Folk Dancing Improves Lives of Tibetan Elderly

As the sun rose over Lhasa yesterday morning, hundreds of local Tibetans walked briskly towards the Potala Palace.

Murmuring sacred words from Buddhist scriptures and running their fingers down their religious beads, the pilgrims were going to circulate the Potala to pay homage to the Buddha.

A number of elderly men and women, dressed in the sportswear that the Chinese athletes wore during the Sidney Olympics, made their way into the central square of the Potala Palace.

In about half an hour, 100 of them, mostly Tibetans, gathered together. Standing in a casual formation, they started practising the traditional Han Chinese yangko dance.

"I've just learned the yangko," said Zhuoga, 57, a pensioner from the region's Bureau of Transportation.

Ever since she retired from her administrative job at the end of last year, Zhuoga has been getting up early for morning exercises at a park behind the Potala Palace.

She said she had learned square Tibetan dancing as well as a series of taiji exercises with or without a sword, disco dancing and yangko.

She counts the exercises by siting the number of steps or movements each requires.

She is not alone. Everyday, between 180 and 200 pensioners gather at the park to practise taiji, Tibetan dancing and yangko, said Zhuoma, 30， who is an administrator with the Lhasa Commission of Education and Sports and the pensioners' volunteer coach. Her father is Han and her mother Tibetan.

"I learned a bit of yangko in Chengdu just a few months ago," she said. "When I returned， the pensioners asked me to teach them yangko dancing. For them, it was something really new."

Compared with traditional Tibetan dancing, yangko requires more extensive movements and faster rhythms.

Zhuoma said life in retirement in Lhasa had not been as rich as in inland areas.

"There are not many schools for the elderly to attend," she said. "They don't have a variety of exercises, either. So many go to religious sites on daily pilgrimages."

Her elderly students are different. They have begun to learn other exercises, such as ethnic dances，taiji， disco dancing and yangko, and quite a few go on for their daily pilgrimage after morning exercises in the park.

"These exercises add more fun to my retirement and will help keep up our health and lower medical expenses，" Zhuoga said. "We will not be a drag to our children."

Anti-Drugs Day

Yesterday, the pensioners moved their exercise ground to the central square, where the local police were holding an exhibition to mark International Anti-Drugs Day， on June 26.

While local policemen and women handed out print-outs of articles related to drugs in the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China，a few hundred local people， monks in dark-red cassocks in Lhasa visited the open pictorial exhibition that told people of the harm drugs have had upon human society and individuals.

Narcotics cases have been rising slowly in the Tibet Autonomous Region since local police cracked the first case in 1986.

Drug addicts in Tibet are migrant workers from inland areas and local residents.

A billboard at the exhibition showed that regional police cracked 66 cases related to drug smuggling， sales and transport，a 4.8 per cent increase over the number in 1999.

In the same year， the police confiscated 613.66 grams of heroin and 9 ，490.2 grams of marijuana. Eighty-two men and 12 women were detained. Enditem

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