The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  I now worried how he, as clumsy as he is meticulous, would fare riding ponies in Tibet: he admitted he had never ridden any kind of horse. Maybe he was the wrong man for this venture, in that he had never been to high altitudes, either. Yet somehow I knew he would wear well—or die gallantly—with a Victorian indifference to hardship in the tradition of Scott, who died a heroic, yet lucid, death on his way back from the South Pole. In 1989, Jacques had been an excellent second-in-command of a wretched little Viking boat in which I had foolishly decided to cross the whole of the (now former) Soviet Union from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He had rowed and filmed without complaining up the Dvina and down the Dnieper, a total of fifteen hundred miles; at the end of it, to our mutual amazement, we were still on speaking terms.

  Of course, this was another expedition altogether. We were then at most three hundred feet above the Black Sea or the Baltic; now we would be over fifteen thousand feet above sea level for the duration of our journey—a journey that not only was considered impossible by many, but had been proven so by the fifteen-odd expeditions that had preceded ours and all come to grief, failing to reach the source of the Mekong.

  I remember thinking that at least Jacques could see to it that we didn’t die unexpectedly from such high-altitude sicknesses as pulmonary edema. No sooner were we seated on the plane from Paris to Beijing, ironically, than he began to explain, in a morbidly dreary voice, the origins of the foam that invades the lungs as a result of reverse osmosis, the first symptom of that deadly affliction whose sinister name was to haunt our journey.

  When, like me, you think you are twenty-seven but you read in your passport that you are close to fifty-eight, it feels good to have a doctor along. “Bring something against heart attacks,” I had said jokingly, but I later made sure he had because, after a year of immobility in Paris, I was hardly in shape, even if I had been to Lhasa for a four-week stay in May in an effort to prepare for our journey.

  Just as Jacques was tall, gray, and serious, Sebastian Guinness was short, rosy-cheeked, and jovial.

  He was an excellent rider of pleasant disposition, but what mattered most was that he spoke Chinese and had been on two previous expeditions to Tibet. He was the son of good friends, and I had known him as a child.

  At the last moment my sponsor had backed out, and I had had a mere two weeks to recalculate everything. I had to pay Jacques’s way, but Sebastian kindly had volunteered to foot his own bill, allowing us to carry on, thus saving an expedition that had taken me two years to organize. As far as we could tell, we had the first permit ever granted by the Chinese allowing foreigners to travel to the highly restricted area where the source of the Mekong was to be found.

  I had obtained this extraordinary permission thanks to Equus caballus, or the common horse.

  Ever since Moorcroft broke into Tibet uninvited and in disguise, pushing a flock of sheep before him, foreigners have been unwelcome there, and for good reason. For over two hundred years the only foreigners seen by most of the inhabitants of Asia were colonial troops, out to seize political power and dominion over local commerce.

  The British swept across India and the French across Indochina, and the Russians gained control over the Near and the Far East from the Black Sea to the Pacific, from Azerbaijan via Mongolia to Manchuria.

  Only Tibet and three other countries escaped the greed of the white man: Nepal, whose people gave the British a thrashing in 1815; and Bhutan and Afghanistan, which were protected by fierce warriors of their own and by high mountains.

  Buddhism had worn down the warring spirit of most Tibetans, so they defended themselves, instead, by slamming the door against all travelers, be they priest, merchant, or suspected spy. By closing their frontiers they hoped to escape being colonized.

  It is useless to demur on how pompous the British were in colonial days, especially in the colonies themselves. They were, unarguably, as pompous and arrogant as I was as a child, looking with pride at how the white man had come to control or, more delicately, to bestow the benefits of his civilization upon the world’s primitives. To recall the shimmering egret feathers in the tall white topees of the British viceroys is enough to understand how deeply vexed they were when mysterious monks from Tibet and Bhutan scorned British power by (for instance) returning their letters unopened.

