Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  Tibetan isn’t really a single language but a collection of sometimes quite strikingly different dialects (as is the case with many “languages” around the world). The word hair, for example, becomes škya in the Amdo dialect and štra in the Kham dialect, while in the south, in Bhutan, they say kya. Similarly, a Ladakhi (from Ladakh in the far west) says sa, while an upper-class resident of Lhasa says tsa.

  Furthermore, if any of these people are literate and are asked to write the word for hair down, they’ll all produce the same written form (properly something like skra), which is really the ninth-century pronunciation — a form crystallized at a time when the Sanskrit writing system was first introduced.

  Unfortunately, the outlying dialects are quickly disappearing, which is the first sign that the language as a whole is in trouble. In the far-flung regions of Tibet the people might still speak their own dialects at home, but increasingly, because they haven’t learned the dialect of Lhasa, they conduct their business in Chinese or even English. Their children might not need to speak the dialect at all so that in a generation or two that dialect will most likely be dead. The dialect of Lhasa will hang on longer, but it, too, is being systematically dismantled and has been rendered useless and without value.

  As we drove over the last high pass to Lhasa, Tashi told us his story. When he was a child, he had fled over the passes and into India. The Chinese built new schools, Tashi told us, but they weren’t for people like him. From grades one to six, Tibetan is taught, but after that the language of instruction is Chinese. Before you say that’s oppressive, however, consider that English is also widely taught in place of the native Tibetan. What’s more, education is expensive at about 800 yuan (or $100) for three months, far outside what the average Tibetan can afford. Accordingly, most Tibetan children don’t go to school. As a boy of only twelve, Tashi fled by himself over the mountains and down into India, solely to get an education.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “To Dharamsala.”

  “That’s where the Dalai Lama is,” I said.

  “Yes.” Tashi smiled. “I was there for three years. I heard him speak many times.”

  “But then … why are you back here?”

  “The authorities in Lhasa took my father. They took him to the security building and asked him where I was.” Tashi paused; I was beginning to learn what his pauses prefaced. “Of course, they already knew where I was. It was no good for my father to try to lie. It would just be worse for him. As it was, they told him that his pay would be cut off until I returned. What could I do? I had to come back.”

  Tashi told me later that if and when the guide job ended for him, he would return to India. There was no life and no future for him in Tibet otherwise. “The Tibetan language,” Tashi said, “is useless.” What he meant was that it wouldn’t get him a job. It wouldn’t get him anywhere in this world. And that’s how a language is murdered.

  What we need to remember is that when a language such as Tibetan dies it’s not only its denotations — the literal dictionary meanings — that are lost. Denotations are relatively easily translated from one language into another — bird, chair, hand. What’s much more important, as I’ve already said, are the connotations, the baggage a word carries with it, the metaphors it sails on. Like the wind horses on the high passes, the connotations are the ideas that lie at the heart of a language and culture. When these connotations are lost, the whole feel of that world, the way of being, disappears. For Tibet, on the roof of the world, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is already being chanted.

  When at last we came to the fabled city of Lhasa, we pressed our faces against the bus’s windows, searching for the Tibetan capital’s most famous landmark. However, we discovered something quite shocking. The fabulous Potala Palace is now almost completely obscured by block after block of squat grey apartment flats and department stores. A telecommunications tower stands on the hill where the ancient medical school used to sit. The little district of Shol, which had lain at the foot of the Potala, is gone, replaced by a wide plaza blaring with Chinese music. It was as if we had arrived in a thoroughly Chinese city. And, sadly, we had.

  A majority of the population of Lhasa is now Han Chinese. Individually, they’re not to blame. Many of them are small shopkeepers who have come to make a better life for themselves, just like everyone else. The one-child-per-family regulations of China are relaxed in Tibet, and there’s extra money for working at high altitude so that the incentives are pretty tempting to many young Chinese. Most of all, though, there’s the simple fact that China has well over a billion people. In Tibet there are a few million. It’s easy to see what the Chinese government is thinking.

