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Tibetans

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A Striking Transformation
Photograph by Steve McCurry

Dressed in her finest, a Tibetan woman poses for a portrait at a photo studio in Jyekundo, a city in the Chinese province of Qinghai. Tibetans get pictures taken this way because the Chinese do—one of the many customs they have begun to copy since the Chinese took over their homeland in 1959. Today five million ethnic Tibetans are spread among the Tibetan Autonomous Region—created in 1965—and its neighboring Chinese provinces.