Dalai Lama's former biographer takes up residence in mainland China

A former senior member of the exiled Tibetan government in India and one-time biographer for the Dalai Lama has returned to live in China, a Chinese government-run news website said.

Tibet.cn said late on Saturday that Achok Rinpoche, who had visited China several times in recent years, returned in May and was now living permanently in Ngaba, a heavily Tibetan part of the southwestern province of Sichuan  that is traditionally strongly defiant of Chinese rule.

“I’ve now really become a Chinese citizen,” he was quoted as telling senior Sichuan government official Cui Baohua last week.

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The website showed a picture of the two of them walking around a temple in Ngaba surrounded by Tibetan Buddhist monks.

According to the website of the Austria-based Tibet Centre Institute, where Achok Rinpoche is listed as a teacher, he had been working on compiling a list of teachings of the Dalai Lama and had once been his official biographer.

He also lived in Beijing for a year in 1987 at the request of the Dalai Lama and the late Panchen Lama, working at a school for reincarnated lamas, the centre said.

China has ruled Tibet with an iron fist since the People’s Liberation Army “peacefully liberated” it in 1950.