by David Eimer
Part II
TIBET – THE WILD WEST
We can see that for Chinese with respect to barbarians, to slaughter them is not an unbenevolent act, to deceive them is not untrustworthy and to steal their land and wealth is not unrighteous.
Wang Fuzhi, seventeenth-century Han philosopher
8
The Tibetan Borderlands
Samphel’s home was a temple of Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule. The two-room house was squeezed between other similar dwellings in an unpaved alley in the lee of Litang’s monastery. One room was given over to prayers, the other served as the living room, kitchen and bedroom for Samphel, his mother and two brothers when they were around. Outside, a satellite dish rusted slowly in the tiny yard.
I perched on a low stool opposite his mum, a smiling, fat woman with cropped hair who constantly spun the prayer wheel she clutched in her left hand. Samphel sat next to me, tall and broad-shouldered in his crimson monk’s robes. A TV tuned to Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan channel murmured softly in the background. On the far wall, pictures of the Dalai Lama and the former Panchen Lama, the second most senior monk in Tibet, hung side by side.
Almost all Tibetans refuse to recognise the current Panchen Lama, who was selected by the CCP after it rejected the Dalai Lama’s choice of a six-year-old boy as the Panchen’s next reincarnation. Three days after the Dalai Lama named him in May 1995, he was taken away by the Chinese authorities and hasn’t been seen since. ‘He is under arrest,’ said Samphel, bringing his two wrists together to indicate someone handcuffed. His replacement lives in Beijing and makes occasional, stage-managed visits to Tibet during which he invariably praises the religious freedom enjoyed by Tibetans under the CCP’s benevolent reign.
In Litang, there is little sign of such tolerance. ‘We have to hide the pictures and our satellite dish when the police come to check the houses,’ Samphel told me. ‘They do the same up at the monastery.’ Earlier that day, I had been astounded to see a near-life-size photo of the Dalai Lama in the prayer hall of Litang’s monastery. It was propped up next to the empty throne all Tibetan monasteries maintain in case he should ever return from exile in Dharamsala in northern India.
Just possessing a picture of the Dalai Lama can lead to arrest for any Tibetan. If the monastery was found to be displaying one, then the senior lamas would likely disappear and the other 600 monks consigned to yet more of the re-education classes the CCP requires them to attend on a regular basis. Listening to Radio Free Asia for the latest news of the Dalai Lama’s activities, or the statements of the Tibetan government-in-exile, is a punishable offence too. But many of Litang’s policemen are Tibetans, and I suspected the monastery received advance warning when they were about to make their rounds.
‘Do you eat tsampa?’ asked Samphel. He offered me a paper cup half full of the barley flour which is the staple dish of Tibetans. He poured in some yak-butter tea – yaks rather than cows provide many Tibetans with meat and milk – and I used a chopstick to churn it into the sticky, porridge-like paste it needs to become before it can be consumed. We ate it with gori, doughy Tibetan flatbread, drinking hot water to wash it down. A diet of tsampa alone swiftly becomes tedious. But the last time I had eaten it was in a restaurant in Beijing, where Tibetan dancers circled the tables of the mostly foreign and Han diners. It tasted better in Litang.
As we ate, Samphel told me about his life. He was nineteen and a student monk. ‘I want to teach Tibetan history and language at the monastery,’ he said. In a mix of fractured English and passable Mandarin, he told me how happy he was to speak with a foreigner. ‘I envy your lifestyle and the fact you can talk in your mother tongue with freedom.’ Like all people in China his age, Samphel had attended a Mandarin-speaking school, but Tibetan was his first language. He asked if I had met the Dalai Lama or been to Dharamsala. ‘One of my brothers lives there,’ he said. Samphel’s siblings were monks too.
He dug out a prized photo taken in Barkhor Square, the heart of the Tibetan capital Lhasa. In jeans and a T-shirt and with a broad grin on his face, Samphel looked like any carefree teenager on holiday rather than the serious monk sitting next to me. I wondered why he was in mufti, rather than his robes. ‘The Chinese don’t like monks going to Tibet. I had to go dressed in normal clothes,’ he explained.
