by Tahir Shah
MY CONTACT HAD SCRIBBLED an address in Mandarin on a scrap of paper no larger than a postage stamp.
Nudging a thumb in the direction of a hutong, one of the labyrinthine alleys tucked away in downtown Beijing, he balked.
‘Dealer very dangerous man. You go alone.’
So I did.
After zigzagging down telescoping lanes abundant with life, asking everyone who passed me, I eventually arrived at the dealer’s den. I knocked apprehensively.
Much time passed, then the door slowly slid back.
A stocky waxy figure wearing only an eye-patch and a pair of fake Calvin Klein’s was standing in the frame. He barked something angrily in Chinese. I held up the scrap of paper. The dealer’s good eye glanced left and right subversively, and he yanked me inside.
The contact at my hotel had promised that the dealer could source just about anything – legal or illegal. Having travelled to Beijing to take the celebrated new train to Lhasa, I was getting desperate. Restrictions and astonishing passenger numbers, set against a backdrop of general Chinese railway mayhem, had made tickets a very elusive commodity. Weeks before, I had paid a huge amount of cash in advance to a Tibetan guide based abroad. Despite promising the earth, he hadn’t been able to secure any seats, leaving me ticketless on the day I planned to travel.
Probing a hand down the front of his Calvin Klein’s the dealer slid out a mobile phone, roared into it for a minute and a half, looked at me, then grunted hard. He whipped out the hand and rubbed thumb and forefinger together fast. I counted out a wad of money and left with nothing to show for it, except a smirk from the dealer as he slid the door shut.
Early that evening I had all but given up hope when an envelope was slipped silently under the door of my hotel room. It had dried blood on the front, and a crumpled railway ticket inside.
An hour later I was pushing through the crowds at Beijing’s immense West Station. Oceans of people, most of them clutching sacks filled with their worldly possessions, were shuffling forwards away from the station, as if fleeing a natural disaster. Diving in, I pushed upstream, swimming against the current. And, after terrible difficulty, arrived at the gate of the fabled Lhasa Express.
Pushed up in a kind of holding pen, waiting to board the train, I could hardly believe that the journey I had anticipated for so long was at last about to start. Ever since I had heard of the Beijing to Lhasa railway opening four years before, I’d been desperate to get aboard.
Modern China is a land of tremendous engineering achievement, one in which the word ‘impossible’ simply doesn’t exist. And the cherry on the Cake of Marvels is surely the railway line that spans the route from Beijing to the Tibetan capital, a journey of four thousand kilometres. Known locally as Kien Liu, the ‘Railway to Heaven’, it’s something of which all Chinese are justifiably proud. But at the same time it’s controversial, the easy access it provides for ordinary Han-Chinese to visit Lhasa, has made it yet another nail in the coffin of ancient Tibetan culture.
The frenzied hysteria of boarding was replaced by a silent serenity, as train T27 glided out of Beijing West precisely on time, at nine p.m. The majority of the passengers were Chinese tourists, eager for a glimpse at Tibet, a province that’s become for them a kind of exotic Disneyland, and an extension of their own realm.
From the moment the train slipped through the suburbs of Beijing, to the time of its arrival at Lhasa, my fellow passengers galvanized into a ubiquitous routine: slurping pots of minute-noodles, gambling incessantly, sms-ing each other madly, slugging back small bottles of gut-rot liquor, chain-smoking in the corridors, gorging themselves in the dining car, and embarking on marathon sessions of mahjong.
For two days and nights a hard sleeper berth was my home. Across from me lay a woman whom I never saw move once. She was covered head to toe in sheets of tatty newspaper. An old English teacher from Shanghai named Mr. Ma, on the lowest berth, said she was not to be trusted. He wouldn’t tell me why, but instead spent most of the journey asking how I could help get his son into British university.
Other than some of the more peculiar dishes on offer in the dining car, the hardest thing to stomach on the Lhasa Express were the loos. They quickly became an obsession for all the passengers. Ten minutes from Beijing and every toilet was overflowing with excrement. Those of a fragile disposition took to bottling their pee, and leaving it furtively in the corridors.
