The journey – thankfully, not mine – begins in central Iraq. The protagonist turns twenty when his spiritual twin visits him in a dream, ordering him to improve the teachings of an eccentric man killed two centuries before for a religion he didn’t even plan to create. Exactly twelve years later, again in a dream, the spiritual twin comes back to repeat his request, and the young man awakens, declares himself an apostle of Jesus Christ and goes to India with a clear intent: to create a religion.

View of the Cao'an temple. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

Standing on the shore of the muddy Jin river, I’m struggling to understand the concept of spiritual twin. To eyes trained on European dimensions, everything in Asia seems slightly frightening: the intimidating mountain chains that jut out far above the clouds, the yellow void of the deserts, the rivers whose other shore can barely be made out in the mist, the unimaginable masses of people in perpetual motion. In some translations, I remember, it is a celestial or divine twin. Do I have one too? Philosophers of Modal Realism claim that each theoretically possible world is as real as the one we live in, and some of them believe (or at least pretend to believe) that in each one of those worlds there is one me, just a little different. I also remember reading, in Karl Jung’s Memories, that early on in his childhood he discovered a separate person inside himself – an old man with a white wig and iron-buckled shoes – with whom he sometimes conversed. If Buddha was right and “I” really is an illusion, or an overarching process in the cerebral cortex evolved to oversee everything else (including itself), then why, beside the main I-process, there couldn’t be some minor ones, half-conscious, the parasitic frequencies that huddle around the pure tone each time a hammer hits a bell?

After India, where he got acquainted with the local religious ideas, in the mid-third century A.D. Mani returns to Persia in order to teach the religion bestowed upon him by the spiritual twin. He teaches his disciples that there are two worlds: good – light – spirit on one side, vs. evil – darkness – matter on the other. Our universe wasn’t created by God, but by a lower-rank malicious creature that belongs to the material world. That is why our world is essentially evil and unbearably painful, and our task is to somehow extricate ourselves from it. The human soul fell from the world of Light and got tangled up in materiality. However, within itself it still contains thin Light threads, strong and fragile at the same time, as the last link to that other, better place – and the hope of a return.

A whole decade and a half earlier, I stared at the entry portal of Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona thinking of Neo-Platonists: in the middle there is the god, emanating logos, which emanates the world soul, which in turn emanates our small individual souls and finally the matter. It seemed to me that, in Gaudi’s amorphous shapes differentiating from the center towards the edges, I could detect some sort of a homage, a tip-of-the-hat to old Plotinus and his teachings. All of that, of course, only existed in my imagination, for which Gaudi himself is at least partially to blame, leaving his cathedral unfinished when he was run over by a tram car, and then ignored in the hospital because he looked like a beggar; if only he had put some more effort into selecting his attire for the day, maybe the cathedral would have been finished and my musings avoided. Be that as it may, it is almost certain that Mani nicked some of his ideas from the workbook of Plotinus, his contemporary: the farther we are from the source of Light, the more defined, physical, material and miserable we are. Simply put: the more material we are, the more it hurts.

In one of my favorite short stories, H. L. Borges tries to understand Averroes, an Andalusian philosopher who tries to understand Aristotle, and in the end nobody manages to understand anybody, each remaining locked in his own time-space and isolated in the bubble of his great misunderstanding – one of the few constants that we, human beings, can always count on. At the end of the story everyone disappears, dissolved in the impossibility of touch, as Borges realizes the futility of his effort. Sometimes I play that game myself: I choose someone – a beggar in the street or a historical figure, a man sitting opposite me on the metro or one of my distant ancestors from a faded sepia photograph – and try to imagine being him or her. What do I see? What do I feel inside my chest? What am I thinking about? If all the people who have ever lived are connected by some invisible (light?) threads, I say to myself, maybe it would be possible to somehow pick out the thread between any two randomly selected human beings, and then carefully follow it?

Still on the shore of the same Jin river, now under an umbrella, I look at a small boat with fishermen pulling oysters out of a wide estuary. Green bushy aquatic plants float on the surface, and the older houses in this suburb – that once used to be a separate village – are built out of those same oysters. I relish in the knowledge that this very place, the city of Quanzhou, used to be the largest port of the Old World, from which Marco Polo set sails on his final journey home. At about that time, and also from here, the fleet of Kublai Khan sailed out on his ambitious conquest of Japan. Their ships were pulverized by a typhoon (which even now, as the weather forecast informs me, creeps somewhere just behind the horizon). The typhoon that saved Japan from the Mongolian invasion earned itself the name of kami kaze, the divine wind. And in those hard and murky times, on a mountain on the other side of the city, a statue was being carved following the order by a divine twin.

