Later I had a letter from her, posted in a town called Luhou, the nearest to her lamasery: she said she had had to ride two days in a truck to post it.
I hope you remember me [she wrote, as if I could possibly forget]…
I am the girl you met in Luhou, Tibet. I am sure when you get home you will have many adventures to tell your friends… Being a poor talker I couldn't tell you much about Tibet. In China there is no freedom of speech, as you must know, and you can hardly talk about what you really feel. Living in Tibet for nearly three years now I really don't know what people feel in their minds and hearts. No one seems to believe any other person. They may be spies, or maybe they had been tortured badly during the Revolution. It still has an effect on them, this past – the older ones tell the younger generation to keep quiet and not to believe the third persons. Even the small children follow the rules.
I might be late in writing to you some more. I mean I might not be able to write to you very often. I hope you won't mind. You see, we don't have a post office here and going to town is difficult as there is no bus or cars. I have to go and look for a truck passing by, and they hardly ever give a lift. But I will do my best to write to you as often as I could.
That was the only letter that ever came. She enclosed a photograph of Domand Gunpa, the lamasery she was building for her uncle. It had room for forty student monks, she said, and there was to be a large chorten built near by. What had gone up so far was a grand and colourful two-storey structure of wood, and in the photograph there is a milling crowd of monks and abbots, and the local Tibetan girls in the foreground look happy enough.
On the surface, in many ways, it might seem as though the Chinese are allowing, if cautiously, some resurgence in Tibet's religious traditions. The fact that westerners are being invited to help rebuild lamaseries and that Sikkimese devotees like Changchup Dolma are being allowed to cross what was once a rigidly controlled international frontier speaks of a growing liberalization – at least to Lily, who consistently argued that China's policies towards Tibet had been universally beneficial and were now marked by an excess of tolerance. But this letter, which was waiting for me at home, postmarked in Chinese and Tibetan script, spoke of other, less pleasant attitudes – and knowing the Chinese, and their low regard for the barbarians who are their neighbours, I had to doubt that matters were improving in any significant way.
The road got steadily bleaker and more lonely, and the idea grew that we were journeying well beyond all law and beyond all organization – a notion that was in some way exhilarating, in another quite daunting. An example came a hundred or so miles outside Luhou, on a stretch of road near one of the many opencast gold mines that pepper this hazily administered part of Tibet-cum-Sichuan. It was when I watched two truck drivers – in the only trucks I had seen for dozens of miles – having a spirited argument. The one had climbed down from his truck and was standing on the running board of the other, gesticulating wildly at the man inside. As we passed by, this man suddenly pulled an automatic pistol from his jacket and, while the scene diminished steadily in our rearview mirror, had thrust it into the face of his antagonist. What happened next I can't say, but it had rather the look of violence to it. That the locals call this part of the world the Wild West seemed at the moment only too appropriate.
The gold mines are run by gangsters, too – claims are staked, locals are trucked in to work in near freezing conditions for a few cents a day, and the gold is divided up between a government official and the man who first found the lode. Officially, all gold belongs to the Chinese treasury: unofficially, a lot of local farmers are getting rich, and, more to the point, a lot of corrupt government officials – a phrase that in China has the ring of tautology to it these days – are getting even richer.
We were on the northern branch of the brick tea road, a longer route to Lhasa than for those who go by way of Batang, so there was very little traffic, no more than two or three trucks a day. Occasionally we would find broken-down vehicles, and once a bus that lay at the bottom of a canyon, wrecked almost beyond recognition, and still smouldering. The passengers, if any had survived, were nowhere to be seen.
And every day, every hour, we climbed higher and higher towards the great plateau. On our fifth day, after lunch at a hot, dry junction town that looked like a rest stop in eastern Montana, or Wyoming, we began to inch our way up the sides of a long couloir that the maps said led to the summit of Chola-shan, the final mountain chain before we reached the Yangtze.
