Tibetan culture

Tibet's specific geographic and climatic conditions have encouraged reliance on pastoralism, as well as the development of a different cuisine from surrounding regions, which fits the needs of the human body in these high altitudes.

The Tibetan language is spoken in a variety of dialects in all parts of the Tibetan-inhabited area which covers half a million square miles.

It spreads over a wide range of paintings, frescos, statues, ritual objects, coins, ornaments and furniture.

But with the introduction of modern technology, a few aspects of the rug making processes have been taken over by machine primarily because of cost, the disappearance of knowledge etc.

Thangkas, a syncrestistic art of Chinese hanging scrolls with Nepalese and Kashmiri painting, first survive from the eleventh century.

Rectangular and intricately painted on cotton or linen, they are usually traditional compositions depicting deities, famous monks, and other religious, astrological, and theological subjects, and sometimes mandalas.

There is a rich ancient tradition of lay Tibetan literature which includes epics, poetry, short stories, dance scripts and mime, plays and so on which has expanded into a huge body of work - some of which has been translated into Western languages.

The most unusual feature of Tibetan architecture is that many of the houses and monasteries are built on elevated, sunny sites facing the south, and are often made of a mixture of rocks, wood, cement and earth.

China's Cultural Revolution resulted in the deterioration or loss of Buddhist monasteries, both by intentional destruction and through lack of protection and maintenance.

Tsurphu Monastery was founded by Düsum Khyenpa, 1st Karmapa Lama (1110–1193) in 1159, after he visited the site and laid the foundation for an establishment of a seat there by making offerings to the local protectors, dharmapalas and genius loci.

The original building complex was strongly influenced by Tang dynasty architectural style as it was first built by Han Chinese architects in the middle of the 7th century.

Women wear dark-colored wrap dresses over a blouse, and a colorfully striped, woven wool apron, called pangden signals that she is married.

They often wear a huge conical felt hat, whose shape varies according to the district they come from; sometimes its peak supports a kind of mortarboard from which dangles a thick woolen fringe.

In their left ear they wear a heavy silver ring decorated with a huge ornament of either coral or turquoise.

This is caught up at the waist by a woolen girdle, so that its skirts reach only to the knees and its upper folds form an enormous circular pocket round its wearer's chest.

This is called the ampa, and in it are stowed a wide range of implements — an eating bowl, a bag of tsampa, and many other small necessities.

The nomads, on the other hand, generally wear a sheepskin chuba, hand-sewn and crudely tanned in butter, with the fleece on the inside.

The right shoulder and arm are almost always left free, and when they are on the march or at work the whole top part of the robe is allowed to slip down so that it is supported only by the belt.

They hardly feel the cold at all and in the depth of winter, heedless of frost or snow or wind, they trudge imperturbably along with their bosoms bared to the icy blast.

These have soft soles of raw, untanned leather; the loose-fitting leg of the boot, which may be red or black or green, has a sort of woolen garter around the top of it which is fastened to the leg above the knee with another, very brightly colored strip of woolen material.A chab chab is a piece of jewellery which wealthy Tibetan ladies attached to their clothes beneath the right shoulder.

The name of the months are ༼ མཆུ་ཟླ་བ།༽ January, ༼ དབོ་ཟླ་བ།༽ February, ༼ ནག་པ་ཟླ་བ།༽་ March, ༼ ས་ག་ཟླ་བ།་༽ April, ༼ སྣྲོན་ཟླ་བ།༽ May, ༼ ཆུ་སྟོད་ཟླ་བ།༽ June, ༼ གྲོ་བཞིན་ཟླ་བ།༽ July, ༼ ཁྲུམས་སྟདོ།༽ August, ༼ དབྱུ་གུ་ཟླ་བ།༽ September, ༼ སྨིན་དྲུག་ཟླ་བ།༽ October, ༼ གོ་ཟླ་བ།༽ November and ༼ རྒྱལ་ཟླ་བ།༽ December.

Nyima "Sun", Dawa "Moon" and Lhakpa "Mercury" are common personal names for people born on Sunday, Monday or Wednesday respectively.

He gave me one of those figures, which are made of flour and butter, and told me that it was a custom in Tibet and Ladakh, to make presents of "flour-ibex" on the occasion of the birth of a child.

Kelsang Metok (格桑梅朵) is a popular singer who combines traditional Tibetan songs with elements of Chinese and Western pop.

In 2006, he starred in Sherwood Hu's Prince of the Himalayas, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, set in ancient Tibet and featuring an all-Tibetan cast.

Indian ghazal and filmi are very popular, as is rock and roll, an American style which has produced Tibetan performers like Rangzen Shonu.

Lhamo was founded in the fourteenth century by the Thang Tong Gyalpo, a lama and important historical civil engineer.

Gyalpo and seven recruited girls organized the first performance to raise funds for building bridges that would facilitate transportation in Tibet.

Colorful masks are sometimes worn to identify a character, with red symbolizing a king and yellow indicating deities and lamas.

In light of the ongoing 2019–20 Hong Kong protests that have been taking place since June 2019 and subsequent mainland Chinese interference in major social media platforms, Tibetans have called or are calling for Unicode to extend the timeline for at least one more year, to ensure the elimination of mainland Chinese influence in operations conducted by social media platforms and Unicode before prioritising on the eventual acceptance and release of the Tibetan flag emoji to the public.