That trip was the only time Samphel had visited Tibet as China defines it. Officially, his hometown of Litang is in the far west of Sichuan Province. The actual border with Tibet is another 160 kilometres away across the grasslands and mountains that encircle the town. But this is still the Tibetan Plateau, the roof of the world, which stretches for almost 2.5 million square kilometres in all directions, and Litang is over 4,000 metres high. I had come from much lower Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, and the sudden jump in altitude had left me with a headache and gasping in the thin air.
To the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala and its numerous supporters overseas, Tibet extends far beyond its present-day frontiers, pushing into the neighbouring provinces of Qinghai and Gansu to the north-east, Sichuan in the east and Yunnan in the south-east. Their version of Tibet dates back to a 1914 interpretation of the borders, and is almost double the size of the land Beijing currently recognises. It includes the areas in the neighbouring provinces, like Litang, which are historically part of Amdo and Kham, pronounced ‘Cham’, two of the four regions Tibet is divided into.
Those borderlands are designated Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures, as opposed to Tibet itself, which is classified as an Autonomous Region like Xinjiang. The prefectures are overwhelmingly populated by Tibetans. So many live in them, around three million, they outnumber the 2.7 million Tibetans who reside inside Tibet. Another 150,000 or so are in exile, mostly in India and Nepal.
Tibetans in the borderlands regard themselves as still living within Tibet – the Dalai Lama was born in an area of Qinghai that is traditionally part of Amdo – even if both Kham and Amdo functioned as semi-independent states largely outside of Lhasa’s control in the time before Beijing ran Tibet. They ignore the fact that their country’s frontiers have fluctuated, just as the fortunes of the Tibetans have, and many still identify themselves by the region they come from. ‘The Chinese say we are Sichuan people. But we are Khampa,’ stressed Samphel, his voice rising as he used the Tibetan word for those from Kham.
His vehemence didn’t surprise me. Litang has long been associated with a particularly militant form of Tibetan nationalism. As well as being the hometown of the seventh and tenth Dalai Lamas – the present one is the fourteenth – Litang was the site of a fierce battle in 1956. The Khampa had risen up against the Chinese who had marched into Lhasa five years earlier and ended Tibet’s brief period of de facto independence. Litang’s monastery was besieged for a month, before the PLA resorted to bombing it from the air. The revolt went on to become a Tibet-wide uprising. It ended in defeat three years later, resulting in the Dalai Lama escaping into exile.
Exactly how many Tibetans were killed during the 1956–9 rebellion is unknown. Exile groups in Dharamsala put the number at around 85,000, based on what they say are captured Chinese documents. Many historians dispute that figure, but there is little doubt that tens of thousands died and that thousands more were subsequently imprisoned in the harshest of conditions. For a country with such a small population, Tibet paid a very high price for its refusal to bow to Beijing.
Litang remains a place the CCP is deeply suspicious of. Since March 2008, when protests against the Chinese erupted in Lhasa, prompting demonstrations elsewhere across greater Tibet, it has been periodically barred to visitors. Many other parts of western Sichuan are permanently closed. Tibetans in the autonomous prefectures suffer the double indignity of being under Chinese sway and not considered to be living in Tibet itself – reasons for many to resist Beijing’s rule.
Foreigners had been banned from Litang until a few days before I arrived, because monks from all over Tibet and the borderlands were gathered at the monastery for debates. Sam
phel had returned for them; he was temporarily studying at another monastery. He thought 3,000 had come to Litang, enough to spark fears among the authorities that disgruntled lamas might publicly express their dissatisfaction with China’s occupation of Tibet.
Litang’s annual horse-racing festival had been cancelled again as well. The week of races and horse-trading is the social highlight of the year for the locals, but has taken place only once since 2008 and then just for a single day. Even if they aren’t waving pictures of the Dalai Lama, the nomads from across Kham who descend on Litang for the festival have a habit of fighting over the race results.