The scene was unforgettably dramatic. In the background was the immense massif, scoured by three mighty glaciers that left razor-sharp peaks to slice through the racing clouds. In the foreground, beside a stream of cloudy ice-milk, was a sloping meadow, with pines and junipers where it joined the rocky slopes, untidy piles of tussock grass in the middle and then acres of sweet, lush, and damp grass closer to the road, where the land was flat. A dozen yaks grazed contentedly, and in front of her family's large black tent sat a young Tibetan woman, nursing her baby. In her right hand she held a prayer wheel, which she whirled like a top, sending blessings out on the wind. Her left arm supported her child, pressed tight to her breast.
She had long pigtails, and her hair was decorated with amulets made of yellowed amber; on her arms she wore bracelets of braided silver. I thought then I had never seen anything quite so beautiful. There was distant birdsong. The icy water tinkled merrily between the grasses, and some of the yaks wore bells, which pealed slightly as they changed feet and moved on for another mouthful of meadow. Blue smoke wafted from a dying fire, and a black pot hissed on its embers. The young woman looked up at me and smiled warmly, quite unconcerned at my presence as she continued to turn her prayer wheel in silent, practised devotion.
Behind and above, the mists spun through the peaks like gossamer trails and tiny puffs of cloud lazed in the summer sunshine, their shadows briefly darkening the grassland. I wanted to stay here, my own Shangri-la among the hills, for always.
But we had to cross the Chola hills, and so I said my good-byes – blithely ignored by the young woman – and we continued, whipping the broken Jeep into some semblance of forward motion. The road was a switchback – ‘twenty-five bends to the summit!’ said Tang, who had been here before. Soon the meadow was just distant patchwork, and the sharp peaks were all around us, and melting snow was leaking onto the gravel. A half-wrecked snowplough lay in wait in a road menders' hut, and a cold wind rattled the corrugated iron of its driver's cabin.
There was a cairn at the summit – 4916 metres, 16,100 feet said the sign, not quite accurately – and lines of prayer flags fluttering wildly in the gale. It was bitterly cold, and the thin air was making Lily feel unsteady. In the distance I could see the black cleft where the Yangtze ran, on the far side of which was Tibet proper – and another roadmen's hut. We headed there for shelter, and a cup of tea.
It was entirely run by women, tough old brutes dressed to their chins in wool and padded green coats from the army. They volunteered for the work, they said, and were paid sixty yuan a month – nine dollars. The contract called for a five-year stint up at these altitudes – and there was a bonus paid to those who stuck it out and didn't go back to Dêgê or Luhou, pleading for easier duty.
‘But you know what bothers me?’ said one woman, thinking that I could perhaps improve her lot because, being a foreigner, I should have plenty of good guanxi. ‘The bosses say this pass is at 4916 metres – you saw the sign? Well, they put it up – but it's wrong. We're actually at 5500 metres [18,000 feet] – but they changed the sign just so they don't have to pay us the extra money that's supposed to be given to anyone who works over five thousand metres. They're cheating us. Cheapskates! Damn bastards!’ She kicked her boot furiously against a broken-down truck, and added: ‘You write about it. Then maybe they'll change it.’ I assured her I would do just that.
The fields on the weather side of the hills were covered near the summit with yellow tuliplike flowers and mats of blue he
ather, and lower down there were poppies and rapeseed fields – the hillside was a riot of primary colours. But as I was admiring the prettiness of it all, a huge black cloud roared in out of nowhere and it began to hail, the ice clanging angrily off the wrecked cars and trucks that had fetched up at the way station. We got back into the Jeep and raced downhill, until the hail turned to rain and then stopped altogether. A scattering of grubby little shacks showed that we were on the outskirts of Dêgê.
Sixty thousand people live in this ugly little settlement, wedged into the valley of a noisily rushing Yangtze tributary. None of the buildings seemed to be complete – they were either being built, or falling down. Our hotel was as grubby a place as I expected, without water of any sort – I had to wash in public under a hose that builders were using to help make cement. I drew quite a crowd of nut-brown watchers, especially at the more intimate ablutionary moments.
