by David Eimer
Sili was a reverse migrant, the opposite of the Tibetans fleeing the countryside for the cities. There were others like her in Darchen, running restaurants and shops. There are few Han workers in Tibet’s far west, just as the region attracts only a handful of Chinese tourists, in part because it is so far from civilisation but mainly because of the altitude. ‘The Han don’t like being so high, they think it is bad for them,’ said Sili.
Many of the senior CCP officials sent to oversee Tibet refuse to live there, citing their susceptibility to altitude sickness as the reason why they have to stay in Chengdu. Hu Jintao, who governed Tibet between 1988 and 1992, and was president of China from 2002 to 2012, went further; he mostly ran Tibet from Beijing. That was almost certainly better for his career than being isolated out west. It was Hu who ordered the violent response to the 1989 protests in Lhasa, when the Wu Jing opened fire on the demonstrators. That decision established his hardline credentials with the CCP’s elders, setting him on the path to the presidency.
Tenzin had a different theory to explain why hardly any Chinese attempt the Kailash Kora. ‘The Han are lazy, they like to drive everywhere. You know why so many of them go to Everest base camp? It’s because you can drive right up to it,’ he said, laughing. But the paucity of Chinese migrants is a blessing because it leaves some space for locals like Sili to profit from the tourist trade, even if they have to go to the ends of Tibet to do so.
Like all the Tibetans in Darchen, Sili was a Kailash Kora veteran. ‘I’ve done it eleven times this year already. We Tibetans do it in just one day. We start at four in the morning and finish at eight in the evening. It takes you westerners three days to do it, but Tibetans are strong,’ she said, with a smile that was also a challenge. The Kora is fifty-one kilometres, a negligible distance on the flat but a daunting one at over 5,000 metres unless you have spent your life breathing Tibet’s oxygen-depleted air. I had no intention of competing with the locals in a one-day marathon around the mountain.
As I walked back to the hotel, the clouds parted and I got my first glimpse of the strangely elongated summit of Kailash, the snow atop it glinting in the rays of the fading sun. Like everywhere in China Tibet runs on Beijing time, so it stays light till past nine in the evening in the summer. The dying sunset turned the surrounding grassland extraordinary shades of yellow and green, making Kailash’s white-coated peak all the more alluring in contrast. I stared at it fascinated until darkness came. It felt as if the mountain was emanating energy, that I was being summoned towards it. I slept restlessly that night, wanting only to set foot on Kailash.
13
The Precious Jewel of the Snows
We set out in a light drizzle as the dark cloak that descends every night on the far west lifted slowly. A pack of amiable, inquisitive dogs escorted us uphill out of Darchen, before we turned left to walk clockwise around Kailash. Every Buddhist site in Tibet has to be circumnavigated in that direction, but I noticed a few people who went the opposite way. Tenzin told me they were followers of the Bon religion, the animist faith which held sway in Tibet until Buddhism began to make inroads in the seventh century. Kailash is a pilgrimage site for them too.
Initially, the going was easy as the stony track wound gently around the south face. Horses moved in packs across the nearby grassland, while berkuts, giant golden eagles, their curved, dark-brown bills clearly visible, circled low for prey above us. Saddled yaks came past, herded by two locals on horseback. ‘They’re for the Indians. A lot of them ride up to the north face,’ said Tenzin. I had refused the offer of a porter, stripping my pack down to the bare essentials: sleeping bag, spare clothes, a toothbrush and some food. But the further we went, the heavier it felt.
There was an encampment of Hindu pilgrims a few kilometres out of Darchen, close to the entrance to a narrow gorge through which the Yarlung flowed. One side of the valley was dominated by the black granite wall of Kailash’s west face, a huge, intimidating presence that rose towards the sky as far as I could see. Dank to the touch, it glistened from the waterfalls which had cut shallow channels in the rock, sending streams of water from the glaciers higher up the mountain to feed the Yarlung.