  Lhasa itself lies in the Tsangpo Valley where barley, wheat, rapeseed, turnips, carrots, apples, pears, potatoes, onions, and cabbage are grown. It’s the capital of the old region of Ü. Lhasa’s name means Ground (sa) of the Gods (lha), the place where the gods dwell. It’s no coincidence that the high passes are also called la, especially since they’re all places of great spiritual force.

  Until 1950 Lhasa had twenty thousand monks, but to become a monk today you need permission from the government. That’s usually denied, of course, and while previously perhaps 25 percent of the population consisted of monks, now there are fewer and fewer young men entering the monasteries.

  The final blow came when the first rail line into Tibet was completed. It links Beijing with Lhasa, coming up over the northern reaches of the Tibetan Plateau. And with the railway came a flood of mining operations, a swamp of cheap goods, and an unstoppable flood of people.

  The project is one of the four main initiatives of the most recent Five Year Plan in China (one of the others being the infamous Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River). Unfortunately, this project likely spells the end of the fabled civilization of Tibet. As more and more ethnic Chinese populate Tibet, the traditional culture of the country withers. There’s a saying in Tibet: “Under the communists man exploits man; under capitalism it’s the other way around.”

  The Potala Palace rises like a fortress over the Tibetan Plateau. For almost four hundred years it was the seat of the Dalai Lama, but as I stood on its doorstep waiting to enter, Tashi gripped my arm. “Don’t say anything inside. There are microphones everywhere.” Then he took me into the whispering darkness of a lost world.

  There are a thousand rooms in the Potala, but only thirty-five were open to us. I wasn’t allowed to take photographs. At various points down the hallways monks sat on cushions, scrutinizing us in a way that made me think they weren’t monks at all. This is Tibet today, a place of spies and surveillance.

  Within moments of entering I was lost. Dark passageways twisted and turned like tunnels. Somewhere in the lower levels we came to the Stupa Thom of the fifth Dalai Lama, perhaps the greatest of the fourteen people who have held that title. The stupa had five levels, one again for each of the five elements, like the prayer flags. This one, however, was a couple of storeys high, was made of 3,721 kilograms of solid gold, and was studded with more than ten thousand pearls and gems. I wondered how this edifice could have possibly survived the Cultural Revolution. But it did, and even in the dark shadows it radiated a special beauty.

  As we moved up through the various levels, I realized that the Potala was as large and intricate as any of the royal castles of Europe. Toward the end of our “tour” we were taken through the tiny apartments that had belonged to the current Dalai Lama as a child. I was surprised that we were allowed to see them at all, and I suspect they were left pretty much as they had been when he fled in 1959. The rooms looked comfortable, with cushions on the floor and draperies on the walls. Candles flickered in the polished wood, but nothing could erase the sense of emptiness. A thick silence embraced the rooms, and I could almost see the ghost of a small boy there, prisoner to his fate, writing out his lessons in the quiet shadows of history.

  That night Tashi took us to a Chinese disco. We had all felt the need to let loose a l
ittle. So when the Lhasa beer arrived by the dozen, we chugged them down with abandon. My head started to swim. Tashi raised his glass again. “Shepta!” he called.

  “Shepta!” we returned.

  All over the world there are such words: skål, sláinte, salud, prost, l’chaim. They all mean “cheers” or “to your health,” preferably with a drink in hand.

  Amit joined in. “Boomshunkar!” he said, “Cheers!” in Nepali. This toast was a particularly good one, we thought, so we all boomshunkar-ed him at the top of our lungs. Soon enough a kind of floor show began. I had never seen anything quite like it. A dancing papier mâché yak tottered out, and the young female dancers who, beer notwithstanding, were looking pretty good, proceeded to milk it. Then there were more songs, karaoke really, crooned by the pretty Tibetans.

  “What are they singing about?” I asked Tashi.

  He listened for a moment. “Agricultural production. They are saying that the agricultural production is very good this year.”

  So to the sweet strains of a Chinese version of “Moon River” the young ladies belted their hearts out to the simple statistics of barley yields.

