From the Plateau to a Gold Medal in France: She Gave 22 Years to One Cheese

Sixty-year-old Dolma said to me, “I’ll keep doing this even if I die.”

She was calm and firm when she said it—like she was stating something she had already decided on years ago.

For many people, sixty is the age when you settle into retirement. But for Dolma, it’s her 22nd year of entrepreneurship. This isn’t the kind of work where results show up quickly. Even now, she told me, she still hasn’t made a profit from it. And yet she hasn’t stopped.

Dolma makes yak cheese. Her product is called “Geza Gold.” In Shangri-La, cheese isn’t a familiar food for many people. It’s common overseas, but here plenty of locals have never even tasted it. When they hear the word “cheese,” the reaction is often the same: Isn’t that something foreigners eat? It must be expensive—and we probably won’t get used to it anyway. In Shangri-La, it still feels like a “new” thing from outside—so new that there’s no ready market for it, and it’s hard to understand right away.

That’s exactly why I couldn’t help wondering. Dolma was born in a rural village near Shangri-La and left school after middle school because her family couldn’t afford to keep her there. How did she end up connected to cheese—something that seems like it belongs on tables in France, Switzerland, or Italy—and keep making this “new thing” in Shangri-La for so many years?

Her story goes back twenty years.

Around the early 2000s, Dolma was working as a tour guide. She took visitors into the mountains and to villages to see pastureland and herding life. When she had time, she also did small business with Cordyceps and wild mushrooms. Life wasn’t easy. One season ended and the next began, and the days repeated in a way that made it hard to imagine a different possibility.

Then a visit that looked completely ordinary ended up changing her life.

That day, she was hosting a guest from the Hong Kong Adventurer’s Association—Mr. Huang. As usual, she took him to her family’s pasture to see the yaks and talked about how people lived in the village. Mr. Huang watched very carefully the whole way. He stood by the pasture for a long time, watching the yaks lower their heads and graze on the grass. The plateau air was clean, and the wind carried the smell of the grass. After a while, he suddenly asked Dolma, “What do you usually do with yak milk?”

A Tibetan woman milking a yak in the highlands

Dolma replied casually that yak milk yields are low, and it spoils quickly. Locally, most people turn it into milk curds and butter.

Mr. Huang didn’t say much after hearing that. A few days later, he came back with a Harvard-based professor who specialized in dairy science. The professor came to the pasture, collected yak milk samples from Dolma’s pasture, and later brought the samples back to the U.S. for testing.

Dolma still remembered clearly that when the results came back, the reaction was immediate: “Incredible—this milk is exceptional.”

Once she heard their explanation, she understood right away what was behind it. The yaks here live on high-altitude grasslands. The environment is clean, and they feed on natural pasture—geza, a wild grass that grows only above 4,000 meters and flowers between July and September. When the yaks graze on it, the milk turns noticeably richer and more fragrant. And their milk follows the season: they produce only from June to October. There’s no way to “push” output with hormones. A single milking yields at most about a kilogram. Low yield, a short season, and no shortcuts—those limits are exactly what make this milk so rare, and so valuable.

So in 2004, Mr. Huang and the professor began teaching Dolma how to make yak cheese. They supported her with the technique and covered all the costs.

When Dolma told me this part, she didn’t pause to explain. She didn’t say why Mr. Huang was willing to help her, or why he chose her. She simply went on—how she learned, how she made it, how she experimented again and again.

I was a little puzzled. Why? They weren’t close, and there was no obvious financial exchange.

 But Dolma had already let that question go. If someone was willing to teach her, she learned seriously. If someone was willing to support her, she kept building it into something real. I thought that might be part of why Mr. Huang chose to help her—he saw her determination, and the way she could carry the work through.

That was how Dolma learned to make yak cheese. She named it “Geza.” She told me the name came from the pasture—from the wild grass that grows on high-altitude grasslands, from the yaks that only give milk when the season allows, from resources that usually never make it beyond the region. She wanted more people to see them.

Making Geza cheese is not a simple process. The yak milk is first heated to sterilize it. After it cools, starter cultures are added and the milk is left to ferment until it curdles. The curds are pressed by hand, shaped, and salted. Then it enters the aging stage: it’s placed in an aging room, kept at the right temperature and humidity, and allowed to develop a natural white rind. It’s wiped with oil, turned again and again, and tended to over time—at least three months before the flavor begins to settle.

But later Dolma told me the hardest part was never the steps. The hardest part was who she could sell it to.

