osang again, I found he shed a lot of weight due to busy work those days. Losang Gyaltsen was one of the four persons who were very hard to find by reporters at that time in Lhasa. The other three were Living Buddha Shengqin who was in charge of the team searching for the reincarnated soul boys, prestigious Living Buddha Bumi, who would draw lots from the gold urn and was now in meditation, and Lhagpa Phuntshogs, vice chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government and chief organizer of the lots-drawing and enthronement ceremony.

The lots-drawing ceremony was held in front of the principal nave, which covered about ten square meters only. Therefore, a wooden platform was extended out from the smooth platform in front of the gate for the sake of convenience and protection of the construction and cultural relics inside the monastery. Placed in the center near the principal nave's door was a table, on which the gold urn would be put on. Only leading Party officials and representatives of eminent monks could sit on the two sides of the principal nave, and other representatives from all walks of life would sit in the grand hall. Statues of Padmasambhava and Byams-pa were enshrined in the grand hall, blocking the principal nave where the statue of Sakyamuni was worshipped. In order to enable all these attendees to clearly observe the whole process of the lots-drawing ceremony, an outside broadcast car from Tibet TV was deployed and two TV sets were placed in the front two corners of the grand hall. In this way, guests and reporters in the grand hall could watch the lots-drawing process clearly via TV broadcasting.

We made preparations for news coverage in the evening prior to the ceremony. People's Daily sent Xuan Yucai, Zhang Zhong, and me to report this grand Buddhist ceremony. I was up all the night, sitting in front of the computer and typing into the news story titled How to decide the reincarnated soul boy of the 10th Panchen. At around 2 a.m., I called Xuan Yucai, who was also awake for the whole night, and then we drove to the Jokhang Monastery in a hurry. Along the streets, policemen on duty could be seen in each block.

We entered the grand hall aglow with lights where people moved back and forth. Workers with Tibet TV were busy adjusting the angle of video cameras. Tupden and Chogo, two Tibetan photographers from the Xinhua News Agency Tibet Branch, were walking around the grand hall with different kinds of cameras on their necks. Lhasa Mayor Losang Gyaltsen spoke to the mobile phone with a very serious look on his face. We shook hands when he passed by me. We had known each other for a long time.

Losang was the secretary of the Communist Youth League Committee when I was learning Chinese at Tibet Institute for Nationalities from 1979 to 1983. He worked for the college upon graduation