Taiwan and Tibet have long enjoyed a paradoxical relationship. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Taipei's Kuomintang government agreed with Beijing that Tibet was an integral part of China. This had interesting repercussions.
Taipei considered Mongolia also to be a part of China, in theory - though not, of course, in practice. There is thus an arm of government here called the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission. That explicit claim was not much liked by the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. So for several decades a visit by the Dalai Lama was unthinkable, even though his particular brand of Buddhism had, and still has, many followers on the island.
Despite this rift, many observers have noted that Taiwan and Tibet actually have much in common. Both are would-be nations lacking full international recognition, with the right of a people to self-determination at the heart of their aspirations.
A thaw began in the late 1990s. The Dalai Lama finally visited the island in 1997, and the Tibet Religious Foundation was opened in Taipei the following year. The Democratic Progressive Party attained power in 2000 and the spiritual leader visited again in 2002. Then the quasi-official Taiwan-Tibet Exchange Foundation was launched, and President Chen Shui-bian attended its opening ceremony.
Today, some 600 Tibetans live in Taiwan, many of them working in textile factories. About 100 - mainly those who came here on scholarships and learned Chinese - work in office jobs in Taipei. Their longing for a lost homeland emerges in the pages of Searching for Buddha's Tooth, an astute new book on the Tibetan diaspora by Tsering Khortsa. The author, who for several years worked for a Taipei newspaper, writes that the KMT of old and the exiled Tibetans have tried to recreate their homelands on what was essentially alien soil. Both mixed the cement of their hopes with bitter tears.
Kelsang, a Tibetan who has lived here for 12 years, said that while some Tibetans might be working on the island illegally, the police were not overzealous in pursuing them because they were traditionally considered a Chinese minority people. Most Tibetans wanted to earn enough money to emigrate to Canada or the United States, he added.