Alarmed, Keping backs out of the room slowly. “I’ll be right back with a kettle!” he yells, and takes off down the corridor.
Jorie closes the door and collapses onto the bed. “The first ones in,” I tell her, sitting down gently at her side.
“The first ones in,” she sighs, turning toward me to prop herself up on her elbow. “Tonight I’ll be the first one tucked in.”
There’s a knock on the door. “Mrs. Kent, your water!”
I open the door to find a woman standing outside, her smile as delicate as the rest of her. “It’s warm, sir,” she says, and I thank her sincerely.
Jorie rises, accepts the kettle, and slips into the bathroom. “It’s warm, dear!” she calls, and she returns from the bathroom with new energy. We opt for dinner in our room—beef and fresh vegetables clearly flown in from China for our visit—and retire to bed in a freezing cold room, wearing the same clothes we’d worn all day—our luggage is still stuck on the other side of the blasting area near Gongkar.
In China and Tibet, there is only one official time zone for the entire country, and so the farther west one gets, the later the sun rises and sets. When I wake at eight o’clock, I call for a coffee and part the sheer curtains to find light cast across the land from a sun not yet visible. There’d been a snowstorm in the night, and the red-brown Himalayas are sprinkled in white—a precise contrast with the blue sky beyond. It’s unfathomable to me that for so long, so many travellers have missed out on this experience—a sight both splendid and humble, both completely natural and utterly perfect.
It’s a view that will stay with me as one of the most memorable, grounded moments in my life.
The morning to follow remains every bit as inspired. As we approach the Potala Palace, the sun pierces the clouds and spotlights this, the Dalai Lama’s winter living quarters, which was first built in the seventh century. Keping drives us onto the sacred mountain, Red Hill, where the two main palaces are situated. The immensity of the place is incredible: more than one thousand rooms soaring to thirteen stories and expanding to nearly a million and a half square feet. Keping ushers us through two chapels; the second of them, known as the Hall of the Sacrifice, contain stupas that house the salt-dried and embalmed remains of some of the Dalai Lamas. The stupas are decorated with what are literally tons of gold and precious stones. At their bases are lamps of yak butter oil that keep the stupas ablaze at all times and throw glimmers and shadows across the shrines. There are groups of primitive-looking people circulating in the chapels with us, each carrying a container of yak butter. “Who are these people?” Jorie asks.
“These are pilgrims who come from the northwest of Tibet,” Keping says. “They live in small tents and lead a nomadic life, tending to their goats and their yaks.”
{Gerald J. Sullivan}
Inside the Forbidden City, a series of palaces and courtyards that was home to the imperial courts of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties.
Jorie clicks her camera, capturing remarkable images of the pilgrims bowing and praying and spooning their yak butter oil into the bases of the stupa lamps to keep the candles burning.
Keping leads us throughout two more chapels, one of which was the cave of the god of mercy, built in the seventh century on the rock of the hill, which now serves as its floor—it’s the oldest building in the Potala Palace. “You notice that in each chapel there are these story paintings mounted on silk brocades that hang from the ceilings. They’re called thankas, and they’re hundreds of years old—”
“And so beautifully preserved,” Jorie says.
“That’s actually because of the cold, dry air up here on the hill,” Keping explains. “The same is true for the murals you see on the walls, despite the fact that they range anywhere from three hundred to thirteen hundred years old.”
“Fascinating, isn’t it, dear?” Jorie says.
I nod.
“You’re quiet,” she says.
“Just taking it all in.”
“Geoff . . . are you all right?”
“I’m actually not feeling all that well.”
“How about some Potala holy water, Mr. Kent?”
“Thanks, but no,” I tell Keping. “I don’t think another cold bath will help, even if it is with holy water.”
