Westerners appear to have a willful blindness about Tibet, with strong opinions often held by those who haven’t been there and whose knowledge appears gleaned from misguided propaganda in the popular press. The Western media have imposed on our imaginations an image of a fabled theocracy where a reincarnated god rules over a peaceful people spinning prayer wheels in a pastoral idyll. The West’s fascination with Tibet has turned it into a mythic place upon which we project our dreams and our own spiritual fantasies. The result is what I call the Shangri-La syndrome (1), millions of Westerners choosing to believe in an attractive but wholly mythological, romantic fantasy which has never existed.

The first adjective that would come to mind about Tibet is ‘desolate’. Those who have been in the far North beyond the Arctic Circle, or above the tree line…