by David Eimer
Traditional Tibetan music, with an added electronic backbeat, started pumping out of the speakers and an MC appeared on stage dressed in smart nomad gear – baggy trousers tucked into high leather boots and a fancy chuba. He set about cheerleading the audience with a few jokes and songs. Confused, I wondered if I had wandered by mistake into a Tibetan version of the film Cabaret, with Lhasa substituting for Weimar-era Berlin.
Nangma were once dances where troupes of beautiful women entertained aristocrats and senior monks, with most Tibetans excluded from viewing them. Here girls in white dresses danced elegantly while waving yellow prayer scarves, but solo female and male singers took to the stage to perform Tibetan folk songs too. Members of the audience could buy a katag and drape it around the singer’s neck to show their approval. Every so often, the audience was summoned on stage for a collective dance. Led by the MC, they shuffled left and right around the stage in a circle, arms waving, feet stamping.
Compared to what I had witnessed in clubs in Beijing, never mind London, it all seemed very innocent. I couldn’t equate what I was seeing with the gloomy view held by Pemba and his friends that the modern-day version of the nangma represents the decline and fall of Tibetan culture. Instead, the dances were simply being updated for a new audience. The setting might have been modern, but the songs were the same and the young crowd knew all the lyrics.
Spending their nights listening to such music actually marked them out as rather more conventional than the people in 798. They weren’t in a bar named after a Beijing neighbourhood, listening to American rock and talking to zang piao and stray westerners. For all their superficial similarities to the nightclubs of inland China, there is nothing remotely Han or foreign about the nangma, unless you believe that alcohol abuse is a Chinese or overseas import to Tibet.
Class snobbery inspires much of the disdain for the nangma. The aristocracy may have been displaced by the events of the last sixty years, but in Lhasa there is a clear divide between urban Tibetans and those who have migrated from the countryside. In the nangma, the clothes of most of the people indicated they were recent arrivals in Lhasa. Their high-crowned baseball caps, mysteriously popular in rural Tibet, fake low-end western labels and no-name jeans gave them away as surely as if they were pilgrims on the Barkhor Kora with braided hair, wearing chubas and spinning prayer wheels.
Chinese from the country use the term chuqu – ‘to go out’ – to describe their move to the cities. Often, it is boredom as much as the lack of economic opportunities which inspires them to leave. For young Tibetans, the sheer harshness of life on the grasslands makes the cities of Tibet and the borderlands very attractive. Some are choosing to go further afield; around 50,000 Tibetans are now estimated to live in the Sichuan capital Chengdu.
Many end up unemployed, like the Uighur migrants in Urumqi from southern Xinjiang. For a growing minority, crime is the only way to survive, and conning and robbing tourists is a thriving industry. Lhasa’s sex trade, too, is as demarcated as the divide between the Chinese city and the old town, with the Tibetan brothels populated exclusively by teenage girls from the countryside. With prospects like that, a night in the nangma, drinking and watching dances their forebears were not considered worthy enough to glimpse seemed to me more like a reaffirmation of their roots than a rejection of them.
11
U-Tsang
Tenzin was singing as his chum Lopa casually steered the land cruiser one-handed out of Lhasa on the first stage of our 1,900-kilometre odyssey to the far west. We were all buoyed up to be leaving, even if we would be crammed together in a white Toyota jeep for much of the time. I hadn’t travelled in such close proximity with strangers for so long a journey in years. But Tenzin’s high spirits and the bright-blue sky made it easy to relegate any uneasiness to the back of my mind.
Apart from trucks and buses, the traffic was all land cruisers like ours ferrying tourists. Most were bound for Mount Everest, right on the border with Nepal, although the Tibetans and Chinese don’t know it by that name and call it Qomolangma. For many visitors to Tibet, a visit to Everest base camp is obligatory and the week-long run there from Lhasa follows a well-worn route that gets crowded in the summer.