“No, Mr. Kent,” Keping says. “Come, follow me quickly through the seventh chapel and then you’ll see what I mean.” He locates a tea room where Jorie and I take a seat, then he returns. “Potala holy water is green tea, Mr. Kent. It will help you stay hydrated—very important here on the mountain.” Jorie and I both sip cups of tea, which are very welcome indeed. Then Keping leads us to another wing of the Potala Palace. “Of the sixty-four palaces here,” he says, “this, the White Palace, is the room where they hold ceremonies each time a new Dalai Lama is chosen.”
“Chosen?” Jorie says. “I thought the Dalai Lama was a hereditary title.”
“It’s a common misunderstanding, Mrs. Kent, but to become the Dalai Lama is a chance experience.” He goes on to explain that when a Dalai Lama dies, it’s here that the names of infants, born at exactly the moment of his death, are placed in a gold vase. The successor is chosen when the ivory stick with his name on it is randomly pulled from the vase. The baby who’s the lucky winner represents the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation and therefore becomes his successor. Until that baby turns eighteen and comes to the throne, the country is ruled by a regent king, who is often the previous Dalai Lama’s son.
“Geoff,” Jorie says. “Still not feeling well?”
I shake my head. “A headache.”
“Chest pains, Mr. Kent? Nausea?”
I hate to admit it, but I do. “A little.”
“Geoff!” Jorie cries.
“It’s altitude sickness, Mrs. Kent, don’t be alarmed.”
“But Geoff’s so fit!”
“Lhasa is the highest capital city in the world, and we’ve been up here all day. Let’s quickly go visit the Jokhang Temple,” he says. “Then you two can go have a rest.”
Outside on the beams and porches of the temple are a wealth of decadent carvings in brilliant colors. Inside we find it lavishly decorated, featuring a gilded bronze statue of the Jowo Shakyamuni Buddha sitting on a golden throne. Legend has it that the statue was brought to Lhasa by the Chinese princess Wen Cheng in the seventh century when she married the king, Songtsen Gampo, who first unified Tibet.
“It’s all very fascinating,” Jorie says. “But why don’t we get back to the cottage?”
We have a mediocre dinner in the dark, due to one of the frequent blackouts that come from the lack of oil. It is very important, I write in my diary, for all clients to bring a torch with them to Tibet.
“A ‘torch’?” Jorie smiles slyly over my shoulder. “For the American brochures, why don’t we call it a ‘flashlight.’”
I awake the next morning with a fiendish sore throat and a headache—all the signs of a real dose of the flu. “Maybe no wonder,” I muse out loud.
“The altitude?”
“No, the hundreds of pilgrims that streamed past us in those tiny rooms with their noses running!”
We leave at nine o’clock for what’s to be the most rugged day of our entire tour of China and Tibet: a 168-mile trek west to the city of Shigatse. Shigatse is the second city of Tibet, and only a handful of Westerners have ever been there. Our journey in the army vehicle is expected to take eleven hours, but thirty minutes into the trip, when we make our first stop, we’re impressed at the time we’re making: already we’ve reached a colored portrait of the Sakyamuni Buddha carved into the stone of the Himalayas in the seventh century and painted on and off since then to ward off evil spirits within the valley. “This was supposed to take an hour for us to reach,” Jorie says.
I make a note in my diary about logistics and pledge to watch our driver’s speedometer.
An hour later, at ten thirty, we cross the bridge over the Zangbo River and start to ascend the summit
of the mountain pass called Gampa-La. Climbing to the top is slightly hair-raising as we overtake trucks on blind corners. “These drops are totally vertical for thousands of feet,” I tell Jorie.
“Not recommended for a client who doesn’t like heights,” she agrees.
But at the top of the Gampa-La, at nearly seventeen thousand feet, are the most stupendous views of the Zangbo River and the beautiful turquoise lake Yamzho Yumco.
At one thirty, we stop for a picnic lunch beside the river with a large mountain range towering above us. We then start out again, and the closer we get to Shigatse, the more and more we have to share the narrow dirt roads with the stream of donkeys and mules that tow small graders with blades to flatten the roads. “Oh dear,” Jorie says, sighing. “The dust . . .”
