Summer next year I'm going to language school in China. After 1 year of study, then I'll go.

Politically things may have loosened up by then. Right now, things not good in most parts of Tibet, although it varies area by area. The Chinese came down hard after the 2008 Lhasa riots, and the revolutions in the Middle East this year made them yet more paranoid

Albums from another photographer who went to the (much bigger) 2008 festival:

Yushu Festival Trip - Assorted Festival Photos
Yushu Festival Trip - Bamboo Temple Photos
Yushu Festival Trip - Xinzhai's Mani Stones
Yushu Festival Trip - Tibetan Umbrellas
Yushu Festival Trip - Tibetan Jewelry I
Yushu Festival Trip - Tibetan Jewelry II

In the Tibetan Jewelry II album linked to above, as well as in the photos below, there are some dzi beads being worn in saddle rings. Curious whether people think they are authentic or remakes?

The resolution in the linked album's photos is not so high, so maybe nobody can see enough. But the picture below is better. Please look at the dzi beads worn in rings by the Khampa man. The bottom dzi looks old and battered, and has two chips missing across the eye. The middle one has small dents, the top one appears to have a chip missing from one end.

I have no doubt that the dzi in necklaces are reproductions.

But as for the Dzi beads in rings - are they antiques or reproductions... What do you think?

Religious Sites around Yushu County
Kids in ceremonial dresses at 2008 festival
Faces from 2008 Festival
Yushu Khampa Women
Grassland nomads from Yushu Prefecture

I spent hours with the photo blog links. Using the sideways links in the Tibetan Jewelry II link at http://my.poco.cn/lastphoto_v2.htx&id=1101487&user_id=43309621&p=0 found many more ring.

It was also interesting to use translate.google.com to read some of the captions and comments on the blogs.

Browsing on one link I found a great collection of pictures of westerner tourists taken by one of the Chinese photographers. Interesting perspectives in that set!

I'd be interested in seeing anything nice you find. And yes I also really enjoy looking through the photo albums of bloggers from eastern Tibet. The nature is incredibly beautiful, most people think of Tibet as all snow capped himalayan peaks, but eastern Tibet (Kham) is covered in vast grasslands with all sorts of nature.

Sometimes, maybe one if three bloggers I find, are actually Khampas (eastern Tibetans) using Chinese. Some Tibetans in Kham speak Chinese either as a second or as their main language. But from what I have seen that doesn't necessarily stop them from keeping their cultural identity.

Here's a music video with plenty of footage of local ladies in their finery at the Yushu festival costume display. Or is it secretly a Coral and Amber weightlifting competition?

without intending disrespect they appear to be wearing strings of oranges and lemons, and -well, kebab skewers with cheese slabs, cherry tomatoes and pineapple chunks...
its hard to imagine there can still be supplies of so much enormous amounts of bright yellow real amber anywhere in the world...

Stefany you have made me hungry

Tomatoes may well be available in Tibet, and they certainly have (Yak's) cheese, but I question your pineapple suggestion. I believe it's quite the wrong climate.

I must confess that I know less about amber than I do pineapples. I don't know nearly enough about Amber to have any opinion about what those stones really are. Indeed, I didn't know that bright yellow amber was rare or even particularly valuable (I should have guessed cos bright yellow is most beautiful). Duly noted, of course.

I can point you in the direction of a few things to look at. On the one hand, please refer to the posts by Vikuk down the bottom of this 2007 BC.N thread. He visited the second biggest horse festival in Kham, in Litang (currently banned because a nomad called Runggye Adak made this inpromptu speech.
Amounst other things, Vikuk said "Here are a couple pics of modern amberite type jewelry being 'used' in Tibet (Sichuan Tibet).
The amber is some type of plastic/amber powder mix - and some of it actually gives an amber smell when you rub it. Some of it is pure plastic."

On the other hand, I have seen some sellers of Amber, such as this guy who have sold amber in Tibet. Also I have exchanged emails with a former poster on these boards (let's call him 'Mr.Bead') who I understand knows more than most people about beads, and amber especially. He said that he thinks the amber shown in the photos in this thread are baltic amber. As well as the appearance in those photos, that was also based on many anecdotes: he had knows/knew amber dealers in American whose biggest customers had been Tibetans, as well as meeting somebody who had brought back a strand of 5 inch diameter amber beads from Tibet.

I hope some of that information is useful. My suspicion is that many grades of amber, plastic at the bottom, powdered mixes in the middle, and real baltic amber, are all available and worn in Kham, including at these festivals.

I was reading Jewellery of Tibet and the Himalayas by John Clarke (which I highly recommend, if you haven't read it), I think I nearly but not quite got to the bit on Amber... He has photos from the Yushu horse festival in the book, including these amber headdresses. The captions to those images just said "huge amber beads", and did not say they are fake. I will endeavor to finish read the chapters in the book.

Again, if you haven't, please take a look at the high-res photos in this thread, where there's a much closer view of the amber/cheese/lemons. I will try and post more high-res photos at a later point. Now I'm going to bed.

So, I read the bit on amber in John Clarke’s ‘Jewellery of Tibet and the Himalayas’. It’s on Page 38.

The bits relevant to our discussion are: “From the early seventeenth century, the more distant Baltic amber was also brought to Indian ports by European trading companies .… other supplies of Siberian amber, from the shores of Lake Baikal in Buriatia, part of eastern Siberia lying on the borders of Outer Monglia, were being used by the nomads of north-east Tibet in the 1940s. Pale yellow Russian amber which may be from the same source is being imported into eastern Tibet [Kham] today.”
(my emphasis)

Two pages earlier, there is a photograph from the Yushu festival 2003 showing none other than the woman in the pictures below. (In the book it’s a sharper, frontal photo, and she has her eyes closed)

The caption reads “Woman wearing Gaba head ornaments: A festival headdress showing the extraordinarily large amber pieces set with coral worn in the north-easterly part of Kham. Sewn onto felt strips these extend most of the length of her back. The necklaces of mixed coral and imitation dzi beads are also definitely for wear on special occasions.”

They sure are valuable. The folks in this nomadic region of Tibet for centuries have used the jewelry and ornaments of their ceremonial costumes both as their bank accounts and as status symbols. Once or twice a year, such as at these big horse festivals, as well as on their wedding days, the men and women come out dressed in their full regalia. Many many times I have read that some women, the wives of successful traders for example, come wearing a million yuan of investments (1m yuan = 160,000 dollars = 100,000 pounds). For example in this documentary, in the scene starting from 17:30, a million yuan is quoted. And the costumes in the previous music video probably are from a special exhibition of crazy heavy/expensive costumes.

That's just the culture in the Kham region - lots of Khampas invest their wealth into jewelry and wear it all to festivals. It's a culture that goes back centuries and is still going strong. In fact, until Chinese colonisation, the rest of Tibet used to be similar, the old style of dress in Lhasa and otherplaces men and women would walk around everyday wearing a fortune (several years of their salary for instance, regardless of how high that might be), the wives of noblemen wouldn't go out without a servant in case of being robbed, and they would also sleep in their headdresses because it was considered bad luck to take it off. Their heads needed to go outside the bed.

All of this is in John Clarke's book.