  Worse, Sir Ashley Eden, representative plenipotentiary of the British Crown, dressed in full regalia, feathers and all, had actually been spat upon in Bhutan. War followed immediately, of course, but then the British forces had been severely defeated, just as they had been in Nepal. As for the Afghan Wars, after the massacre of the British fleeing Kabul, colonial troops on the “Northwest Frontier” had made little or no progress in a conflict that was to stretch from 1839 until 1937.

  Thus, in the West, the mystery of the region was laced with fear and needled by the insolence and mockery of Tibet and her neighbors. It just “wasn’t on” for natives to defy the humorless Victorians who, after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, had replaced the more congenial members of the British East India Company, or John Company, as it was also called.

  To discover the source of the Indus and the Brahmaputra, the British had had to rely on adventurers. And where the British couldn’t go in Tibet they sent native secret agents to map the land for them clandestinely.

  For my part, I had used Equus caballus to gain access to Tibet’s forbidden territories. Since the Chinese were even less keen than the Tibetans to allow foreigners to roam freely around the country—much less to have a look at the garrisons they had set up to pacify it—a lot of work was required to allow me to travel to restricted areas.

  Years before in Cadaques, in Spain, I had first mentioned to Sebastian’s cousin Loel Guinness, a keen polo player, my idea for an Equus caballus project. I myself am a keen but lousy polo player, and well short of the financial means to play the game, as much as I love it, but I have always been interested in horses, and for eighteen years, between occasional polo games, I indulged heavily in the slightly archaic and currently very unpopular sport of hunting wild boar and stags on horseback.

  When I pointed out to Loel that the word polo was a Tibetan word meaning “ball,” and that rTa-polo, “horse ball,” was a Tibetan game imported via Baltistan into British India, he was surprised, to say the least. He then became enthusiastic when I suggested to him somewhat later that it would be interesting to seek out and study the various Tibetan breeds of horses.

  Historically, foreigners in Tibet had been too busy studying the Buddhist monasteries and their monks to bother about the horses they encountered. On the whole they considered them to be rough, vulgar ponies, like all those they had encountered on the borders of the British Empire; this I knew to be untrue.

  Horses exist everywhere around the world, but, whereas we can trace their origins through fossils to a doglike, clawed creature, we know very little about the provenance of our modern horses. On the one hand there are the wild equids—zebras, asses, and the Przewalski horse—and on the other hand, all the tame, domestic horses, in two types: the rustic horses and the man-made breeds. The rustic horses and ponies are breeds that mate freely according to whim.

  Do all domestic horses have the same origins, from the Shetland pony to the Arabian thoroughbred? In a word, nobody knows.

  Thanks to help from Loel’s foundation and to his enthusiasm, in 1992 I was able to organize my first “equine expedition” to Tibet in search of various breeds of Tibetan horses.

  It was then, quite by accident, that I found in horses the unexpected “open sesame” to the last secret regions of Tibet, where I believed I would also find the source of the Mekong. For the sensitive Chinese government, there was apparently nothing political in horses, and I was allowed to enter regions normally closed to foreigners; thus it was that I was now able to consider exploring the upper reaches of the Mekong River.

  * * *

  This explains how, on September 2, 1994, I found myself seated next to Jacques Falck, off to t
ry to find the source of the third-most important river in Asia. It all seemed a little bit too grand and too extraordinary to be true. I felt like getting up and explaining all this to the stewardess, but of course I did nothing of the sort.

  I hate airplanes in which one cannot sit in the front seat, and find modern air travel about as exciting as riding an elevator. Yet in a matter of hours I was crossing a distance nonstop that had taken Marco Polo two years to traverse. As I munched on tasteless chicken, beneath me unfurled the carpeted grasslands of the Ukraine, followed by the basin of the Volga and the deserts bordering the dehydrated Aral Sea. Then came the sands of Bactria, leading to the orchards of Samarkand and Tashkent and on to Chinese Turkestan, the Taklamakan desert, and then, just north of Tibet, to the Gansu corridor of the Silk Road, better known in China as the Horse Road. It was there that I had ridden the Silk Road post pony, the Chakori, a small vivid little beast, born to amble and carry fat merchants between Urumqi and Lanzhou.

