At Twenty-Five, She Carried the Weight of an Entire Brewery

As I listened to Dolma Lhamo speak, I sat there smiling, already looking forward to our next conversation.

The young woman on the other end of the line, laughing constantly and telling her story with such vivid ease, is the chief executive officer of Shangri-La Highland Craft Brewery.

At first, I had a hard time connecting her to that role. The brewery has been one of Shangri-La’s most iconic local brands for the past ten years, carrying a kind of formality, almost like a public emblem of the city itself. In my mind, its CEO should have been steady, serious, maybe even a little reserved. But Dolma Lhamo is nothing like that. She laughs out loud as she talks, telling even the heaviest parts of her life with an almost playful lightness.

And the path that led her to this position was just as unexpected.

Dolma Lhamo, CEO of Shangri-La Highland Craft Brewery Co., Ltd.

At the end of 2019, the pandemic arrived suddenly. Songtsen Gyalzur, the brewery’s chairman, was stuck in Switzerland and could no longer travel back and forth to China. Dolma Lhamo was only twenty-five that year. She had been working as his assistant, and almost overnight, the weight of the whole company fell onto her shoulders. Later, she described that period by saying, “Everywhere I looked, there were difficulties.” The brewery still had to run, decisions still had to be made, and outside relationships still had to be maintained. She was taking on responsibilities far beyond her age and experience, and trying to get guidance from Songtsen Gyalzur across time zones made it even harder. She joked that it felt “as helpless as being in a long-distance relationship.”

Shangri-La Highland Craft Brewery, founded in 2009 by Songtsen Gyalzur

But management itself was only part of it. She was a young woman in the manufacturing world, where almost everyone around her—from suppliers and business partners to many of the government officials she had to deal with—was an older man. In that kind of environment, what people noticed first was often not her ability, but the fact that she was young and female. She never told those stories in a heavy way, but it was easy to hear that she had run into a lot of resistance. People dismissed her simply because she did not match their “standard” of what a CEO should be.

That made those years even harder. Many people told her, How unlucky. Why did this have to happen at exactly this moment? Why did such a huge burden have to land on you? For a while, she thought the same thing herself. At twenty-five, suddenly taking over a well-known local company, with chaos outside and pressure inside, it really did seem as if life was making things difficult for someone who had not yet had time to prepare.

And yet this is exactly where Dolma Lhamo becomes most powerful and moving. She did not stay in that question forever—why me?

One day, she realized that her biggest obstacle was not the pandemic, not the time difference, and not even the lack of recognition from others. It was the way she was framing everything in her own mind. Once she decided that she was the one being mistreated, that story began to weigh on everything before she had even begun. Every difficulty felt aimed at her. Every setback felt like a reminder that life had treated her unfairly.

“So why not look at it another way? Why did it have to be Why me? Why couldn’t it be Thank goodness it was me?” She was young, and yet she had already been given the chance to stand in that position—to make decisions, to carry responsibility, to step into an opportunity many people might never have in their entire lives. If it was a hardship, then it was also an opportunity.

Life chose her for a bigger stage.

Once she began thinking that way, things slowly started to feel right. What became clear to her was her own strength.

I kept thinking about how she was able to make that turn at that point in her life. Was she simply born optimistic? Was it just her personality? I do not think it was that simple. The strength in Dolma Lhamo feels like something that had been growing in her long before any of this happened.

Dolma Lhamo grew up in the Tendol Gyalzur Orphanage, founded by Tendol Gyalzur, the mother of Songtsen Gyalzur. In 2009, hoping to create more job opportunities for the children there, Songtsen Gyalzur returned to Shangri-La and built the brewery. That is part of why Dolma Lhamo’s life became so closely tied to this place—she grew up in the orphanage first, and years later, walked into the brewery.

Tendol Gyalzur and the children of her orphanage

The way Dolma Lhamo first entered the orphanage was just as unusual as the path that later led her to CEO.

Originally, it was her cousin who was supposed to be sent to the orphanage. But on that very day, the family suddenly could not bear to part with her cousin, so they switched at the last minute and sent Dolma Lhamo instead. Little her was standing right there, not fully understanding what was happening. All she could think was: If you couldn’t bear to send her away, how could you bear to send me?

