Tongren, China - For Jigdal Tulku, 23, from the deep west of China, the Olympic Games are precious — but for reasons very different to those of young men in Beijing or Shanghai.
Chinese sporting success means little to him. When the basketball is on, he cheers for Kobe Bryant and the United States, not for China. But the Olympic fortnight has brought something sweeter than medals: a respite from the most wretched six months of his life.
Jigdal — whose real name has been withheld to protect his identity — is a Buddhist monk in Tongren, Qinghai province, an ethnically Tibetan town that for most of the year has been the site of violent confrontations between unarmed Tibetans and Chinese security forces.
Police cars have been smashed beneath a rain of stones, women and children have choked on teargas and Buddhist monks have wept as their dormitories have been ransacked by armed police.
But with the beginning of the Olympics the violence suddenly receded, as it seems to have done over much of the restive area that is Greater Tibet.
Perhaps the presence of so many foreigners, even in distant Beijing, made the authorities self-conscious about blatant displays of force; perhaps the troubles have simply run their course.
Either way, Tongren, for now, has come the closest it ever gets to peace — which is to say that the fear of imminent violence has given way to a resigned anger and long-term hopelessness.
“They have stopped for the Olympics, but after they have finished we don't know what they will do,” says Jigdal. “Maybe things will go bad again. Maybe the police will hurt us again. We don't know. But our future is poor; our future is nothing.”
The riots in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, commanded the world's attention in March this year, with either 22 or 200 killed in the widespread violence, depending on whether you believe the Chinese Government or the Dalai Lama's India-based Tibetan government in exile.
But this was merely the climax of a general uprising, not only in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but also in the old Tibetan territories that have been absorbed into the westernmost provinces of China proper.
In Aba, Gansu province, there were reports of young monks beaten to death and nuns left bleeding from the blows of police truncheons; in the town of Xiahe, the site of the biggest Tibetan monastery outside Tibet, hundreds of monks were said to have been arrested.
Both of the areas remain closed to outsiders, with foreigners and even some Chinese who have attempted to enter reportedly being turned away at police checkpoints.
In Tongren, we came and went unmolested, but the tension was evident — in the reluctance of many monks and people to talk about what had happened and in the columns of armed police, sporting bulletproof waistcoats and travelling in armoured vehicles, who patrolled the streets by night.
It was a full month before the riots in Lhasa that Tongren exploded. It began on February 21, a festival day, when thousands of Tibetans converged on the town from the poor villages surrounding it.
An argument broke out between a Tibetan customer and a Muslim shopkeeper of the Hui minority over, of all things, the price of a balloon.
Festival fireworks were exploding overhead as police arrived and beat and hauled away the Tibetan, to the fury of his friends.
A crowd gathered and stones were thrown at the patrol car. More and more people were drawn by the commotion and red-robed monks from the prominent Longwu Monastery began to chant slogans calling for Tibetan independence. By the time police reinforcements had restored order several hours later, the squabble had become an uprising against Chinese rule.
“I saw the damage the next day,” said one middle-aged monk. “It was chaos. There were 12 or 13 police cars smashed. The Tibetans attacked them with sticks and stones.”
A month later an incense-burning ceremony held by the Longwu monks, a few days after the violence in Lhasa, provoked a smaller outburst of separatist passion, and the same thing happened again in April.
Each stirring of defiance attracted a ferocious response. It was described by an old monk in the Longwu Monastery in one of its secret chambers — a room sacred as the place where the young Dalai Lama once slept, decorated with a painting of him as a living Buddha.
“There are 400 monk lodging houses here and they came into every one,” he said. “If you had a lock on the door they broke it. They pointed their guns and shouted, 'Freeze!' and took away our possessions. They took 1,000 yuan (£80) if you had it, or 3,000 yuan. Pictures of the Dalai Lama they broke on the floor, and they arrested many monks. We went to the police but they told us to get out.”
The police took computers and mobile phones in their search for an organisation they believed was behind the spontaneous riots. Jigdal, a thoroughly modern monk who keeps an MP3 player beneath his robes, had his digital camera confiscated, with its photographs of the protests.
An unknown number of monks and laymen were led away, many with wrists bound by electrical wire. Many have not returned home. According to monks in Tongren and exile organisations, one old lama, Alak Khaso Rinpoche, suffered a broken leg and damage to his vision and hearing after a severe beating.
In a town where so many are afraid to talk to a foreigner it is difficult to gauge opinion, but the more realistic Tibetans seem to understand that their dream of full independence will never be realised. China is too powerful for foreign governments to jeopardise a relationship with Beijing over the issue.
“As Tibetans, there is nothing we can do,” says one monk. “The Chinese use guns, we do not.”
But perhaps the fundamental grievance is not Chinese authority in itself, but the crudity with which it is wielded. The roads that cut into a once impenetrable mountain region, the new buildings, including schools and hospitals - all are evidence of Chinese investment.
There is no doubt that life is easier than it was in the past, but Tibetan resentment stems from the perception that however much it improves for the locals, it improves all the quicker for the Chinese immigrants.
“They build the roads, they build the train to Lhasa, but they build for the Chinese, not Tibetans,” says Jigdal. “They send Tibetans to school, but then there are no jobs, except nomad and farmer. The jobs go to the Chinese. This is what I feel when I watch the Olympics. Because on the television the Chinese smile for the rest of the world, but behind it they do so much bad here. That is why I cannot support the team of China — China, which is cunning like a fox.”
— The Dalai Lama accused Chinese troops of firing into a crowd of Tibetans in the Kham region, southwest China, Le Monde reported in Paris yesterday. The Tibetan spiritual leader, who is on a visit to France, said reports that as many as 140 people died in the incident would have to be confirmed.