TSERING WOESER
Tsering Woeser (b. 1966), who publishes under the single name Woeser, is a photographer, poet, blogger, and essayist, and is among the most active and best-known Tibetan public intellectuals active today. Born in Lhasa, she currently lives in Beijing under close surveillance and publishes in Chinese. Her work incorporates social and political criticism, reflections on Buddhist religious practice, and self-reflective explorations of a Sinophone Tibetan woman living in the dual Tibetan and Chinese cultural worlds. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Courage in Journalism Award (2010) and the International Women of Courage Award from the US State Department.
Her earlier writing includes Notes on Tibet (西藏笔记) (Huacheng Publishing Press, 2003), Voices from Tibet (Hong Kong University Press, 2013), and her collection of poetry Tibet’s True Heart (Ragged Banner Press, 2008). In 1999 she began collecting and researching her father’s photographs, a process that culminated in the book Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution (Potomic Books, 2020). Woeser’s 2016 Tibet on Fire (Verso 2016) documents the acts of self-immolation that have taken place across the Tibetan world and serves as an extended meditation on the nature of cultural identity and resistance.
Woeser Poems
Translated by Ian Boyden:
︎︎︎“Flames of My Homeland”
︎︎︎“The Spider of Yabzhi Taktser”
︎︎︎“The Entire Night I Dreamt of Langchen-la”
︎︎︎“I Think of Returning to the Ruins but It’s Already in Vain”
︎︎︎“Absent, or Not Absent”
2013
I bow my head to record
my homeland’s flames
that spark suddenly and extinguish suddenly.
One by one by one, one hundred fifty-
two flames and counting, unstoppable.
But there’s not a sound to be heard.
I think of the poet Pasternak,
who wrote “dipping my pen into ink,
I can not help
but cry.”
my homeland’s flames
that spark suddenly and extinguish suddenly.
One by one by one, one hundred fifty-
two flames and counting, unstoppable.
But there’s not a sound to be heard.
I think of the poet Pasternak,
who wrote “dipping my pen into ink,
I can not help
but cry.”
—Woeser, excerpt from “Flames of My Homeland”

The Spider of Yabzhi Taktser
Photograph by Tsering Woeser
YABZHI TAKTSER SERIES
(11 WORKS)
In 2013, Woeser visited Lhasa with Tsering Dorje’s Zeiss Ikon in hand to follow the traces recorded by her father almost five decades earlier. In August of that year, using a Gopro Hero3, she recorded a series of images from Yabzhi Taktser, former residence of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s family, then in a state of decay. 11 of those photographs appear below. One photo captured a dead spider in the foreground, creating a tableau that served as the catalyst for her poem ︎︎︎“The Spider of Yabzhi Taktser.”
(11 WORKS)
Photographs Courtesy of Tsering Woeser
2013










