A Tibetan Christmas

In 2014, anthropologist Brendan A. Galipeau attended a Christmas celebration in the village of Cizhong, just outside the Tibetan border in China’s Yunnan Province. The holiday represents the village’s biggest festival of the year, enjoyed by the area’s unique Catholic community and the Buddhist minority. The event bears the influences of European missionaries, Chinese government policies, and cultural and economic interplay between villagers and outsiders.

During the two-day celebration, Galipeau writes, villagers decorated their local church with strings of lights, an elaborate nativity scene, and branches of a local evergreen tree with red berries known as “Christmas tree.” During the Christmas Eve and Christmas morning masses, the congregation chanted in Tibetan and the priest spoke in Mandarin Chinese. The festival included a procession of children in traditional Tibetan clothing topped with Santa hats and a feast with Tibetan singing and dancing attended by local Buddhists as well as the Catholics. It also drew many Chinese and international tourists and academics fascinated by the unique event.

Galipeau writes that the story of Cizhong’s Catholicism began in the mid-nineteenth century when French Catholic missionaries arrived in northwest Yunnan with plans to spread their faith across Tibet. Difficulties, including resistance from Buddhist lamas, limited their geographical reach, but they successfully established churches and converted Tibetans in the local area.

After a violent campaign in which Buddhists killed a number of priests and destroyed churches, in 1909, locals built the church that Galipeau visited in Cizhong. In the 1930s, a group of Swiss priests from the Grand Saint Bernard Hospice in the Alps arrived to supplement the French contingent, deploying their expertise in mountain living. And then, in 1952, the Chinese government expelled the French and Swiss Catholics. This meant there were no priests to lead mass until 2008, when the Catholic Association of China sent the Han priest who led the masses Galipeau witnessed. However, villagers quietly kept to their religious traditions.

In 2001, as part of a broader change in its approach to local cultures, the Chinese government began promoting tourism in the region focused on the scenic countryside and Tibetan traditions. Among other things, it renamed Zhongdian County—located near Cizhong—as Shangri-La City, a nod to English author James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizons, which described a fictional community where Tibetan Buddhists and Catholics live together peacefully.

Galipeau writes that the Catholic Cizhong community recognized an opportunity to capitalize on their unique mixture of cultures. Some opened guesthouses where tourists could drink wine made from grapes first introduced to the area by the French and Swiss.

Local tourism benefited from both international interest and a growing fascination inside China with Tibetan culture as a source of mystical, nature-based inspiration—a phenomenon that some scholars have called “internal orientalism.” But, Galipeau writes, the depiction of their traditions as exotic generally doesn’t seem to bother local people, who appreciate the interest in their culture and the economic benefits of the tourist industry.

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