Riffling through scanned specimens of Manichaean scripts (feeling grateful to the Light Deity for the miracle of Internet that enables me to never leave my house) on the websites of various museums, archives and universities, I discover that, in fact, very little has been preserved. The pivotal document on Mani and his religion was discovered in Egypt in 1969, which was hardly breaking news in the year when humans, among other endeavors, landed on the Moon (at the same time planning to destroy their own planet with nuclear bombs). The text was written in Greek by Mani’s disciples “based on his own words”. That was how we found out about the syzigos, the spiritual twin. Using this document, as well as the scripts found in the oasis of Turfan in the Chinese Taklimakan desert, in the Thousand Buddhas Caves in Dunhuang and the writings of St. Augustine (a former Manichaean who abandoned the religion due to a disagreement about the nature of evil), L. J. R. Ort wrote a book in which there is a chapter entitled Mani’s Perception of Self. There I learn that the spiritual twin, after the second revelation in a dream, stayed with Mani for the rest of his life, even at the moment of his death in a Persian prison. He whispered into his ear what to say, how to preach, and traveled around the world with him helping him in the battle against the evil forces of the darkness/matter. I also learn that the young Mani first shared his revelation with his father, who was – upon hearing all that – “amazed” and soon afterwards “converted”. And it is exactly here, says Ort, that we can for a brief moment hear the voice of Mani himself, telling about his childhood and his father. The father who became the first disciple of his own son.

Illustration from a Manichaean manuscript, 8th-9th century.

At the other end of Quanzhou, climbing towards a small mountain temple of Cao'an, I wonder what happens in a man to make him wish to create a new religion. (The same conundrum bugs me when it comes to politicians, military leaders, statesmen: greedy charismatic egomaniacs, or idealists to the bone?) Pulling on the thin Light thread I try to fathom who is on the other side: a trickster or a prophet, a villain or a madman? Or neither? Or all?

Psychologist V. S. Ramachandran writes that localized epileptic seizures in the brain’s temporal lobe sometimes induce the feeling of direct communication with god. People who suffer from this kind of seizures often claim to have seen the all-illuminating light, fathomed the absolute truth that lies beyond the grasp of mortals, clearly felt the presence of angels or heard god’s voice. The effects of the seizure are long-lasting: obsession with theological, philosophical and metaphysical topics and an unbearable urge to talk about it; hypergraphia (compulsive writing, in this case of religious manifestos, treatises, essays, theories). He also mentions his patients who showed him their lengthy manuscripts full of complex symbols and explanations: the holy books with only a single follower. In the late 20th century, scientists Koren and Persinger made a contraption aptly named “God helmet”, which uses fluctuating magnetic field to stimulate the brain’s temporal lobe. The subjects who underwent the stimulation allegedly attested to direct communication with god, visions of long-passed relatives, or the presence of an unidentified conscious being (in a BBC documentary, Richard Dawkins put the helmet on his head and felt, in his words, just slightly dizzy).

At the foot of the rock on which the Cao'an temple was built there is a giant conifer, with a plaque that informs us that the tree was one thousand years old as of March 2016. For a moment I ponder the insufferable Chinese logic – instead of writing the year when the tree was planted, they always write how old it was in the year when it was dated, meaning that in the future every visitor will have to do the adding up – but I instantly abandon that futile train of thought and put my foot on the first step of the staircase that leads to a small building made of red bricks and stones of varying shapes and shades, the temple whose religious affiliation seems impossible to determine from the outside. On the way I stop to take a photo of a wacky insect, who eyes me wearily and then slowly moves away.

