,000 Tibetan children have been enrolled in Chinese boarding schools; the Tibetan language is being replaced by Chinese; monasteries are forced to teach “Sinicized Buddhism”; and Tibetans who advocate for cultural and linguistic preservation are arrested on suspicion of promoting separatism.
To this end, authorities sponsor “red” tourist sites associated with the 1950 “liberation” of Tibet by the Red Army. They have also carefully revised official history, taught in schools and reinforced at tourist sites, to assert that Tibet has always been part of the Chinese nation and that Tibetans are grateful to their Han Chinese comrades. Tour guides are monitored to ensure that they are patriotic and advance the correct narrative.
One of the most heavily promoted tourist attractions in Lhasa, advertised as a “must-see” for anyone visiting the city, is a government-subsidized musical spectacle that tells the story of Chinese Princess Wencheng, who married a powerful Tibetan king in the seventh century. In reality, she was a minor character in Tibetan history, only one of the king’s diplomatic marriages at a time when the Tibetan Empire was so powerful that it briefly conquered parts of China. But Chinese propaganda has turned history on its head and seized upon Princess Wencheng’s story to argue, without evidence, that she introduced agriculture, Buddhism, and civilization to Tibet and that, therefore, China’s annexation of the region is justified. According to state media, more than 3 million tourists have attended this show since it premiered in 2013.
Chinese soldiers stand guard in front of Jokhang Temple in Lhasa on July 1, 2019.
Despite the CCP’s efforts to turn Tibetans into patriotic Chinese citizens, protests continue to flare up. Since the widespread unrest of 2008 and 2009, triggered by the increased Chinese presence in Tibet and the perceived marginalization of locals, 159 Tibetans have self-immolated in anger at government policies that activists have described as “cultural genocide.” Meanwhile, heavy-handed security measures have been implemented to suppress dissent. Tibetans who are not Lhasa residents need a special permit to enter the city, and there are frequent checkpoints where passersby must scan their identification cards and are searched for weapons and flammable materials. Even so, as recently as 2022, the young Tibetan pop star Tsewang Norbu set himself on fire in front of Lhasa’s Potala Palace, chanting, “Free Tibet!”
Official planning documents have asserted that tourism will “stabilize Tibet,” allowing farmers and herders to quit their traditional way of life and “embark on the road to wealth.” Indeed, some Tibetans have benefitted from the tourism boom. They have opened restaurants, costume shops, hotels, or found other ways to make a living off the tourism industry, which, according to government reports, now constitutes more than 33 percent of the Tibetan economy.
Tourists dressed in Tibetan costumes photograph each other at Sumtseling Monastery in Shangri-La City in October 2023.
But many resent the tourists. A Tibetan woman named Dauwa who waited tables at a café in Litang complained to me that most of the visitors who play at being Tibetan are not interested in its real culture. She gestured at some tourists posing for photos just outside the café, wearing phony Tibetan costumes in garish colors.
“So ugly,” she whispered to me.