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Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Asia Perspectives: History, Society & Culture)
 
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Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Asia Perspectives: History, Society & Culture) (Hardcover)

by R Barnett (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 244 pages
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press (3 Mar 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0231136803
  • ISBN-13: 978-0231136808
  • Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 674,218 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #94 in  Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Asia > Tibet

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Product Description

Review

"Barnett's book is a wonderful read... This is a book that will transfix readers." -- Booklist "[A] Brilliant rumination on Tibet's capital." -- Tricycle "Most readers of this fascinating book will finish reading it feeling that they truly know the Tibetan City." -- Lucian Pye, Foreign Affairs "[Barnett] emerges in these pages as a perceptive and sympathetic observer of a city that has often been described, but rarely understood." -- Isabel Hilton, London Review of Books "An imaginative and atmospheric book... which will appeal to all those interested in Tibet." -- Wendy Palace, Asian Affairs "An eloquent account of the changes in the city's geography" -- Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books "[This] rumination on the capital of Tibet is the rare book that can draw tears just with its assemblage of neutral, entirely unpolemical facts." -- Pico Iyer, TIME Asia "Barnett's ruminations on Lhasa in this slim text are eloquently written, captivating reading, and highly recommended. " -- Tom Grunfeld, China Review International "[A] remarkable book." -- Elidor Mehilli, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism "A fascinating account of Lhasa." -- Ben Hillman, The China Journal


Product Description

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 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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, profoundly moving book on Tibet, 23 Feb 2007
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.
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