Dêgê is an overwhelmingly Tibetan town (it used to have a king, like Muli and Chala) but with a large number of Han Chinese immigrants. ‘Solidarity between the Han and the Zang* people will make China strong!’ said a poster above the police station. Inside, the police chief, Ma Lu – who was Tibetan, but not a believer in the primacy of the Dalai Lama and thus trustworthy, in Chinese eyes – beamed with pleasure at our arrival.
‘I have heard from your friend Miss Pam,’ he said. ‘She has already told me you might be coming.’ I then handed over her letter, with the fifty yuan enclosed. ‘Another letter from her?’ He opened it, and exclaimed: ‘How good she is!’ He was a kind and helpful man, and he knew where I was hoping to go, and agreed readily to write a note of recommendation to his colleague across the border in Qamdo, the first true Tibetan town of any size on the far side of the river. This is what Pam Logan had hoped he might do. He sealed his letter with a huge red chop and signed his name for further authentication.
‘This will ensure you have no trouble,’ he said, though he looked a little doubtful, and added, ‘I hope.’
Officer Ma took us next morning to the one institution for which Dêgê remains well known – the Bakong Scripture Printing House, where, for the last 250 years, monks and their apprentices have been printing Tibetan bibles and prayers, for dissemination around Tibet, China and the lamaist world.
The building is wooden, constructed around a courtyard, and festooned with flags. On its flat roof are golden-plated sacred birds and a gold chorten, beneath which lie the relics of the founding lama. Inside, on old and sagging wooden floors that are connected by a maze of steep staircases, hidden trapdoors, secret passages and corridors, scores of young men were about the printing of thousands of sheets of biblical text, their energy astonishing, their hurry overwhelming.
They were screen printing from carved blocks of pepper wood, a peculiarly durable local wood that is stored for decades to be seasoned so that it never cracks. The process was perfectly mechanical, except that the mechanisms were young Tibetan lads. Two of them would sit facing each other, the one holding the block between his knees with the lower end resting on the floor. His partner would then swiftly roll an ink wheel down over the block – some pairs of boys were working in red ink, others in black – and then the first boy would with equal swiftness take from a pile on his right a sheet of fine mulberry paper, about thirty inches by five, and place it on top of the ink-glistening wood. The other boy would pass an uninked roller firmly over the paper, pressing paper to ink, transferring the Tibetan symbols – or the Hindi symbols, for Sanskrit versions of the bibles were exported to Sikkim and Nepal, as well as to the devout in India proper – from block to sheet.
The first boy then lifted the paper away and placed it, face up, on a pile to his right, as his colleague inked the block again and waited for the fresh sheet of paper to be set before him.
I counted: one pair of boys did a sheet every second. A Tibetan bible has 1800 pages. One hundred boys were working on the day we visited. The numbers seemed staggering.
‘It may look frantic,’ said the ancient lama who seemed to be in charge and who, with a lame left leg, limped gamely past his charges, to make sure they were working well. ‘But we have to make up for lost time. During the Cultural Revolution, we did nothing. We didn't print a thing. And there's a lot more than just bibles.’
He took me upstairs, puffing and wheezing his way up the attic flights. Older men were working under the eaves producing prayer flags, or slips of tissue paper imprinted with mantras that would flutter away in a breeze and produce a scriptural litter that the world would not mind.
One particularly ancient fellow, so thin that it seemed for a moment as if it was only a bagful of burgundy robes hunched over the wood block, was carving flat plates of hujiao-mu – pepper wood – which would be used to imprint prayers on water. The idea, he explained, in the croaky voice of an ancient more used to silence, was that a divine would squat beside a flowing stream and, once every couple of seconds, push briefly down with the prayer side of the block, impressing the inscribed prayer onto the surface of the water and letting the river carry the words of the deity to the river's mouth.
