Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture) [Hardcover]

Robert Barnett (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231136803 | ISBN-13: 978-0231136808 | Publication Date: February 14, 2006

There are many Lhasas. One is a grid of uniform boulevards lined with plush hotels, all-night bars, and blue-glass-fronted offices. Another is a warren of alleyways that surround a seventh-century temple built to pin down a supine demoness. A web of Stalinist, rectangular blocks houses the new nomenklatura. Crumbling mansions, once home to noble ministers, famous lovers, nationalist spies, and covert revolutionaries, now serve as shopping malls and faux-antique hotels. Each embodiment of the city partakes of the others' memories, whispered across time and along the city streets.

In this imaginative new work, Robert Barnett offers a powerful and lyrical exploration of a city long idealized, disregarded, or misunderstood by outsiders. Looking to its streets and stone, Robert Barnett presents a searching and unforgettable portrait of Lhasa, its history, and its illegibility. His book not only offers itself as a manual for thinking about contemporary Tibet but also questions our ways of thinking about foreign places.

Barnett juxtaposes contemporary accounts of Tibet, architectural observations, and descriptions by foreign observers to describe Lhasa and its current status as both an ancient city and a modern Chinese provincial capital. His narrative reveals how historical layering, popular memory, symbolism, and mythology constitute the story of a city. Besides the ancient Buddhist temples and former picnic gardens of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa describes the urban sprawl, the harsh rectangular structures, and the geometric blue-glass tower blocks that speak of the anxieties of successive regimes intent upon improving on the past. In Barnett's excavation of the city's past, the buildings and the city streets, interwoven with his own recollections of unrest and resistance, recount the story of Tibet's complex transition from tradition to modernity and its painful history of foreign encounters and political experiment.

(Sept/Oct. 2006)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Columbia University lecturer in modern Tibetan studies who's taught at Tibet University and written extensively about Tibet, Barnett has no intention of explaining Tibet to anyone. After all, for more than a century, foreigners have described the Tibet they thought they knew, propagating either unwitting or deliberate misapprehensions. So it's with reluctance and some negativity ("Lhasa was not in every way an otherworldly place") that Barnett attempts "to scrape a little of the topsoil off the affective history of a city, Lhasa," to discover its "inner language." The book's chapters have loose themes—foreigners' views of Tibet, Lhasa's geomantic layout, evolving architectural styles—and are usually spliced with diary accounts from Barnett's visit during the 1987 protest riots. Much of the book contains passages Barnett wrote for other publications in other languages; now revised and translated, they produce an uneasy flow. The illustrations—edgy line drawings of unidentified and often unidentifiable subjects—ensure the generally obscure mood, as do the lack of a modern map of Lhasa or Tibet, or a clear drawing of the types of buildings Barnett describes. Alas, even patient readers, dutifully consulting the hefty endnotes and glossary, may give up before reaching the final five-page chapter, where Barnett finally speaks plainly about Lhasa's architecture. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Lhasa is rather like the elephant in the tale of the blind men trying to describe the small part they are able to perceive. There is no explaining this city, or Tibet in general, and Barnett does not attempt to do so. Instead he acts as an "architect of the urban soul," shifting carefully through layer upon layer of history, his personal memories, and architectural symbolism to trace Tibet's often-painful transition from tradition to modernity. Foreign influence and interference have cost Tibetans dearly, particularly in their push toward independence. Barnett's book is a wonderful read for the patient reader willing to consult the generous notes and glossary to glean the clearest understanding of this attempt "to scrape away a bit of the topsoil off the affective history of a city." Barnett's text is interspersed with beautiful line drawings contributed by Karen Diemberger, images that suggest more than they reveal about this phenomenal city. In all, this is a book that will transfix readers intrigued with Tibet. Pamela Crossland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 244 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (February 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231136803
• ISBN-13: 978-0231136808
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,063,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written and profoundly moving, February 21, 2007

By 

msjuliap - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture) (Hardcover)

I had no more than a passing interest in Tibet when I was given this book, and I found it absolutely riveting. It gave me a clearer, more immediate sense of the cultural crisis in Tibet than any straightforward, linear history could have done. Robert Barnett begins with the premise that one has to learn how to read any foreign city, and points out that Lhasa, where so much of the text is hidden below the surface, has suffered more than most from foreign misreadings. The book sets out to make Lhasa more legible to foreigners, but what it achieves is deeper and far more important.

Barnett approaches his subject from two perspectives, one intellectual, the other experiential. The main narrative traces the history, mythos and cultural development of the city, and is written from Barnett's current vantage point as a Tibet scholar. This on its own would be an interesting and informative read. But it is the secondary narrative that makes the book so compelling: In hushed italics, Barnett gives us glimpses of his own experiences in Lhasa, first as a hapless tourist who wanders into the middle of the 1987 uprising, and later as a part-time resident teaching at the university. He is careful not to impose his own interpretation on the events, but simply, and generously, shares his observations. The most harrowing of the episodes he recounts come early on, and have to do with his own inability to read Lhasa during a period when a foreigner's misreading could hold serious consequences for the Tibetans involved.

Barnett has an artist's eye for detail, and his writing is lush and vivid. The dual narratives struck me at first as an interesting literary device: the scholar describes the city's development from the ground up, while the foreigner sees the superficial and gradually learns to read what's below the surface. But toward the end of the book, when the two narratives catch up with each other, something extraordinary happens: the scholar succeeds in making Lhasa more legible just as the foreigner observes that the city he has learned to read has in effect already been erased by the Chinese. This realization had a visceral impact on me; the tragic urgency of the situation in Tibet hit me like a blow. "Lhasa: Streets With Memories" is an important book and deserves a wide audience.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliantly naunced meditation on a changing culture, April 23, 2006

By 

Mikel Dunham - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture) (Hardcover)

I am struck by the originality of Robert Barnett's approach, as well as the clarity and utter honesty of his voice. LHASA: STREETS WITH MEMORIES is a much needed tool in grappling with the way in which China has absorbed and digested old Tibet and, sadly, the way in which Beijing has re-interpreted Lhasan culture with often appalling results. It's an old tale but told from an utterly fresh viewpoint--a must-read for those who are troubled by China's ongoing stranglehold of Tibetan society.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living Lhasa, December 21, 2007

By 

Marie L. Broch - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture) (Hardcover)

An unusual book that offers a layered and multi-faceted vision of Lhasa, with great historical depth and an uncommon awareness of the many factors at work. This is not a feel-good narrative, it does not take sides, nor does it presume to tell you what to think. Instead, it combines deep scholarship and detailed knowledge of the political, cultural, social and economic forces behind the tremendous changes in Lhasa since the Chinese arrived - the author is a world-renowned expert on Tibet - with an artist or a poet's sensitivity to what lies beneath appearances. In addition, the writer's perspective is infused with a rare and touching humility, a welcome relief from the rather authoritative or even didactive tone of much travel writing. There is a great deal to be learned from this subtle book and I enjoyed the juxtaposition of personal experience and learned content.