A Happy New Year to all High Peaks Pure Earth readers!
As challenging as 2020 was, it was still a significant one for us as we revamped the site, started a newsletter and entered new territory, first with our Instagram takeover featuring women poets and also with our online Tibetan history seminar “Unlearning Tibet”.
We’d like to thank all readers, newsletter subscribers and seminar participants for your continued support. We’re happy to see so many of you stay with us, not only here but also on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Be sure to follow us!
Here is our annual round-up of our posts that were popular over 2020:
1. It might not come as a surprise that our most read translations in 2020 were related to the Coronavirus. The most read post was “Masks, Mantras, and the Black-9 Pill: Thubten Phuntsok and Tibetan Netizens on Coronavirus and Tibetan Medicine”, an overview of Tibetan netizen translation activism combined with a guest contribution by William A. McGrath looking at a poem by Thubten Phuntsok (who happened also to author our top posts of 2019 as well!). Alongside this post, other Coronavirus related pieces also did well including Woeser’s Covid-related Instagram posts and “The Epidemic in the Year of the Rat” by Yungdrung Gyurme.
2. Our Tibet Reading Lists were more popular this year than in the last years with the Summer Tibet Reading List ranking particularly highly. We’ve also just published the Winter Tibet Reading List so please do take a look!
3. In November we reported on imprisoned singer Lhundrub Drakpa from Driru and published the subtitled music video of his song “Black Hat”. We’d like to thank translator Bhuchung D. Sonam la for his quick translation and for his support of High Peaks Pure Earth since our founding!
4. Popular translations on High Peaks Pure Earth in 2020 continued to be of Woeser’s blog. As regular readers know, Woeser is one of the most prolific Tibetans online and this general link to her articles is one of the most-clicked links on the site: http://highpeakspureearth.com/category/woeser/
Woeser’s most read posts were about Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s installations around Mount Kailash. Check out “Our Sacred Land, Their Rubbish Dump”, Part 1 is here and Part 2 here.
5. First published on our Instagram feed, this post Young Tibetan Writers Discuss the State of Modern Tibetan Literature came from WeChat and contained short observations by writers on writings. The extensive footnotes were also appreciated by readers.
Those were the highlights of last year, do stay with us in 2021!
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