The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  But I was hampered by my journalist’s visa, a black spot handed down by Beijing. Tibet is the one part of China where foreign reporters cannot travel, except on trips run by the CCP’s propaganda department. The Chinese claim it is for our safety, as if we will be suborned by the natives when they see our notebooks and cameras. As long as my visa scarred my passport, revealing my occupation every time I checked into a hotel, I would never be given the permits to travel in Tibet.

  A trump card appeared in the shape of another passport I possessed, one which the Chinese knew nothing about. It offered no clue that I was a China-based journalist, so I took a trip to a Chinese embassy in a neighbouring country and used it to apply for a standard tourist visa. Trusting that the details of my existence in Beijing would be filed away in the netherworld of Chinese cyberspace, I reasoned there was no way, nor any reason, to cross-check a routine visa application with the list of foreign reporters resident in China. I was right. Now it was time for Tibet.

  9

  Lhasa

  The midday flight from Chengdu to Lhasa was delayed, allowing time for contemplation. Other departure gates signalled their less glamorous destinations in red neon dots. I was smug in the knowledge that I was heading somewhere far more exotic. But although my passport and permits had been examined, I was not leaving China, not officially anyway, and I was travelling by air. I felt none of the exhilaration, the spurious sense of achievement, implicit in the crossing of a land border: walking out of a country, the slow march across stateless territory, an abrupt change of language, the dull thud of a new entry stamp.

  Tenzin was waiting for me when I emerged from baggage claim. Slim and nervous, short wavy black hair showing flecks of dandruff, he offered a shy smile, hung a katag, the white scarf traditionally given by lay people to lamas, around my neck and said, ‘Welcome to Tibet.’ Moving towards the exit, we sized each other up with swift sideways glances. We would be together for a month – a lifetime in the wrong company.

  As my appointed guide, Tenzin was required to accompany me to official tourist sites, such as monasteries and museums, when we travelled between towns, and on the Kora, the three-day pilgrim circuit around Mount Kailash that would be the climax of my trip. The rest of the time, in theory anyway, I could roam alone. Tenzin was Tibetan, and I hoped he would be relaxed about the solo wanderings I had planned. If he was officious or suspicious, he could make it difficult for me to slip away.

  Little of the journey into Lhasa has stayed with me: a blurry image of barley fields beyond the car window. Just being here was befuddling. I had skirted the edges of the Tibetan Plateau, but Tibet itself was still an unknown – my first substantial journey into a region that takes up one-quarter of China’s landmass. And I couldn’t concentrate, not with such a massive sky over me. At 3,650 metres above sea level, Lhasa is actually lower than Litang. But Litang is notorious for its miserable weather and was covered in murky, grey cloud during my stay. Here the sky was a brilliant blue, stretching for ever and rendering everything below it puny in comparison.

  Countryside gave way to the outskirts of Lhasa, rousing me from my dream daze. We passed the monolithic train station, opened with much fanfare in 2006, which connects Tibet to Qinghai and the rest of China. It is a source of great pride to the Chinese, who crow about how they laid the highest railway line in the world across the permafrost of the Tibetan Plateau. The locals are more circumspect about the achievement, because the trains bring not only tourists but increasing numbers of Han migrants.

  We entered Lhasa at the western, Chinese end of town. Brighter and cleaner than many inland cities, it looked like a place eager to expand, with empty lots of land beckoning to be built on interspersed between the new office and apartment blocks. We drove down Beijing Road, past Han scurrying on their errands, shops and restaurants with Chinese characters dominant over the spidery script the Tibetan language uses. But then, like a hologram of ancient Tibet imposed on a new city, there was the Potala Palace on a small hill above the road, its white and red colours magnificent against the cloudless sky.

  Dirty white Tibetan houses, no taller than three or four storeys and separated by tempting narrow streets and alleys, began to appear. Now there were far more Tibetans, some in their traditional garb but most in the same western clothes worn by the Chinese. We negotiated the first Wu Jing checkpoints and I realised we were in the old town, the Tibetan district of Lhasa.

