Four young monks, all 20-something, were so anxious to raise a question that everyone tried to elbow the others out of the way. One of them fell to the ground and caused all the other monks and onlookers to laugh.

Loga laughed, too, as he sat on a stone in a quiet corner to take a break. At 85, he is blind in one eye but is generally in good shape, and walks without a stick. "I've been to Sera every day since I was 13," he said in Tibetan dialect. He wore a cotton-padded traditional costume, with a bright yellow shirt and a hand knitted blue woolen vest underneath.

Guo Haoran watched the Sutra debate with immense interest. "It's a pity I don't understand a word," he said. "There's so much to learn about Tibetan culture and religion."

Guo, 26, works for a foreign trade company in the southern boom city of Guangzhou. He arrived in Lhasa by train on Saturday for a one-man sightseeing tour that would last for a month. "We're suffering a business decline amid the global financial crisis. So I decided to take my annual vacation in advance."

Guo said the Tibetans had impressed him with hospitality. "I walked along the Pogor Street when I first arrived and ventured to enter a Tibetan family. We had a nice chat, at the end of which they insisted I should stay for dinner."

Earlier today, the chairman Qiangba Puncog also said in Beijing the "Tibetan genocide" by which the Dalai Lama and his secessionist group claimed more than 1 million Tibetans had been killed in the past 50 years was merely fabrication and vilification.

The population of Tibet increased from 1.2 million in 1959 to 2.87 million in 2008, and the 50 years was a period during which the population there grew the most fast in the past several centuries, he said.

Of the total population, Tibetans and people from other ethnic minorities account for more than 95 percent, he said.

(Xinhua News Agency March 10, 2009)