We close the windows of our jeep and stop at three thirty in the afternoon in the small town of Gyangze, with its fortress on a hill and a long wall surrounding it. Keping offers to show us the local temple, but with more traffic and army trucks heading toward Shigatse, the dust problem is growing unbearable. Not a good journey for anyone to make in summer months! I write in my diary: At the moment, at the start of November, the temperature is cool enough for us to close the jeep windows . . . but in the summer, a person would nearly suffocate.
We reach a turnoff to the Indian border, meaning we’re only 250 miles away from India. “Jorie,” I whisper, “this means we’ll arrive at Shigatse in time for tea.”
She looks at her watch. “True, it’s nearing five o’clock.” She looks up at me with wide eyes, knowing what it means: our driver has made an eleven-hour trip in eight hours.
When we enter our hotel suite, we find that it’s merely a converted army barracks. It consists of two double rooms separated in the middle and a small alcove containing two washbasins and some towels. There is no running water. If that’s not bad enough, the lavatory facilities are simply open pit latrines, dreadful-smelling things, and I borrow a stick of Tiger Balm and Jorie’s Chanel No. 5 to alleviate the experience. “If I wasn’t sick before, I definitely am now,” I tell her. As I stagger to bed with a damp cloth on my brow, it’s clear that I’m running a fever.
I wake the next morning with a raging headache. After the staff delivers coffee and toast with honey—cheering me up considerably—Jorie takes the morning excursion on a yak boat down the Yalu Zangbo River, boarding the boat ten miles north of Shigatse. I take to bed until lunchtime, finally rising to sit in the sun like a great monitor lizard until Jorie returns for our afternoon tour of Tashi Lhunpo, the monastery built in 1447 that is considered to be one of the most beautiful remaining examples of Tibetan architecture.
Situated against brown hills, the monastery glows vivid white and orange in the hot sunlight. Our first stop is inside the Chapel of the Future Buddha, featuring a Buddha statue that was built in 1914 of copper, gold, and brass with 1,400 pieces of diamonds, coral, and jade that construct his sparkling third eye. We tour the monastery’s library with its seven hundred books on the sciences, the Ganzhur holy scriptures, and swastikas on the floor—a sign of good luck in Tibet. We view a stupa containing the Fourth Panchen Lama, then follow ancient cobbled pathways between winding adobe walls, passing monks wandering to and fro in their saffron-colored robes and headdresses. We come to an area of the monastery with a thousand Buddha statues and a printing press, where I ask the monk printing money to print out a few extra yuan so I can leave an offering at the monastery before I leave. “I don’t think he understands you,” says our guide.
“Thank goodness,” says Jorie.
Our guide takes us into the tea rooms with five enormous bronze caldrons holding yak butter tea for the monks . . . and then into the most fascinating place we’ve seen in all of Tibet: the chanting room. It’s the oldest building in the monastery, and beautifully embroidered scrolls hang from the ceiling and rows of seats are set in squares, with the whole room being bisected by pillars. Seated throughout the room are chanting monks, led by a senior monk who tolls his bell, a symbol of wisdom, at auspicious moments.
From the chanting room we move into a foyer where a monk stands preparing an offering to Buddha made of yak butter and barley flour. This room is even more stunning than the great chanting room, which our guide explains is because it’s a room meant for the highest-ranking monks. There’s a great deal of bell ringing, drum beating, and cymbal clashing.
We return to our sparse room, and we suddenly feel that it is all worthwhile—the wild, dusty drive, the gray barracks, and the nearly inedible food we’ve tried to eat all week.
Just as I’m dozing off, there’s a flash of light through the curtains and a blaring noise. “What on earth . . . ?” Jorie says.
“Is that the radio next door?”
“Call the front desk.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” says the young man who answers the phone. “On Friday nights, there’s the Chinese cinema.”
“What time does it end?”
“Usually around midnight.”
Jorie stuffs the pillow over her head and moans.
