Biography
Catriona Bass is an English writer and photographer and conservationist. In the 1980s she taught at Hubei University in Wuhan and also worked for the Ministry of Education of the Lhasa City Government and the Academy of Social Science of the Tibet Autonomous Region (RAT). Since 2000 she has farmed Long Mead, one of the last fragments of original lowland wildflower hay meadows in the UK. She is currently writing a book on the cultural history of St. Petersburg.
She has written a memoir of her time in Tibet: Inside the Treasure House (Gollancz,1980), which was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Prize and was translated into German, Dutch, and Japanese.
Her book Education in Tibet: Policy and practice since 1950 Zed Books, 1998) revealed that the illiteracy rate in Tibet was one of the highest in the world, reaching 70% in the rural population. She noted that at the end of the 1980s, with the resurgence of the Tibetan independence movement, ethnic unity was reaffirmed and the concessions made to the Tibetan language eroded in part.She addressed the European Parliament and the United Nations on the development of education in the RAT.