BEIJING — The museum visitors file past black-and-white photos from the early 20th century showing Tibetan children in filthy rags begging for food on the streets of Lhasa. They click their tongues at a display case with a wooden cage for imprisoning disobedient serfs and wooden blocks used for crushing fingers when the cage wasn't punishment enough.
Then they move into the second room of the exhibit "Tibet of China: Past and Present," where color photographs show rosy cheeked children, modern houses and grinning nomads marching with a portrait of Mao Tse-tung.
The exhibit running through July 25 at Beijing's Cultural Palace of Nationalities is one of the clearest expressions of the Communist Party line on Tibet. There is nothing subtle in the selection of 400 photographs and 160 objects on display, and the explanatory material is unabashed in proclaiming the exhibit's purpose.
"This exhibition displays the backwardness and the darkness of the old Tibet as well as the development and the progress of the new Tibet," states a panel at the entrance.
Heavy security greets visitors at the museum, a few blocks west of Tiananmen Square. Although tickets are free, visitors must show an identity card or passport, empty pockets of change and leave water bottles behind. The exhibit has been attracting as many as 1,500 visitors per day, according to the museum. Many of them are children, although the macabre exhibits are enough to induce nightmares.
Besides the cage and torture instruments, there is a mummified hand allegedly cut from a serf, and photographs of a punishment cave filled with scorpions and of a man with his nose cut off.
"See how evil the Dalai Lama is!" a middle-aged woman told a young boy she was leading by the hand, referring to the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.
The Dalai Lama was 15 years old when the Chinese invaded in 1950, but the exhibit blames him for the ills of pre-Communist Tibet. "Dalai Lama had all kinds of costly foods and wore silk or satin clothes, living a luxurious and dissipated life," says one panel.
Revered in the West as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the 73-year-old Dalai Lama is one of the most reviled figures in Chinese propaganda. Even as his envoys were in Beijing last week trying to revive stalled negotiations, the Communist Party head in Tibet, Zhang Qingli, accused the Dalai Lama of trying to disrupt the upcoming summer Olympics and "destroying Tibet's stability and political harmony."
