While religion is crucial to Tibetan culture, the language— incomprehensible to Chinese, almost none of whom bother to learn it—is the second pillar of Tibetan identity. In this as well the new entrepreneurs are helping, financing schools and colleges to teach Tibetan to young Tibetans, who are in danger of losing their language as they become proficient in Chinese, the language they must use if they’re to get ahead.

One of these young people—Sonam—traveled with me as guide and interpreter; he was fluent in Tibetan,Mandarin, and English.We met in Chengdu in Sichuan Province, but before starting out, Sonam wanted to receive a blessing from a friend, a lama, who was in town. This senior monk, in his early 60s, told me he'd sat out 30 years of "liberation," Cultural Revolution, and other Chinese-inflicted horrors as a hermit, meditating in a cave. Five years ago, having reached the level of spiritual growth he was seeking, he rejoined the world and found that Chinese were fascinated by his story. He was now on the lecture circuit, spreading Tibetan Buddhism to born-again former communists.

The lama received us in his room in a bare-bones hotel where he and a large party of aides—monks, nuns, and laypeople—occupied two entirefloors. As he sat cross-legged on his bed, wrapped in a maroon robe, his young assistants flowed silently in and out with an endless stream of plastic trays bearing foam cups of instant noodles, hard candies, apples, bananas, cheese, buttered tea, and Coca-Cola. All had been paid for by the lama’s followers—including some wealthy Chinese women.

Tibetan Buddhism, said the holy man, was becoming fashionable among sophisticated Chinese. "Some of it is due to their awareness that Buddhism is popular with famous American movie stars," he said, "and part is because their lives are empty and they feel a need to fill that emptiness with spirituality. In addition, he said with a vague smile, some are attracted by a misunderstanding of tantric practice, an esoteric element of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, which they associate with a more erotic sex life.

After taking our leave, Sonam and I headed west toward Tibet. An hour or so out of town, the four-lane superhighway gave way to lesser roads, some newly paved, some barely there, some holed deep enough to swallow our car, others terrifyingly narrow enough to drop it, and us, into bottomless ravines. Accommodations, too, deteriorated: Within a couple of days in Tibet, we slipped from hot water to cold to none; from indoor toilet to outdoor privy to a squat in the bushes; from clean linen to questionable to probably-never-washed to bare mattress.

Along the way I encountered my most enduring image from anywhere in Tibet: thousands of men and women—Chinese and Mongols as well as Tibetans—digging, hammering, blasting, pouring concrete, cooking tar, and meticulously assembling rough stone into towering retaining walls as they pushed an expanding web of roads mile after mile westward through the mountains and across the great Tibetan Plateau.