Every day I look for nuggets of Buddhist news on the Web, and every day I run into news from Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency. Today Xinhua net announced that "Labrang Monastery is to see the biggest maintenance and repair work in its history of 300 years."
Labrang monastery is called one of the six great monasteries of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. It was founded in 1709 and is located in Xiahe county, Gannan Tibet Autonomous Prefecture in southwest Gansu province, China. It was partly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, then rebuilt and re-opened in the 1980s.
In March 2008, monks at Labrang led protest rallies against the government of China. According to the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), these monks were all detained and beaten by Chinese police.
In April 2008, Chinese officials were taking 20 Chinese and foreign journalists on a media tour of Labrang when about 15 monks came forward to speak of human rights abuses (see YouTube video). One journalist said,
The monks were very emotional, and one of them was crying. They said that they were not asking for Tibetan independence, but for human rights, and that they had no human rights now. They spoke mostly in Tibetan although then switched to Chinese and also some words of English to communicate. When some of them saw the photographers they threw their robes over their heads so we couldn't see their faces, but kept talking.
The demonstration lasted for about ten minutes. The monks later were taken away by Chinese police. Later that month, Lodi Gyari, a special envoy from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, testified to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs:
The actions of the authorities are doing nothing to create stability - they are provoking further resentment, despair and unrest. For instance, in a raid on Labrang monastery on April 15, Chinese forces smashed altars in monks' cells and burned images of the Dalai Lama that some monks had kept at great risk.
For the next several months, Labrang was kept under the tightest possible security. According to a monk from another monastery, everyone entering Labrang was subjected to a strip search.
In November, a senior monk named Jigme Guri (or Gyatso) disappeared. He had recorded a video testimony of being tortured while in detention. In September this video was broadcast by the Voice of America. The monk went into hiding after, but People's Armed Police reportedly found him on November 4, 2008, and he has not been heard from since. (See this Amnesty International media briefing, March 6 2009, p. 2.)
In March 2009, Andreas Lorenz reported for Spiegel:
Armed police and soldiers wearing steel helmets are positioned behind sandbags to monitor the roads leading to Xiahe in Gansu Province, where the Labrang monastery is located. No foreigners are allowed into Xiahe, and Chinese visitors have to sign a register as they enter the city. In marked contrast to the scenes in March 2008 when hundreds of them congregated in the city, the usually ubiquitous monks are nowhere to be seen.In its announcement of upgrades and repairs to the Labrang Monastery, Xinhua did not mention any of these events of the past year. However, the news release did link to a charming photograph gallery showing happy Tibetans happily celebrating 50 years of peace and prosperity under Chinese rule.