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157 NOTES INTRODUCTION. Tibet, Trade, and Territory 1. Because of the sensitive nature of conducting research on cross-border trade and in Tibet, an area with potential political, economic, religious, and cultural unrest, I have changed the names and many identifying characteristics of people and several locations in this book. Although some individuals said that they would not mind my using their real names, I have given everyone pseudonyms for the sake of consistency. See both the methodology discussion at the end of this chapter and the note on research methods at the end of the book for further information on fieldwork methodology and language. 2. Don Mitchell, citing Raymond Williams, points out that one of the purposes of creating a landscape is to make the view look natural, as if it were made on its own, for “landscape is both a work and an erasure of work” (Mitchell 1996: 6). 3. The city of Calcutta was renamed Kolkata in 2001, partly in order to deemphasize British influence and to highlight its Bengali identity. I will refer to the city as Kolkata throughout the book, both for the sake of consistency and also because the historical naming and renaming of places is another example of configuring certain kinds of territory against others. 4. For a good description of British economic interests in Tibet, see Schuyler Cammann , Trade through the Himalayas: The Early British Attempts to Open Tibet (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970). 5. In 2001, the population of Kalimpong was approximately 43,000 inhabitants. (At the time of writing, the figures for the 2011 Indian census were at a provisional stage and available only at the district level.) The official 2000 census figures for urban Lhasa were roughly 230,000 (residents of “urban administrative areas” in all of Lhasa municipality). See Yeh and Henderson 2008 for more information on tar census figures. In 2001, the population of Kathmandu was approximately 672,000, and the projected figure for 2010 was nearly 990,000. 6. The mass protests in the tar in March 2008 and Chinese worries over security before and during the 2008 Olympics have led to the indefinite cancellation of most of these partnerships. During 2009, 2010, and 2011, the tar has also been closed to foreigners on several separate occasions, for instance in anticipation of possible Tibetan unrest during the sixtieth anniversary of China’s rule over Tibet, the fiftieth anniversary of the exile of the Dalai Lama to India in 1959, the anniversary of the March 10, 1959, uprising, or the anniversary of the huge demonstrations that began on March 5, 1989. 158 • Notes to chapter one CHAPTER ONE. Middlemen, Marketplaces, and Maps 1. The history of the Mirror is explained in further detail in books such as Tsering Shakya’s Dragon in the Land of Snows and H. Louis Fader’s Christian bio-history of Tharchin Babu; however, nearly the full run of newspapers has now been collected as part of the Tharchin Collection at the Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University. 2. This clipping, taken from the June 28, 1938, issue of the Tibetan Mirror newspaper , reads, “A very useful, top quality and strong carding comb for female wool carders . Please check whether or not the ‘woman carding wool label’ is there when you make your purchase.” Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy has noted that the Tibetan word for “label,” “trademark,” or “brand” (lam ’bar) “is held to be a Tibetan phonetic adaptation of either ‘number’ or ‘label’ in Indian English,” since many foreign products were more easily distinguished by their image (e.g. “peacock brand” soap) than by their written name. The term lam ’bar was also used to nickname or “brand” nang ma (Tibetan classical music) singers and prostitutes; according to Henrion-Dourcy, sha bag leb lam ’bar (meat-filled bread label) was the nickname for a woman whose mother sold such bread, and sna rtug lam ’bar (snot label) was someone who was likely often seen with a runny nose (Henrion-Dourcy 2005: 204, n. 22). 3. Xibu da kaifa, the “Develop the West” campaign, was formally initiated in 2000, coinciding with plans for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Since then, over us$150 billion has been allocated to hundreds of economic and political projects in western regions of China (particularly the Autonomous Regions of Tibet and Xinjiang) in order to promote “national unity and state security,” as outlined in Hu Jintao’s speech in Lhasa, July 19, 2001, on the occasion...

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