Like so many other people in the West, for a long time I had had a very romantic idea of Tibet as a mystical, fantasy land. When, before the Beijing Olympics, somebody asked me what I thought about the riots in Lhasa, I realized I didn't really know anything about the past or the present reality in Tibet! This made me decide to start learning about the history and the current reality in Tibet.

Contrary to the romantic idea prevalent in the West, I learned that before 1959 Tibet had been a feudal, almost medieval society, where serfs were bound to their masters' land and to their accumulating, hereditary debts to the landowners; slaves could be bought and sold and their hands could be lopped off or eyes gouged out for almost any offence against their masters from the small nobility class.

There were no schools besides religious teachings in the monasteries and very few people could read or write.