Today’s post is just an interstitial morsel designed to carry a few portraits taken in wonderful light- the through line here is Tibet, so let’s talk Tibet.

So Tibet’s high water mark as its own country may have come and gone a millennium or so ago, but it retained its culture and religion and its Dali Lama and considerable autonomy under the Mongols and, by the 1700’s or so, under the Chinese emperors who claimed it for their own. This survived the 1911 overthrow of the Chinese emperors but not the later creation of the People’s Republic of China. Mao wanted to shorten Tibet’s long leash, negotiations ensued, and the Chinese army showed up uninvited for lunch to assist. When a Nepalese delegation showed up in Beijing for further talks, they were presented upon arrival with the final 17 point agreement, which saved their negotiating muscles from overexertion, and were invited to sign it, and were also invited to not get instructions or permission from the Tibetan leaders to do so. This crafty move was celebrated in the Chinese press as the liberation of Tibet, one gathers from their autonomy and self rule.

The somewhat obscure point of all this is that after a quashed rebellion in the late 50’s Beijing cracked down harder, and the Dali Lama and quite a few Tibetans fled to neighbouring India. A centre was set up in Darjeeling for a community of refugees who developed a carpet weaving industry which the older people still run, the younger and now educated generations not being interested. We visited. The spaces where they work are clean and spare with diffuse misty morning light pouring in through the windows. Our guide asked a few if we could take pictures and explained to us the price: show the subject their photo. Which we did, and the universal reaction was to lean back and laugh.

Anyhow here are some of the people at their work, preparing the wool, hand knotting the rugs, doing some final sewing. The old gentleman doing the sewing claims to be 90 and his treadle machine looked at least that old. And the shot of two women together is actually a video which, if it plays, shows how fast those hands can knot.

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