Tibetan Nuns, Monks Forced to Leave Religious Settlement

China News Digest, 22 August 2001

[CND, 08/22/01] Hundreds of Tibetan nuns and monks have recently been forced to leave a remote religious settlement in Tibet, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.

Authorities started to dismantle of many homes at the Serthar religious settlement last June, and forced a large number of nuns and monks to leave. The London-based Tibetan Information Network said the order was directly from Beijing, which wanted to control the population makeup of the site to about 1,000 monks and 400 nuns by October.

Khenpo Jigme Phuntsog found the religious settlement, also known as Larung Gar, in 1980. It once housed about 6,000 to 7,000 people, including about 1,000 Han Chinese students, and was said to have the largest concentration of monks and nuns in Tibet.

Local officials in the town of Serthar, which is about 15km from the settlement, said they were now registering students who were to study Buddhism at the settlement. (LIU Weijun)