I was twenty-two when I discovered that the world knew very little about Tibet beyond what was known about its monks and their religion. Religion has always been a blind behind which the Tibetan people have been hidden. Even today, when one evokes Tibet it is nearly always in relation to the Dalai Lama and the lamaist religion. The true Tibet, made up of real people, has remained inaccessible.
Ever since I first became interested in Tibet, I was attracted to the nomadic warrior tribes of Kham, as eastern Tibet is called. In my mind, they seemed to be the last free men on the planet. As the years went by I became familiar with how they had fought the Chinese Communists and had eventually forced the Dalai Lama himself to join them in the struggle.
My professor of Tibetan civilization in Paris, Rolf Stein, had spent years studying in ancient manuscripts the names of these tribes, tribes whom he himself had encountered at Tatsienlu, the eastern gateway to Tibet and the doorway to Kham.
The earliest Chinese chronicles called all these men Kiang, lumping them together regardless of their true origins. The warlike nomads had constantly harassed the Chinese, frequently invading China itself, most recently in 1929.
“Wild and accustomed to living by loot.” Thus they were branded by exploring Europeans such as Pierre Migot, who found himself naked on the summit of a pass, his clothes down to his underwear stolen by local nomads. Not even the Dalai Lamas trusted these ferociously independent tribesmen. That said, the present Dalai Lama himself is from Amdo, the home of—among others—the Goloks, the fiercest of them all, although His Holiness is from the extreme northern part of Amdo, near Xining, a region of farms as opposed to pastures.
Xining is the capital of Amdo/Qinghai. At seventy-two hundred feet in altitude it is located just south of the Silk Road and just east of Koko Nor, the largest inland sea of Asia, a great turquoise saltwater lake the size of Corsica. Xining has always been an important crossroads for caravans: From here set out two trails that link the Silk Road with Tibet and with Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, China’s most populous province.
Xining was first mentioned in the West by Marco Polo, who referred to it in his memoirs as Sin-ju, and, although a town of considerable importance, it escaped the attention of Westerners for centuries thereafter. We owe the earliest good description of it to the American diplomat and scholar William Woodville Rockhill, one of the few Western explorers of Tibet who spoke both Chinese and Tibetan. He set out in 1888 hoping to reach Lhasa from the north, having been preceded along that route by two French missionaries, Huc and Gabet, who traveled all the way to Lhasa and back from China in 1846. The account they left of their journey was so unpretentious, so naïve, and so vivid that in a way it shamed the pompous Victorian explorers who came after them, such as the Russian Przewalski, whose imperialistic anticlericalism moved him to try to negate the fact that the innocent missionaries had succeeded where he failed thirty-five years later. Przewalski bestowed his unpronounceable name on the wild horse of central Asia, but his efforts to discredit the two French missionaries somewhat tarnished his reputation forever after. This famed Przewalski horse was first encountered by the Scottish doctor John Bell during a visit to central Asia in the service of Peter the Great from 1719 to 1722. It was the Russian geographer, however, who brought back specimens of the breed, which has since died out in the wild, but which flourishes still in zoos and on special farms around the world.
Rockhill was as unsuccessful at reaching Lhasa as Przewalski had been, but a measure less pompous, and his account gives us our first scholarly and informed description of the tribes of eastern Tibet.
My small party and I left the bustle of the airport and drove into Xining proper. I couldn’t forget that in 1933 near Xining, in a village called Tagster, lived a certain horse dealer whose sons were to bring him unimaginable fame and satisfaction. The eldest son of the horse trader was identified as the reincarnation of the abbot of the region’s most famous monastery, Kum Bum, that of the one hundred thousand images of Buddha. Kum Bum was the holy birth site of Tsong Khapa, the great reformer of Tibetan Buddhism and the founder of the Gelug-pa, the yellow-hat sect of the Dalai Lamas.
The holy oracles of the region having pronounced the horse trader’s son the lama of Kum Bum, his family moved some twelve miles closer to Xining and took up residence in the great buildings of the monastery.
In 1928 Xining became the capital of a largely fictitious Chinese province called Qinghai, whose governor was a self-appointed general called Ma Pu-feng, a Chinese Muslim warlord.