Tenzin pointed to a ledge decked out with a tangled rigging of prayer flags – a sky burial site. For Buddhists, the body is an empty vessel once life has expired, a useless irrelevance. In Tibet, where the ground is often rock hard, a sky burial is an effective means of disposing of it. Bodies are taken to designated locations on mountainsides and quickly chopped and crushed into small pieces, before vultures descend to make off with the remains. I was invited to a sky burial in Litang but had declined, uncomfortable with attending a funeral solely to witness such a shocking spectacle.
The track began to rise gradually as we traversed through the valley. Kailash couldn’t have been closer, the west face hanging over us, yet I couldn’t focus on it. The clouds were still down, although the rain had stopped, and the brief, tantalising glimpses of the upper slopes didn’t clasp hold of my imagination the way the snow-draped summit had the night before. I concentrated on keeping moving as the trail climbed ever more sharply. Soon, I was sucking in air as hard as I could, inching forward in places rather than striding out.
Two nomads I encountered were going more slowly than me; they were prostrating their way around Kailash. ‘It will take us fifteen days,’ said one as he sat resting on a rock through which seams of rich red copper oxide ran. His scuffed and dirty leather kneepads and the wooden blocks on his hands were his only protection against the sharp rocks littering the track. The Tibetans on foot moved much faster, whether they were old ladies in traditional dress spinning their prayer wheels or young couples in jeans and windbreakers. They would be back in Darchen that night.
Around midday, an apple purchased from Uighurs in Darchen and a cup of black tea laced with salt in a tented teahouse revived me. Other travellers were resting too. One aged man asked me where I was from and when I said ‘England’ he told me he had once owned an English rifle, a 303 Lee Enfield. ‘I used it to fight the Chinese in 1959,’ he said, grinning faintly at the distant memory.
It took just over six hours to cover the eighteen kilometres to Dirapuk, where we would stay the first night, and the final stretch was a battle with heaving lungs and tiring legs as I ascended to 4,900 metres. Dirapuk is home only to a small monastery from which it takes its name, a collection of tents and a one-storey, long brick box with broken windows and a few rooms for passing travellers. A few hundred metres below was a newly built, more substantial hotel booked out by Indian pilgrims.
Dirapuk sits right underneath Kailash. As I approached, the clouds miraculously parted, blue sky appeared and suddenly there was the north face above me, a mostly snow-covered slab of malevolent black rock. At just over 6,700 metres, Kailash is not particularly high by Himalayan standards. But with its curved ridges and pyramid-like faces it looks nothing like the jagged peaks around it, or any other mountain. From far off, Kailash appears as a beautiful black and white diamond that has been planted arbitrarily on earth. Close up, it is a brooding, unsettling presence.
For Ippolito Desideri, an Italian Jesuit missionary who in 1715 became the first westerner to visit Kailash, the mountain was ‘most horrible, barren, steep, and bitterly cold’. Desideri was no starry-eyed traveller, in part because he was suffering from snow blindness after crossing the Himalayas from India into Tibet. He wrote the first foreign account of the Kailash Kora, detailing how the Tibetan pilgrims ‘walk most devoutly round the base of this mountain which takes several days and they believe will procure them great indulgences’.
No one knows how long Tibetans have been making pilgrimages around Kailash, walking for months or longer just to reach the mountain; Kailash’s status as a throne of the gods is immemorial. For Buddhists it is the domain of Demchok, the Buddha who represents supreme bliss, and to do one circuit of Kailash will remove the sins of a lifetime. Complete 108 and the transgressions of all your existences are washed away
. Sili in Darchen had many more to do before she could be certain of a carefree eternity.
Hindus regard the mountain with even more awe because it is the abode of Shiva, the god who is all things: benefactor, destroyer and transformer. He sits atop Kailash, his presence making it the fulcrum around which the world turns, surrounded by his ganas, or attendants, led by the elephant-headed Ganesha, who is both Shiva’s son and a significant deity in his own right. Kailash’s north face is believed to be etched with the same swastika that is marked on Ganesha’s palm, making it the most holy part of the mountain for Hindus.