Desperate for a clean loo, I roamed the train’s entire length. Clambering from one carriage to the next meant hoisting oneself over the seat-less, their babies, and their bales of luggage and wares. Mr. Ma said those without seats were Tibetan, adding darkly that they were not to be trusted either.
In the middle of the train lay a kind of no-man’s-land, three carriages of hard chair cars, a raucous day and night jamboree of Chinese college students. Seething with hormones and alcohol, iPods buzzing, they spent their time eyeing each other up, playing it ice cool.
Beyond them was the dining car with its ferocious waitresses and bowls of steaming pig-fat stew. And, beyond that, was the Promised Land – the soft sleeper compartment: piped musak, pristine toilets, miniature TVs, and all mod cons.
I got talking to a Chinese student said who her name was Jennifer, and that she was in love with Robbie Williams. I asked her about Tibet. She sighed. At first I mistook it for a sigh of affection, the kind she reserved for Robbie. ‘Shopping in Lhasa very very good,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Because Tibetans very frightened of us Chinese.’
By dawn of the second day, the train was ascending steeply. With the wheels grinding hard against the tracks all morning, the locomotive hauled us up to the highest point, the five thousand metre Tanggula Pass.
Now wearing a pair of silk royal blue pyjamas, Mr. Ma got a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. He looked as though someone had stabbed him through the heart. The woman across from him moaned she had a headache. Then she fainted. A minute later there was a gushing sound and we all perked up. The engineers had thought of everything, even pumping oxygen into the compartments through little nozzles built into the walls.
A railway journey gives a fleeting cross-section, a blend of blurred detail against a backdrop of gradual change. We live in a world preoccupied with cities, but it’s the rural landscape that always stays so firmly in my mind. Modern China may be all about the urban, but it’s the rural topography that’s still the heartland. And what a vast, uncompromising place it is: boundless vistas of fields and lakes, little hamlets, forests, and great swathes of emptiness, save for the odd herd of sheep, or goats.
As the train rolled on towards Tibet, the scenery changed. The weeping willows, farmland, and screens of rustling poplar died away, replaced gradually by stark steppe, peppered with thousands of black dots – grazing yaks. And the closer we drew to Lhasa, the more wondrous the feats of engineering and technology – vast dams, power stations, tunnels, road-building and sprawling bridges, beneath great boiling cumulus clouds.
All of a sudden, Lhasa arrived.
Gliding into the station was like slipping into a military encampment on high alert. The platform was awash with stern-looking soldiers in camouflage, marching double-time, automatic weapons held tight over chests, eyes fixed on the middle distance. I watched as an American tourist, trying to take a photo of the station’s name, was tackled for his camera. Photography was against the law.
As he said goodbye, Mr. Ma ordered me to beware of yak meat and of Tibetans, neither of which he said were to be trusted in the least. We shook hands, and he was gone.
Reaching Lhasa at last was for me itself a profoundly moving experience. My obsession for all things Tibetan began in childhood on reading Heinrich Harrar’s classic, Seven Years in Tibet.
A champion skier and mountaineer, Harrar had found himself trapped in Tibet during World War II. His tale was later turned into a movie staring Brad Pitt. Unable to leave, Harrar was invited to become a private tutor to the young Dalai Lama. His writing paints a candid pictur
e of a Tibet, a land quite untouched by the modern world. Seven Years is a time capsule of a book, illuminating in freeze-frame a way of life that changed irrevocably with the Chinese invasion sixty years ago.
Like everyone else watching the mountain stronghold from afar, I had been touched by the gentleness of the society and its Buddhist faith. Yet I had never quite imagined I would actually set foot in the place that has become such a symbol, much more than a simple destination.
Visiting Tibet is a subject plagued in misinformation, and surfing the Internet leads to all sorts of contradictory advice, much of it surrounding the compulsory Tibetan Travel Permit. Despite what you hear, you can apply for the Travel Permit yourself, although most people get theirs through an agency or a guide.
