bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

paywallTypes

corrections

sponsorType

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

factSheets

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

copyrighted

customTimezone

liveContents

Ajay Singh

Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution
by Tsering Woeser
Potomac Books
4/5 stars
The Dalai Lama has called it “the most sacred temple” in Tibet. Located in the capital, Lhasa, and dating back to the seventh century, the Jokhang temple is a magnet for devout Tibetans who gather there every day to pray, prostrating themselves on the ground.
But among the worshippers who visit Jokhang these days, it would not be unusual to find former cadres of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary Red Guards – Tibetans who helped ransack the temple in the early years of China’s tumultuous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
That is the disquieting belief of Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan intellectual, blogger and critic of Beijing’s Tibet policies. In her latest book, Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing resident dives into one of the most traumatic chapters in Chinese history, during which cultural relics were destroyed and political enemies were targeted for public abuse and humiliation.

The book is an updated English translation of Shajie, the title under which Woeser first published her work in Chinese, in Taiwan in 2006, the 40th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution.
Based on interviews with more than 70 people who lived through the Cultural Revolution, Forbidden Memory contains hundreds of photographs from the period taken by Woeser’s father, Tsering Dorje, a People’s Liberation Army officer born to a Chinese father and Tibetan mother.
Woeser, who was born in 1966 just as the Cultural Revolution was beginning, inherited the photographs after her father died in 1991. But it wasn’t until 1999 that she thought of doing something with what she describes as “the most complete private record of these events yet to have come to light”. That year, she mailed the photographs to Wang Lixiong, a Chinese dissident whose book, Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet (1998), she had just read.
“I had never met him, but I thought that rather than leave father’s photographs sitting in the trunk, it might not be a bad idea to entrust them to a scholar willing to study Tibet in a balanced way,” Woeser writes.
Wang promptly returned the images. By letter, he explained they “belonged to the yet-to-be-rediscovered memory of Tibet”, as Woeser puts it. He said he would be willing to help – Woeser and Wang eventually married – but as an outsider he was reluctant to take on the task alone.
The photographs in Woeser’s book depict everything from the destruction of religious relics, “struggle sessions” (a form of public humiliation and torture) and militia training to rallies, parades and manual labour. Just about every image captured by Woeser’s father is a precious historical resource: “until Woeser released this book there were no images of that period from Tibet in public circulation, either in Tibet or elsewhere in the world”, writes Robert Barnett, a British scholar of Tibetan performance art and media, in the book’s introduction.

Many of the photographs attest to the vandalism and violence of the revolution. When Red Guard cadres ransacked the Jokhang in 1966, for example, Woeser’s father photographed a young Tibetan woman hacking off the golden edging of the temple’s roof with a harrow.
The woman, like her compatriots, was following one of the revolution’s central tenets: denounce the “four olds” – old society, old culture, old traditions and old habits. Woeser wonders why the woman appeared to believe that “turning the past to ruins would give birth to a bright new world”. Her question, like many of the book’s 345 images, challenges readers “to try to understand the ideological constructions of the time that made such actions seem natural and even necessary to so many participants, both the rulers and the ruled”, writes Barnett.
In lucid, engaging prose interspersed with her own insights, Woeser highlights how the Cultural Revolution shaped the contours of Tibet’s negotiation with communist China. Her account is a powerful, nuanced argument against the popular perception that Tibetans strongly resisted Beijing’s secularisation and sinicising policies.
Woeser is intrigued by the possibility that many Tibetans became Red Guards, attracted to new ideas and revolutionary fervour. At the same time, she writes, “the atmosphere of red fear created by the authoritarian regime” probably left them no choice but to be “sucked against their will into the string ride of radicalism”.

A close look at a photograph depicting the installation of a Mao portrait on the rooftop of the Jokhang illustrates the author’s viewpoint. The image captures crowds gathered to watch uniformed Red Guards place the portrait and a Chinese flag in a spot previously occupied by the Wheel of Dharma, a revered Buddhist symbol.
“Tibetans would not easily abandon their gods,” Woeser writes. But the occupation and the Dalai Lama’s 1959 exile, “seem to have shown that the new god was so powerful that the ancient gods of the land had been defeated”.
She adds: “Tibetans can be said to have been in shock, stunned by everything that was unfolding before their eyes, so that when the Cultural Revolution took place, they accepted the new reality.”