I told him that I was going to the Yangtze headwaters, and he became animated, his face creased with smiles. He looked around his shelves and found a small block, which he pressed into my hand. ‘Take it with you, my son,’ he said, ‘send prayers down the waters. You will become saintly if you do so. You will gain much merit. You will give me much pleasure. And you will please God.’
Half a mile above the printing house, at the end of a valley road lined with almond trees, lay a small lamasery. Four elders were sitting in the sun outside, wearily watching the group of wild dogs that were pacing on the far side of the street. The men beamed with pleasure at the prospect of having a visitor, and they spent much of the rest of the morning shuffling ahead of me, showing me the altar rooms and the huge prayer drums and the portraits – all treasures of great antiquity, and all of which had mercifully escaped the rigours of the Cultural Revolution. Dozens of temples had been wrecked, thousands of icons smashed; sacred texts had been used as toilet paper by Chinese marauders, so say countless books on the tragedy of Tibet. But here in Dêgê at least, this one lamasery survives, more or less unscathed; and I suspect that there are very many more. The destruction of Tibetan culture may have been savage; but it was most assuredly not complete.
The following morning we crossed the Yangtze. The river was narrow up here – scarcely surprising, since Dêgê is 3100 miles up from the buoy in the East China Sea, and less than 900 miles from the source. It was so far from the river mouth and so different that it might have been in another world.
Down on the banks men were offering ferry rides to the far side in coracles made of yakskin. Some of the men had homemade kayak-style oars, which they used in the familiar style, dipping one end in, then the other on the other side. I had seen a film of them being taught this technique by an American, a visitor who came with the ill-fated Warren expedition of 1986: beforehand they had used single-ended oars, and paddled slowly and erratically. It seemed likely that they were now indeed using the American technique – or perhaps more accurately, the Inuit technique. If so, they were displaying one of the very rare advantages that have come to these corners of the world from contact with the supposedly more advanced outside.
A grumpy-looking Chinese policewoman was on picket duty on the Sichuan side of the narrow stone bridge, but she did not even glance up from her breakfast noodles as our Jeep stuttered across. On the far side – in what was now legally and properly Tibet, Xizang, there was a red-and-white pole barrier blocking the road, and I readied myself for interrogation and a smart return to China. But the ancient who manned the post turned out to be friendly and he raised the pole high. Before he could change his mind, Miao pressed his foot to the floor and the car, trailing more smoke than was healthy even for a Sherman tank, raced up the slope on the far side of the valley. For the time being we were leaving the Yangtze valley and would have to drive several hundred mil
es through forbidden land before seeing the Long River again.
The topography here reflects more than anywhere else the precise point of collision between this part of the world's two great tectonic plates. It is not an edgewise collision, the kind of collision that produces the chaotic kind of geology we had seen back in northern Yunnan. Here the plates had hit almost exactly head-on – so while the world here was rumpled, and violently for sure, it was rumpled in a somehow orderly way, with all the hills arranged in steep and equally tall ranges, and the rivers rushing through deep and equally narrow valleys, and all aligned precisely, as though with a compass.
The hills were arranged in an almost exactly north–south pattern – and the three huge rivers that drain this corner of Asia ran through the mountains parallel to one another, north–south also. Compounding the strangeness of the topography, they were also very, very close – making this one of the best-drained parts of the world, with rivers shearing away like railway lines from a city terminus.
First there was the Yangtze, heading south to Shigu and – but for the intervention of Cloud Mountain – the Gulf of Tonkin; then, a mere fifty miles to the west, was the upper part of the Mekong, which drained through Laos and Cambodia before entering the South China Sea near Saigon; and thirty miles farther west was the Salween, a lesser-known river that watered the Shan States of upper Burma, and flowed into the Andaman Sea by the town of Moulmein, a place made famous only in a poem by Kipling, the one about the Burma girl a-settin' by the old Moulmein pagoda.
We had our first spot of bother with the Chinese police when we arrived at Qamdo, a large town on the upper Mekong. We had found a ramshackle hotel, and were finishing an equally ramshackle dinner, when a young man sidled up beside me.
The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze Page 41