The 800-square-metre auditorium was stuffed with people in colorful festival attire. Their ovations hovered under the eaves.

It was October 20. The cold wind of Beijing's late autumn moaning outside but the only things the people inside the auditorium could feel were warmth, happiness, excitement and pride.

The great party was held to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the founding of the Beijing Tibetan Middle School. More than 760 students, about 200 teachers and staff workers, and about 70 alumni immersed the whole campus in hugs, laughs and excited tears.

Pengzuo Zhaxi, who is in the second grade of the senior class, composed a song in Tibetan and prepared for the show for two months.

"The name of the song is 'Bless,'" he said before going on stage. ''I made it to show my affection for my school which is also my home in Beijing."

Coming from a herdsman's family in Nagqu, in the northern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Pengzuo Zhaxi is the third of five brothers and sisters. He was born with a beautiful voice.

"I have loved singing since childhood. I used to sing facing wide grasslands, blue sky, white clouds and herds of yaks, but now I am used to facing the audience and holding a microphone," he said, smiling.

Pengzuo Zhaxi is one of the best solo singers in the school's troupe. Besides singing, he also likes to play football and basketball after class.

Describing Beijing as his second hometown, Pengzuo Zhaxi said he doesn't miss his home in Tibet very much, although he has gone home only once during his six-years of study here.

"The weather is warmer here," was his simple reason.

Pengzuo Zhaxi and the other 759 students in the school are top students from Tibet. Half of them came from herdsmen's or farmers' families, according to the school's principal Yu Rucai.

Educational Base

Founded in 1987, the school was built under the guidance and sponsorship of the central government. Setting up Tibetan classes or schools in better-developed cities is a means to help ease the region's shortage of teaching staff and educational resources.

So far, the country has instituted 23 Tibetan classes at the junior and senior school levels, and 50 classes at the technical-school level. These classes, scattered throughout 100 schools in 25 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, are attended by about 14,000 Tibetan students.

The Beijing Tibetan Middle School is one of the best.

The school enrolls 200 students from Tibet each year, 100 for junior classes, and the rest for senior middle classes. The students' daily living and study expenses are all covered by the school, according to Yu.

"The school keeps growing," said Yu at the ceremony. ''Next year, we will have 18 classes and 810 students."

Sweet Home Beijing

Although six years have passed, Cidan Wangmu, an 18-year-old Tibetan girl from Shigatse (also known as Xigaze) Prefecture in west Tibet, still remembers the excitement and happiness she and her parents felt when they got the enrollment news.

But she will also never forget the tears as she waved goodbye to her parents at the railway station. Facing a totally unfamiliar city so far away from home, Cidan Wangmu, then only 11, was uncertain of her fate.

But when she arrived at the Beijing Tibetan Middle School and saw the Potala-Palace-style school buildings, her homesickness was a little eased.

"The school has offered us a comprehensive Tibetan-style life here, which is very in-tune with our local customs," Cidan Wangmu said.

"We can drink tea with milk, our favorite drink, and eat traditional Tibetan food and celebrate the Tibetan Lunar New Year.

"But what really helped us overcome our homesickness was the care of our teachers," she added. ''They treat us like their daughters and sons, and even better."

Besides their teaching job, the 60 teachers in the school are also responsible for the students' daily life. For example, they remind their students to dress properly when the weather turns cold, and they take care of them the whole day and whole night when they are ill in hospital, and they hold birthday parties for each of them.

"The students left their homes so far away when they were only children, and it is not easy for them," said Yan Suyin, 53, who is in charge of student affairs and began working at the school when it was founded.

"We don't have holidays or weekends because we have to stay with the students, who cannot easily go home," she said.

Zhang Mei, 39, who teaches Chinese in senior classes, said students from Tibet have many special and good characteristics.

"They are more unadorned, honest and modest and more diligent in their studies compared with local Beijing students," she said.

Busy Schedules

In addition to basic subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, biography, geography, music and physical education, the school also offers English and Tibetan language classes.

"We have eight classes every day and two self-study classes each night," said Cidan Wangmu, who is studying in the third-grade of the senior class and will take the national college entrance exams next June.

Her dream is to enter a normal university so she can go back to Tibet and teach more children.

"The key advantages of studying in Beijing are that we can get in touch with the deeper aspect of knowledge and we are better informed on major domestic and international affairs, compared to our peers in our hometowns," she said.

Cidan Wangmu said she will miss her warm dormitory and the library where she often immerses herself in all kinds of Chinese and foreign novels when she leaves here half a year from now.

Service for Tibetans

So far, the school has graduated 1,072 students from junior classes and 1,125 from senior classes, according to the school secretary Qi Yuekuan.

"Among them, more than 600 are back in Tibet working after having finished their college study," he said. "They are working in different fields where they are becoming the pillars of the community."

Dawa Ciren, who graduated from the Beijing Tibetan Middle School in 1993 and later studied at the Beijing Medical University (now the Peking University Health Science Center), is a doctor in the Tibetan People's Hospital in Lhasa.

All of his classmates, whose jobs range from archaeologist to film director, work in Tibet now.

"Beijing Tibetan Middle School is where our dreams start, and in Tibet the dream is fulfilled," he said.

(China Daily October 25, 2002)