www.tibetnetwork.com/blog – 吐蕃网博客བོད་ཀྱི་དྲ་མཛོད་ཀྱི་ཟིན་བྲིས།

Bloomberg Television interview with Sun Shuyun, 21 December 2008

Sun Shuyun is a Chinese  writer and a filmmaker. She was born in China in the 1960s, graduated from Beijing University and won a scholarship to Oxford. Her books include

Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud (in which she retraces the journey of the 7th century Chinese monk Xuanzang)

The Long March: The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth

A Year in Tibet, a book made in conjunction with the BBC documentary A Year in Tibet.

Episodes: (BBC version)

• The Visit

The Panchen Lama, the highest ranking Buddhist living in Tibet today, pays an unexpected visit to the local monastery and throws the monks into turmoil. In the nearby village of Tangmai, a young farmer’s wife is rushed into hospital with complications with her pregnancy.

• Three Husbands and a Wedding

It’s autumn and everyone is pulling together to get in the harvest, as Dundan worries about hailstones flattening his crops. The local government has installed guns to disperse the clouds and this has put the shaman Tseden, who used to protect the fields with spells, out of a job. Tseden is also helping a local family to arrange their daughter’s wedding.

• Faith, Hope and Charity

The monks begin preparations for New Year, one of Tibet’s biggest festivals. Lhakpa, a local rickshaw driver, struggles to earn money as winter approaches. He embarks on a scheme to buy and sell puppies, with disastrous consequences. Hotel owner Jianzang gets involved in a court case which has a surprising outcome. In Tangmai, the doctor cannot cure Lhamo’s crippling stomach pains.

• Monks Behaving Badly

In the Pel Kor monastery, the director Choephel discovers that some irreplaceable statues have been stolen and the theft gives the local Communist Party an excuse to put in a government ‘work team’ to weed out monks they think are behaving badly. Lhakpa heads north in search of a lucrative job on a building site, and Butri gets an unpleasant surprise as she approaches her retirement.

• A Tale of Three Monks

Deputy head lama Tsultrim has to juggle running the monastery whilst complying with a myriad of government restrictions. Young monk Tsephun lives and works with his master Dondrup, a curmudgeonly old lama. Tsephun helps his master with the day-to-day jobs of cleaning and tidying; in return, Dondrup teaches Tsephun the sutras and scriptures, an essential part of becoming a monk.

Episodes: (CCTV version in Chinese language -you can easily see how it was changed from the original version of BBC)

《西藏一年》第一集：夏末  (Watch CCTV version)

江孜的白居寺是西藏最著名的寺庙之一，是一世班禅克珠杰于1418年创建的。影片开始，我们有幸拍摄了十一世班禅视察白居寺，并记录了白居寺管委会副主任次成喇嘛和寺庙里最小的僧人次平，及僧众的紧张的准备工作和盛大的欢迎活动。

《西藏一年》第二集：秋(watch CCTV version)

秋收，对以农业为主的江孜人来说，至关重要。但是就是在秋季，西藏的气候往往变化莫测。冰雹往往使农民一年的辛苦毁于一旦。次旦法师，也叫“冰雹喇嘛”，据说可以通过做法驱散冰雹，保证丰收。

《西藏一年》第三集：冬(watch CCTV version)

西藏的冬季特别漫长，江孜城一个普通的年轻人拉巴，一个乡村医生拉姆，世界上最畅销的英文旅游书认定的江孜家庭旅社的第一选择的饭店老板，三个人如何度过漫长而轻松的冬季。

《西藏一年》第四集：冬末(watch CCTV version)

冬夜，警车闪烁的灯光划破白居寺的夜空，一尊珍贵的佛像被盗。整个寺庙被紧张的气氛笼罩。以往，民风的纯朴和人们对佛的虔诚使白居寺没有采取任何的防范措施。

《西藏一年》第五集：春(watch CCTV version)

萨嘎达瓦，也就是佛诞节，是江孜最重要的节日，上万信众到白居寺朝香拜佛。僧人们用了一个星期的时间制作了三个坛城，之后，这三个坛城又被他们一扫而光，其用意是让我们在赞叹它们的精美之余，去领会世间幻相的无常。

Sun Shuyun: Let world see the most intimate Tibetan village life

Date:08-12-2009 (Source:eng.tibet.cn )

On the remote village of Tibet, life goes as usual as the sun again rises in the east. The hotel runner Jiangzang is busy serving his guests from abroad while the shaman Tseten is healing a patient in a religionary way. Stories about eight ordinary Tibetan people in Gyantse are unfolding.

Here is a series, which has never been done before, that really gives you a feel for how ordinary Tibetan people live. It was directed by Sun Shuyun, who also wrote the book, “A Year in Tibet”.

“I was always thinking of going further and further-I mean the frontier areas like Tibet and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions of China, since my dad paid less attention to me, his third daughter,” said Sun.