In the late afternoon, the Indians puffed up past Dirapuk to a location around 5,000 metres high and directly beneath the north face to pray and pose for group photos. Completing the full Kora is not essential for Hindus. Worshipping at Kailash’s north face is the most important ritual of all. Nor did most of them even walk to Dirapuk, riding yaks and ponies instead. That they were here at all was enough, because in the recent past Kailash was barred to them. Tensions over the Sino-Indian border resulted in the mountain being closed to Hindu pilgrims between 1954 and 1978, and even now their numbers are limited by Beijing.
I met one of them outside the freezing, tiny room that was my home for the night. Ken was comfortably tubby, middle-aged and originally from Mill Hill in north London, but now resident in Germany. He had walked away from his group for a sly cigarette. ‘I don’t want the others to see me smoking,’ he said. Not even Tibet’s oxygen-light air can stop a dedicated smoker.
Ken told me he had been in ‘unit trusts’ in London, before giving it up to become a homeopath. Now he ran a company selling electronic medical devices. One of his products was strapped to his left arm. It looked like an over-sized watch and he claimed it increased the amount of oxygen carried in red blood cells through electrical pulses. Ken was a fount of dubious health tips and a natural salesman, and kindly offered me a balm which he said would cure my aching calves.
He was part of a group of seventy pilgrims and was frank about how he was here more for the experience than for religious reasons, admitting he had failed to make out the swastika on the north face that is supposed to be the representation of Ganesha. He was scathing about the motivation of the other Indian pilgrims too. ‘Most of the people who come to Kailash are rich Hindus, many who live abroad,’ he said. ‘Real devotees can’t afford to make this trip.’ Nor was he in thrall to their swami. ‘The best gurus are storytellers really. They can recite the scriptures in such a way that they enrapture the people listening.’
His concern about maintaining his strength at altitude was being sorely tested by what passed for bathroom facilities in Tibet’s far west. ‘I can’t go here, can you?’ he asked me. ‘I try but I just can’t. Once I see the toilets, it’s enough to block me up.’ I sympathised with him. A Tibetan pit lavatory can induce constipation in someone suffering from dysentery. On Kailash, where the temperature dropped significantly when the sun went down, crouching over them at night with a cold wind blowing brought the added risk of a frozen arse.
Tibet, and China, was of little interest to Ken and the other Indians. Kailash was the sole purpose of their trip. With so many foreigners in the area, and no Han present, the mountain was like its own little country, one which just happened to be on territory claimed by Beijing. I thought of Vatican City in the heart of Rome, yet a separate state from Italy. But the comparison is too simplistic and narrow because Kailash is claimed not just by one faith but by four. As well as adherents of Buddhism, Hinduism and Bon, the followers of Jainism, another religion whose origins lie across the Indian border, regard Kailash as sacred.
Once dominant in southern India, Jainism is now a minority faith which preaches pacifism and strict vegetarianism. Like Bon worshippers, Jainists do the Kora anti-clockwise, and both religions believe Kailash is where their founders had their spiritual awakening. And just as many elements of Bon ritual were incorporated into Tibetan Buddhism, so Jainism influenced Hinduism. Kailash is a catalyst, a place where religions meet and merge and spiritual precepts can be adapted while the fundamental holy nature of the mountain stays the same.
Just about the only locals Ken had met were the guides steering his group. He asked me if mine spoke English and I told him Tenzin had spent five years in Dharamsala. ‘So many Tibetans go there. I don’t know why they come back,’ he said. Ken was another exile floating around China’s borders. His parents had left India for east Africa before coming to the UK and now he was in Germany. When I asked him if he missed London, he shook his head. ‘I don’t care where I live.’
That night, I huddled close to the yak-dung stove in Dirapuk’s one teahouse, delaying the moment when I would climb fully clothed into my sleeping bag to try and sleep. A husband-and-wife team ran the place, which was a prefab structure tacked on to the block I was staying in. Their newly born child was tucked tight in a fur-lined bag, his cheeks already spotted red. ‘We stay here during the summer when the pilgrims come,’ the wife told me. ‘We go down to Darchen for the winter.’ From October to April, with deep snow blocking the Kora route, Kailash is mostly deserted, home only to a few monks and the deities.