  We were to meet Sebastian in Beijing, where he was flying from the United States via Tokyo.

  As we were winging our way toward Beijing, it was hard to escape the magic of the name. My heart beat faster as I got off the plane, even though this would be my fourth touchdown in the Chinese capital. My mind crowded with images of dreamland China, coolies and mandarins, the tinkle of bells and the banging of gongs, everything poetic—but unfortunately far removed from what actually greeted us. There were lines of taxis fighting for customers, billboards advertising Korean television sets, foreign exchange desks, hotel pushers trying to whisk you away to the Sheraton, the Holiday Inn, the Swiss Hotel, the latest German Palace, or simply to the Novotel or the more modest Taiwan Hotel for overseas Chinese, all claiming to be downtown, although most are miles apart in what seems the most far-flung city in the world. As Pico Iyer has written, one really travels in one’s head, and for me, superimposed on the Peking of Marco Polo, the Cathay of all marvels, was the Beijing of Mao and the People’s Liberation Army, whose soldiers had caused the shedding of so much Tibetan blood. That Beijing was the capital of the enemy, the Beijing that had, in 1972, banned me from China, and whose embassies had written to the world press calling me a liar, to discredit my book on the Tibetan freedom fighters.

  My love of Tibet had caused me to cross swords with China before, but that China now seemed nearly as far back in the past as the land of Genghis Khan: the China of drab, dark-blue masses, besotted by a cult of Mao bordering on the ludicrous, his name hammered into everything in a trancelike litany, quoted by the Red Guards up to fifty times a page in every article—the same Red Guards who had burned, dynamited, and pickaxed every Tibetan monastery they could get near, thereby doing away with the last traces of ancient libraries already partially gutted by the People’s Liberation Army a decade earlier.

  In Tibet the Cultural Revolution had turned into the blindest folly, an orgy of vengeance, fueled by the genetic fear all Chinese seemed to have for the “barbarians” on their western frontier.

  Driving into Beijing from the airport in 1994, one could see everywhere that the destructive hysteria of the years before had now been channeled into a building boom. The new fanatics sang the glory of Mao no more, but worshipped instead the gods of greed.

  In Beijing, the future is today. It took over an hour for a taxi, laden with our kit bags, to make it to the walls of the Forbidden City, weaving its way between yellow Japanese minitaxis and cyclists to the glass front of the fifteen-story Peace Hotel in the true heart of the city.

  Arrogance is the favorite weapon of an old civilization that scorns all others. In China today one experiences in reverse the humiliation the Chinese suffered at the hands of the colonial powers. Its ports, at Hong Kong and Shanghai, taken by unfair treaties, the Chinese were deeply hurt in a manner Westerners have trouble understanding. Steeped in their ancient dignity, to have to suffer the dictates of dog-faced barbarians was a fate that surpassed all cruelty, especially for the highly educated, who ascribed so much importance to saving face.

  To understand China in the West, one has to appreciate that for a very long time, it might as well have been another planet, a planet floating in a void. To the east stretched the limitless, empty horizons of the Pacific. To the west, behind the double barriers of the Great Wall and the Himalayan ranges lay the no less limitless horizons of the steppes of Mongolia and Tibet, empty horizons possessed of a crucial distinction: They were the realm of the barbarians.

  However short the miniskirts of Beijing today, however bright the neon signs in the streets, nowhere can one forget the Great Wall. Not just because the shops are called the Great Wall this, the Great Wall that, but because the Forbidden City itself is a visual reminder of that serpentine giant, the greatest monument in the world to fear: an atavistic fear that still lies present deep down in the hearts of a majority of Chinese, a fear of the barbarians who, for thousands of years, as far back as memory can stretch—which in China is further than anywhere else on earth—came out of the nameless steppes of central Asia to swoop down and conquer China.

