The result was a multistoried, tile-faced structure replete with gilt dragons on red-lacquered pillars, a glass-domed lobby with marble floor and electric-eye doors. Clean rooms, clean beds, clean bathrooms, fresh towels, soap, toilet paper, TV spouting Chinese dramas and advertisements for luxury condominium communities in Beijing, and, most delicious after days of red dust and no showers, the prominently advertised "24-hour hot water."

Gama Sera, too, is contributing to the rejuvenation of Buddhism. With his earnings, he said, "I'm helping support a lama whose teachings I follow."

With religious practice woven so inextricably through the fabric of their lives, and with China having systematically undermined it, the Tibetans' fear of cultural genocide is well-founded. Although individuals are permitted to worship, owners of photos of the Dalai Lama, which are seized from temples and even personal shrines, have been jailed for as long as six years. Monks feel the lash of Chinese control most severely. In the Dalai Lama's day the power of the religious establishment was complete. Nearly a fourth of all Tibetan males took the tonsure and maroon robes of monkhood. The great monasteries counted members in the thousands and owned huge tracts of farming and grazing land. They enjoyed the right to use peasants as laborers and to recruit little boys, some of whom they may have used for sex. Claiming moral outrage, although in reality far more concerned with loosening Buddhism's hold on Tibetans, the Chinese have jailed thousands of monks during their occupation.

In Lhasa, I spoke with 73-year-old Tashi Tsering,who also allowed me to use his real name. He said that at the age of ten he'd been recruited into the Dalai Lama's dance troupe and chose to become a drombo, or passive sex partner, for a senior monk. Tsering, who has written a book about his life, said the drombo practice was widespread, but I was unable to find any other Tibetan willing to acknowledge awareness of this sexual activity in the monasteries.

Lhasa is the spiritual focus of Tibetan Buddhism, and in the heart of the city is the Potala, the deep-red, 13-story hilltop palace that has been the residence of all Dalai Lamas since the 17th century. The Potala is now a museum, and fewer than a dozen of its thousand rooms are open to visitors. Bored Chinese tour guides deliver rote recitations on paintings and statuary in a smattering of languages. I found a few men hanging around languidly in the dim halls, mainly for atmosphere, I thought. But like Tibetans I encountered elsewhere, they were willing to risk being caught to let a foreigner know their true allegiance. One, prayer beads in hand, sidled up to me and whispered, "I love the Dalai Lama. I think of him every day."