Golog Prefecture, Qinghai Province: Beijing’s Bonfire of Tibetan Prayer Flags

With the pretext of “fire security,” the Chinese desecrate Buddhist sacred symbols.

By Lopsang Gurung

December 16, 2025

Fire safety agents burning the Mani prayer flags. From Weibo.

It takes a special kind of bureaucratic genius to turn sacred symbols into “fire hazards.” On November 18, in Chik Dril County (Jigzhi County), Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, officials from China’s environmental and fire safety departments descended on mountain tops to incinerate Buddhist Mani prayer flags (inscribed with the mantra of compassion “Om mani padme hum”) and other religious items. Their justification? The flags might catch fire during the dry winter season. Their solution? Burn them all at once. One can only marvel at the logic: prevent fire by starting one.

The absurdity does not end there. After torching the prayer flags—objects revered by Tibetans as carriers of blessings and ancestral memory—the officials walked away, leaving ashes and debris scattered across the sacred landscape. Local Tibetans, with dignity and devotion, cleaned up the mess themselves. Yet, in a flourish of propaganda worthy of Orwell, the authorities later boasted online that “professionals” had been deployed to manage fire hazards—professionals, apparently, at desecration.

For Tibetans, prayer flags are not mere cloth fluttering in the wind. They are living prayers, woven into the fabric of daily life, tied to ancestors, and infused with spiritual meaning. Burning them is not “safety management.” It is desecration. One Tibetan who talked to the “Tibet Times” put it plainly: destroying prayer flags is equivalent to desecrating ancestral resting places. Another noted the obvious: in a dry, rocky region, setting flags on fire is more likely to start fires than prevent them. But when the state is determined to erase faith, common sense is the first casualty.

This latest bonfire fits neatly into Beijing’s broader campaign against Tibetan religious practices. Smoke offerings, prayer flag hoisting, and stone mounds—all are now branded as “pollution” or “wildlife hazards.” For the CCP, Tibetan spirituality must be scrubbed from the landscape, its symbols reduced to ashes.

The cruelty is not abstract. In September 2023, five Tibetans in Sêrtar County (in Sichuan Province, bordering Qinghai, and also part of historical Tibet) were sentenced to prison for the “crime” of performing rituals and erecting stone mounds. One of them, 52-year-old Chuk Dhar, was beaten in custody and died from his injuries. Officials insisted he “died suddenly,” as if brutality could be rebranded as natural causes. His family, offered hush-money compensation that never materialized, was left with grief and silence.

A view of Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Credits.

The burning of prayer flags in Chik Dril County is part of a systematic effort to erase Tibetan identity, particularly in the part of historical Tibet made by Beijing a part of Qinghai Province, under the guise of regulation. Beijing’s bureaucrats may claim they are preventing fires, but what they are really igniting is resentment, sorrow, and resistance. The flames they lit were consuming trust, dignity, and the fragile hope that religious freedom might one day be respected in Tibet.

If this is “fire safety,” then it is safety only for authoritarianism. For Tibetans, it is yet another reminder that their prayers, their rituals, and their very culture are treated as disposable waste. “Bitter Winter” has long documented the slow-motion cultural arson in the Tibetan region. The latest bonfire of prayer flags shows that the campaign continues, with bureaucratic cynicism as its accelerant.

Source: bitterwinter.org