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Pema Tseden is the first director in China ever to film movies entirely in the Tibetan language. His latest film, The Search, won the Grand Jury Prize at Shanghai's recent International Film Festival. He says Tibet has always been depicted by outsiders who pander to their own imagination.

On an island in a pond behind the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet sits the Lukhang Temple, or;Temple to the Serpent Spirits; a secret meditation space created by the Dalai Lama in the 17th century.

The Sino-Tibetan frontier is typically portrayed as a large, complex, and diverse transitional region between Tibetan and Chinese cultural realms. The concept of Tibetanization is often deployed to classify the ethnically ambiguous 'interstitial' populations of this area. This article critically examines the concept of Tibetanization through a study of the Mongols of Henan County, Qinghai Province, a population repeatedly described as Tibetanized. A survey of local folkways reveals that Henan Mongols do, indeed, share many cultural practices with neighboring Tibetans. However, an examination of the historical processes underlying these similarities fails to identify anything that could be described as Tibetanization. Based on this finding, I problematize some of Tibetanization's unexamined theoretical assumptions relating to concepts of ethnicity and assimilation. I conclude by asking what a critical reading of Tibetanization and the Sino-Tibetan frontier tells us about contemporary ethnopolitics in China...