  My hotel was squirreled away in an alley close to the Muslim quarter, home to a small community of Hui, whose forebears began arriving in Tibet in the seventeenth century. Not bothering to unpack, I rushed out to experience Lhasa after being denied the chance for so long. I joined monks, urban Tibetans in jeans and trainers, nomads in long boots and chubas, Han and foreign tourists, all moving towards Barkhor Square, the centre of the city.

  Within five minutes I ran headlong into crowds of pilgrims travelling in the opposite direction. Oblivious to everyone around them, they spun prayer wheels or fingered beads while chanting incomprehensible incantations. Overwhelmingly country Tibetans, their faces brown and leathery, most were wrapped up in chubas, but some men wore the utilitarian blue jackets and trousers ubiquitous across rural China until recently. Many of the women wore the brightly coloured, horizontally striped aprons called bangden over long black skirts.

  This was the Barkhor Kora, the pilgrim path that runs around the Jokhang Temple, Tibet’s most sacred shrine. I was going against the flow; believers circle clockwise and are meant to complete 100 such circuits. The old far outnumbered the young and I marvelled at their energy as they tapped along the uneven streets with walking sticks, gripping over-sized prayer wheels they looked too frail to hold. The most devout prostrated themselves as they went: crawling along the street, with leather aprons, knee pads and wooden blocks on their hands as protection, rising every few feet as part of their prayers, before repeating the process over and over again.

  Intermittently, the crowds parted a little and a six-man squad of Wu Jing moved through. Since the 2008 protests, the Tibetan old town is patrolled twenty-four hours a day by soldiers in helmets and camouflage uniforms, armed with AK47 rifles, shotguns and riot batons. Late at night, they were often the only people walking the streets. Most were teenagers and they appeared more nervous than menacing. But their weapons were real enough, and the Tibetans took care never to acknowledge them, avoiding all eye contact.

  Pilgrims, tourists, locals, police and army were massed in Barkhor Square. The crowds were most dense at its southern end, outside the 1,300-year-old Jokhang or the ‘House of the Buddha’. It was built on the orders of King Songtsen Gampo, Tibet’s most revered monarch and the man who converted the country to Buddhism. Every morning, pilgrims line up five or six deep to prostrate themselves in the dust in front of the surprisingly small Jokhang. Almost as many tourists surround the worshippers, who ignore them as if they are Wu Jing, but armed with cameras rather than guns.

  When the Jokhang was constructed in the mid-seventh century, Tibet enjoyed a prestige it has never managed to regain. Early Tibetan history details a warrior people who functioned less as a nation than as a series of distinct clans. When they did unite, the chainmail-clad Tibetans on their famed chargers were so fearsome they vanquished the armies sent from China to probe their borders.

  By the time King Songtsen Gampo was on the throne, Tibet’s frontiers stretched east almost as far as the old Chinese capital of Xi’an, as well as extending west, north and south into present-day India, Nepal, Pakistan and Xinjiang. Songsten’s status was such that he was able to demand a bride from Emperor Taizhong in Beijing. The emperor sent his niece, Princess Wencheng. Han historians use their wedding as part proof of what they claim is China’s longstanding dominion over Tibet, even though the match was tribute paid by Beijing to its powerful neighbour.

  Princess Wencheng’s arrival did not create or cement a relationship between the Chinese and the Tibetans. On the contrary, the Han had barely any influence or c
ontrol in Tibet for the next ten centuries. Instead, as the country split into warring states and its borders receded, Lhasa fell under the patronage of the Mongol empire. From the time of Kublai Khan, in the thirteenth century, Tibetan monks were the spiritual advisers to a succession of Mongol emperors. In 1578, one of them, Altan Khan, bestowed the title of ‘Dalai’, the Mongolian for ‘ocean’, on his senior lama, itself a corruption of the Tibetan word blama, meaning ‘teacher’.

  Not till the eighteenth century and the high point of the imperial-minded Qing dynasty did China have a real presence in Tibet. It was still a token one, based on a resident senior official known as the amban and a small garrison of soldiers. Beijing, though, had no say in internal affairs – Tibet was a protectorate at best – and Lhasa was a precarious posting; three of the amban were assassinated.