Meet Harlan Coben, the author behind Netflix’s Missing You and Fool Me Once: the New Jersey-born talent is co-authoring a novel with Reese Witherspoon, and wrote The Stranger during his Uber rides

Donnie Yen as Wukong? Notable Monkey King adaptations in contemporary Hong Kong cinema

Scottish author Ian Rankin on his favourite books and why he’s a ‘frustrated rock star’

Award-winning author Melanie Cheng on leaving Australia for Hong Kong, and juggling writing with being a doctor

Books and literature

Forbidden Memory explores the role of Tibetan Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution

The cover image from Forbidden Memory, Tibet During The Cultural Revolution, by Tsering Woeser. Photo: Handout

Handout image taken on August 19, 1966, when a rally was held at the PeopleÕs Stadium in Lhasa, which had been created on the site of the Polingka, formerly a popular picnic resort for the lite. The man speaking from the podium in figure 12 is Zhang Guohua, the most powerful political figure in Tibet at the time: he was both the commander of the Tibet Military Region and the Secretary of the Party Committee of theTAR [AJAY ADDS: Tibet Autonomous Region]. In front of the Mao portrait, beneath the central banner and directly facing the speakerÕs podium, we can just make out two photographers. One is wearing a dark jacket and peaked cap, and the otherÑa Tibetan cameraman from the Tibet office of the Central Newsreel Production StudioÑhastwo cameras strapped across his body. A photographer from the Tibet Daily, also with two cameras, stands just to the left of Zhang Guohua. In figure 13, the two large boards to the left of the Mao portraits say, ÒLong live the Proletarian Cultural Revol

Handout image. The picture was taken from the spot used by my father (TSERING WOESER) for his photograph of the Monlam Chenmo festivities in 1964, two years before the Cultural Revolution began (figs. 3, 297). He used the same spot for his photograph of the front entrance of the Jokhang during the attack by the Red Guards on August 24, 1966, in which he showed Red Guards hoisting a portrait of Mao on the Jokhang roof (figs. 38, 298). I chose the same month and day to take my photograph in 2012, forty-six years later. Only a few Tibetans were doing full-length prostrations in front of the temple that day, because entry to the center of the old city of Lhasa, where the Jokhang is situated, had been restricted after the double self-immolation protest just outside the temple on May 27 that year. The two self-immolators had come from the eastern Tibetan areas outside the tar, so after their protest the authorities had shut off entry to the city and the region to all Tibetans from those area

Ants and dinosaurs as metaphor for China and US, interdependent but doomed to conflict, in Cixin Liu’s new sci-fi satire

Chinese author Liu Cixin. Photo: Handout

Of Ants and Dinos

Nepal bans Tibetans from celebrating Dalai Lama’s birthday, citing security concerns

The Dalai Lama. Photo: EPA

Bird Talk: in Xu Xu’s short stories, Hong Kong is a symbol of new beginnings and opportunity

An image from the cover of Bird Talk.

Old buildings in Bonham Strand, Sheung Wan, 1977. Photo: Yau Tin-kwai

Magazines

PostMag

Books

Lifestyle

Arts & Culture

Culture


The starting point for Tsering Woeser’s book was a trunk of photographs taken by her father in Tibet in the 1960s
Based on more than 70 interviews, Woeser makes a powerful and nuanced argument against popular perceptions



The starting point for Tsering Woeser’s book, Forbidden Memory, was a trunk of photographs taken by her father in Tibet in the 1960s.


Tibet

Chinese history

Cultural Revolution

Chinese authors

An assessment or critique of a service, product or creative endeavour.  Film reviews, restaurant reviews, reviews of art exhibitions. (Eg. Crazy Rich Asians: an important film, yes, but a good one?)


Review

Review | Forbidden Memory explores the role of Tibetan Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution

The starting point for Tsering Woeser’s book was a trunk of photographs taken by her father in Tibet in the 1960s Based on more than 70 interviews, Woeser makes a powerful and nuanced argument against popular perceptions

The starting point for Tsering Woeser’s book was a trunk of photographs taken by her father in Tibet in the 1960s

Based on more than 70 interviews, Woeser makes a powerful and nuanced argument against popular perceptions