The monastic establishment today is a faint shadow of what it had been before the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa just steps ahead of the People's Liberation Army. I visited six monasteries, and at each one the nervous whispers were the same: By reducing the number of monks, the Chinese are attempting to destroy our religion.

At Derge, an 18th-century town carved into the side of a ravine rising steeply off the east bank of the Zi Qu tributary of the Yangtze, I met two men in their 20s. For protection, I will not identify their homes, but they'd been traveling by truck for nearly a month, and now they, as I, were gawking at the Derge Parkhang. This exquisite carmine, gilt-roofed, three-story printing house, which looks like a temple rather than a factory, was built in 1744 to produce traditional unbound books of religious and medical texts. During the 1960s troops of the People's Liberation Army occupied the building, gravely damaging it. The Chinese government, always in search of tourism income, restored it and opened it to visitors in the late 1990s.

Led by a Chinese government guide, after paying the 20-cent admission fee (no charge for Tibetans), we walked past walls newly painted with religious murals of fantastic demons and through unlit rooms lined with floor-to-ceiling racks holding 270,000 ancient wooden printing plates that had survived the Chinese army and subsequent neglect. Tibetan men, many physically disabled, sat by threes on the floor, each team slathering the plates with thick black ink, pressing them onto sheets of rough paper, and peeling off some 2,500 pages an hour of the classical texts. This impressive output, sold inexpensively in bookshops throughout Tibet, appeared to contradict allegations among Tibetans living abroad that the Chinese ban Tibetan-language publishing.

After the tour, as I chatted with the two men, it became evident that they knew a great deal about the tribulations Tibetan monks face today. "Fifteen times a year Chinese officials visit the monasteries and conduct 'patriotic education' classes," said the younger man. "Each class lasts two or three hours. Basically they tell the monks that the Dalai Lama is evil and that he wants to split the motherland. The monks must pretend to listen, but most manage to block it out by chanting silently to themselves." Afterward the monks try to erase anything that might have seeped in by listening to Voice of America Tibetan-language broadcasts on shortwave radios.