Before tensions imploded in Tibetan areas, Chinese officials thought the chief domestic security threat to the 2008 Summer Games would come from Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. Many officials still think that. My recent journey to one traditional redoubt of Uighur unrest revealed growing polarization of the religious and cultural landscape, as both the economy and Islam begin to flourish. Whether the situation might devolve into the extremism Beijing evokes is another question however. Herewith some field notes I made while reporting an earlier magazine piece:

Sunday’s “big bazaar” day in Khotan, on China’s northwest frontier, where the big money’s tied up in Khotanese jade. Prices for pure nephrite from the local “White Jade River” have shot up ten-fold in just two to three years, helping this desert junction on the storied Silk Road – in the late 1990’s, a poor, dusty seedbed of violent outbursts by Muslim Uighur separatists – recoup some of its ancient luster as a nexus of trade. On a recent Sunday in April, along an arcade lined by dozens of jade shops and a vast mosque, Uighur men in skullcaps shuffled about in scrums, palms extended like beggars. They held pebbles with black beauty marks, sunbursts of orange, and creme de mint-colored ripples. The precious stones fetched offers in the hundreds of dollars from Han Chinese collectors from as far east as Suzhou.

Chinese authorities and representatives of the exiled Dalai Lama will meet in "coming days," says the state-run Xinhua News Agency. This is a potential breakthrough. Chinese officials blame the "splittist Dalai clique" for violent riots that erupted in Lhasa March 14, followed by brushfire protests in other Tibetan communities, and have demonized the Tibetan spiritual leader as a "jackal wrapped in monk's robes," as one put it.  

But the Dalai Lama denied Beijing's accusations, and has kept the door open to high-level negotiations. Such contacts have taken place sporadically since 1980 -- I remember making my first trip to Lhasa, in July 1980, and being startled to see dozens of emotional Tibetans crying and prostrating on the ground in a courtyard beside the guesthouse where I was staying (as part of a government-organized media tour.)  Turns out an envoy of the Dalai Lama was staying in the next-door guesthouse. We foreign correspondents on that trip got our story simply by interviewing people across the courtyard wall.

But institutionalized talks between the two sides broke down in 2006. When my colleague Sudip Mazumdar and I interviewed the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala on March 20, he said he'd received private messages of sympathy from ordinary citizens, and even some officials, in China. And he expressed his extreme willingness to talk with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, for whom he professed "great respect".

Just before our interview, we glimpsed the Dalai Lama through a window saying farewell to a delegation of Buddhist believers of Asian descent.  One of his aides said that they were from mainland China, and that if their identities were made public they "could be executed" just for visiting Dharmsala. The Dalai Lama said "thousands" of ordinary Buddhist devotees from China had requested audiences with him over the years (he fled from Lhasa into exile in 1959, after an abortive Tibetan uprising) and that even some officials considered to be upright communist party loyalists had sent him private expressions of support.

Xinhua quoted an anonymous Chinese official saying that authorities had taken into account "requests repeatedly made by the Dalai side for resuming talks",  and that "the relevant department of the central government will have contact and consultation with Dalai's private representative in the coming days."