Story of first Tibetan woman lawyer

Yangjen, is a Tibetan woman lawyer. And there are 72 others like her, taking up 39.2 percent of all the lawyers in the whole Tibet Autonomous Region with 60 of them under the age of 40, and over 95 percent of them with undergraduate degrees after the reform and opening-up policy was adopted.

"In the past, we Tibetans take contracts as taboos,"said the first lawyer in Tibet.

With the economic and social development of Tibet，the legal awareness has been raised. Since early 1990s, the civil and economic cases have been increasing for more people have begun to resolve disputes in the legal framework, according to Yangjen.

She also recalled that before 1951, women’s social status was very low due to the patrilineal social system. They were prejudiced the same way as "contracts" in Tibet.
Likewise, women's social status also led to the prejudice held toward them in education. If any woman was literate, she would be despised. And 95 percent of the women were illiterate then.

In 1951, life of Yangjen’s mother changed, which in turn changed Yangjen’s life. After the first primary school–Chamdo Elementary School was established in the same year, Yangjen’s mother got an opportunity to go to school, becoming one of the first batch of its students, where she started to receive formal education learning Tibetan grammar and rhymes of Tibetan poems.

Afterwards, Yangjen's mother was sent to the Tibetan College of Nationalities located in Xianyang in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, where she continued to work after graduation. In 1964, Yangjen was born in Xianyang, and she moved to Lhasa at the age of three with her parents.