Tibet, the once remote "roof of the world," has been suffering increasing strain due to rapidly growing tourism. Last year the number of tourists who visited Tibet (an estimated four million) vastly outnumbered the 2.8 million people who actually live there, resulting in a general overload on Tibet’s roads, palaces, and monasteries, reports The Guardian.
To accommodate the constant flood of people pouring in, 775 tour buses are operating within Tibet at all times. That's in addition to three civilian airports (with a fourth in the works) and the high-altitude Qinghai-Tibet Train that connects the capital Lhasa to Xining, China, and brings in over 1.5 million tourists a year.
Matt Whitticase of the Free Tibet Campaign sums up the problem effectively in the Guardian's story: “Tourism is obviously a pillar of China’s western development strategy, but it is putting unacceptable strains on Tibet’s fragile environment.” While China’s government asserts that tourism helps generate the money necessary to protect Tibet’s sacred monuments and general way of life, Whitticase points out that the Tibetan people are not benefiting because the “tourist industry is being run by Han Chinese companies not domiciled in Tibet.”
The fact that China’s Han population is overshadowing the number of native Tibetans actually living in Tibet gives rise to a number of concerns. The Dalai Lama, for one, has accused the Chinese government of committing “cultural genocide,” while other critics lament that certain cultural landmarks—such as Lhasa’s Potala Palace—are being crushed under the weight of high-impact tourism, which occurs when millions of tourists all flock to the same attraction. Indeed, UNESCO has expressed continued concern that development around the 1,300-year-old palace (which earned a spot on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1994) is spoiling the site's unique atmosphere.
What’s happening in Tibet should be a good reminder to all travelers to consider the impact their presence has on the places they visit. Read more about Tibet in Traveler's Destination's Rated: World Heritage sites.
Photo: Balavenise via Flickr
That's a great point. It's very difficult for these kinds of places in emerging economies to retain any sort of control over these sites.
Posted by: Fanny Pack Antics | February 20, 2008 at 11:21 PM
this is very upsetting... hopefully the travelers to tibet will try to have less of an impact
Posted by: josie | February 22, 2008 at 12:23 PM