A nose-thumbing anti-China demonstration Wednesday on Mount Everest by four activists — including two from the Bay Area — brought cheers from members of the East Bay's large Tibetan community.

The activists held up a banner at the Mount Everest Base Camp calling for a Tibet free of Chinese domination and mocking China's Olympic slogan, changing it from "One World One Dream," to "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008."

The four, including Shannon Service and Laurel Max Sutherlin, both of Sausalito, were being detained by Chinese authorities for questioning.

The activists were protesting China's bid to take the Olympic torch en route to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to the top of the world's tallest mountain on the border between Tibet and Nepal.

They were detained while Service was taping the protest, sending her images wirelessly to a laptop computer, which was connected by modem to a satellite, said Kate Woznow, of Students for a Free Tibet, the New York City-based group that planned the protest.

"It was pretty amazing, we were able to download the images as it happened," she said.

Local Tibetans saluted the effort.

Demonstrations like the one on Mount Everest are very important, said Tenzin Tsephel of Oakland, president of the Tibetan Association of Northern California.

"The very existence of Tibetans as human beings is being wiped out there by the Chinese," Tsephel said. "There's a mass influx of Chinese into Tibet and Tibetans in Tibet have no way to protest or fight for their rights."

It's up to Tibetans and others outside the country to speak up for them, Tsephel said.

He estimated there are about 1,500 Tibetans living in the Bay Area, many in the East Bay.

Most were born either here in the U.S. or in exile in India, where the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, and many Tibetans fled in 1959 following a bloody protest eight years after China annexed the country.

Tenzin Dickyi of Oakland, a member of the University of California, Davis, chapter of Students for a Free Tibet, said the protest was important.

"China is using the Olympic Games to cover up the brutality of the occupation of Tibet," she said. Dickyi noted the protest also comes on the 18th birthday of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who is being held under house arrest in Beijing by China. Tibetans believe he is the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second highest person in the Tibetan religious hierarchy.

But the Chinese government has declared a second, more Chinese-friendly Tibetan as the Panchen Lama.

One of the Mount Everest protesters, reached by cell phone, said they had been well-treated, but did not know how long they would be held.

"We were questioned separately by police and they took our passports away," said Kierstan Westby of Boulder, Colo.

She said they displayed the banner for about 30 minutes before local authorities took them away.

"We are hoping they take us to the border and let us go," she said. Attempts to call her later were unsuccessful.

The fourth protester was Tenzin Dorjee, a Tibetan-American who lives in New York. It was the first demonstration inside Tibet by a Tibetan who grew up in exile, Woznow said.

The group unfurled its banner inside the 17,400-foot elevation base camp where the Chinese national climbing team was preparing to ascend the mountain with a replica of the Olympic Torch to see if it could be ignited successfully at the summit of 29,035-foot-high Everest.