Our destination was a very different mountain: Mount Kailash. Known to Tibetans as ‘The Precious Jewel of Snows’ and standing in majestic isolation in Tibet’s western reaches, close to the borders with India and Nepal, Kailash is the centre of the universe for over a billion people, as well as the source of four of Asia’s longest rivers. No Buddhist’s or Hindu’s life can be considered complete until they have made the Kora around Kailash. It is a journey that takes the pilgrims over 5,600 metres, as high as they can go on a mountain so sacred it cannot be climbed by mortals, its summit reserved for gods only.
The idea of a peak so remote yet so venerated and which is also the fount of life for much of the subcontinent, through the mighty rivers that begin at its untouched glaciers, fascinated me. I thought, too, that its significance to both Buddhists and Hindus encapsulates the way cultures and religions take precedence over mere nationality at the far edges of the Chinese empire.
Kailash imposes itself even just outside Lhasa. The road we were on hugs the Yarlung Tsangpo, the highest river in the world. Its source is in the Kailash region. After tumbling off the mountains of the far west, the Yarlung flows through central Tibet. It then turns south and enters north-east India, where it becomes the Brahmaputra River, before crossing Bangladesh and emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Here, far removed from the snow and ice of Kailash, it was sluggish and mud-coloured, its current broken up by mud banks and outcrops of small trees.
Feeding the valleys of U-Tsang, the central province of Tibet we were passing through, the Yarlung’s waters render the landscape very different from the bleak high-altitude desert that awaited us further west. This part of U-Tsang is the most fertile area of Tibet, known for the quality of its tsampa, and all around were neat barley fields broken up by small settlements of white-stone houses.
An hour and a half from Lhasa we started to climb past grassland away from the Yarlung, before cresting a pass at 4,800 metres. Below us was Yamdrok-Tso, a huge azure salt lake that winds for over seventy kilometres through a valley towards giant peaks that sit off in the far distance. We descended to the lakeshore, where deposits of salt were piled up on its banks, avoiding the piles of rocks that had broken away from the mountainsides and crashed on to the road, and started to circle around it.
For Tenzin, this was the journey home; he was from a village in U-Tsang. Now twenty-nine, he had left at fourteen to walk across the Himalayas to Nepal, and then on to India and Dharamsala. ‘I was a pilgrim. I stayed for five years. That’s where I got the chance to really study Tibetan, as well as learning English,’ he said. Tenzin had also been taught how to paint thangka, the scroll paintings of Buddhist deities and scenes from the life of the Buddha which hang in every Tibetan and Nepalese monastery.
Later, he tried his luck as a thangka painter in Kathmandu for a year and a half, before returning to Tibet. For Tibetans of his age, or slightly older, such a journey was not uncommon. In the 1990s, many chose to spend time in India and Nepal, sometimes for religious reasons but often as a way out of farming on the high plateau. It was a chance to experience a different life in countries where Tibetans are not subject to the whims of the Chinese.
Crossing the frontier was still straightforward when Tenzin was a teenager. ‘You either went across the mountains or paid the border guards,’ he recalled. ‘It’s much harder now. There are more soldiers and you can’t pay to get across any more. You need a passport and they are very hard for young Tibetans to get.’ Up to 3,000 Tibetans a year once travelled to Dharamsala. Now, around fifty a month arrive – a similar number reaching Nepal – and the Wu Jing open fire if they spot them trying to leave Tibet. Only the most religious migrants still aim for India. The less devout are turning towards inland China.
Even without the risk of being shot, Te
nzin’s journey was a remarkable one for a fourteen-year-old boy to attempt. But he brushed off the difficulties, making crossing the Himalayas sound like a stroll in Barkhor Square, as if traversing 7,000-metre passes, where in the winter you can sink up to your waist in snow, and sleeping on mountainsides for weeks was easy. Maybe it is for Tibetans, because nuns and schoolgirls manage the trip. I read of one crippled monk who crawled most of the way to Dharamsala. Put it down to growing up on the roof of the world, but Tenzin’s story was a reminder of just how tough Tibetans are.
Past Yamdrok-Tso, the road rose again and we crossed a 5,000-metre pass, the highest I had ever been. After my time in Litang and Lhasa, I assumed I was more or less acclimatised to the altitude. But we were now 1,300 metres above Lhasa, and a headache made it clear that I was not yet used to being so high. Some people dose themselves with pills to counter the effects of mountain life. I was relying on the time it would take to get to Kailash, during which we would ascend each day, to adapt to the lofty elevations of western Tibet.