Somewhere towards the end of his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins puts forward the possibility that ideas evolve and fight for dominance in a way akin to the evolution of living things. Since the unit of information for the development of living things is gene, he suggests the term meme as the unit of the idea. Some memes are more successful – for example, those that make up the greatest ideologies of our world – while others aren’t particularly tough, so they eventually drop out of the meme pool. Religious ideas – we were told in our Marxist-oriented schools in the penultimate decade of the 20th century – developed as the result of the human inability to understand the forces of nature, from our fear of chaos and randomness. The universe – even if it really was created by a lower-rank malicious demiurge – obviously wasn’t made for us. Not only are we not located at the center of it, but even in our own galaxy we are tucked away at the deep periphery, and so on, in short – nobody and nothing cares about us. But at the same time we feel that we have to matter for something. How to make up these two extremes? At his ripe age, Leo Tolstoy was so tormented by that question that he removed the belt from his trousers every night before going to sleep, lest he should give in to the urge to hang himself: how can something finite, such as human life, have a meaning that is infinite? If only we could somehow forget about the cruel indifference of the universe, wriggle out of the meaninglessness and avoid death! And if we can’t – well, let us at least shut our eyes and avoid ourselves. The ideas that help us do that (or at least promise to do so) are the most successful memes in the history of mankind (except, of course, for those of you who wish to stop being Borges).

Cao'an, the temple on the rock that rises before me was built a thousand years ago, at which time a tree was planted in front of it. A thousand years, I mumble, a bit theatrically, trying to envision the hand putting a sapling into the hole, then burying the root and patting the soil. The planter disappears, and instead of him, in that very same place, I stand under a large canopy. The thought travels the distance of a thousand years in one second.

A 1000-year old tree growing in front of the Cao'an Temple. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

Mani envisaged his teaching as an integrative, ecumenical religion based on Zoroastrianism, supplemented with dualist (good-evil, spirit-matter, light-darkness) teachings of various Gnostics, and then stuffed with the ideas and iconography of other religions that he came into touch with. In a temple in Japan (Seiun Ji, city of Kofu, Yamanashi prefecture) an image of Buddha Jesus has recently been discovered. Some historians of religion believe that the image was made in the Manichaean community in Southern China, in the 12th or 13th century. Buddha Jesus has slant eyes and a wide halo, sits cross-legged on a lotus flower, and holds a golden cross on his chest. The memes of Jesus and Buddha, mixed in the embrace of Manichaeism, merged into one.

Left: Aristotle with a disciple, Arab illustration from 1220. Right: Manichaean Buddha Jesus.

The day before, I clambered around a forested hill in this same city of Quanzhou, looking for old Islamic tombs from the times of Sinbad the Sailor and thinking how everything that comes to China sooner or later becomes China. On the weed-covered tombstones, the image of lotus flower and the bismilah ir-rahman ir-rahim written in Arabic calligraphy sit next to each other. Lotus is also present in the old mosque in the city center, that to an untrained eye looks exactly like any Chinese temple, plus a minaret. The Mongols led by Kublai Khan conquered China in the 13th century, but already the next generations of Mongol emperors spoke Chinese and called themselves the Yuan Dynasty. The great civilization relentlessly pulls towards itself, but its gravity at the same time distorts and adjusts everything to its own needs: Jesus gets to keep his cross, but somewhere along the way he also becomes Chinese, crosses his legs and takes a seat among lotus petals.

Língshān Islamic Cemetery in Quanzhou. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

The small plateau is deserted. The Temple of the Buddha of Light, the arrow says. Under it there’s another arrow that says toilet. The door is open. In semi-darkness on the right side I see another door leading off to a small side chamber, in which an old woman in worn-out clothes sits, staring absent-mindedly at nothing and clicking a rosary in her hand. On the table in front of her there are several jars with pickles or fruit preserves.

Manichaeism is long forgotten in its Middle Eastern cradle. Then it also disappeared in the West, lingering on for a little longer in the mountains, disguised as the religion of the Bogomils in the Balkans (which then lingered on just a little longer disguised in the person of a crackpot painter Lazar Drljača). For the longest time it survived in Southern China, as a once large community that crumbled from one century to another, to finally disintegrate completely. From a religion that once spread on three continents, all that remains is a couple of torn scraps of parchment, several books on history of religion that nobody reads... and the miniature Cao'an temple, today a Buddhist one, without any priests.

