Nothing quite prepared me for the sight of modern Lhasa, where its ancient Buddhist culture seems to be giving way fast to the bland, hurried and monotonous look of many a modern Chinese city.

Within a kilometre of the magnificent Potala Palace, said to be the earthly representation of a celestial palace, I spotted two Giordano stores, as well as a Bossini and a Baleno store. And, of course, Lau beaming from poster to poster. Walking along Lhasa's main thoroughfare, the tellingly named Beijing Central Road, I could well have been in any mid-sized Chinese city with the smell of spicy Sichuanese food wafting from nondescript restaurants and music blasting from CD shops stocked with the latest pirated wares. It would not be long before KFC and Starbucks make their presence felt, I fear.

""Yes, this place has changed a lot in the eight years I've been working here,'' said taxi-driver Hu Chengang, who left his native Sichuan province to make more money to pay for his son's school fees. ""It's losing some of its flavour, but the economy's doing better. You can't expect the Tibetans to live on faith and prayers alone right?'' No one will dispute that, but what I find disturbing is how Lhasa, like so many cities across China, has taken on that numbingly similar look in the big rush to urbanise and modernise.

In the last 20 months, work and a healthy dose of wanderlust have taken me to the newly-built river towns along the mighty Yangtze River, failing third-tier cities in the north-eastern rust belt, as well as the fabled Kashgar, the trading town in the remote western Xinjiang province that was once the pivot post of the original Silk Route, to name a few places in China. You would expect cities stretching across such vast geographical distances to look very different, but the experience has unfortunately proven otherwise.

For me, strolling around Kashgar was not unlike walking through a time warp, for so drastic was the difference between the older markets and parts of town still standing, and the refurbished areas now turned into hotels and Chinese restaurants. It is as if some mysterious and all-powerful town planner in Beijing had mapped out a Uniform - and uniformly boring - look for these new cities. Without fail, there would be a huge public square modelled after the Tiananmen Square and a pedestrian shopping street. The biggest, shiniest building is inevitably the local government office.

There are, of course, pockets in major metropolises, such as Shanghai and Beijing, which hint at their rich cultural and historical heritage. But beyond areas like the Forbidden City and the Bund, much of the modern architecture borders on banality. ""What's the big deal?'' a Singaporean friend shot back in an e-mail. ""You are telling me Ang Mo Kio looks very different from Toa Payoh to a mainland Chinese? People like you are just looking for exotica.'' To be honest, Ang Mo Kio and Toa Payoh do not look very different even to my eyes, much less a pair of foreign ones. But that is an argument for another day.

The issue in China, I feel, goes much deeper than the loss of exoticism however one defines it. In places like Tibet and Xinjiang, there is a debate on whether modernisation means Sinicisation. I am no activist, but I can now empathise with some of the anguish the Tibetans and Uyghurs feel about the plight of their cities. Doubtless, Chinese officials put much emphasis and funds into the restoration of historic sites like the Potala Palace and the Jhokhang Temple, also in Lhasa, and the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar.

But these palaces, temples and mosques cannot and do not exist in a social vacuum. With the kind of thoughtless modernisation drive encroaching upon Lhasa, it will be a matter of time before it turns into a theme park with the Potala Palace as its Disneyland and Tibetan culture and monks as its star attractions, if not already so. The surrounding city, with its Giordanos and Bossinis, provides a familiar and convenient environment for the hordes of gawking tourists, which will swell to a flood when a new railway line connecting Lhasa with Golmud in China's Qinghai province is ready in a few years' time.

This is not just an issue for China's ethnic minorities. Beijingers have been screaming bloody murder for years over the reshaping of the Chinese capital's skyline and the destruction of its iconic hutong, or alleyway. Architecture lecturer Zhou Rong, from Beijing's Tsinghua University, remarked in a recent issue of the Post Magazine: ""Cities are very much like human beings. ""Would you be prepared to give up all your memories as the price for driving a Mercedes-Benz? Probably not. ""So why do we allow this to happen to our city? Some of what's happening on these sites cuts off the city's memory. Beijing is losing its cultural and historical sense. Its Chinese characteristics are lost.''

His comments bring the dilemma full circle in all its ironic glory. If Chinese cities are losing their Chineseness and those in Tibet and Xinjiang are turning into sad parodies of their Chinese counterpart, what is China left with?

I still remember the rage I once felt in my first couple of weeks in Beijing in late 2002, when I discovered that Starbucks had opened an outlet in the historic Forbidden City. ""How could anyone stomach such an outrage and don't you Chinese care?'' I thundered then.

Sadly, growing knowledge about this place and the way things work have an unfortunate way of wearing down such well-meaning, if naive, anger. As the Chinese are fond of telling foreigners ""guo qing bu tong'', which is a polite way of saying conditions in China are different, so your standards do not apply.

So you smile and walk away, and wish them luck in bringing all this back someday. - Published in The Straits Times on 5 Sept 2004.