  I had already seen a few quirky things in Lhasa. We had all gotten a good laugh at many of the Chinese shopkeepers’ signs. SUPER EXCELLENT SNACK OF CHONG KING, one had read. Another was: THE STORE OF GREAT BENEFIT. When we went in to check that one out, Amit had pulled a little box off a shelf. “Look at this,” he had said, laughing. Beside the Chinese characters was the English translation — INSURANCE GLOVES, it read — and when Amit opened the package, the insurance gloves had turned out to be condoms.

  Outside the disco, at about two in the morning, we came across a barbershop set up on the sidewalk. Who knew what the barber was thinking — unless he was clever enough to know that drunken tourists stumbling onto the forbidden streets would instantly desire a haircut. So we all lined up for this old man and got trimmed.

  I approached the mirror a bit tentatively the next morning, but found to my delight that the barber had actually done a good job. When I joined the rest of our group downstairs for a hungover breakfast, all the guys were preening a bit and admiring one another’s brand-new hairdos.

  We were lucky enough to be staying in the Barkhor area of Lhasa. Barkhor is the ancient marketplace, and at the centre of it is a temple called Jokhang. We had arrived, after ten days of hard travelling, to find the Potala Palace surrounded by a very Chinese city. Many of the earliest buildings had been bulldozed, so it was with some relief that we found ourselves in the old section of the city.

  We put down our backpacks and sat on a stoop that overlooked Jokhang, none of us talking, everyone a bit tired and depressed and almost ready to go home. In front of us, though, an amazing procession was taking place. It went on all day, from the first rays of dawn to the setting of the sun over the distant hills. The pilgrims had come.

  From across Tibet these people had arrived, many elderly, having walked several thousand kilometres to get here. Jokhang is the single most holy place in Tibet, and our little inn was directly across the street from it.

  The pilgrims had come to do their final kora, a circumnavigation of the temple in which they walked three times around the sacred building before entering. Many of them twirled hand-held prayer wheels. As we sat there dejected, watching an era of history seemingly coming to a close in front of us, it was Bryan from Yorkshire who got up first.

  Bryan was in his late fifties but was a hard-core traveller. Only two months earlier this usually quiet man had skied to the North Pole from a Russian whaling station at the edge of the Arctic ice sheet. Suddenly, he got up and joined the pilgrims. I sat for a moment longer, then got to my feet, as well. Hundreds of pilgrims were milling around the temple now, and I strolled among them, unsure what their reaction would be. But I needn’t have worried. I was quickly enveloped by weathered, aged faces lighting up in smiles. Curiously, old people here often have near-perfect teeth. Either it’s something to do with the plain diet, or as Tashi told me later, we were literally too high for most forms of bacteria to live. As I walked with the pilgrims, I was greeted with more flashing smiles and was touched warmly on the shoulder.

  Like them, I proceeded around Jokhang three times in a moment of true transcendence. That’s what I recall most about Tibet — being carried along in a crowd of smiling, rag-tattered pilgrims. Near the doors the most pious prostrated themselves over and over. Some, I later learned, had actually come across the entire country on hands and knees, springing up to pray, taking a step forward, then down again. It must have taken months to get here like that.

  On my last day in Lhasa I asked Tashi what would happen next. Did he think there was any chance the Dalai Lama would be allowed to return to Tibet?

  “Listen,” he said, “you know when Mao Zedong died in 1982, that’s when the Panchen Lama began to speak out. Then Deng Xiaoping took over as paramount leader.”

  “Tiananmen Square,” I said.

  “Yes, Deng was the Chinese leader during the massacre. But we waited, and in the 1990s Deng was succeeded by Jiang Zemin, who became the president of the People’s Republic of China. But he, too, has now stepped down, and our worst fears have come true. In March 2003, Hu Jintao became president.”

  Hu Jintao, I found out later, is now general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, president of the country, and chairman of the Central Military Commission. Currently, he’s the most powerful man in China.

  “The West,” Tashi continued, “is waiting to see what Hu Jintao will do. But we in Tibet already know.”

  “Know what?”

  “In 1989, when our Panchen Lama died, Hu Jintao was in charge of Tibet. He was the head of the Party Committee here. So most likely it was he who gave the orders to poison the Panchen Lama.”