During Sun’s last year at Peking University, Sun decided to work in Tibet as a volunteer after graduation but was strongly turned down by her parents. She tried to persuade them by listing the benefits for working in Tibet for years: would get party membership, better pay, and housing priority and faster promotion upon return, but failed.

For her parents, Tibet was a barbarous land where men drank blood, serfs were treated worse than animals, the moral standards were so low that brothers-and even fathers and sons-shared a wife, and sisters shared a husband. Sun finally made concession, but her yearning towards Tibet has never perished.

Then Sun started learning Tibetan at Oxford, with the late Tibetologist Michael Aris. She made her first trip to Gyantse of Tibet in 1991, to see whether it was hell on earth or Shangri-la.

“They say Tibet is closer to heaven, and that is what I felt: a harmony between nature, man and faith, which had a strong appeal for me,” Sun said.

Sun has visited Tibet for a dozen times, going further and further to the plateau. After the running of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, Tibet is even taking up rapidly. She said:”Will the modernization bring influence to the life of Tibetans? I want to record the progress and deliver a real Tibet to the outside world.”

Accompanying with the series, Sun also published a book covering some details in the series and stories about characters both in Chinese and English. She wrote in her prologue: I decided to film in Gyantse…It was a place big enough for me to find a representative range of characters, but small enough for their life to intersect. And it is beautiful and all of a piece, with its ancient fort, well-known monastery, and traditional houses largely intact-a rarity in today’s Tibet.”

Of course, change has come to Gyantse too, along with a growing influx of tourists, migrants and traders, although they have not, or not yet, altered its character, she wrote.

For a year, Sun and her crew followed a village shaman, a doctor, a junior party official, a hotel runner, a rickshaw driver, a builder and two monks in Palkor Monastery through the ups and downs of their life.

Altogether there were eight people in the crew, a mixture of Tibetan and Han: the director, three cameramen, two Tibetan researchers who would be in close contact with Tibetan characters, a Tibetan driver, a young Han production assistant, and a Han production manager.

“We rented a Tibetan house, which is used as village committee, without water and with an outside loo. There were three main rooms—the men shared one room, the women another, and I had a room to myself,” said Sun.

“There is no water, that is really a problem. We had to economize on water which we fetched from another place,” Sun added, “We did as many Tibetans did.”

What Sun has done, quite simply, is to tell the truth, and let the audiences see the most intimate aspects of village life, both the goods and the bads: the hotel runner Jiangzang is living a better life with the flowing of tourists; the builder Rinchen was trying to get a contractor’s certificate, which requires him to pass an exam in Chinese; the rickshaw driver Lhakpa was struggling up hills to earn next to nothing; the novice monk Ciping was threatened with expulsion for lack of discipline…

As both a writer and a filmmaker, Sun chose to concentrate on the shaman Tseden’s family in her book. The shaman Tseden is at the very heart of Tibetan life, “and is even more important than the village head.” People come to him with headaches and toothaches.

“They even ask him to drive away the evil in their bodies, which hospital to go to for operations, who should marry whom, where to find the lover, whether or when to start a business…” Sun told the journalist.

But Tseten was also threatened by adoption of modernity: the villagers now prefer to use the ack-ack to warder-off of hailstones in harvest season rather than invite him to hold a religionary activity which costs higher than the ack-ack.

“They are smart and willing to accept science and development,” said Sun.

The book goes much deeper than the film did, exploring deeper personal feelings. I was at first completely baffled by many of the things I experienced on this trip, despite my previous visits to Tibet. But slowly I came to appreciate the strength of people’s beliefs and the importance of their rituals, and came to admire their resilience, their tolerance, and the joy they take in life in the face of all its pressures and deprivations, Sun wrote in the book.

However, the recent Gyantse is still far from modernization. For instance, the doctor Lhamo found herself sick in spring, on top of her ability to cure the patients in her ill-equipped clinic, then she turned to a lama and a pilgrimage in hopes of a cure, according to Sun.

“It sounds ridiculous, but intelligible. When they found themselves incapable, they turned to the god for help,” Sun added,” Modernation and tradition are both needed.”

According to Sun, the characters didn’t take kindly to them at first and sometimes were embarrassed by the camera. But Sun always put cultural sensitivity before her own needs as an author and film-maker. “We were trying best not to interrupt their normal life and fully respected their custom and religion.”

After Sagadawa, the whole-year filming came to an end. The crew threw a farewell party for all characters, their families, the officials they had worked with, and all the people who had helped them over the past year.

“We thanked for their cooperation and help, especially for our characters. We are friends, and I will certainly miss them.”

According to Sun, Lhakpa, the rickshaw driver, is now a father; the monk Ciping is behaving better with his new master, and his former master Dondrup passed away last year; Lhakpa’s nephew Ngodup, who has congenital heart disease, had an operation last year in Beijing with the donation from a British public servant named Maurice, who was impressed by the film…

“It will be an endless story, directed by the Tibetans themselves, if we stay longer,” Sun said while recalling her Tibetan friends who spent a whole year with her.

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