A Travellers Tale
Saturday, April 21 2007 @ 10:52 am BST
The Tibetan capital and its surrounding attractions reveal extraordinary beauty and ritual to Dinah Gardner
It's remarkable how the Dalai Lama elicits such intense feelings of love and hate.
Tibetans revere their ruler-in-exile. "If I could meet the Dalai Lama face to face I would die happy," says Khenpo, a 30-something Tibetan taxi driver in Lhasa. Khenpo is not his real name.
Not so Lin Feng. This photographer from Sichuan province reacts violently at news the Dalai Lama may be in talks with Beijing over returning to his homeland. "If the Dalai Lama comes back here to China, I will kill him, we will all kill him," he yells and makes stabbing gestures in the air. "You know he thinks he is the emperor of China," he spits. His wife scurries over and shushes him up. Lin, 42, moved to Lhasa five years ago and makes his living by taking photos of tourists in front of the Potala Palace, the magnificent, 1,000-roomed former home of the Dalai Lama