It’s not an easy job being the first to bring tourists to a section of the world that has had its reasons for keeping foreigners out—but by 1994, we see how our efforts in places like China have really made an impact. Bill Gates, passionate about travelling and learning about different cultures, contacts us to organize an itinerary for him to visit China. He and Warren Buffett are planning a trip together, and they will be bringing along a group of their friends and revered business acquaintances. Keenly aware of how important this trip will be to both them and us, we dispatch Gerald Hatherly, our A&K China specialist, to lock down all the arrangements and special requests.
We want to plan a trip that’s more than just the “standard” China itinerary. The Gateses haven’t been to China as leisure travellers, so we design a trip that introduces them to China but also gives them access to some locations that are off the beaten path and very intriguing.
It helps that Mimi Gardner Gates, who is married to Bill Gates’s father, is an eminent China scholar. Mimi approves of the inclusion of Urumqi, a region that’s rarely traveled but so rich in sights, sounds, and life, and also Dunhuang, which means “Blazing Beacon”—a reference to its once glorious status as a major center for trade and culture over 1,500 years ago.
Therefore we plan a China itinerary that touches on the classic regions that make China such a magical destination: Beijing, capital and city of historic monuments; Xi’an, one of the great cradles of Chinese civilization; and Guilin, the living landscape painting. To this we add the Silk Road cities of Urumqi, Turfan, and Dunhuang because of their place in China’s ancient history, and also because they are wonderful examples of just how diverse and how unusual China is. The average traveller may not know that the world’s second largest desert is located in China or that the greatest concentration of Buddhist cave art is found in the shifting sands of China’s vast northwestern desert; or that in Turfan there were ancient Silk Road cities that had Nestorian Christian churches, Manichean temples, and images of Greco-Roman deities.
To complete the itinerary, we add a cruise along the middle reaches of the Yangzi River through the Three Gorges—a region that is celebrated by the Chinese. The Yangzi is the “mother river” and it is truly the lifeblood of the country, with more than four hundred million people living along the river’s course. It accounts for 35 percent of the country’s most productive agricultural land, and it has always been a natural barometer or metaphor for what it is to be Chinese–stoic yet passionate (just like the swirling waters of the gorges), and also deep and enduring.
So, combining these diverse elements we design what we feel is the ideal China trip.
I’m especially pleased with the way Gerald and his team plan to introduce the Gateses to the Three Gorges of the Yangzi River, which was one of my favorite experiences on that first reconnaissance. It so happens that their visit will coincide with the Three Gorges Dam Project, approved in 1992 and now
well underway. The project has generated worldwide interest and is likened to being “the Great Wall across the Water,” and Bill Gates makes a request that we offer some informative briefings on the project that cover the planning stages, the costs, the environmental impact, and the social issues that are front-page news.
The cruise on the Yangzi will make for a wonderful interlude during the trip so the party can relax and enjoy themselves. We’re able to charter MS East Queen, the best boat on the river, and as the cruise director we arrange to bring on board the great Bill Hurst—the finest Yangzi River specialist. Gerald also pledges to carve out time for the group to swim on the Shennong River, a tributary of the Yangzi, with crystalline mountain waters.
The Gateses’ group also hopes to ride on the train that Chairman Mao Zedong, who lived from 1893 to 1976, rode when he made his national tours of China. The train sits in Beijing, not used by foreign travellers, VIP or not. Gerald and Austin Zhu of the China International Travel Sector sit down for meetings with the Ministry of Railways, and after six months of conversations to and fro, they obtain official permission to host the Gates group on Chairman Mao’s train from Dunhuang to Urumqi.
Once the official permission is granted, I agree with Gerald that we should hold a banquet for the Ministry of Railways to really seal the deal with the top officials from the ministry. At the party, Austin and Gerald find themselves seated in a private room with a group of older men, all dressed in Mao suits and clearly all figures from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
{A&K staff}
Holding a giant panda in Chengdu, and wearing special clothes to protect it from infection, 2010.
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