  As we drove past the great gates of the Forbidden City along the north end of Tiananmen Square, I pointed out to Jacques that above the formidable bastion of the imperial enclave, the highest monuments on the city’s skyline were two giant Tibetan chortens (shrines), ever-present reminders of the barbarians at the gate, reminders that Tibetan Buddhism was, until 1912, the official creed of the Manchu emperors, and reminders, finally, that Tibet and the Dalai Lama are still a very sore point in the minds of the Chinese.

  Invasions in Europe came from the east, and in China they came from the west. If one were to pinpoint where they came from exactly, one would point on the map to the very place we were headed: the heart of the highest plateau of central Asia.

  * * *

  When Sebastian sailed across the hotel lobby, half a ton of brand-new kit bags in his wake, I suddenly realized we were all there, all of the members of the smallest and least impressive expedition I had ever led. Excluding myself, whose own less-than-striking countenance I could not see, the twosome of Jacques and Sebastian was not what you would call imposing. To be charitable to them, they looked for all the world like Laurel and Hardy out of their element. There in the ugly beige marble lobby of the Peace Hotel in Beijing, I was struck, once again, with the fact that I had talked myself into yet another impossible venture.

  Had I been encouraged by some august institution and backed by the same, I would have had an excuse. But it was all my own doing, this idea of trying to find the source of the Mekong, a place that everyone before me had failed to find, on a river for which I didn’t give a damn. There was really nothing in it for me except a measure of glory, perhaps, that shining nothing of a currency, as useless today as it is out of date.

  That evening I held a conference, which is to say that I had an intimate chat with my two friends. I briefed them on the operation before us. We would have to wait two days in Beijing before taking a flight to Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province.

  I had advised the QMA, the Qinghai Mountaineering Association, of our arrival, and they would greet us at the airport.

  I explained to Jacques and Sebastian that we couldn’t linger in Xining because of a concern I had that had soured our departure. A few weeks before leaving Paris I had been visited by a woman whom I took to be an innocent and sweet young lady. She told me that she had read all my articles on how, in 1993, I had identified a remarkable new breed of horses in southern Qinghai. I, in turn, had told her of my new plan to find the source of the Mekong. Then, to my amazement and dismay, just before we left I received a fax in which she said she had obtained funds to ride “my” horse in Qinghai, and that she and a companion were also going to find the source of the Mekong. She had, in fact, made a public announcement to that effect. I was furious and upset, for although I held no proprietary rights in the matter, this person had stolen my project outright and had used my research to further her own ends. I called the young lady
to say how upset I was, only to have the bitter facts spat back at me: I didn’t own the source of the Mekong.

  Once again I would have been better off keeping my mouth shut. Now, not only did we have a potential rival in our quest, but she and her companion were due to arrive in Xining eight days after us.

  I said to Jacques and Sebastian that I thought it unlikely that they would secure permits to the restricted areas. Yet, whatever I said, there remained a threat that we would be beaten to our own goal. The threat was a constant source of irritation until it was superseded by an even worse menace from another quarter.

  In the meantime we set out filming Beijing and shopped for last-minute supplies of film stock, camera bags, gloves, sunglasses, rope, and other small pieces of equipment.

  2

  BEYOND THE MOON

  As we repacked our bags to fly from Beijing to Xining, a region that was once part of greater Tibet, I couldn’t help thinking back to the first expeditions that tried to reach the source of the Mekong.

  It all began in June of 1866 in Paris, four years after the discovery of the source of the Nile, when the Société de Géographie created the Committee for the Exploration of the Upper Mekong. The American Civil War had just ended, and the United States was still suffering from its aftermath. By contrast, in France, Napoléon III was at the height of his power and was transforming Paris with Baron Haussmann into the beautiful city it is today. That very year, Jules Verne published his book From the Earth to the Moon, but it would have been hard to believe then, I’m sure, that man would actually set foot on the moon before finding the source of the Mekong.