Inside the land cruiser, I was insulated against the environment to some extent. But outside it took only moments for the altitude to make its unseen presence known. No matter that it was summer, the wind chilled and chapped me, even as the sun that was closer than ever before turned my skin red in a matter of minutes. Walking up gentle inclines became hard work, as did going up flights of stairs. I got a sore thumb from clicking countless lighters that refused to fire in the thin air.
Throughout this stage of the journey, the road climbed and dipped endlessly as we curled our way through the mountains. Only towards the end, as we dropped down to a plain of barley fields, did we run on the flat before arriving in Gyantse. Like Lhasa, Gyantse is sharply divided between a bigger new town and the Tibetan quarter. But the similarities end there. It is tranquil, a small country town, and I found it hard to believe it was once Tibet’s third-largest city.
Gyantse’s monastery dominates one end of the Tibetan old town, almost burrowing its way in to the hills behind it. At the other end, a ruined fort, or dzong, lies atop a precipitously rocky hill that rises incongruously close to the centre of town. It looms over low-rise Gyantse like a crumbling castle guarding a loch in Scotland. Between those two landmarks, the old town’s mostly car-free main street is lined by two- and three-storey white-stone houses. Their window frames and doors were outlined in black, some bearing the gyung drung, the Tibetan Buddhist swastika.
Women in long black dresses and bangden walked home with baskets of shopping, along with monks and people going to and from the monastery, prayer wheels in hand. A mix of Bollywood tunes, traditional Tibetan music and western pop – the Backstreet Boys – emanated from the shops on the street. There were few tourists here, and after Lhasa’s hectic old town it appeared idyllic.
Narrow lanes run parallel to the main street, leading on one side to nearby barley fields. The lanes are like mini-villages transported into the old town, adding to the bucolic feel. Cows were tethered outside almost every house, and there was forage for them along with piles of dung kept as fuel for cooking and heating. The sewage system was primitive, dogs skulked and slumbered everywhere and grimy-faced kids ran up shouting ‘Hello’ in English and wanting their pictures taken.
On the hillsides near the monastery are the remains of the other monasteries which had made Gyantse a key centre of Buddhist learning, until the Red Guards sacked them during the Cultural Revolution. As many as fifteen monasteries from three different schools of Tibetan Buddhism were located here, attracting monks from all over Tibet, as well as Bhutan and India. Now, only one survives and it is home to just seventy monks.
Bhutan lies eighty kilometres due south of Gyantse across a closed border that has never been fully demarcated. Over the years, the Bhutanese have accused the PLA of extending roads from Tibet into what they regard as their territory. With a similar language and religion, Bhutan and Tibet have long been intertwined, even if for much of their history Tibet, and now China, has done its best to dominate its smaller neighbour.
South-west from Gyantse, and not much further away than Bhutan, is the mountain pass of Nathu La and the frontier with the Indian state of Sikkim. Since 2006, Nathu La has become one of just three points along the 3,400-kilometre-long Chinese–Indian border that is open for traffic. It is for local trade only, like the other two border crossings, with Tibetan and Indian merchants allowed to venture a few kilometres in either direction to sell their goods at designated markets.
More than fifty years after the construction of Highway 219 from Xinjiang to Tibet led to the Sino-Indian War, there is no sign that either Beijing or New Delhi is willing to agree on what constitutes the boundary between China and India. Apart from the disputed territory of Aksai Chin close to Xinjiang, Beijing insists also that the Tawang region of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is sandwiched between Bhutan and Burma, belongs to Tibet.
Inhabited by the Monpa people, who are closely related to both the Tibetans and the Bhutanese and practise Tibetan Buddhism, Tawang was the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama. It was the British who ceded Tawang to India, when they imposed the McMahon Line as the frontier between their empire and Tibet in 1914. China has never accepted that definition of the border and continues to refer to Tawang as South Tibet. The 9,000 or so Monpa who live across the border in Tibet are known to the Chinese as the Monba, and are one of the smallest of the country’s minorities.
