Of all the unforgettable Tibet images to emerge this week, the wild-haired Tibetan horsemen twirling tether ropes and galloping on cobby little ponies to lay seige to a government building in some podunk corner of Gansu province keeps running through my mind.

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A couple hundred protestors, led by dozens of Tibetan riders shouting in high-pitched voices, tried to take over a government building but were repelled by volleys of tear gas fired by 100-some police holed up inside. They galloped off to a nearby school, tore down the Chinese flag and shredded it, then raised the banned former Tibetan national flag.

The footage was captured by CTV, then went viral on Youtube. In other areas, foreign journalists who managed to infiltrate Tibetan monasteries found a sort of Uprising by Cellphone going on (see the evocative account from Tongren, by my colleague Jonathan Ansfield). But the Canadian TV correspondent popped up in the middle of a throwback scene that could have been lifted out of the failed Tibetan revolt of 1959.

Virtually every rural Tibetan town has horsemen like this -- though, of course, they're not normally on the warpath. When I catch my breath I'll blog on the legendary Litang horse festival where amazingly athletic horseback riders race each other and perform dangerous acrobatics on a big flat field--actually an old World War II-era grass airstrip -- decked out in festival finery, firing fake rifles and arrows. (It's life-threatening stuff; one year I saw a rider badly trampled after he fell from his horse while doing a backbend from his saddle, dragging his robes' long sleeves on the ground behind him.) Events of the past week give these popular Tibetan horse festivals a whole new context.