A thousand years, I repeat, mockingly, to myself. And if any priest comes to confess me and give me communion, tell him to make himself scarce, and may he give me his curse! ... Men like me should live a thousand years! – bellows, from the edge of death, the sick, aged Zorba the Greek, or at least the man who served as the inspiration for the literary character, if the memoirs of Nikos Kazantzakis – written on the brink of his own death – are to be trusted. But how can one live a thousand years? I will die twice, whispers Ivo Andrić into my ear with some self-pity, once when I leave this world... and the second time... when my lifework disappears.

Eyes are getting used to the darkness. In front of me, in his last temple, sits the Buddha of Light.

He is carved out of living rock that at the same time makes the head wall of the temple and the mountain on whose ledge the whole building sits. At first sight he looks like any typical statue of Buddha, but a closer inspection reveals secret signs, tiny traces, bits of the riddle carved in 1339 during the great renovation of the Cao'an temple, which had then already been more than three centuries old. Long hair falls over his shoulders, and his beard flows down his chest. His brow is prominent and his jaw strong and pronounced. Instead of looking down, as Buddha normally does, Mani is looking straight at me. Instead of having one palm facing upwards and the other downwards according to the Buddhist tradition, both his hands rest on his belly, palms upturned.

Old weasel Borges once wrote that it doesn’t matter what Buddha is, but what he becomes. By the same token, one might say that it doesn’t matter what Mani was – an overexcited boy, a self-proclaimed prophet, a hardcore idealist, a charlatan, the owner of an atypical brain, a twin of his spiritual twin – but what he became.

The statue of Mani in Cao'an, the last standing Manichaean temple in the world.

The statue sits behind a protective glass wall, with a white rectangular reflection of the main door and, trapped in it, my confused face, broken in the glass. In the background there is the crown of the millennial tree and an adjacent hilltop. And I can’t help but wonder how many of us, following the complicated Light threads of our lives, have lingered here, passing a brief moment on his doorstep? And we have all gone.

Disappeared, once or twice.

Chinese dictionary was made by:
Carrie Chen
Ivana Mandić

A 2.7-hectare enclave of opium parlours, whorehouses and gambling dens run by triads, it was a place where police, health inspectors and even tax collectors feared to tread. In Cantonese, it was known as the City of Darkness.

But though it may have been a fetid slum, crawling with rats and dripping with sewage, it was stoutly defended to the last by those who lived there, as well as an unlikely ensemble of Chinese shopkeepers, faith healers and self-taught dentists. It was once thought to be the most densely populated place on earth, with 35,000 people crammed into a few tiny apartment blocks and more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect.

But in March 1993, the last batch of residents finally accepted the government's rehousing terms and compensation terms. It brought down the final curtain on a bizarre chapter of Hong Kong's colonial past. Ask former residents what they miss most about the Walled City and most say the friendship.

In the 1960s, the Heung family of six moved from a rooftop hut in Hung Hom to the Walled City. 

click on the image to zoom

At first they lived in a 70 sq ft room in a two-storey house near Tung Tau Chuen Road, which they shared with seven other families. Several years later they moved to a two-bedroom flat on the fourth floor of a high-rise on Tai Cheng Street.

"Life was poor, but we were very happy," said Heung Yin-king, the eldest daughter.

"We had the best times in the first house, even though the rooms were so tiny there wasn't space for a dinner table.

"We ate from a board laid over the knitting machine and sat on the bed. Everyone got along, and it was great to have so many kids to play with.

"The second house was all right but had no taps, so as the eldest daughter I had the responsibility of hauling buckets of water from the public taps up four floors to the flat every day. That's why I'm so short!"

The history of the Kowloon Walled City dates from the Sung Dynasty of 960-1297, when it began as a small fort to house the imperial soldiers who controlled the salt trade. In the second half of the 19th century, the Chinese were facing invasion by the British, who held Hong Kong Island. So they expanded it into a proper garrison town containing soldiers, officials and their families.

In 1898, it became the only part of Hong Kong that China was unwilling to cede to Britain under the 99-year lease of Kowloon and the New Territories. The British agreed that China could keep the Walled City until the colonial administration for the area was established. But China never dropped its claim of jurisdiction and the sovereignty fight remained unresolved. The result was that it became a lawless enclave and a hotbed of criminal activity.

In December 1899, after several unsuccessful attempts to clear the city, the British announced their jurisdiction was to be extended to include it and the Chinese officials left. The city became isolated. While parts were leased to church-run, charitable institutions, much was left to fall into disrepair. By 1940 only the Lung Chun School, its gateway and one private home remained.