Many nomads had travelled to Litang anyway and their tents were pitched outside town on the grassland. Grazing yaks stood as unofficial sentries, while wild-looking horses whinnied and mean mastiffs barked ferociously at the approach of a stranger, straining at the ropes and chains that tethered them. I learned quickly that it is best to announce your arrival at a nomad settlement by yelling from afar ‘Tashi Delek’, the Tibetan for ‘Hello’, so that the nomads can keep any loose dogs under control.
They looked nothing like any Tibetans I had encountered before. The long-haired men were haughty and appeared almost piratical, with gold teeth glinting out of their brown faces and knives tucked into the belts or sashes that held in place their chuba, the thick woollen cloak worn by rural Tibetans at all times of the year. Every so often, they swung themselves easily up on to the horses and galloped them around bareback. Their women had pony-tailed hair dangling almost to their waists, and were bundled up in so many layers their bodies seemed shapeless.
Herding yaks and horses and moving across the grasslands in groups a few families strong, camping in set places depending on the time of year, the nomads are romantic figures but have a distinct edge to them. It is easy to see why they make the Chinese wary. Even now, they are still shengfan, or uncooked in the old Han classification of barbarians – people who have resisted all efforts to tame them. At night, when they roared into Litang on motorbikes decorated with Buddhist symbols, the long red tassels on their handlebars flying in the wind, police cars shadowed them.
Outside its few towns, Kham has always been a wild west. Before 1951 and the Chinese occupation of Tibet, it was a place where every man carried a gun or a sword and outlaws flourished by robbing both passing travellers and the locals. Many of those high-plateau highwaymen were people fleeing the bonded labour that all Tibetans – apart from the aristocratic landlords, officials and monks – spent part of each year performing in lieu of tax.
Old Tibet was a feudal society, one where most people lived in desperate poverty. In 2009, as part of the CCP’s efforts to remind Tibetans of what their lives had been like before 1951, a new public holiday was introduced, the ponderously titled ‘Serf Liberation Day’. Yet few of the former ‘slaves’ appear keen to celebrate it. By harking back to those times, the Chinese are just reinforcing the idea that Tibetans have always been subjugated by someone, while reminding them that Beijing is the new landlord.
Nothing about the nomads camped outside Litang suggested they were ever serfs, even if they remain poor by any standards. The knives in their belts are testament to the reputation the Khampa have among their fellow Tibetans for being especially unruly. It was the nomads of Kham who played a major part in the war of 1956–9. They launched brave, foolhardy and ultimately hopeless attacks on horseback armed with swords, antique rifles and amulets around their necks which they believed would deflect the PLA’s machine-gun bullets.
China still uses its superior technology to subdue Tibet and the autonomous prefectures. With 90 per cent of its 50,000 residents Tibetan, Litang is a town under permanent surveillance. CCTV cameras monitor every street, while a large contingent of Wu Jing are based conveniently close to the monastery. For Samphel and many others, the police searches of homes, and the need to hide any evidence of loyalty to the Dalai Lama, have become part of daily life.
It was a highly frustrating existence for Samphel, who struggled to contain his anger at the imposition of Beijing’s rules in the local schools and the monastery. Deeply cynical about the Han, he railed against the way the excruciating, pitted road that runs from Chengdu into Tibet was being turned into a smooth highway. ‘The Chinese say they are putting money into the area,’ said Samphel, ‘but the new road is only being built so Chinese companies can get here more easily to do their mining.’
My irritation with how China’s laws were affecting my movements was minor compared to the strictures Samphel faced, but the restrictions were still vexing. Litang was almost the end of the road for me in western Sichuan. I could travel on to the next town of Batang, a mere fifty kilometres from Tibet, but not beyond it because solo foreigners cannot cross Tibet’s land borders legally. It is another legacy of the 2008 protests. Just as parts of the borderlands are closed, so now almost all travel inside Tibet by westerners is in groups who arrive by air or train in Lhasa, armed with a folder full of permits that need to be negotiated in advance.