For many people, that feeling—being swapped out, being decided for—might have become a memory they never fully escaped. But Dolma Lhamo talks about it now with a kind of light humor. She told me that the “funny” part was this: because the orphanage was meant for orphans, the family even “played along,” pretending she had no parents when they sent her away. After that, they barely contacted her.

Later, through her own hard work, she made it to college. Only then did that relative suddenly become close to her again, even telling her that she should be grateful to them.

And yes, for a girl who came from a small village in a Tibetan area and grew up in an orphanage, getting into college was already something to be grateful for. But more than feeling grateful to those relatives, Dolma Lhamo feels grateful to Tendol Gyalzur’s family. They were the family that truly raised her, and gave her the values that shaped the person she today became.

The education of the orphanage children was always supported by Tendol Gyalzur. The school offered to reduce tuition for the children there, but Tendol Gyalzur refused. She said, “My children do not need a single penny waived.” She did not want them to be treated differently. In that firm choice, she was teaching Dolma Lhamo and the other children: you are not children who need to be singled out. You deserve to be taken seriously, just like everyone else.

And that was not all she gave them. Tendol Gyalzur also taught them confidence. The Gyalzur family praised them for small things, let them try, and helped them believe they were capable of more than they imagined. Looking back now, it no longer feels surprising that later in life Dolma Lhamo was able to pull herself out of the trap of Why me? Much earlier on, she had already been taught something else: begin by believing in your own strength, and in your ability to choose your own direction.

After college, she did try what many people would call a safer path. She spent three months interning in a government position. For many people—especially a young person from a Tibetan region—that kind of opportunity would have been the standard answer: stable, respectable, secure. But it did not take her long to realize that it was not the life she wanted. Watching the people around her, she saw that so much of it had little to do with ability. It had to do with connections, pleasing the right people, and endless social maneuvering. Looking at that world, one thought came to her very clearly: If I keep going down this path, one day I will become them. That was when she understood that following the expected route does not always mean it is right for her, and stability does not always mean freedom. So she left.

Maybe there was some quiet kind of fate in it after all. Back in college, Dolma Lhamo had taken an elective course in brewing. So after leaving that government path behind, she went to Shangri-La Brewery and sought out Songtsen Gyalzur herself, asking for the chance to work with him. She started at the very bottom, putting labels on bottles. From there, step by step, she moved through different roles—assistant to the deputy general manager, administrative management, then the CEO’s assistant—until eventually, she became CEO herself.

She told me that when she first started receiving guests, she was shy and did not know how to express herself naturally. But Songtsen Gyalzur always encouraged her in very specific ways. He would tell her she had done a good job hosting people. He would praise her English. Through that steady accumulation of small affirmations, she slowly grew into confidence and steadiness, and little by little, she came to trust that she really could do things well.

Songtsen Gyalzur and Black Yak beer

That may also be why there is something so human in the way she leads today. When she talks to me about her employees, she never mentions efficiency. She talks instead about what kind of environment makes people feel respected. Employees have told her that there is warmth in the brewery, and that if you stay long enough, it can even feel like home.

And as a woman leader, she also uses her position to look after the very real situations women face. For example, If a female employee has painful menstrual cramps, she does not have to come in to work. From a company’s efficiency-driven point of view, that might seem like a loss. But for many women, simply having their discomfort acknowledged rather than dismissed as overreacting is already a form of care.

Employees of Shangri-La Highland Craft Brewery Co., Ltd.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked her which beer from the brewery she would use to describe herself.

She answered, “I hope I am Son Gha.”

In Tibetan, Son Gha means “to charge forward.” It carries the determination of a horse racing toward victory. The word is tied to the horse-racing culture so familiar in Tibetan life, and to the legend of King Gesar—the spirit of advancing, of not backing down. Dolma Lhamo did not explain it in any complicated way. She simply said that she hopes to “do good things and be a good person.”

Brewed with pure spring water and local highland barley, Shangri-La Highland Craft Brewery’s beer carries the clean, distinctive taste of the plateau.

I kept thinking about that line afterward. What makes her story so touching is not simply that she became CEO at such a young age, or even that she managed to steady a company through difficult years. It is the strength with which she keeps reclaiming her own narrative.

So if I could say one thing back to her: Dolma Lhamo, in a life where you have kept choosing to charge ahead, you are Son Gha.

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