Cheese was simply too new in Shangri-La. Many people had never heard of it, and even if they had, they didn’t necessarily want to try. Some thought it was food for foreigners. Some assumed the taste would be strange. And most people’s first reaction was the price—yak milk is scarce to begin with, and the process is slow and labor-intensive. The cost could never be low.

So for a long time, her only customers were friends. They all said it tasted great, but “friends saying it’s good” doesn’t turn into a stable business. Dolma told me that in those years, what she ran into most often wasn’t a lack of praise—it was a lack of buyers. And as time went on, even she began to wonder: Is it really worth it to keep making something with no market?

Then, in 2015, she received her first validation from outside.

A friend thought her cheese was so good that they brought Geza yak cheese to France to compete in the Mondial du Fromage cheese competition. Unexpectedly, it came back with a gold medal. The competition was held in Tours, France, with participants including traditional European cheese producers, artisan cheesemakers, and dairy professionals. Her yak cheese from Shangri-La won gold in a place where cheese has its deepest roots. That result itself proved the flavor and craft of Geza cheese. Dolma said she hadn’t dared to hope for much. But when the results came out, that was the moment she realized: what I’ve been making really is something special.

Awards and recognitions earned by Geza Cheese

After that gold medal, people started reaching out to work with her. Her customers slowly expanded beyond friends to hotels, restaurants, and more stable orders.

But life didn’t suddenly become easy.

She still couldn’t obtain formal cheese certification locally. In many places, cheese has long-established standards and regulatory experience. But in Shangri-La, it was too new—so new that even figuring out how to certify it was difficult. Local authorities didn’t want to take on the risk, and they didn’t want to endorse something unfamiliar. So her production, sales, and ability to expand were all blocked in ways that weren’t always visible.

She also said it plainly: even now, she still hasn’t truly made a profit. Many times, she has to rely on other small businesses just to cover the cost of continuing.

So I couldn’t help asking: “Why do you still keep going?”

In a world that runs on gain and loss, a business that loses money year after year should, by all logic, have ended long ago. So why would Dolma stake twenty-two years on it?

She paused, then spoke slowly. She comes from herding. In Tibetan herding communities, families depend on yaks generation after generation. If even one product can make it out beyond the plateau, herders can have a steadier income and a more stable life. The region has exceptional natural materials, but most of them never travel far. She knew cheese had a market in major cities—it keeps longer, travels better, and reaches far more people. That was why she had fought for it for so long.

She said that after the gold medal, she became even more certain of one thing: this has a future. She didn’t want “good things in Tibet can never make it beyond the plateau” to become a permanent ending. 

Listening to her, I finally understood why she wouldn't stop. What she valued was never the profit. In this world, we’ve gotten used to measuring whether something is worth doing by money—but there are many people who have already let that measure go.

Dolma and her son, Qilin, at her cheese factory

“If it doesn’t make money, does your family support you?” Then I asked.

“Of course not,” she replied. “They opposed it strongly.” The elders didn’t understand, and her husband didn’t understand. They felt she was putting time and money into something with no return. But every time, she was unwavering: “I’ll keep doing this even if I die.”

Dolma’s determination was not something anyone could talk her out of. Over these twenty-two years, she has chosen to stay committed to seeing Geza cheese all the way through.

She also brought up something else: the people outside her family supported her more. Mr. Huang has supported her financially—right up to now. He was the one who brought the idea to her and gave her the chance to learn the skills. When she said this, she became visibly emotional: “If that’s not like a second parent, then what is?”

At that moment, I understood her persistence even more. She had weighed the difficulties and the risks. She knew her family wouldn’t support her. But she refused to stop. She didn’t want to let down the people who had helped her, and she didn’t want to let down the path she had come to believe in.

For a sixty-year-old woman, there will always be a sentence people throw at you: You should stop now.

But she didn’t stop.

She didn’t want to be defined by her age, her family, or by the word “impossible.” If her business didn’t work out, all she needed to face was just failure. But if it did work, it could change life for countless herding families like hers. 

Her reason for continuing was simple: for herself, and for the herders who have lived by yaks for generations, the way she has.

So sixty-year-old Dolma is still an entrepreneur. In the past, she has poured twenty-two years into this one thing. And today, she still persists.

Explore Her Collection

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Part of the cheese-making process in this article draws inspiration from:

– “The ‘nectar’ of enlightenment — a Tibetan delicacy revealed.”