A boisterous crew of Tibetans sat drinking beer and baijiu. They weren’t pilgrims, but a road crew slowly expanding the track leading back to Darchen. One day in the future the Indians will be able to drive all the way to Dirapuk and, if Tenzin’s theory on how the Han like to ride rather than walk was true, they might be joined by a few Chinese. But somehow I doubted it, because there is nothing for the Han here. I couldn’t imagine even the zang piao abandoning their Lhasa cafés for a mountain so alien to their culture. In a land the Chinese have occupied so comprehensively, perhaps Kailash alone remains truly independent.
Next morning, it was cold and wet again as I shouldered my pack for what would be the hardest leg of the Kora. There were more than twenty kilometres to cover, and most of them would be above 5,000 metres. Straightaway, I began ascending on a narrow track made slippery by the rain, stumbling and taking far shorter steps than I would lower down, my breathing shallow and quick. The first hour was agonising, as I struggled to get my protesting legs moving after a night of inactivity.
At 5,200 metres, we reached the snowline and the rain was replaced by a sky of high clouds broken up by patches of blue. For a brief, glorious period we trudged along on the flat, winding slowly right as Kailash’s north face began to give way to the east, through a plain of rocks covered in ice and snow and interspersed with countless little streams running down from the summit of the mountain.
Those insignificant brooks are the source of four of Asia’s major rivers. The Indus, Sutlej, Brahmaputra and Karnali, the largest tributary of the Ganges, begin on or near Kailash, feeding vast swathes of the subcontinent. The Indus crosses into India, before running the full length of Pakistan and into the Arabian Sea. Its easternmost tributary is the Sutlej, which flows into the Punjab in northern India and Pakistan. Nepal is watered by the Karnali, before it enters Bangladesh and India, as does the Brahmaputra, and becomes the Ganges, the lifeblood for the 400 million people who live in the surrounding river basin.
Perhaps it was some unconscious realisation that Kailash was giving them life that made Hindus and Buddhists, as well as the Bon adherents and Jainists before them, pinpoint the mountain as the heart of the world millennia prior to the region being identified as the source of the four rivers. By the nineteenth century, Europeans were vying to discover where they started from but it took them another 100 years actually to do so.
Sven Hedin, a dogged, driven Swedish explorer who criss-crossed central Asia, Xinjiang and Tibet repeatedly, is credited with discovering the origins of the Indus, Sutlej, Karnali and Brahmaputra on his 1905–8 expedition to the area. But it was the Englishman Bailey, during his unauthorised 1913 foray into southern Tibet, who confirmed that the Yarlung Tsangpo turns into the Brahmaputra.
Harnessing the hydroelectric potential of the rivers that flow from Kailash is a long-he
ld dream of Beijing’s, as is diverting them to help water inland China’s increasingly parched landscape. In the 1990s, there was talk of building a dam in the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge, the deepest canyon in the world, which would have dwarfed the giant Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Soon after I visited Kailash, Beijing was forced to abandon plans to re-route water from the gorge north to Xinjiang, after vehement protests from New Delhi over the impact it might have on the people living downstream in India and Bangladesh.
China is going ahead with building a smaller dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo, one of twenty-eight proposed hydroelectric projects on the river, despite India’s opposition and fears of the effect it will have on the rare and fragile ecosystems dependent on it. With water an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity, the prospect of an environmental war between India and China is rather more likely than future clashes over their unresolved frontier.
Musing over geopolitics, as well as raising my eyes from the treacherous track occasionally to glimpse the snow and rock of the east face, helped distract me from thinking about the pain I knew was about to come. A second wind was pushing me across the all too short flat plain, but ahead I could see the start of the final climb up to the Dolma La Pass, the highest point of the Kora. The path rose dramatically, a near-vertical series of what were almost ledges cut into the rock. It was steep enough to make even the Tibetans slow down and the trail was choked with pilgrims bunched close together.