popular Tibetan website

Websites by or about ethnic minority groups in China can be hard to find; and because we do not normally mention our ethnic background when we write posts or chat, it can be even harder to tell if the people who use these sites actually belong to a minority group themselves.

Phayul.com is a website that is popular among expatriated Tibetans, but unfortunately it cannot be accessed from inside The Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). Phayul is a Tibetan word that roughly translates into “Homeland” and the website mainly deals with issues that relate to the Tibetan societies around the world. The majority of the people who post on the site seem to be Tibetans.

The site has a news section, a variety of message forums, chat functionality, book and movie reviews, and a music/radio broad casting service. The message forum topics range from “Humor” over “Buddhism” to “Express Yourself”, but the topic “Issues and Causes”, where users can “bring burning issues to the other’s notice” is the category that most people use – it has over 22 thousand posts, the oldest thread dating from 2002.