Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  I had brought fifty pictures of the Dalai Lama with me. I had been told that they were impossible to obtain in China and that I was likely to win friends among people in this region if I handed them over. It was a simple expedient. I had no personal objection to presenting pictures of this solemn bespectacled incarnation of Buddha; and it seemed to work.

  On the way back to the monastery we ran into a pilgrim who said he was a yak herd—he had about thirty of them. They sold for about $100 each (but Chris Bonington was paying $8 a day just to rent them), and he had had to sell two of his yaks to pay for this pilgrimage to Taer'si with his wife and two small children. The Chinese word for yak meant "hairy cow" (mao niu). It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.

  Taer Monastery is known for its butter sculptures, and as yak butter is the medium they are pungent works of art. A hall about forty yards long held statues and friezes of multicolored flowers, cherubs, trees, temples, little animals, and gods and goddesses. One of the largest statues was of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. But the Yellow Sect interprets this deity as having thirty-six forms, and in this yak-butter statue she was a mustached man.

  The monk watching over the butter sculpture took the portrait of the Dalai Lama I offered him and folded it into his robes. Then he gave me a surreptitious blessing.

  "You have made him happy," Mr. Xun said.

  This present Dalai Lama, number fourteen, was born not far away from here at Hong Nei Village in Pingan County, in 1935. He came to Taer Monastery at the age of two, borne on a sacred white yak and guided by three lamas from Lhasa who had gone in search of him.

  It happened in this way. After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, the corpse was found to be facing east. The head was repositioned, but soon after, it moved again, to face northeast. The state oracle put on his mask and went into a trance and he too faced northeast. The three lamas set out for the northeast to find the new Dalai Lama. They interviewed the parents of three or four children. One was Lhamo Dhondrub. His family was very poor. But there had been portents at his birth, in particular the strange visitations of crows in a place where there had never been any crows. Still, the lamas were not convinced. It takes a while for a Dalai Lama to be proven. But this child passed all the crucial tests, chose the correct beads when they were offered, answered all the questions, and was physically the Holy One: had oversize ears, sorrowful eyes, "tiger stripes" on his legs, and the rest of the eight bodily marks. He was brought to Taer'si and then to Lhasa. He was named: Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshi Tenzin Gyatso—Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Eloquent, Compassionate, Learned Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom.

  "When he was here in Taer'si he stayed over there, in a house."

  The monk was pointing at nothing.

  "I don't see anything."

  "His house was wrecked by the Red Guards."

  This monk was one of the few people I met in China who refused to talk to me about the Cultural Revolution. He was not afraid; he was simply furious and disgusted. He lived in the stables of Taer'si, in a small cell, with another monk. On the walls of his cell were pictures of Buddha. He had a teapot, a little brazier, a pallet and a faded quilt. It was not austere, but it was very simple. Over his tiny bed was a poster of a tiger. This monk too had a large can of yak butter.

  In the market outside Taer'si business was slow. There were no foreign tourists because it was winter, and there were very few Chinese tourists. The shops sold beads, brassware, wolf pelts, Tibetan cloaks and hats and horns, walking sticks, Buddhas, and trinkets. Also this—in one shop, cans of cooking fat for sale. The label on the can said,

  Norwegian EDIBLE FAT Sandarit Brand—5 lbs.

  Supplied by the World Food Programme

  Gift of Norway

  Produced by Jahres Fabrikker A/S Sandefjord Norway

  "How much?" I asked.

  "Fifteen yuan a can."

  "How many cans do you have?"

  "Plenty."

  The cases were stacked in his shop. How had the stuff arrived here? Perhaps through India or Afghanistan. In any event, this free gift, courtesy of the Norwegian people, was generating income for a prosperous little shop in remote Qinghai.

  In that same market, Tibeten men were haggling over gray otter pelts, and buying beads, and swapping silver for chunks of amber. There was a brisk trade in pretty ornaments, and some were trying on the Chinese-made cowboy hats that are so popular among Tibetans.

  Remembering the cassette player in Mr. Fu's little car, and our impending trip to Lhasa by road, I went into a music shop and bought some tapes. When I went back to Xining I did the same, but the music shops and department stores were so well stocked, I emboldened myself and asked for tapes with political songs on them.

  "What kind of songs?" the salesgirl asked. "Do you know the names."

  "The East Is Red,"' I said. "And one that starts, 'I love Peking's Tiananmen Square.' The Liu River Song.' The White-haired Girl.'"

  They were the Maoist revolutionary songs that had been sung for the past two or three decades.

  "We don't have those."

  Mr. Xun said, "We are sick of those songs."

  But they had pop songs, they had Hong Kong rock, and they had tapes of Oklahoma! They also had Strauss, Mendelssohn, Bach, and the complete Beethoven symphonies, which I bought for the trip to Tibet.

  A few days later, as I was walking through Xining in the middle of the day, the sky darkened. It began to snow, at first softly, and then blizzarding down. No one seemed to mind. There was hardly any traffic, anyway. And the place looked better under a few inches of snow. A blind boy was caught in it, and tapping his stick he squawked when there was no sound or echo—in just a few minutes he had lost his way because he could not hear his stick in the snow. But he turned his face up and as the snow hit it he licked the flakes from his lips. Then a troop of black-cloaked Muslims came by and rescued the blind boy. The Muslims were either old bearded patriarchs with severe eyes, or else bratty boys fooling with each other. I followed them to their mosque, which was the biggest one I had seen in China, but like every other religious building I had seen, it had a vandalized-and-renovated look.

  I stayed in Xining longer than I had planned because I liked its stuffed pancakes and snowy skies, its red-cheeked Hans and the ragged Tibetans in their greasy cloaks, who went smiling down the street. I climbed all the nearby hills—to the Tao Monastery, with its cave-dwelling monks and its temples balanced on cliffs (the whole thing looks like a wooden fire escape)—and from the tops of these hills I could see that Xining was larger than I had imagined. But the rest of the town was merely brown shoe-box-shaped buildings that had no visible function. After the snow melted, the harsh wind from the mountains whirled dust into the air. It was a terrible-looking place, but it was friendly; and I liked being the only barbarous foreign devil (yang guedze) in town.

  22: The Train to Tibet

  In the more remote regions of China, where people are not trusted to be orderly, the authorities devise specific drills for boarding the trains. Xining had one of the cruelest I had seen. The Hard Class passengers were lined up in front of the station—perhaps a thousand cold, impatient people in a long, shuffling line. But it was a directionless line. It led nowhere. It was formed in the windy plaza in front of the station, behind an ugly statue depicting a dozen contending minorities. That was appropriate, because the line for the train was composed of the same minorities, contending for seats.

  Ten minutes before the train left, a railway guard blew a whistle, and these people snatched up their bales and bundles, and ran. They went flapping two hundred yards across the plaza, panted another hundred around the station, and wheezed down the platform to where the train sat steaming. That race sorted them out, and so there was a gasping free-for-all for the seats, women and children last.

  It was a horrible train. But that was not a bad thing. It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places. I had a strong feel
ing—and I was proved right—that I would be traveling through one of the most beautiful landscapes in China. This train was dirty, scruffy and extremely crowded. Before it set off there was a fight among the passengers, as five heavily laden Tibetans tried to get into the wrong coach. No punches were thrown. It was all push and pull, and some snarling. The Tibetans smilingly resisted. The most explicit sign that it was a bad train was that it ran out of water an hour after it started. No water—for tea more than for washing—is a catastrophe rather than a simple hardship in China. But no one got angry. No one even complained. They inquired in froggy voices, and then took it without further muttering. I was impressed but annoyed. Without hot water this long trip—thirty hours or so—would be unbearable. We were headed for Golmud, in the Qinghai desert, and there the train stopped. I planned to make my own way to Lhasa, with Mr. Fu.

  There was no food either. I made noodles in a cup with the last few inches of hot water. People congregated in the dining car, but nothing was served. There was a certain amount of shouting and lots of abuse, but these sounds were drowned by the rattling and clanking steam engine. There were no lights on the train either. I was exasperated, then uncomfortable, and finally bored stiff. I couldn't eat, I couldn't read. I hated the friendly honks of passengers, the yells, the squawking kids. I dug out some of my food and ate it, and wished I had more. The floor was covered with spat-out sunflower seeds.

  I was in a compartment with a young man and an old man. The young one smoked, the old one spat. But they were otherwise very courteous. They were also going to Golmud. As we went along in the trembling train it struck me that we were a great distance from what most people would regard as fruitful and bounteous China. We were over the edge, way past the old Chinese frontier, four days at least from civilization and its vast, stinking cities.

  The scenery was lovely. The train had risen and snaked through the mountain passes west of Xining and then had traveled down to the cold valleys. The frozen river was a startling chalky white, and it showed up clearly even in twilight, like a road covered with snow, winding through the brown valleys.

  "Going to Xizang?" the old man asked, meaning Tibet.

  He assumed that no one would go to Golmud to stay, and of course he was right. That was why this was the train to Tibet.

  The other passengers were Salars in embroidered jackets, and small brown people wearing stiff little felt bowls on their heads, and Kazakhs in boots and goatskin cloaks, Huis in skullcaps, and enormous Tibetans with ragged rucksacks and shaven heads and greasy robes. They were mostly country folk—shepherds and yak herds and tent dwellers—heading home after their pilgrimage to Taer'si or else their foray at Xining market. There were many soldiers, there were rowdies and spitters and shitters and oddballs in long underwear who loitered in the train's corridors and blew their noses on the curtains.

  The mountains nearby had bright, sharp peaks and warm slopes, but beneath them in the shadows, the valleys were frozen and the square mud-walled villages looked like habitations left over from the Neolithic age. They had been built by Mao's pioneers in the 1950s, the Hans who left settled homes and headed west to bring order—as if it needed more order than Buddhism—to Tibet. Night came quickly, a sky of black and blue that was all cloud, and beneath it the brilliant whiteness of the ice on the river.

  I lay in bed, cursing the lack of hot tea on this cold train and reading The Hole in the Wall, by Arthur Morrison. It was an old novel about the East End of London in its days of banditry. Leaving Xining, I had asked the young man what those quarries were. He said, "Lime pits." In the novel, lime figures in a hideous way. Blind George, having been assaulted by the bully Dan Ogle, takes his revenge by sneaking into Ogle's room and pressing lime into his eyes to blind him ("the thumbs still drove at the eyes the mess of smoking lime that clung and dripped about Ogle's head ... Blind George gasped, 'Hit me now you's as blind as me!'").

  That gave me a nightmare, and its terror arose from my confusing snow and lime—they looked the same—and disfiguring myself as I slipped in it. But it was fitful sleep. The cold in the train increased and it woke me a number of times. In the morning there were mountains in the north, and sandy waste all around. It was the roughest land I had seen in China, wild and stony, and later on, towards noon on this overcast day, there was snow thinly covering the desert—it had an uneven, spilled look—and swatches of snow lay in the ridges of the far-off mountains. The wind blew hard on the ground, and though it was flat, all its boulders were exposed. There was no vegetation at all, no one lived here, and even the railway stations seemed pointlessly positioned, because no one got on or off the train; the stationmaster stood at attention with his green flag—no one else.

  There was still no water. It amazed me that no one complained. I spoke to a man in the kitchen who was actually pouring water into a pot. He did not reply. He came over to me, smiled briefly, then slammed the door in my face.

  A boy in a smock was selling tickets in the dining car. I asked what the tickets were for. Noodles, he said. So I bought some tickets and lined up at a window leading on to the kitchen. I waited ten minutes, and when nothing happened, I said, "What about the noodles?"

  "No more left!" the ticket seller said. He was smiling, but it was an ambiguous smile.

  I complained: "I just gave you some money—"

  "Come back in an hour."

  "I want my noodles or else my money back."

  "Later."