I would have loved to venture into Tawang to explore the Tibetan borderlands in India. But, as with Xinjiang’s border with Afghanistan, I was not allowed to get close; the Tibetan side of the frontier with Tawang is barred to foreigners. So is the road south from Gyantse, ruling out a visit to the Nathu La Pass. It was yet another route that Francis Younghusband had travelled. He led his invasion force of British, Indian and Gurkha soldiers through the pass in late 1903.
From the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Qing’s hold on power grew progressively weaker, the British were able to sidle into Tibet, motivated by its proximity to India and fears that the Russians might use it as a backdoor route to undermine the British empire. They mapped the country secretly and in 1903 sent Younghusband and his soldiers to force the Dalai Lama to agree to a trade treaty. In March 1904, outside Gyantse, they ran into a 3,000-strong Tibetan force armed with ancient matchlock muskets, weapons over 200 years out of date. The British carried machine guns, and in a matter of minutes they left around 700 Tibetans dead.
Four months later, Gyantse was the site of a more glorious battle. The town’s dzong, the best-fortified fort in Tibet, guarded the road to Lhasa. Two soldiers won the Victoria Cross for leading the assault up the near-vertical slopes which led to its surrender. An inscription at the bottom of the hill records the event, and condemns Younghusband and his troops for their colonial arrogance. While I was gazing at it, two young Han tourists asked me why the British had come to Tibet. It was a hard question to answer. ‘Because it was next to India,’ I said finally. I thought they might understand, now that China is the imperial power in Tibet.
After Gyantse’s mellow charms, Shigatse is a harbinger of what all Tibetan towns and cities will look like if Beijing continues to develop Tibet in the image of Han China. Tibet’s second city is a sprawling work in progress, its roads and buildings being hastily refashioned in the untidy and anonymous style common to all provincial Chinese cities. Even the tiny Tibetan neighbourhood is modern in comparison to the old towns of Lhasa and Gyantse. It is dwarfed anyway by the Chinese town, and the Han are far more of a presence here than anywhere else in Tibet apart from Lhasa.
They are recent arrivals. Until the CCP took control of Tibet, Chinese settlers rarely ventured any further than Lhasa. In old Tibet, Shigatse was a trading centre and meeting point for Indian and Nepali traders, as well as Mongolians and Uighurs. It was where Tibet encountered the rest of Asia, and far-off China was an irrelevance. Now Shigatse’s location on the Friendship Highway, which links Lhasa to Kathmandu, mak
es it a stop on the tourist route that runs through central Tibet. Apart from small convenience stores and a few restaurants in the Tibetan district, it is Chinese businesses that dominate.
That is partly due to Tibet’s rural heritage. ‘You have to remember most Tibetans are farmers,’ Pemba had told me in Lhasa. ‘Only a few do business. So it’s mostly the Chinese who run companies, hotels, restaurants. They’ve taken over nearly all the tourist trade and almost all the money from tourism goes to the Chinese.’ But as Shigatse’s history indicated, the Tibetans in this part of U-Tsang were once traders. By closing the border with India, the CCP hasn’t just sealed off Tibet from foreign influence, it has driven the Tibetans here back to the land.
Shigatse’s fifteenth-century dzong, supposedly the model for the Potala Palace, was completely destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and has since been rebuilt, using cement rather than Tibetan stone. The Tashilhunpo Monastery, Shigatse’s other landmark, is rather more authentic. Like Sera, it is the size of a village and as much a university as a monastery. As the traditional seat of the Panchen Lamas, it is the only place in Tibet and the borderlands where I saw the young, bespectacled face of the present, disputed Panchen Lama on display.
Everywhere else it is the chubby, double-chinned face of his predecessor, with his cropped, receding hair, which stares down at you in restaurants, shops and houses. He is hugely respected by Tibetans for his steadfast opposition to China’s presence in Tibet, and probably more deserving than the Dalai Lama of veneration because of his courage in challenging the Chinese and the suffering it caused him.