In fact, Ma Pu-feng ruled only the northern part of Qinghai, in that he was constantly at war with the nomads of the south, principally with the feared Golok tribe and the inhabitants of a mysterious kingdom called Nangchen, whose existence had escaped the attention of most explorers. The remotest, largest, and most secretive of the many little kingdoms of the much-feared Khamba tribes, Nangchen was incorporated by mapmakers into Chinese Qinghai. According to my maps, the source of the Mekong lay somewhere in Nangchen.
Two years after the great thirteenth Dalai Lama died in 1933, the State Oracle of Tibet suggested that a delegation of monks be sent to northeastern Tibet to look for his successor. And as amazing as it may seem, it was in the family of the same poor horse dealer from Tagster (whose eldest son had by then become head of the Kum Bum monastery) that, in 1938, they found the reincarnation of the fourteenth Dalai Lama—the present Dalai Lama, currently in exile in Dharmsala, India.
In 1939, Ma Pu-feng demanded one hundred thousand Chinese silver dollars to allow the new Dalai Lama to go to Lhasa. Upon receiving the amount stated from the Tibetan government, the warlord abruptly changed his mind and asked for an additional three hundred thousand silver dollars before he would release the young god-king.
* * *
As we drove into the modern Chinese city of Xining, I searched in vain for anyone looking remotely Tibetan; everyone around me was Chinese. Today Xining has nine hundred thousand inhabitants and a high pollution rate from the smoke of its hundreds of factories, most of which, it is believed, are manned by political prisoners.
In Xining we were the “guests” of the Qinghai Mountaineering Association. In Communist countries where officially no private enterprises exist, one cannot do anything unless one is sponsored by an official governmental organization. I had discovered this in the former Soviet Union when I decided to take my Viking boat overland (rowing and sailing the major rivers) from Riga to Odessa. In Russia the Soviet Peace Foundation had been my chaperon. In China I had opted for the obscure QMA, which had provided me in 1993 with the necessary official status to perform my first survey of southern Qinghai in search of horses.
Once again the QMA was ready to assist me—for a price—by granting me the official permits to go, this time, deeper into the forbidden territory of the southern nomads to look for the source of the Mekong. No member of the QMA had ever been in the area, except of course for Mr. Wang, whom I had taken south the preceding year. But now, alas, he was not coming with us.
In Xining we were hustled into a modern twenty-story hotel, the local skyscraper, where as we lay down for a short rest before sorting our bags, I contemplated the future of our project. Without Mr. Wang we would have our work cut out for us to get the support we needed. I knew that the QMA members were more interested in the money we were paying them than in helping us actually find the source of the Mekong. This was evident in everything Mr. Ling had to say. He treated us as if we were some sort of tour group just out to have a pleasant holiday. The fact that three cases of Pepsi were just about the only provisions he had packed, and that he had neither adequate tents nor reasonable clothes for travel by pony, clearly showed that he was not quite aware of what he had gotten himself into.
All this was most worrying, but not half as worrying as the news that Mr. Wang now broke to me.
“Ten days ago,” he announced, “a party of Japanese set out up the Mekong along with a group from the Chinese Academy of Science.”
The news made my heart sink. In spite of the fact that I like to think myself uninterested in setting records, I had not organized this expedition to be number two. I went to sleep with visions of our reaching our objective exhausted only to run into a big gang of Chinese and Japanese scholars having a party. The thought was unbearable, so unbearable that I chased it from my mind.
Now there was a double threat to our venture, the French party arriving in a week and the Asian scholars. To cheer up I kept repeating to myself that my primary interest in the region was in the horses and in the exploration of the mysterious kingdom of Nangchen.
My research into the history of Nangchen the previous year had convinced me that Nangchen was no doubt the last of the truly unexplored old Tibetan kingdoms.
I have always had a special affection for lost kingdoms, and, in fact, I owed much of my small reputation as an explorer to having been the first to place on the map the little kingdom of Mustang in Nepal. Thirty years had elapsed since I had fought my way alone across the Himalayan range via the deep Kali Gandaki gorge headed for the walled city of Lo Mantang. The year was 1964, and thousands of Khamba guerrillas who had fled Tibet and crossed Nepal were still fighting the Chinese and had made Mantang their new headquarters. From there they crossed over into Tibet to attack the Chinese convoys heading for Lhasa.
