BYCU
The new Gatorade: You can now get drunk while exercising. They've added electrolytes to beer. * * * * * * * This might be the most interesting drinking story of the year: Wine and Catholicism among the Tibetans of China's Yunnan Province. Here's a generous excerpt:
The Society of Foreign Missions of Paris (still going strong today after 350 years) was planning to evangelize Tibet. It was the mid-nineteenth century, and French adventurers had slowly been nudging the empire's influence up the Mekong from its Asian base in Indochina. The Pope granted his assent; the Qing, under duress, added theirs. Barred, sometimes violently, from preaching within Tibet itself, the missionaries set up camp among the Tibetans living right on its edge, in northwest Yunnan.
What inroads they made proved to be intensely local – family by family, village by village – and Tibetan Catholicism never extended beyond a few valleys, a few thousand souls. The Trung – many of whom are now converting to a kind of indigenous evangelical Protestantism–were never “reached,” but some of their Nu cousins were. After eighty years of this unimaginably difficult and controversial work, the missionaries were sent packing by the party after 1949.
The most revered and best-remembered of the fathers, Père Genestier, lies buried in a Bingzhongluo churchyard, which I visited one Christmas as the bells were ringing and the Tibetan dancers were starting to form their circles. Let Party atheists, orthodox Catholics, and other Tibetans think what they may: by now the Tibetan Catholics emphatically have their own thing going.
* * * * * * * Pic received in an email:
