The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Yang said. . . . According to Yang, Che Fu, a Chinese photographer with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Pictorial, was the first person from outside Tibet to find and record the waterfall on film. . . . While flying across the canyon in an army helicopter, he caught a bird’s-eye view of two waterfalls on the Yarlung Zangbo River, which roars through the canyon and becomes the Brahmaputra River after crossing into India.

  He took some pictures and showed them to Professor Yang after returning to Beijing. It was the first time Yang obtained concrete evidence of the existence of waterfalls on the main part of the river. “One of the two waterfalls is what the American adventurers call ‘Hidden Waterfall,’” Yang said. “We named it No. 1 Zangbo Badong Falls.”

  In the following years, Yang, along with professors Gao Dengyi, Li Bosheng and Guan Zhihua, also with CAS, trekked into parts of the canyon several times on scientific surveys. It was Yang, Gao and Li who determined in 1994 that the canyon is the deepest of the world, being 5,000 meters deep on average and 496.3 kilometres long. . . . They were not able to explore the core section of the canyon until last October. . . . They found not only the two waterfalls, No. 1 and No. 2 Zangbo Badong Falls, but also two other groups of multilevel waterfalls which were unknown to the world. They were named Rongzha Falls and Quigu Dulong Falls . . .

  In actuality, “Rongzha Falls” is the same waterfall that Frank Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor reached in 1924 and described in the “Falls of the Brahmaputra” chapter of Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges. Ken Storm, Ralph Rynning, and I revisited the site in 1996, accompanied by the grandson of Kingdon Ward’s 1924 guide.

  The China Daily article contains a further misconception when it states that the famous “Rainbow Falls” discovered by Kingdon Ward no longer exists: “During last year’s expedition, the Chinese explorers arrived at the site where Kingdon Ward described where he found the falls, but failed to find it. ‘We think it was destroyed by an earthquake of magnitude 8.5 (on the Richter Scale) that took place on August 15, 1950,’ Yang said.”

  As Ken Storm wrote in a supplementary chapter of a 2001 reprint of Kingdon Ward’s Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges: “The Chinese speculation that Frank Kingdon Ward’s Rainbow Falls may have been destroyed in the Assam Earthquake of 1950 is, of course, incorrect. What they call ‘No. 1 Zangbo Badong Falls’ is undoubtedly Rainbow Falls although the height given, 33 meters, is too high. ‘No. 2 Zangbo Badong Falls’ is almost certainly our ‘Hidden Falls of Dorje Pagmo.’ Their measured height of 35 meters corresponds closely to our own results.”

  23 On October 22, 2000, The Telegraph reported from Beijing that: “Chinese leaders are drawing up plans to use nuclear explosions, in breach of the international test-ban treaty, to blast a tunnel through the Himalayas for the world’s biggest hydroelectric plant. The proposed power station is forecast to produce more than twice as much electricity as the controversial Three Gorges Dam being built on the Yangtze river. The project, which also involves diverting Tibetan water to arid regions, is due to begin as soon as construction of the Three Gorges Dam is completed in 2009.” China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that the China Water Conservancy and Hydropower Planning and Designing Institute would begin a feasibility study for the proposed hydropower plant in the Great Bend of the Tsangpo in October 2003. “The river drops by 2,755 meters in the 500 kilometer-long U section,” the release stated, “leading to a water energy reserve of about 68 million kilowatts, or one tenth of the national total.” The proposed storage dam would form part of a national strategy to divert water from rivers in the south and west (i.e. Tibet) to more than 600 cities in northern China that suffer from chronic water shortages, Xinhua reported. A 38 million kilowatt power station situated at Medok “would harness the force of a 9,840 ft drop in terrain over only a few miles.” From a vast reservoir at the base of the tunnel, the water would be redirected across more than 500 miles of the Tibetan plateau to arid regions of China’s Xinjiang and Gansu provinces. The capacity of the station would make it the world’s largest power generation facility—more than double the 18 million kilowatt output of the controversial plant at the Three Gorges, which will submerge towns and historical sites and displace more than 1.2 million people. The astronomical cost of blasting the tunnel through Namcha Barwa had not yet been announced, but The Telegraph stated that it “appears likely to surpass £10 billion.” The Telegraph further stated that: “International opposition may bar Beijing from World Bank loans for the project and prevent it from listing bonds and shares on world markets to fund the scheme. If, as its experts believe, China has to use nuclear materials in order to blast the proposed 10-mile tunnel, the country will attract international opprobrium for breaching the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”

  If the Chinese do proceed with the proposed dam, they will face fierce opposition in India and Bangladesh, where the lives and livelihoods of millions of people along the Brahmaputra would be at the mercy of Chinese dam officials. (Just as thirteen dams that the Chinese have planned along the Salween and others along the Mekhong and Irrawaddy will jeopardize agriculture and increase flood risks in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.) During the dry season, dam officials could withhold water crucial for irrigating Assam’s agricultural areas. During the monsoon flood season, they would be compelled to release the swelling reservoirs, with potentially catastrophic consequences downriver. Statements in the Indian press have been alarmist. In New Delhi, the Daily Times reported: “China’s move not only threatens the environment but also national security. If Beijing goes ahead with the Brahmaputra project, it would practically mean a declaration of war against India.” China’s proposed diversion of the Tsangpo would also cripple a highly controversial plan on the part of the Indian government to interlink thirty of its own rivers by 2012.

  Tibetans living in exile in India have also voiced strong objections to the proposed dam. A report released in July 2003 by the Tibetan government-in-exile emphasizes that the Tibetan plateau is Asia’s principal watershed and the source of its ten major rivers, including the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, the Indus, the Mekong, the Salween, and the Irrawaddy. Based on findings of the United Nations Development Program, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), and other studies, the thirty-page “Tibet 2003: State of the Environment” maintains that gross mismanagement of Tibet’s environment during the fifty years of Chinese occupation has resulted in biodiversity loss, grassland degradation and devastating floods in the downstream regions of south and southeast Asia. The report claims that potentially destructive development projects that exploit Tibet’s natural resources will in the long run prove disastrous for Tibetans, China, and neighboring countries that depend on the life-sustaining river waters of the Tibetan Plateau. It urges China to “reconsider these big projects and replace them with small-scale development projects that materially benefit the Tibetan people and which do not undermine the integrity of Tibet’s ecosystem.”

  Over the past thirty years, China has built more dams than the rest of the world combined, and thirty-one large hydroelectric projects are currently planned along the Yangtze and its tributaries, the Mekong, the Salween, and the Tsangpo. Yet the nation’s push toward rampant industrialization is not without internal criticism. The proposal to dam and divert the Yarlung Tsangpo has drawn fire from several Chinese scientists. Yang Yong, a geologist connected with the 1998 Tenyen Expedition, said the dam could become an economic disaster amid growing signs that the volume of water flowing in the Tsangpo—like that of the Yangtze and Yellow River—is lessening every year. “Environmental conditions in the upper reaches of the Tsangpo continue to deteriorate,” he said, “with glaciers receding and tributaries and lakes going dry.”

  In Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, Kingdon Ward recounted a prophecy made by Padmasambhava that the waters of the Tsangpo would one day be diverted and flow over the Doshung
-La pass. The Chinese seem intent on fulfilling this vision, although in their version, the waters will pass beneath it. Beijing’s Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics has recommended that the gargantuan task be accomplished with nuclear explosives. The gorge’s seismological instability is well documented. The greatest earthquake ever recorded had its epicenter in the lower Tsangpo gorge in the year of the Chinese invasion, and the Great Assam earthquake of 1897 was possibly even larger. But even if an earthquake-proof dam could actually be constructed, the Tsangpo gorge’s unique ecosystem would be destroyed and waterfalls and forests would vanish beneath the rising waters of the artificial reservoir. Where negatively charged ions once ensured one of the purest air qualities on the planet, vegetation rotting in the stagnant waters would give rise to greenhouse emissions. Yet in China’s commitment to rapid economic development, what use is an Eden, or nature itself, if it doesn’t generate cash? As Chinese vice premier Wen Jiabao stated in a press release: “In the 21st century, the construction of large dams will play a key role in exploiting China’s water resources . . . and pushing the national economy and the country’s modernization forward.”

  Communism promised the peoples of China and Tibet a sociological earthly paradise. Yet railways, oil and gas pipelines, petrochemical complexes, hydroelectric dams, airports, highways, military bases, and new cities for migrants from Mainland China have negatively impacted much of Tibet’s environment and culture. A dam in the Great Bend of the Tsangpo would destroy one of the earth’s most pristine environments, and submerge forever the Hidden Falls of Dorje Pagmo and the regions toward which it leads.

  24 Traditional Chinese landscape paintings were called “images of the mind,” as painters went to the mountains for inspiration but created the scrolls in their studios. No attempt was made to represent the landscape realistically, nor to trick the mind into a three-dimensional perspective. The paintings distilled the essence of natural scenery and created new, idealized realms that viewers could visit in their imaginations.

  25 The Chinese response to nature was not always so positive and, judging by early historical accounts, the wilderness offered neither solace nor delight. In 303 b.c., a banished court official named Chu Yuan wandered through the region of Tung-t’ing lake in northern Ho-nan province, where he found only “dark and interminable forests, the habitation of apes and monkeys. And mountains, wet with rain and mists, so high that the sun was hidden.” Quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 103.

  EPILOGUE: THE VEILS OF PARADISE

  1 Quoted in Nature (1869), vol. 1, p. 9.

  2 On April 9, 2000, a massive landslide—the largest ever recorded in Asia and the third largest in the world—formed a 1.6-mile long barrage of mud and rock on the Yigrong Tsangpo River, a northern tributary of the Po Tsangpo. The river had backed up steadily behind the rubble, creating a lake 10.5 miles long, 2 miles wide, and nearly 200 feet deep behind the earthen barrier. With the onset of summer rains, the water was rising more than six feet per day. The Chinese Government never reported the landslide, either in state media or the international press. Recognizing the risk of a potentially devastating flash flood, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army quietly warned local people in the canyons downstream to evacuate their homes, and a team of soldiers began digging trenches to divert the waters that were building up behind the 200-foot-high wall of mud and rock. By early June, they could not keep pace with the rising water and ordered that the road be closed between Kongpo and Powo. On the night of June 10, the drainage ditches widened in heavy rain and the dam eventually burst, releasing a tidal wave of mud and water and sweeping away bridges across the Po Tsangpo and Tsangpo rivers.

  Authorities in Beijing had not warned the Indian Government of the impending disaster. The flood surged through Pemako without any reported casualties, but it unleashed havoc across the border, destroying more than twenty bridges and submerging fifty-five villages in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. More than 50,000 people were left homeless, and hundreds were rescued from treetops and rooftops by Indian air force helicopters. A month later, more than one hundred people were still missing, and at least thirty had died, some from what the Indian press called “timber fishing” as villagers sought to harvest precious teak, bamboo, and other varieties of logs that the swirling floodwaters had unearthed from the jungles.

  Indian newspapers initially reported that the dam had been an artificial one in the Great Bend of the Tsangpo River and implied that the breach may have been caused by “water mismanagement” on the part of the Chinese. Quoting an anonymous Indian official, the Associated Foreign Press in Arunachal Pradesh’s capital, Itanagar, reported on July 10 that, “Preliminary findings suggest the floods in Arunachal Pradesh were due to the breach of a dam on the Tsangpo, as the river makes a turn to enter India.” The widely read Indian Express quoted Arunachal’s state minister of information and public relations, Takam Sanjay: “We strongly believe there could be artificial reasons for the river Siang [the name of the Tsangpo as it flows through Arunachal Pradesh] to flood the hills.”

  3 Scott Lindgren and other team members filmed the expedition for Outside Television Productions. The hour-long documentary, Into the Tsangpo Gorge, aired on NBC Sports on May 26, 2002. Outside Magazine ran a cover story in July 2002.

  4 In 1999, the Tibetan Forestry Bureau mapped out a 3,540 square mile area encompassing Namcha Barwa and Medok and declared it an “ecological reserve.” Within months, Beijing upgraded it to national status and designated the area as the “Yarlung Tsangpo Great Canyon National Reserve.” Ranging in altitude from less than 3,000 feet along the line of control with India to the 25,530-foot-high massif of Namcha Barwa to the west, the reserve is bounded to the north and east by the Kangri Karpo range—a sub-branch of the Himalayas with peaks rising to more than 19,000 feet. A northwestern extension continues up the Yigrong River—a tributary of the Po Tsangpo—into the area where the devastating flash flood in June 2000 wreaked havoc in the lower Tsangpo gorge.

  The Yarlung Tsangpo Great Canyon National Reserve contains Tibet’s last remaining tigers, as well as other rare mammals such as black muntjac and capped leaf monkeys. The project’s focus on wildlife and forest conservation has also sought to develop alternative income sources for the reserve’s 114 villages and estimated 14,745 residents, many of whom hunt and engage in other ecologically destructive practices such as slash and burn agriculture.

  Renowned field biologist and wildlife conservationist George Schaller conducted initial studies of the region’s biodiversity in collaboration with the Tibet Forestry Department, but he remained skeptical that the designated reserve would stop the poaching of wildlife or protect the environment unless the government actively prepares and implements a management plan for the reserve.

  In Bayi, Ken Storm had learned that the Chinese had grandiose hopes for the region and were actively planning for a major influx of mainland Chinese and foreign tourists. “Holiday villas” were underway to facilitate access to the world’s deepest gorge. The remote village of Bayu would become an educational and cultural center where tourists could buy locally produced trinkets and handicrafts.

  5 Thoreau, Journal, 2.

  6 Our minds have no real or absolute boundaries; on the contrary, we are part of an infinite field of intelligence that extends beyond space and time into realities we have yet to comprehend. The beyul and their dakini emissaries are traces of the original world, inviting us to open to the abiding mystery at the heart of all experience, the inseparability that infuses every action, thought, and intention.

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  ———. “Report on the University of California Expedition to Kutang and Nubri in Northern Nepal in Autumn 1973.” Contributions to Nepalese Studies, vol. 2,1975, pp. 4 5-8 7.

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  ———. “Exploration on the Tsangpo or Upper Brahmaputra.” Scottish Goeographical Magazine, vol. 3 0, Feb. 1914.