  After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 hurled China into chaos, Tibet enjoyed virtual independence until 1950. Crucially, though, no country ever recognised it as a sovereign state. But even when the PLA reached Lhasa in October 1951, the Chinese were at first interested only in controlling Tibet’s foreign policy and forging an alliance with the ruling class. Then came the Khampa revolt of 1956, and all pretence of sharing power disappeared. In March 1959, the Dalai Lama left the Potala Palace for the last time and fled over the Himalayas to India.

  Wandering through the Potala early one morning, I found it impossible to imagine it as a functioning building, the principal residence of the Dalai Lama and the seat of what passed for the Tibetan government. It was like visiting the Forbidden City in Beijing and trying to summon up the ghosts of the emperors, mandarins, eunuchs and concubines who had conspired in its myriad rooms.

  Half disused shrine and half mausoleum, the Potala looms over Lhasa like a phantom from the past: a memorial to Tibet’s long-gone glory days. Made up of two separate palaces, known as the white and the red, it is a wooden warren of rickety staircases, tiny rooms with little natural light, a succession of temples and the gold-laden, incredibly ornate tombs of the last nine Dalai Lamas.

  Non-resident monks mooch around, as do a number of cats, their presence perhaps required to add some verisimilitude. The living quarters of the current Dalai Lama have been preserved and are on display but there is no picture of him, no mention of his time staying there. He has been expunged from the Potala’s history, as all opponents of the CCP are wiped from the official record or ignored, creating a dissonance that only amplifies the building’s lifeless feel.

  Despair permeates the white-stone walls of Sera Monastery too. One of the big three monasteries of the Gelugpa, or yellow hat, school of Tibetan Buddhism, whose leader is the Dalai Lama, it is stranded on the far northern edge of Lhasa, its 600 monks outnumbered by the tourists who visit daily. They pay a high admission fee to stroll the monastery’s paths, while the lamas lurk at the fringes of the complex, marginalised both by the power of the yuan and by the ever-increasing constraints placed upon them.

  Until the 1960s, when well over 10 per cent of Tibet’s male population were monks, Sera was home to 6,000 monks. Monastic life has always offered Tibetans the chance of a free education in their own language, especially now that all schools in Tibet and the borderlands teach in Mandarin. And like educational establishments everywhere in China, schools in Tibet are not free, which prevents many poor rural locals from attending them.

  As a parallel, Tibet-centric school system, the monasteries are not just the messengers of Tibetan Buddhism but highly fertile breeding grounds for dissent. During the 1980s, they emerged as the main centres of resistance to Chinese rule. In October 1987, monks from Sera helped initiate a series of protests in Lhasa that carried on sporadically until March 1989, when the biggest anti-Chinese demonstrations since 1959 ended with Beijing imposing martial law across Tibet.

  Trying to curtail the monasteries’ power and influence occupies much of the CCP’s time. They were a prime target of the Red Guards, Mao’s shock troops during the Cultural Revolution. Monasteries were wrecked and monks in dunce hats were paraded through Lhasa’s streets – all part of Mao’s attempt to reinvigorate China with the revolutionary spirit he felt it had lost, and a typically spiteful way of reasserting his authority.

  Lasting from 1966 to 1976, the Cultural Revolution turned China inside out. Every element of traditional Chinese life came under ferocious attack. Children and students were encouraged to attack their parents and teachers, the education and legal systems collapsed and millions were purged, imprisoned and tortured, or ‘sent down’ to the countryside to work in the fields.

  More than anything, the Cultural Revolution gave ordinary people a licence to settle scores, through the simple tactic of denouncing their neighbours as class enemies. In terms of loss of life, it didn’t come close to matching the disastrous effects of the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. That resulted in between thirty and forty-five million people starving to death in another of Mao’s utterly futile and destructive schemes. But the Cultural Revolution was far worse in the way it turned the Chinese on each other, creating huge fault lines in society and morality that remain today.

  That inversion of the normal resulted in some Tibetans becoming Red Guards. For them, the sacking of the monasteries was revenge for the inequities of feudal Tibet. With senior monks coming from the aristocracy, the monasteries were seen as part of the system of taxation by bonded labour that left the vast majority of Tibetans living in poverty. It is an uncomfortable fact for pro-Tibet campaigners in the West that the Dalai Lama, like all his predecessors, comes from one of those noble families whose privileged life in old Tibet set them apart from most of their compatriots.

