Tibetans I met acknowledged that along with oppression China has brought a standard of living far higher than that of their parents under the Dalai Lama's rule. The Chinese have built hundreds of schools, where until the 1950s there had been just a handful of nonreligious schools. They've built hospitals. Everywhere I traveled, they'd halted deforestation and are replanting trees, having learned through bitter experience in the summer of 1998 that the denuding of Tibet caused the Yangtze to flood, drowning 4,000 people. They've built airports and are beginning the first Tibetan railroad. They've also installed a telecommunications network, one that enabled me to dial directly to the U.S. Despite having a phone line to India, the best the Dalai Lama could do to send word across Lhasa from the dim recesses of the Potala Palace was to dispatch a runner.

Yet Tibetans almost invariably also said that China was implementing development solely to help exploit Tibet's natural resources. "Their goal is to extract all our treasures—timber, wildlife, gold, uranium—"and to make China rich and powerful," said a man in his late 20s in Chamdo, a town on the banks of the Mekong River.

It is in rough-hewn towns like Chamdo that China's colonization is most noticeable. Along streets either ankle deep in putrid mud or swirling with choking red dust, the air foul with sour, eyeburning smoke from yak-dung cooking fires, new Chinese arrivals throw together featureless concrete shops, restaurants, and brothels to serve the needs of the road crews and other transient laborers. The new one—and two—story buildings bear signs in two languages—Tibetan script on top and larger Chinese characters below.

As thankless as I found these towns, dirt-poor Tibetan nomads are as dazzled as the proverbial rubes who see Times Square for the first time. Herdsmen in filthy chubas roam the dirt streets in clusters, gawking into storefronts at Chinese women in short dresses cutting customers' hair or chatting over cans of Coca-Cola. A single tube of pink or purple neon in the window of a brothel can be as exciting as all the lights of Broadway. "I would like to go in," said a man in his 20s with lank, shoulder-length hair, in the little town of Jamdun, a few miles east of the Mekong River. "But I have no money." Few Tibetans do, but that doesn't stop them from aspiring to the pleasures of the towns. And Beijing seems to be counting on that hope to eventually win Tibetan hearts and minds. One soft evening in the northeastern corner of the TAR, I shared dinner with Huadon and his wife, who—despite having suffered, as he put it, "the full misery of liberation and the Cultural Revolution"—seem to be bearing out that hope.