The Disneyfication of Tibet: how tourism has become a tool of occupation.

• Author: Sydenstricker, Pearl
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

High on a mountain in eastern Tibet is a platform where corpses are fed to vultures. It's a dizzying slope carpeted in grass, with a web of sun-bleached prayer flags fluttering overhead. Traditional Tibetan "sky burials" ritualize nature's reclamation of human life, rather than denying it. Instead of neatly cremating or putting the body into a box, protectively, Tibetans feed their dead, bite by bite, to a flock of massive, squawking birds. Now the Chinese government has made this sacred rite into a $5 show for Han Chinese tourists.

The vultures are always the first to arrive, well before the monks and morticians. After the body is unbundled, the birds move in and start with the eyes and the easy bits--fingers, ears, toes. The morticians are there with mallets and hatchets to cut the body into bite-sized pieces, to ensure that nothing is left behind. It's hard to watch, and, understandably, it's not like a funeral, in that family members and friends do not attend. The only Tibetans here are a monk saying prayers, the morticians, and, of course, the body.

But there are also two dozen tourists, all from China, here to gawk. Encouraged by the Chinese government, they've arrived in 4WDs emblazoned with the emblems and flags of an off-roading club. The burial goes on amid titters of disbelief and the whirrs and clicks of cameras and iPhones recording the event for online shares back home.

The $5 tickets to the show come with a map to the site. If there's any question about who is selling them, the monastery down below has surrendered to the government. Locals tell me there was a feud in town between followers of this monastery, which they say had sold out, and the other monastery in town, which tries, impossibly, to maintain a sliver of independence. (You can guess which one has five gilded roofs and which has roofing held down by rocks.) Regardless, both are now deluged with tourists. The monastic town around them has doubled in size in two years. Strips of new hotels are under construction, spurred by cheap loans from the Chinese government, one non-Tibetan hotel owner tells me.

It's government policy: tourism is an officially designated "pillar of the economy" in Tibet. The goal is to attract fifteen million tourists a year by 2015 in the so-called "Tibetan Autonomous Region," which has a population of only three million. In the first half of 2013, tourist visits to Lhasa surged by 36 percent, according to state media. Rather than threatening Tibetan monks with army troops, the government is smothering them with throngs of pushy tourists, who show their sympathies with...