Tibet was then strictly beyond the reach of foreigners, and since the CIA was secretly helping the Khamba guerrillas in Mustang, no one was allowed to go there but the Khambas themselves.
My claim to fame was in discovering that Lo Mantang was, in fact, the capital of a tiny kingdom called Lo or Mustang that had been independent for nearly five hundred years. It was so remote and inaccessible that its very existence as an independent region had escaped the notice of even the best of Tibetan scholars.
Compared to Mustang, the kingdom of Nangchen was enormous—6,500 square miles, in fact—or so I reckoned from my journey to its ancient capital of Nangchen Gar the preceding year. Should our river expedition fail, I reasoned, a trip there would prove a satisfying fallback exploration.
* * *
“We wish to leave tomorrow morning,” I said to Mr. Ling, who seemed puzzled by our haste. “All right, Mr. Psl, but you must first go to the bank and pay us.”
I agreed. I never knew exactly who got the money that I paid to the Qinghai Mountaineering Association—now, for the second year in a row. But I paid a high price for two four-wheel-drive vehicles, their fuel and drivers, along with local food.
3
THE FINAL SOLUTION?
In our room on the twelfth floor, overlooking the gray buildings of the sprawling Chinese city of Xining, we pored over our various maps. The most detailed was the 1:500,000 satellite map of southern Qinghai, which gave the topography only a few place names.
Then came an equally imprecise map used by pilots, the one-million-scale map, or ONC G-8, to be precise, which had a strange, white square on it marked “relief data incomplete,” followed by the amusing notation “maximum elevation believed not to exceed 10,000 feet.” The blank area depicted was close to where we were planning to go, and we knew that all of it was above thirteen thousand feet. More amusing still was the fact that here and there on the map were little black squares marked “nomad camps,” as if it would be of help to lost pilots to use movable nomad tents as points of reference. On the other hand, a note saying “Aircraft infringing upon non-free-flying territory may be fired on without warning…” probably kept planes away in the first place.
Comical as it was, this map proved useful because it gave a fairly precise idea of the topography. The Mekong River, however, was shown petering off in every direction in little blue dotted lines.
My other maps were less topographically accurate but bore more names, though none that were the same from one map to the other.
“Have you any good maps of the region?” I asked Mr. Ling hopefully, well aware that he didn’t. The Chinese are very secretive about maps of the Tibetan highlands, and of Qinghai in particular, because it is here that they have based the principal launch sites and tracking stations for telecommunication satellites and, possibly also, the silos for their nuclear missiles. Some people whisper that Qinghai is home to atomic test sites, but officials point out that the Lop Nor desert of nearby Xinjiang is the official testing ground.
Maps were, in a way, what our whole expedition was about. The maps of the world, it seemed, had all taken it for granted that the source of the Mekong was at the site identified by Dutreuil de Rhins, in spite of all the subsequent denials and challenges. It was now up to us to draw a new and, one would hope, definitive map.
For this purpose we were equipped with a Global Positioning System, a GPS, a little electronic, hand-held calculator with an antenna that contacts one or another of the twenty-one geostationary satellites that circle the globe and, in a few seconds miraculously calculates one’s exact latitude and longitude, and even one’s altitude.
This modern technology would be priceless for drawing our map but of little use in finding our way. Early explorers to Tibet had had, for the most part, no problem finding their way, because they traveled the well-worn caravan routes, whose resting places have always been known to all. But few explorers dared to stray from those routes because of the risk of getting lost. Three years before, one of the members of the Qinghai Mountaineering Association wandered away from his camp alone and was never seen again.
“His body was never found,” Ling commented dryly when I asked him about the tragedy.
* * *
One of the best map rooms in the world is housed in the red-brick headquarters of the venerable Royal Geographical Society, the temple of exploration, located on Kensington Gore in the heart of London.
I contacted the Royal Geographical Society in preparation for our expedition. Mr. Collins of the map department promised to do a special investigation to determine whether I might not be mistaken and someone had, indeed, already discovered the source of the Mekong. Three days later I received the unequivocal reply, a precious piece of information that confirmed all my other inquiries:
“There is no indication that the source has been precisely located.”
Xining is seventy-two hundred feet above sea level, which is a relatively low elevation similar to that of Mexico City. Nevertheless, arriving from Beijing, which some claim is twenty-six feet below sea level, we were immediately exhausted by the change in altitude. After finishing off with Sebastian the first of the two whisky bottles we had brought along for comfort, I tried in vain to sleep.