And the business of guides to Tibet is surely one of the great rackets of the international tourist game. Most visitors use one on their journey, although nothing at all says that you must have a guide. As it happened, the one I found online cajoled me into paying top dollar in advance. He turned out to be a crook, a Tibetan sharper forbidden to set foot in his own homeland. He ended up farming me out to a local guide for a small fraction of the money I had paid him.
To anyone interested, my advice is to get the permit yourself, and to wait until you reach Lhasa before looking for a guide, that is if you think you need one at all. Do-it-yourself Tibet pays great dividends.
You don’t need to be an intrepid explorer to visit Tibet. I can hardly imagine an easier or more pleasant land to wander through. From the first instant, there’s a sense that you have arrived at one of those golden destinations, the kind which changes the way a traveller sees the world. The few Western tourists I met there staggered about with a cloud-nine glow wrapped over their faces, as if they had won a jackpot.
The Tibetans are celebrated for their peacefulness and for their resilience, and it’s that which visitors take away – the feeling that dignity prevails in the face of truly terrible adversity.
For those like me, preoccupied by Tibet, the reality is fascinating and at the same time disturbing. It’s like looking at a picture through a kaleidoscopic lens. The picture’s there, yet it’s distorted. Ordinary life continues for the Tibetan people. They pray at the Jorkhang temple, with its gilded bronze roofs, prostrating themselves every few paces until they reach inside. They eat yak-meat momo dumplings in the backstreets of the old town, shop for rancid yak-butter, vegetables, and for second-hand clothes. And they make the pilgrim circuit clockwise around Jorkhang complex, spinning prayer wheels as they go.
All around them is the dark shadow and unflinching gaze of the Chinese system. There are soldiers on every street corner and at every crossing, many of them outfitted in riot dress, batons and shields gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight, tear gas canisters ready to be deployed. There are lookouts, too, on the rooftops, and even on the minaret of Lhasa’s main mosque. Nothing is overlooked, neither by the soldiers, nor by the legions of spies mingling with the general populace. The heightened state of alert is the result of civil uprisings just over two years ago, unrest that left unknown numbers of Tibetan civilians and lamas imprisoned and dead.
Much of my time in Lhasa was spent standing on street corners, staring at the well-honed melody of life. On one street corner, a stone’s throw from the Jorkhang monastery, a street seller stepped up and tried to interest me in a pair of immensely long brass trumpets, adorned with exquisite silver appliqué.
He was a short man, with large hands, and the kind of smile you can’t quite forget. I asked him how I’d ever get the instruments home. They must have been twenty feet long. Without wasting a second, he collapsed the trumpets in on themselves, telescoping them down to the length of a shoebox. ‘Now they are hand luggage,’ he said with a grin.
The military lock-down is what you notice first, but dwelling on it would be to miss the bigger picture. And that is the dilution of Tibetan culture, the ancient circle of life. Everything Chinese is stressed and applauded, and anything Tibetan is frowned upon, ridiculed, and shamed.
The road signs are in Chinese, and many streets have been renamed, the stores are filled with Chinese goods, a great number of them staffed and owned by Han-Chinese, who are making all the cash.
In a suburb of Lhasa known as the ‘Island of Love’, I was taken to a swish art gallery in which an energetic Chinese lady was encouraging foreigners to part with large sums in the name of modern art, pieces including an enormous wooden phallus painted red. She stressed that most of the artists were Tibetan, and that major dealers were at that moment bidding for the works. She motioned to the door and, as if on cue, it opened and a scout from Sotheby’s stepped in.
The local art market isn’t the only one controlled by the Chinese. Tibetan medicine was until recently celebrated in both East and West. But these days few pharmacies within Tibet practice the ancient techniques. Instead they dole out drugs mass-manufactured far away in China. The Tibetans endure it all, existing in a kind of limbo, a limbo that’s slowly sucking their lifeblood away.
On one street corner in the old town, a farmer was standing with his yak. It looked very old, as if it were diseased. One of the shopkeepers saw me wondering whether the animal was for sale. He said to me, ‘Have pity on this old man. Buy the yak, take it back to your own country and nurse it back to health.’ I told him that I lived a great distance from Lhasa. The shopkeeper seemed worried for a moment. Then he said, ‘If you buy the yak I will look after it for you.’
