In Shangri-La, culture a hot commodity

Jian Hongmei and her nephew take a walk near their picture-postcard village in Tibet. (JILL DREW/WASHINGTON POST)

GEZA, China - Her elder sister is the first to rise, bringing in wood to light the cooking fire and setting water to boil for yak butter tea. Her mother is next, grabbing clumps of freshly picked dandelion greens from a metal tub to mix with barley powder and water to feed the pigs.

Jian Hongmei pulls her blanket tight, trying for a few more minutes of sleep before acknowledging the new day, which opens as so many others have in her 19 years in this Tibetan mountain village.

But today is different. For the past month, Jian has been working in a job at a hotel about two hours away by bus. She's making more money than the four adult farmers in her family put together. Today is her first visit back.

"I've lived here long enough," Jian says later, as she walks beside a brilliant-green barley field, stopping a few times to pick yellow blossoms from wild medicinal plants that she used to spend hours gathering to sell at market. "I want to see other places and do other things. Here, nothing changes."

Tibetans, traditionally nomadic herders and farmers, are increasingly being lured into a commercial world, a place where Chinese and English language skills are prerequisites for success and ethnic identity is something to be marketed to tourists. Many young Tibetans like Jian jump at the chance to escape harsh farm work on mountain plateaus, but the opportunity means leaving behind a way of life that has defined one of the most romanticized cultures in the world.

Tibetan identity is a white-hot global issue after protests in March, the most extensive uprising against Chinese rule of the Himalayan region in nearly 20 years. Tibetans marched for religious freedom, economic opportunity, and cultural autonomy before Chinese police crushed the demonstrations and angry Tibetans started a deadly riot. Police arrested hundreds, closing off the monasteries at the heart of the protests from the public and banning foreign journalists from most Tibetan areas.

The international condemnation that accompanied China's crackdown faded in the aftermath of the earthquake in neighboring Sichuan Province last month that killed more than 60,000 people. But attention is returning to Tibet. The Olympic torch, making its way to Beijing for the Aug. 8 start of the Summer Games, was run through the Tibetan capital city of Lhasa yesterday.

There were no protests near Geza, a village of 42 Tibetan families in the northwestern corner of Yunnan Province. Locals say relations between the Tibetans and the ethnic Han Chinese are more subtle than in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Rather than suppressing Tibetan culture, locals say, officials work to profit from it. The region's economy is centered in the town where Jian now works, which was once known as Zhongdian but has been renamed Shangri-La, after the lost utopia of the 1933 James Hilton novel "Lost Horizon," to appeal to the tourist trade.

The economic successes in Shangri-La have served to keep political and religious tensions low, unlike in Lhasa, where local Tibetans have not been fully integrated into the economy.