More than 100 armed soldiers are camped out in military vehicles in the parking lot of the hotel where Luorang works. His town is locked down, its people trapped inside their homes, ordered to stay off the streets.
But when The Globe and Mail reaches him by telephone, the 35-year-old Tibetan ignores the nearby soldiers and agrees to talk. He is eager to explain why people in his community are angry enough to join the fiercest wave of Tibetan protests in almost 20 years.
His words tumble out. He talks of a sacred mountain, holy to the Tibetans, the site of a Tibetan festival, where Chinese mining companies are blasting for gold and silver mines. He talks of the disappearing forests and how there is nothing left for traditional Tibetan medicine. He describes how China prohibited his town from receiving a group of monks from Lhasa last year, and how the monks of his town were banned from travelling to other monasteries.
"If they take away the water and the soil and the resources, how will our people continue to live here?" he asks.
Exiles hold a candlelight vigil Thursday in Dharamsala, India. Tibetans say nearly 100 people have been killed by Chinese forces in the past week. (Ashwini Bhatia/Associated Press)
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"If our people did not believe in Buddhism, they would have rioted a long time ago. We endured and endured. But now finally it is difficult to endure any more."
Luorang's community, an ethnically Tibetan region in Western China, was one of dozens of Tibetan towns that joined the explosion of anti-government protests over the past week.
(The name of his town is not being disclosed to protect him from government reprisals.) When the Buddhist monks of his town rushed onto the streets on March 15, the fate of their holy mountain was one of their biggest grievances.
While the global spotlight was focused on the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, perhaps the most significant and historic development this week was the rapid spread of the protests to the far-flung Tibetan communities of Western China, including the provinces of Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai and Yunnan.
The Chinese authorities admitted yesterday, for the first time, that the protests had swept across a wide swath of ethnically Tibetan districts, far beyond the borders of the official Tibetan region where Lhasa is located.
"One of the most striking things is that we're now hearing of protests in places where we never heard of monks protesting before," said Robert Barnett, a Tibet specialist at Columbia University in New York.
The scale of the uprising, and the violence on both sides, has shocked the world. But for those who were paying attention, the signs of revolt had been visible for months, if not years.
While there is little doubt that the Tibetans are aware of the Beijing Olympics, and the potential impact of their demonstrations in an Olympic year, a closer look at their uprising shows that most of their protests were spontaneous, often in reaction to repressive Chinese measures, and usually had their roots in a vast array of local issues, including environmental, economic and demographic grievances.
"With or without the Olympics, the situation in Tibet is very grave," said Thubten Samphel, a spokesman for the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile.
"The Tibetan people have deep-seated resentments. They feel marginalized and isolated from economic development in Tibet. They feel that they're being reduced to a minority in their own land. They feel very fearful about the survival of their culture and their identity. These are the underlying roots, the sense of despair that they feel. The Olympics may have been a factor, but they were not the major factor."
Consider, for example, a clash between Chinese security forces and hundreds of ordinary Tibetans in Qinghai province last month, more than two weeks before the latest wave of protests began.
It began, oddly enough, with a balloon seller.
On Feb. 21, during a fireworks festival in the town of Tongren in Qinghai province, a Tibetan child tried to buy a balloon from a Chinese vendor. They argued over the price, and the vendor reportedly slapped the child in the face. When an older man began fighting with the balloon seller, the man was allegedly beaten and detained by a Chinese policeman, who was soon surrounded by a crowd of Tibetans.
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