Conflating religious practice with ethnic culture is considered to carry the risk of breeding “splittism” – especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. While in the post-Mao era the outright hostility against religion has given way to a religious revival, keeping religion and politics separate has remained a major concern for the Chinese Communist Party. Religion is supposed to be a private matter that does not interfere with politics. Against this backdrop, a recent phenomenon in the Tibet Autonomous Region is all the more remarkable: the (re-)fusion of ethnicity and religion under the label of cultural heritage and its protection.

I argue that endorsing religion as an attribute of Tibetan heritage corresponds to the concept of defining public spaces and events in which religious practice is legitimate and expected. Simultaneously, religious practices outside these dedicated spaces and events become even more problematic, leading to everyday Buddhist practices, such as circumambulation, being seen as (and performed as) political acts.

We can put an Egyptian mummy in a museum and it’s nice and exotic, but we’re not gonna learn anything from it. That’s how we tend to think of tradition. We don’t literally destroy the past, but we render it something that we can learn nothing from.

people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC.

… the tourist town
below us, in buildings made old
by the deliberate hand of business,
not the rain, the sun, the untold
billions of raindrops and tear drops…

220–581 C.E. … This so-called “Dark Age” was highly creative. Innovations in warfare, religion, print technology, artistry of all types set the stage for the China to come out of this period. What scholars haven’t pointed out yet is that this period also marked a high point in the diversification of social roles for women. Indeed, the collapse of the classical tradition is what made space for new understandings of gender performance. Women experienced greater freedom of movement and choice with the entrance of Buddhism to the Yellow River Valley.

How Central Asian Buddhism came to the Chinese court and brought with it new ideas of women’s agency which culminated in the ascension of Empress Dowager Ling (靈皇後) in 515.

With the restoration of my old ID number, the previous six years of my life, including the three years I spent in prison, became a numberless life. In truth, this was a blessing for me. I believe that the record of my punishment and imprisonment had been wiped from the police system. Networked computers had not yet been widely adopted.

The true story of how a Uyghur poet and film director narrowly managed to escape a genocide—and of the friends and family that he left behind.

Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted something a bit outside his lane as a sports guy but fundamentally banal in the context of American public opinion: “fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” […] But Morey turns out to have stepped onto a much bigger landmine — Chinese politics.

Today, thanks to a Canadian passport, I’m entering my father’s homeland for the first time.

A documentary about Tibetans and the struggle to preserve their culture under Chinese occupation.

Even the most bizarre propaganda claims [about Tibet] are accepted by Hans [without] any apparent qualms about them. But on the part of Tibetans, the messages are completely counter-productive. The more the propaganda is imposed on them, the more resolute they become in their rejection of that propaganda.

No explanation has ever been offered or demanded for the admiration the Chinese have had for hermits. Hermits were simply there: beyond city walls, in the mountains, lone columns of smoke after a snowfall. As far back as records go, there were always hermits in China.

A beautifully written introduction to the (living!) tradition of Chinese eremitism: from its pre-Daoist roots to contemporary Chungnan Shan.

… what was the religious environment that encouraged the spread of the new technology of printing in late seventh century China?

The captivating story of how Empress Wu’s struggle for legitimacy led to the printing of the first mass-produced Buddhist text.

… in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia

A country-by-country profile of Southeast Asia and its relations with the PRC.