  But the Cultural Revolution proved to be a temporary madness, one that soon gave way to the typical Tibetan reverence for monks. Thus Beijing continues to try and curb the monasteries’ reach, barring people from joining the monkhood until they are eighteen and requiring them to get permission from their local governments before doing so. Those rules are often flouted, especially in the borderlands. In Litang, Samphel told me he was fifteen when he became a novice.

  A police station next to the entrance to Sera is evidence of the authorities’ continuing distrust of its residents, and the other 120,000 monks scattered throughout Tibet and the autonomous prefectures. ‘It’s for the monks’ protection,’ said Tenzin unconvincingly, when I asked why it was there. After just a few days together, I felt bad about embarrassing him with awkward questions. Sometimes he would respond with only a shrug and a smile, his way of expressing his helplessness at not being able to speak frankly.

  I was wary, too, of appearing overly eager to probe the realities of Tibetan life. Tenzin wasn’t the distrustful type, but he was already wondering why I spoke better Mandarin than he did. That is not difficult; many Tibetans speak little or no Chinese. I, though, was supposed to be an ordinary tourist and few of them converse in Mandarin. I explained it away by saying I had been an English teacher in Beijing for a couple of years after university.

  Sera still bears the scars of the Cultural Revolution in the form of its distressed, crumbling buildings, despite the claim of the local authorities that part of the steep ticket price is going towards its restoration. With its different faculties, including one for the study of Buddhism and one for philosophy, prayer halls and the houses where the monks live dotted around a large area, it resembles a university campus or English boarding school in its layout.

  Yet the monasteries’ role as educators is less important than it was, despite China’s expensive and patchy school system. They remain an option for those who want to study in Tibetan, but the curriculum is a limited one and not very relevant for those eager to make their way in the outside world. Some of the monks’ daily rituals too, such as the afternoon debates, appear to be disconnected from their original purposes.

  Resembling a challenge between warriors more than a conventional academic argument, the debates are supposed to test a young monk’s knowledge of the Buddhist scriptures
. One monk sits cross-legged on the ground, while another fires questions at him with a slap of the right hand on the left. A wrong answer is greeted with the outside of the right hand being laid on the left palm. At Sera, it is a performance rather than an exam, the novices leaping high in the air, slapping their hands together like the crack of a whip, playing to the crowd like good showmen.

  Reducing an age-old practice to a mere spectacle is part of a wider and ongoing dimunition of the monks’ role as the arbiters, the moral authority, of Tibetan society that Beijing’s policies are encouraging. The monasteries are treated now as separate entities by the authorities, as opposed to the interconnected network they once were. And with many tulku, the most senior lamas, in exile, so that the different schools of Buddhism are now led remotely, monks are no longer as central to Tibetan life as they once were.

  The tourists watching the afternoon debates at Sera seemed unconcerned with Tibet’s slow slide towards secularism. In part, that is because the vast majority of them were Han. They moved in packs, often behind a young female guide holding a flag, cameras and phones at the ready. Filling out the Chinese restaurants at mealtimes and crowding around the souvenir stalls in the old town’s alleys to haggle for Tibetan cowboy hats, amulets and necklaces, their presence is as symbolic of Tibet’s conquest as the Wu Jing patrols through the old town.

  Very few people travelled when I first came to China, except for work and study, or to return to their villages and hometowns at Chinese New Year. Now rising incomes have created an urban middle class with cash to spare for luxuries like holidays. The wealthiest travel overseas: to Thailand for the beaches, or Europe and the United States. Everyone else contents themselves with domestic destinations, such as Tibet, Yunnan Province and tropical Hainan Island off China’s southern coast.

  Most come to Tibet for its sheer exoticism. It is a tacit admission that this land with its extraordinary, unique geography, a people in thrall to Buddhism and a language that has its roots across the borders with Burma and India, is separate from the rest of China. Nothing illustrates the CCP’s success in rewriting history more than the irony that all Han will acknowledge how the people and landscapes of Tibet and Xinjiang are so unlike them and anywhere else in China. But they will never admit that those regions have ever been anything but part of the Chinese empire.