  It was like prison, or the army, or an old-fashioned nuthouse.

  I said, "You are not being very friendly. There is no food, no heat, no water on this train. This is very bad."

  The ticket seller was still smiling. I wondered what would happen to me if I hit him. They would probably regard this as a very serious breach of discipline and send me to a far-off place for reeducation; indeed, they would probably send me here, to Qinghai, where they had sent so many other rebels. So I had nothing to fear: I was already in exile.

  "Yes. It's bad," the ticket seller said, when he realized I was angry.

  "At least get me some water for tea."

  "There is no water."

  "There is water in the kitchen. I saw it."

  You win, he seemed to say, and he brought me a thermos of hot water, much to the delight of the men in my compartment as we shared it.

  The landscape became even wilder, though I had not thought that to be possible. It was colder, windier, more rubbly; the mountains blacker. This made bleak Xinjiang seem lush by comparison. A cold wind howled across stony ground. It was hellish and memorable. I thought how the corners of China were so strange and inhospitable and unearthly the Chinese had come to believe that they represented the edges of the flat world they knew as The Middle Kingdom.

  The younger man in the upper berth was Mr. Zhao. He came from Liaoning and said he had never seen a place as bad as this. He was a factory supervisor, something to do with magnesium, and was going to be in Golmud for several weeks.

  "I'd rather be somewhere else," he said.

  But I was pleased to be here, in such a wilderness. I sat in the safety of the train and looked upon the desolation of the land with a sense of mounting excitement. In the Lop Nor Desert of Xinjiang, and in Hami and Turfan they say, "Marco Polo came through here," or "This was the Silk Road." But here in Qinghai no claim at all could be made. There was never anyone here. It was death to attempt a crossing. No one passed through. And it was always like this—just as empty.

  Mr. Zhao was traveling with his father, who visited him from another part of the train. This old man sat and stared at me. I tried to speak with him, but he was deaf. He had a deaf man's bright smile. Whenever I wrote in my notebook the old man put his teacup down and pressed his nose against my notebook page, marveling at my handwriting.

  At last, the mountains and hills utterly vanished and in their place there was a light brown desert. I looked closer and saw that it was all low snowdrifts covered with fine sand. Later in the day it was stony. Still later
, it was dark and rubbly—but still a desert—and the brown twisted symmetry of the rubble made it seem like an immensity of dog turds.

  There were stations every twenty miles, but a station here was three small square buildings, the same brown as the turdy desert, standing in the wind, with emptiness on every side, and clouds madly blowing over them.

  "It is not good," Mr. Zhao said. Obviously he missed the traffic and drizzle of urban Liaoning.

  "I like this place," I said.

  He erupted in the short spitting laugh that in China means You must be out of your mind.

  "I just wish we had some water," I said.

  I asked the Head of the Train, who seemed very young, why there was no water.

  "Because this is the desert."

  He spoke English with a slight American accent.

  "But you have boilers," I said.

  "The water in the boilers is for the engine."

  "Are people complaining about the lack of water?"

  "You are complaining," he said, in a friendly way, "and other people are complaining, too. But I tell everyone it is a problem, and they understand."

  "I don't understand."

  "Because you are a foreign friend," he said, which was a polite Chinese way of saying that I was a Martian.

  He said he was twenty-two. I asked him his name.

  "My name is Gold Country," he said in English.

  "Jinguo?" I asked.

  "Yes. My father named me that because he wanted China to be prosperous."

  He seemed rather ineffectual to hold such an important job—he was in complete charge of the train. But he was pleasant. He said he had not had much formal education and in fact had learned his English on the Voice of America.

  Towards the end of the afternoon the rubbly desert gave way to rockier ground, and mountains appeared to the southwest. Two mountains were distinct and beautiful, and the snow was a luminous bluish color, covering the entirety of these slopes because they faced north and received no sun. They were the mountains (I could see from my map) Yagradagze and Har Sai, each of them just under 20,000 feet. They rose out of great flat snowfields, while in the foreground was rough desert and the chugging train.