  “If he was poisoned,” I said.

  “Yes, but in our minds there is no ‘if.’ So when you ask me, do I think the Dalai Lama will be allowed to return …” Tashi didn’t need to finish that sentence. I knew the answer.

  6

  The Heart of Darkness

  The airport at Siem Reap was small. Our plane careered out of the night sky and skidded across the tarmac. When we finally rolled to a stop, there was only silence and darkness. We stepped onto the landing field and were herded toward the customs house by a row of grim soldiers. In their hands were machine guns.

  We lined up solemnly to pay for our visas. I handed an American $20 bill to an “official” behind the desk and saw him slip the note into his pocket before I’d even fully turned my back.

  Outside, the air was hot and thick with the musk of tropical vegetation. No birds sang; there was only the swish of palm fronds in the evening breeze. A scurry of taxi drivers besieged us, and we chose one randomly to bump across the dusty yellow road into Siem Reap. I was with an older New Zealand couple I’d met in the line, and they’d heard of a place called Sweet Dreams. That was good enough for me. The taxi driver pretended he’d never heard of Sweet Dreams. Of course, he wanted to take us to another place he knew that was “very fine, very good.” Undoubtedly, it belonged to a friend or relative, but we insisted on Sweet Dreams, so he grudgingly turned down an alley and dropped us off at a high concrete wall.

  Immediately, everything changed for the better. We were met by the family that ran Sweet Dreams. They were all smiles and good cheer. A frog hopped happily across the pavement at our feet, the first relief in a tense night. Soon I found myself in a clean room for $6 a night, and I even had a whirling fan overhead. I stopped and breathed deeply. I was in Cambodia and was about to see a place I’d dreamed about for half my life.

  Only a few kilometres north of Siem Reap are the temples of Angkor. Eight hundred years have come and gone since Angkor shone with magnificence. Some say Angkor was the first city on Earth to reach a population of one million. It was the capital of the ancient Khmer civilization, a kingdom that once stretched across the length of Southeast Asia. Most of it is now gone, eaten up by the ju
ngle. The old houses and the shops were made of wood. Even the palaces of the kings were constructed of mahogany and teak, and only the temples were built of stone because of an ancient Khmer belief. The gods, it was thought, were solely worthy of such permanence, and just their dwellings could be made of stone. So today all that remains of Angkor are these temples, dotted like islands in a jungle landscape of three hundred square kilometres.

  The temples, in turn, are intricately carved with inscriptions in ancient Khmer and Sanskrit. Along the bases of many temples are bas reliefs, statues embedded in the walls as if they’re emerging from the stone, and these bas reliefs recount both the great Hindu epics and the rise and fall of the civilization at Angkor, a place far removed in both time and geography from anything I had ever seen. I was looking forward to unlocking some of their secrets, if indeed I was able to understand them at all.

  In the morning the birds were singing. I went down for breakfast and was quickly introduced to the young man who would be my driver. I hadn’t asked for a driver, and a guide wasn’t strictly necessary here, but at a dollar a day it was a luxury worth indulging in. Vana was twenty-three years old. He wore an old green baseball cap and smiled at me shyly. It was then that I realized nobody here was much older than twenty-five. The old people were missing. They were all dead. The Killing Fields had taken care of them.

  Eighty percent of the Cambodian population was born after 1979. That’s the year the Khmer Rouge was finally ousted from Phnom Penh, the country’s capital, and when the true extent of its crimes against humanity started to become apparent. Well over two and a half million people perished out of a total population of about seven million. All the intellectuals — teachers, professionals, anyone wearing glasses — were rounded up, as was everybody who had anything to do with the West. They were tortured and murdered, and their bodies were dumped in anonymous fields. To make matters worse, the Khmer Rouge forcibly removed Cambodians from the nation’s cities and towns. These people were shunted onto farms and expected to eke out a living from the soil, though they were shopkeepers and simple businessman who had never planted seeds in their lives. Many of these relocated Cambodians starved to death. Others suffered greatly or perished when the Khmer Rouge cleared out of Phnom Penh and continued to fight a civil war against the invading Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.