Butterfingers: Resculpting Religion at a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery

For several hundred years a major Buddhist festival has been held at Kubum Monastery (Ch. Taersi) in present-day Qinghai Province in the PRC. Contemporary eyewitness accounts reveal remarkable consistency in its form at least over the century preceding the founding of the current Chinese state in 1949. Evidence of changes, not from cultural imperatives within Tibetan Buddhist civilisation but under Chinese state impetus, can be perceived since the 1950's, and continue into the present