The Chinese media images of shops and homes devastated by fire raises a number of other troubling questions. How, for example, could the damage have been so extensive? On March 14, when the burning happened, the Tibetan rioters who were moving westward reached the Tsomonling area at just past 1:00 p.m. By 3:00 p.m. they still had not crossed Shonu Road, where police crews were already in place. One block farther west, the Peoples Armed Police were already deployed and at the ready. So how could this area have been one where the damage was most severe? Even if we consider that, it being daylight, the troops did not want to use violence in front of the cameras of tourists, they still could have used tear gas or water hoses to prevent major arson. Another puzzle is why, when houses were set ablaze in the Tromsigkhang area, the homes of both Tibetans and Hans were burned. Why would Tibetans burn the homes of Tibetans? It is not plausible that they could not tell the difference. When shops were set ablaze on Shonu Road, the ones owned by Tibetans were left untouched even if the neighboring shops on both sides, if owned by Hans, were burned. It is at least as easy to recognize a Tibetan home as a Tibetan shop.

One image that was shown repeatedly all across China, and internationally, showed a "Tibetan" wielding a machete. He was wearing clothing characteristic of people from the Amdo region in northeast Tibet, but his face did not look like an Amdo Tibetan face and the big knife that he held was one that no Tibetan would recognize. Moreover the aim of the rioters on March 14 was to smash shops, a task for which a big knife like that would have been a clumsy tool. Using it would likely have resulted in damage to the knife itself. Are we supposed to believe that the purpose of the knife was to hack Han Chinese? I cannot. There is no evidence that the rioters, for all their anger, had that kind of bloodthirsty goal.

What the official media showed about the Han people who died in fires raises yet other questions. The deaths are as shocking as the questions are unsettling. The two places where Hans died in fires were on Shonu Road north of Beijing Road and on Beijing Road to the west of Shonu Road. These were both locations where the police were already in place, and the armed militia was nearby, well before the rioters arrived. Moreover the elapsed time between the point at which it was known that rioting had begun in the city and the point at which the slow-moving rioters arrived at these two locations was about two hours. That was plenty of time to do an evacuation. People on the streets at the two locations--Hans and Tibetans alike--were moving freely during those two hours. How, as the media reports said, could the fire victims have been trapped inside their shops? One of the stores in which people died, the Yichun Clothes Shop, was only about 100 meters away from where the Peoples Armed Police were on duty, and yet there seems to have been no effort to evacuate or rescue anyone. On Yuthok Road as well, where a number of government offices suffered heavy damage, as did about one third of the Han-owned shops, other nearby shops and offices suffered no damage at all. The puzzle is that police, including military police, were stationed throughout the area--both where damage occurred and where it did not occur. In some areas the police deterred rioters; in others they stood by and watched. The Chinese media has repeated endlessly that the disturbances had been "plotted, planned, and organized" by the Dalai Lama. But looking at the streets of Lhasa, it seemed much more likely that someone else had done some planning and organizing.

One of the official news reports claimed that Tibetans had set fire to a school. It is true that a school was burned. But that had happened when flames spread from neighboring shops. I find it impossible to imagine that Tibetans deliberately set fire to a school. Moreover one could see from the news clip that only part of the second floor of the school building showed signs of having been burned. Would someone aiming to burn down a building begin at the second floor? Chinese television interviewed some Tibetan witnesses who condemned "the arson," but only a viewer bilingual in Tibetan and Chinese could know that the Chinese subtitles were a poor match what the Tibetans were saying.

In the days that followed March 18, life in Lhasa seemed to calm down. The government announced that "the people's lives and production have been restored to normal order." But the description was superficial. The tension caused by the military crackdown had not diminished. Troops continued to occupy Tibetan neighborhoods, and the household searches, and arrests of Tibetans, continued as before. The arrests from March 15 to 18 had been done by uniformed police; now they were done, more furtively, by plainclothes police. Once arrested, it seemed to matter little whether a person could show that he or she had had nothing to do with the rioting; a beating followed in either case. I interviewed a Tibetan who had been released from a detention center because he was able to show clear evidence that he had been elsewhere when the rioting occurred. His face was still badly swollen from beatings. But he said that the great majority of Tibetans inside his detention center were determined to stay optimistic. Some young Tibetan women detainees, he said, sang songs all day long in an effort to boost everyone's spirits.

He introduced me to another Tibetan who had entered the detention center in good health but came out unable to walk and mentally disoriented. This man died two days later. People have asked me how many Tibetans were arrested, all together, and how many died in both the night-time shootings and the detention centers. I do know, and I am not optimistic that this number will ever be precisely known.

The police presented inducements to detainees as well as coercion. They offered rewards of 2000 yuan (about $285) for information that led to the arrest of a rioter. A few Tibetans apparently took this offer, but not many. The Public Security Office of the Tibet Autonomous Region also sent a text message to every cell-phone subscriber in Lhasa announcing a reward of 20,000 yuan for anyone who could turn over a person on the government's "most wanted" list. Photographs of people on this list were broadcast on television every night beginning March 19, with exceptions only of a brief suspension when foreign journalists and diplomats were being given guided tours to show that all was well in Lhasa.