Since 1995 the introduction of prostitution on a wide scale has occurred in Tibet. Lhasa is a large bordello with more than 2,000 brothels, and there are more than 10,000 prostitutes. In Shigatse, the second most important city in the region, with eighty thousand inhabitants, it seems that there are more brothels than churches. Sexual exploitation of women has added further to the increase in violence towards them. It is the land of the Tibetan people that has made them famous - a land that seems to be suspended in a time without time, filled with sacredness and magic - and it is this land which day by day is being wiped out by a China that today has discovered new and more subtle ways of crushing the last resistance, if there is any resistance left, of a country that is gradually forgetting the meaning of the word «hope ». China can call itself satisfied because arms have been laid down and brute force has been abandoned. Thanks to corrupt local government and military hierarchy as accomplices, Tibet is in fact held in check more and more. Poverty, drugs, prostitution, alcohol and an increase in the flow of money are the new methods with which the government in Beijing is keeping under control, indirectly, a country which can hardly be recognised any more as being the heart of Buddhism.  (More) ...