Before 1949, such constraints were unknown. The Tibetan government did not encourage visitors, often banning them outright, but those who wanted to get into Tibet could do so if they were hardy enough to cross the mountains that guarded it from the outside world. Colonel F. M. Bailey entered from Sikkim in India in 1913, five years before his sojourn in Xinjiang, to explore the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge and procure botanical specimens. He called the book that recounted his adventures No Passport to Tibet.
Some intrepid travellers do still try to get in on their own. Occasionally they succeed in visiting certain areas without getting caught, which would entail a fifteen-day prison term, a fine, a return at their own expense to inland China and sometimes deportation. It was difficult but I knew it was possible. I had done it myself, after paying a Han truck driver for a lift into south-eastern Tibet from the far north of Yunnan Province.
We set off early in the morning from the Nujiang Valley, a remote, little-visited region scrunched up against the borders with Myanmar and Tibet. The road was dire, the worst I had travelled in China – a stone and dirt track along which the truck pitched and yawed like a boat riding a heavy swell. There was a vertigo-inducing sheer drop down to the Nujiang River on one side, and I gave up counting how often the truck’s wheels spun perilously close to the edge. It took four hours to travel the forty kilometres to the border between Yunnan and Tibet.
The frontier was marked by a dilapidated yellow sign proclaiming, ‘Forbid Foreigner Turn into Strictlg’ in English and ‘Strictly Forbidden for Foreigners to Enter’ in Chinese. A few kilometres on, Han workers were tunnelling through the hills, building a new road to tie this part of Tibet closer to the motherland. The truck driver wanted to leave me with them; he was scared of what would happen if we encountered a police or Wu Jing patrol. Arms are sometimes smuggled across the border from Myanmar, destined for both Yunnan and Tibet, and trucks are routinely searched.
Refusing to get out, I accompanied the driver to a village where he was delivering building supplies. Glimpsed from the road, it looked idyllic compared to many of its Chinese counterparts. Golden barley fields that swayed with the wind and ran flush to the fast-flowing, steel-grey waters of the Nujiang surrounded substantial white-stone, flat-roofed houses with carefully painted, multi-coloured window frames. Overlooking them on a hill above the road, Buddhist prayer flags ringed a makeshift shrine and announced Tibet’s fundamental difference from Han China.
Up close, it was less appealing. There was no running water, just a well, and the only lights ran off car batteries. Most of the village turned out to unload the truck, with both men and women slinging the heavy sacks of cement and sand on to their backs and staggering down the steep path that led to their houses. They gazed at me with curiosity and smiled when they discovered where I was from, although few spoke Chinese. But everyone was dirty, their clothes stained and tattered, and they lived off what they grew and their animals. In the winter, when the road became impassable, the
y were completely cut off.
There was no point in me venturing on from the village. Further up the road was Cawarong, the first settlement of any size in south-eastern Tibet, a former stop on the Tea-Horse Road which once connected Yunnan to Tibet and India. Tea from the plantations in Xishuangbanna in the south of Yunnan travelled north, while prized Tibetan war horses went south, along with missionaries, monks and traders. During the Second World War, parts of the Tea-Horse Road became supply lines for the foreign and Chinese soldiers fighting the Japanese.
Only the odd truck travels the route now. But there is a Wu Jing base outside Cawarong and checkpoints before then which I would never get through. I was already ducking out of sight whenever I heard a vehicle engine, in case it was the police. After a few hours in the village, I climbed back into the truck and returned, even more slowly in the dying light, to where I had started that morning. I thought of how Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian climber, SS man and unofficial tutor to the Dalai Lama, spent seven years in Tibet. I had managed just one day.
What I wanted to do was travel from Lhasa to the far west of Tibet and Mount Kailash – the seat of gods and their attendants, the holiest mountain in the world for a billion Hindus and Buddhists. Travelling there would take me along 219, the road that connects Xinjiang and Tibet, while running close to the borders with India, Nepal and Bhutan. Sneaking across the frontier was not going to allow me to accomplish that journey. Travelling in Tibet officially, which meant with a guide, was my only realistic option.