Les caves du Potala - Dai Sijie

1968. China's Cultural Revolution is tearing everything apart. Tibet's caught in it too—has been since the Chinese rolled in back in 1950. The Dalai Lama fled. His palace in Lhasa, the Potala, now belongs to psychotic Red Guards taking orders from a maniac they call the Wolf.

Down in the palace dungeons—old prison cells from the kingdom days—they're torturing people. One prisoner: an ancient man who used to be somebody important. Bstan Pa was the Dalai Lama's official painter for decades. His specialty? Tankas, those ritual Buddhist paintings Tibet's famous for.

The Wolf wants confessions about the Dalai Lama's supposed crimes. Bstan Pa retreats into memory to escape the pain. Born in 1888 near the sacred Lake Manasarovar, he was just a kid when his peasant parents handed him over to Drepung monastery. There, Lama Snyung Gnas taught him to paint and opened his spiritual eyes.

His talent got noticed. He ended up in Lhasa painting for the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, even traveled to Beijing during Empress Cixi's reign—brutal times. When the Thirteenth died, Bstan Pa got the job of finding his reincarnation. The tulkou. The child carrying the Dalai Lama's soul.

This book tries to do two things: honor Tibet's ancient culture and remind us how China destroyed it. Dai Sijie bounces between time periods, showing us the rise and fall of a kingdom obsessed with beauty and spirituality. The Chinese systematically obliterated its delicate art.

Through this lama painter, we get inside a rich artistic tradition. An emotional tour through sixty-plus years of Tibetan history via one man's extraordinary life—artistically and historically significant.

But I didn't find Dai Sijie's usual storytelling magic here. The text feels stuck between historical record and fiction. It suffers from too much information crammed into too few pages. Footnotes everywhere explaining places, people, customs, Tibetan terms. They're meant to educate, but they kill the reading flow.

I cared about the young talented painter and his mentors—the one who taught him sacred tanka art and his spiritual master, the Dalai Lama himself. But I wanted more. More about him, more about them, more about Tibet's story. The book leaves you attached yet frustrated.