Marie Miller
Despite taking part in a momentous rite of passage, tears streaked the faces of the 110 students who graduated from Gangjong Sherig Norbu Lobling School, located on the Tibetan Plateau in Golog prefecture, Qinghai province, this July. For months, authorities had prodded any and all excuses to find violations, pursuing various legal avenues to shutter the school. Until this summer, they were unsuccessful.
Eventually, despite legal battles that ended in the school’s acquittal, regional administration ordered the school’s closure. In a speech before his students, Gen Jigme Gyaltsen indicated the school was closing because it was not in compliance with the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee’s vague standards of vocational schools. Additional details were not disclosed. The 110 students that graduated in July will be the last the institution ever accredits.
The internationally acclaimed Tibetan school was first founded in 1994 inside the Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Since then, its rich curriculum in Tibetan cultural and linguistic studies has drawn youth from across Tibet, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia. The school’s emphasis on the preservation of specialized Tibetan language studies, medicine, and Buddhist philosophy has garnered both private and public extraterritorial support, such as from Finland and the Netherlands. The school’s rigorous curriculum was supplemented with computer science, engineering, medicine, filmmaking, and physical education.
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