My brain was afire as I contemplated what might lay ahead, and once again I asked myself how on earth I had gotten myself involved in the drudgery of yet another near-impossible venture.
The truth is, there seem to be two people inside me: a nice, rational self and a malicious demon.
I suppose everyone is somewhat the same, the difference being that when most people grow up, the naughty child in them vanishes or fades into the background, leaving the reasonable adult in command.
In spite of my gray hair, somehow it seemed the devil was still in full control. I was thrilled that we were heading for the unknown, right into the very unmapped heart of the most forbidden and remote territory of the Tibetan highlands. Secretly, I yearned for as much trouble as possible, imagining my companions all dying on the journey so that I might return a lone hero. I would beat the Chinese and Japanese to the source of the Mekong, come what may. With this resolve, I finally fell asleep.
* * *
When I awoke the next morning, the feeling of exhaustion caused by the altitude was sobering. I was puffing and blowing and bent in two, my lungs making a peculiar squishing sound as I pulled on the low boots that were to be my only shoes on this journey.
I shaved and carefully packed the black kit bag that was from now on to hold my little universe—not just a change of clothes, but my film, notebooks, maps, and those few photographs that in remote parts would remind me that out there,
far beyond the jagged horizons, I had children, the only really valid reason for me to want to get back.
Bags are the nightmare of every expedition. Each night, when one is exhausted, they have to be opened and unpacked, and every frigid morning they have to be packed up again. This routine goes on, day in and day out, and, since bags shrink at night, what fits in one day won’t fit the next. Sleeping bags just grow bigger and bigger.
Alas, in the proletarian People’s Republic of China, I had no recourse to the British-trained sherpas who were attendant upon my first expedition to the Himalayas in 1959. Twenty-two years old and still a democrat in those days, I had trouble at first with the bearers’ custom of kissing my feet in the morning and insisting that they tie my shoelaces. Yet that was what they did, and any effort to stop them was considered an offense. But now there was no question of being helped by my guides. Ling was as censorious as a boys’ school prefect and would certainly kiss nobody’s feet, let alone lift a bag. Having hauled my own bags down to the lobby, I was greeted by the rest of our party, two chauffeurs and a young cook.
First things first. After a hasty Chinese breakfast of cold omelette and spongy, saltless, cold dumplings, we were whisked off to the bank at 9 A.M. sharp. Here we were forced to give up a large amount of our ready cash in dollars just in case we didn’t survive to pay on our return. In exchange I received a thin rice-paper voucher, in Chinese, which would soon disintegrate.
We were nearly ready, but I still wanted to buy a ball of string (unavailable among the nomads), razor blades, drawing paper, sweets, and a few other odds and ends. All the shops were closed, however, and we left without these essential items.
Driving the streets of Xining seemed very similar to driving through a suburb of Beijing. The same police standing on the same red-and-white-striped pedestals from which they directed the same traffic of khaki jeeps, white-and-red buses, and blue trucks, their registration numbers stenciled large across their tailgates. All this traffic was intermingled with bicycles and rickshaws and pushcarts, and, occasionally, with a horse-drawn flatbed wagon piled high with Chinese cabbage. On either side of the street rose little stalls crested with ideograms proclaiming the professions of the shopkeepers. I found it restful not to be able to read them, those playful signs that I took to be little more than dancing children. I wondered if the illiterate were not possibly the happiest people in the modern world, impervious as they are to the constant assault of political and commercial propaganda and to aggressive police orders like Stop, Slow, Beware, No Entry, Dead End, Danger. The undecipherable Chinese characters, elegant and meaningless as they were to my untrained eye, may, in another sense, prove the downfall of China: Because of them, it takes eight to ten years to learn how to read the newspaper, with the result that the Chinese are illiterate, compared with the barbarian Tibetans, whom they scorn. The Tibetans are fortunate to have a simple phonetic syllabary with twenty-nine letters, one written vowel (A), and four vowel accents that are used in combination with them. It takes a smart young Tibetan three years at most before he can read elementary texts, and so nearly everyone in Tibet knows his ka kha ga nga, the Tibetan version of the ABC.
The Last Barbarians Page 4