Spend a little time outside Lhasa, roaming around the countryside, and you do glimpse snapshots of a society that in many ways has hardly altered since medieval times.
Farmers and their families out in the fields winnowing the wheat, nomads in their smoky yak-wool tents pounding the yak-butter with giant pestles, a clutch of pilgrims pausing at crisscrossed prayer flags swooshing in the wind. The deafening sound of gongs and elongated trumpets shattering the silence of dawn.
While monitored through a network of spies and informants, the temples, monasteries and nunneries soldier on day to day. The Dalai Lama’s photo and his name are conspicuously absent, although you quickly realize he’s the one person on everyone’s mind. The Chinese authorities have sought to incapacitate the system gradually, from the inside out. And to a large degree, they have succeeded.
Not surprisingly, it is within the Buddhist institutions that the lifeblood of the Tibetan realm remains most in tact. At Lhasa’s Tsamkhung nunnery, prayer books are still hand printed on slivers of wood, as they have been done for centuries. And at the imposing Potala Palace, which looms down over the capital, lines of pilgrims pour ghee on the flickering lamps, their robed forms mingling with Chinese tourists, coutured head to toe in spotless Burberry. The contrast couldn’t be more incongruous.
To enter the actual palace is to descend back in time, through the interleaving centuries of Tibetan life, a life bound unflinching to the calm serenity of Buddhist culture. It’s not easy to say why the cramped halls of the Potala affect all who enter them as they do. As you trail through them, up narrow staircases, down sweeping corridors and through the many shrines, pungent with incense and smoke, you feel a part of something very ancient. It’s as if you’re being bathed in a thousand years of energy, left by supplicants whose names are lost, but whose devotion lives on.
And at a tiny outlying monastery on the road to Nagansey, I met an eighty-year-old hermit-monk crouching in a niche a little bigger than himself, carved out from the rock. He had been in there for three decades. When I held up a camera, he begged me to take the photo to freedom, to Dharamsala.
On one of my last nights in Tibet, I camped in a steep-sided valley, the verdant slopes grazed close by yaks. Either side of it was a glacier. They seemed to hang there between the crags, translucent ice, prehistoric and compacted, the colour of aquamarines. All through the night a freezing wind ripped down from the ice mountains, followed by hail and rain. My tent collapsed completely, leaving me in a wretched stew of tent poles, pla
stic sheeting and quilts. The driver and my guide, who had slept like kittens curled up in the van, split their sides in laughter when they saw me emerge at first light.
The driver mumbled something and cackled in delight.
‘What did he say?’
My guide wiped a hand over his face.
He said, ‘Only a moron would use a tent not made of yak wool.’
A mile or two away, atop a precipitous slope, with sweeping views of the plateau below, I came to the nunnery set beside a towering stupa and encircled by bronze prayer wheels. My guide had at first resisted making the steep climb on foot. Given the altitude, it was like staggering forwards wearing diving weights. I assumed his reluctance to be inspired by a dislike for physical activity.
But then, when we reached the nunnery – one that’s on no tourist itinerary – I realized that my guide’s apprehension came about for fear of the authorities. Even there, he said, we would encounter spies. And we did. One of the nuns, an old woman with a childlike grin and a shaven head, cocked her creased brow in the direction of a young man sitting in the shade of the central courtyard. When we were out of earshot, she whispered that she didn’t care any longer, at least for herself. ‘We close our eyes,’ she said softly, ‘and we are free.’
As dusk became night, one of the nuns cooked up a thick vegetable broth, and served it with momo dumplings and tea. In the distance there was the sound of a girl singing, a shrill ribbon of tone, mixed with the intermittent clanging of a yak-bell far away. I slept more deeply than on any night I can remember, huddled up on an old rope bed, a patchwork quilt pulled over me.
I was up at dawn, in time to see the nuns with their shaven heads take up their positions for the first chorus. Watching Tibet from a distance, through magazines and photographs, the ritual can appear stiff and even austere. But being there, at the heart of a nunnery as the first blush of sunlight warms the darkness, you can’t help but be moved by the openness, the sense of real conviviality of it all.