When the Japanese invaded in the second world war, they demolished the oldest standing part of the Walled City - its wall, used in work on Kai Tak airport. But the destruction didn't prevent Chinese refugees flocking to the site after the war. Rents were low, and there were no concerns about taxes, visas or licences. By 1947 there were 2,000 squatter camps on the site. Permanent buildings followed, and by 1971, 10,000 people occupied 2,185 dwellings.

By the late 1980s, it was home to 35,000 people. The government tried to clear the city several times, but on each occasion the residents threatened to create a diplomatic incident. Their attitude - handy when it came to keeping the noses of the authorities out of their business - was that the city was part of China and would never belong to Hong Kong. And to avoid damaging Sino-British relations, the government adopted a largely hands-off policy towards it. The city again became a hotbed of criminal activity. Opium dens, heroin stands, brothels and dog restaurants all multiplied in the '50s and '60s, with police usually turning a blind eye. There were three reasons for that - the police were politically hamstrung, some were bribed and it was too dangerous. Real power lay with the triads. But the position changed in the '70s, when a wave of anti-corruption campaigns removed most criminal elements in the authorities. No longer protected, the triads became weaker.

The height of the Walled City rose with the rest of Hong Kong. In the 1950s, housing usually consisted of wooden and stone low-rises. In the '60s, concrete buildings of four or five storeys appeared. And in the '70s, many were replaced by blocks of 10 storeys or more. The site became chaotically cramped, with buildings so close to each other that in some it was impossible to open a window. Low rents also meant many small factories, with toys, plastic goods and food among the biggest products. The factories may have brought their owners decent incomes, but they also brought more rubbish, fire hazards and pollution to the city. Limited interference by the authorities also meant limited welfare. Apart from basic municipal services such as rubbish collection, residents had to rely on each other to maintain living conditions. That bred a close-knit community of people willing to support each other.

The Walled City's fate was finally decided in January 1987, when the government announced plans to demolish it. After an arduous eviction process, demolition began in March 1993 and was completed in April 1994. Kowloon Walled City Park opened on the site in December 1995. But some artefacts from the Walled City, including its Yamen building, remain. This was built in the early 1800s and served as a military headquarters. Remnants of its South Gate have also been preserved.

But while it has been demolished, memories of the Walled City - and its spirit - still live on in the hearts of many Hongkongers. It could be argued that today we have lost some of the sense of community and social solidarity that could once be seen there.

Growing up, Albert Ng Kam-po and his friends would go to the roof and fly kites that could almost scrape the bellies of airliners as they descended to Kai Tak Airport across the street.

"We didn't know it was so dangerous," says Ng, 45, a pastor at the English-speaking Island Evangelical Community Church in Quarry Bay.

"We'd just play ping-pong in the hallway. The kids would go up onto the roofs and leap from building to building, or we would drag discarded mattresses to the roof and jump on them. It was a happy time."

Ida Shum a 62-year-old former resident now living in Hung Hom, agreed that the some of the worst and poorest people in Hong Kong lived there. She said it was a haven for triad groups such as the 14K and Sun Yee On, who jealously controlled their territory. But she also said there was much more to the Walled City than that. She remembered how when it was raining, the street was nearly always flooded. Water would rise to people's knees with trash floating around, but the residents just walked through it in their bare feet. No problem, no matter how difficult, could be overcome. Shum described how her neighbour always helped her take care of her children and they cooked for each other. This allowed her to focus on her work and earn money to feed her family.

"We all had very good relationships in very bad conditions. Even now, many people stay in touch with each other even though some old friends are overseas," Shum said.

"People who lived there were always loyal to each other. In the Walled City, the sunshine always followed the rain."

—

Text and all photos are taken from www.scmp.com.

Jinn are invisible to humans, but they do on occasion present themselves in the form of animals, plants, human-like beings or even inanimate objects. The ancient collection of jinn illustrations, known as Mehmed Siyah Qalam (known in Turkish as Siyah Kalem, meaning "Black Pen") contains around eighty paintings of jinn, who are represented as anthropomorphic beings.  

While man was built from clay and angels from light, jinn were created from smokeless fire.

