Up to present the distinguished Tibetan writer Alai has published four full-length novels, namely, King Gesar, Nyarong (Zhandui), Red Poppies, and the Hollow Mountain series, which have, to a great extent, shaped outsiders' impressions of Kham, or Eastern Tibet, one of the three traditional divisions of "cultural Tibet" or "ethnographical Tibet". Based on historical anthropological perspectives, this article examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of Kham history reflected from these four novels. On the one hand, it shows that the native Khampa's senses of space referring to surrounding political entities has changed from an ancient model of "four regimes at four directions," to a dual model related to central and the local Tibetan polities in late Imperial China and the Republican Period, and finally to the unitary model of a single central government in the contemporary period. On the other hand, this article also points out, Khampa have experienced a changing sense of time from circulatory Tibetan Buddhist time to the dynastic time-scale of Chinese Empires and finally to a modern linear time-scale. Beyond revealing the transformations in the spatial and temporary senses of Khampa people, Alai also implicitly demonstrates alternative models in Sino-Tibetan relations, as both historical reality and ideality:Spatially, the process of forced integration of Han Chinese and Tibetan people has simultaneously preserved a dialectical distinction, this distinction has been buffered and connected through the medium of the Khampa. Temporally, free borderland markets, acting the role of historical transcendence, have been protective and under control, especially for the sake of Tibetans.
The above narratives consist of both the empirical facts and Alai's expectations and constructions. On the one hand, as an ethnic-minority writer and native speaker of Tibetan dialect, Alai loves his siblings and tends to understand the conditions of the Tibetans from the bottom up, on the other hand, raised at a peripheral Tibetan village near the Han area, educated in a modern Mandarin-language schools and college, and not able to write in his mother tongue, Alai's conception of history has been from above to below. It is easy to understand that when faced with issues of frontiers and ethnic minorities, native elites like Alai are quite likely to develop a historical construction of literary complexity. This complexity further diversifies the impressions of Tibet for outsiders.
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