The Dalai Lama launches the Pitt Rivers Museum's Tibet Album in Oxford today. As a virtual museum of Tibet's pre-communist existence, it feeds a cultural revolution that has led to soaring prices for Tibetan contemporary art and a purge of the country's cultural leaders.

The album, with 6,000 images taken by British photographers between 1920 and 1950, reveals a Tibet to which many Tibetans have never had access. In Lhasa, downloaded pictures from the album (at http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/) are already selling fast.

For the Dalai Lama, the images will bring back childhood memories: in the Potala Palace; in his gold silk palanquin being carried through the city. These are images that formed Western myths of Shangri-La. But neither the Dalai Lama nor ordinary Tibetans subscribe to the myths, any more than they do to the Chinese image of Tibet as a feudal hell.

The Dalai Lama calls the Chinese approach to the Tibetan issue “simplistic”. Contemporary Tibetan art also seeks to dispel Chinese and Western stereotypes, showing the Buddhist and communist history as part of a complex contemporary identity. But if the world has yet to understand Tibet's contemporary political sophistication, it seems suddenly to be understanding its art.

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