It is unknown exactly when and how Mehmed Siyah Qalam came into existence. As the pictures are of varying sizes and artistic styles (many of them influenced by Chinese, Persian, Turkish or Mongol artistic traditions), it is believed that the collection was compiled over several centuries, receiving its current form in the late 14th and early 15th century. One theory is that it might have served as a storytelling prop at the Persian royal court.

Most of the illustrations in Siyah Qalam show jinn, but some also contain historically valuable portrayals of nomadic life, as well as rituals related to the last rites and the culture of the dead.

Even though jinn predate the Quran, they have been acknowledged in it and later as Islam spread across the world so did the they. They found their place in a wide range of cultures, from the Maghreb to the Balkans and Middle-East, all the way to Indonesia. These mythical beings are even present in today’s Western World. The word jinni has been anglicized to genie, and the stories from “Arabian nights” have served as the inspiration for Disney’s classic “Aladdin”, with Robin Williams’ as the benevolent Genie. They have been among us for many centuries and it seems that they will stay for many more to come, with all the mischief, apathy and good will that they had with them so far.

Many of the portrayals of jinn have been inspired by the illustrations in Mehmed Siyah Qalam. The collection is nowadays kept at Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, where it is believed to have arrived following the Ottoman war with Persia in 1514.

Ambroise Tézenas started pondering these questions when he read that the Queen of the Sea—a Sri Lankan train destroyed by the 2004 tsunami in what was one of the worst rail accidents in recent history—had become something of a tourist attraction. Tézenas had been in Sri Lanka photographing the aftermath of the tsunami four years earlier, and couldn't reconcile his memories of death and destruction with people's fascination with the site.

This dichotomy prompted Tézenas' research into dark tourism, an industry that draws travelers worldwide to the scenes of some of history's worst accidents and atrocities. The more he learned about humanity's fascination with evil and death, the more he wanted to photograph it.

His photo book, I Was Here, features more than a dozen dark tourist destinations around the globe. Much like the subject matter, the images are starkly unsentimental. Working with a large format camera on a tripod, Tézenas mostly captured the landscapes of these sites—commemorating genocide, assassinations, mass executions and nuclear disasters—at a clinical distance.

Tézenas tried as much as possible to experience these places as a tourist would. He refused special access, and traveled with organized tours, spending the same amount of time at sites as the visitors he photographed. He even limited the information in the book's captions to what he gleaned from guides and brochures.

"The idea was not to go there and spend months there. I wanted to get this immediate feeling of what you see, like the tourists do. I wasn't shooting what could be seen by a photojournalist or someone with a special permit. It was always quite quick," he said. "I wasn't trying to make a book of history. I wanted to show it raw, how it really is."

Everywhere Tézenas went, he saw examples of the oblivious, sometimes offensive behavior one might expect of tourists at any popular attraction. In a torture cell in Cambodia, he saw that a tourist had written "I was here" on a wall. Elsewhere, he saw people shouting and joking, and taking more than a few selfies.

"My idea was not to photograph like Martin Parr, because it's too easy to take a picture of people at these places and to make them look ridiculous and to be very moral and say, 'This is wrong. You shouldn't go there,'" he said.

Beyond the commercialization inherent in guided tours and gift shops, Tézenas saw the blatant Disneyfication of some destinations. At Latvia's Karostas Cietums—a former military prison—he photographed Extreme Night, an overnight, interactive experience allowing "fans of especially extreme adventures" to "step in the shoes of a prisoner on a dark and dismal night." When Tézenas was there, a group of high school students was locked in their cells for the night, only to be awakened violently at 2 am to endure interrogations from guards.

Tézenas doesn't intend to condemn or ridicule the tourists featured in his work. If anything, he hopes his book provokes a discussion of questions that still vex him, even after years of travel and contemplation.

"Maybe you should go there; maybe you shouldn't. But you should think about why you're going there," he said.

—

Originally published on wired.com 
Author of all the photos: Ambroise Tézenas

a man who speaks without lips
and sees without eyes
a man who hears without ears
and runs without legs

the sun and moon play
and they blow into the trumpets
the child touches the wheel of the law
and topples it

--

The Tibetan people are an ethnic group native to Tibet. Their current population is estimated to be around 6.5 million. In addition to living in Tibet Autonomous Region, significant numbers of Tibetans live in other parts of China, as well as in India, Nepal, Bhutan and the western world.