On this occasion his face has been daubed with paint to make him look like a villain and he has been made to carry a small Buddhist shrine in his hands, with a set of ritual cymbals draped around his neck. The man with the crudely painted face was a famous lama from Sera Monastery, Ribur Rinpoche, who was the struggle target in some thirty-five struggle sessions. Targets of struggle sessions are paraded along an alley leading from the Tsemonling temple to the Ramoche temple in Lhasa, on their way to or from a struggle session. ![]() The fires have been set in the Sungchöra, the former teaching courtyard outside the Jokhang temple, the most famous shrine in the Tibetan Buddhist world. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)Īctivists in Lhasa burn religious texts that have been taken from Buddhist volumes in homes and temples. She is said to have later become a devout Buddhist practitioner after the Cultural Revolution. The one in the foreground was from a wealthy trading family and normally would not have been able to join the Red Guards, but an exception seems to have been made in her case. They are holding their red-tasseled spears, an insignia of the Red Guards. Tibetan Red Guards with their armbands, lined up in the Sungchöra, the teaching courtyard beside the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, just before or just after going into the temple to smash up much of its contents. For our previously published interview with Tsering Woeser about her book and her father’s photographs, please read here. His photos, which came to light only after his death, are the only known visual records of the struggle sessions, humiliation parades, and mass rallies staged during the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. All of the photos were taken by Woeser’s father, Tsering Dorje (1937-91), who was a PLA officer and photographer serving in Lhasa in the early 1960s. This photo essay features 18 of the more than 300 photos in the book, accompanied by Woeser’s comments (translated by Susan Chen) these are based on her interviews with Tibetans and Chinese in Lhasa who lived through the events shown in the photos. In her new book Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution, the Tibetan essayist and poet Tsering Woeser dissects the impact of China’s Cultural Revolution on Lhasa, her birthplace, five decades ago. Tsering Woeser presents her father’s photographs of Tibetan struggle sessions ![]() Header: Crowd accusing Samding Dorje Phagmo in the courtyard of her house in Lhasa, 1966 (Tsering Dorje, courtesy of Tsering Woeser)
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