Tibet owes its alphabet to its first famous historical king, Songtsen Gampo, who became ruler of Tibet in A.D. 634 at the age of thirteen. A mere boy, he raised a huge cavalry from among the nomads by distributing banners and buttons. In no time thousands of sturdy Tibetans swore an oath to obey him, and aided by his chief minister, Tongsten of Gar, also a great horseman, he set out at the head of his cavalry to conquer the world as it was then known to Tibetans—which is to say, all of Tibet’s neighbors: Mongolia, China, Bengal, northern India, Nepal, Baltistan (Bolor), the four garrisons of Chinese Turkestan, and the great Samarkand. He established the Tibetan language over this vast territory, and then, having sent scholars to India to obtain an alphabet tailored to Tibetan sounds, he introduced the Tibetan alphabet, one derived from the Sanskrit (Indian Gupta) alphabet.
Upon attacking China, the great Tibetan king, notwithstanding the fact that he had already taken a Nepalese princess as his bride, asked the emperor for a royal Chinese princess. To appease their cumbersome and aggressive neighbor, the Chinese handed over Princess Wen-tch’eng. Popular songs in China still recall the hardships and sorrow of the beautiful princess, forced to leave China against her will to go into the wilds. The Tibetans paint a slightly less grim picture. Far from being the barbarian the Chinese took him to be, the Tibetan king and his court in the valley of Yarlung (southeast of Lhasa) had surrounded themselves with Hindu, Chinese, and Persian scholars. They had goldsmiths of international repute make them refined vases, jewelry, and other objects of great luxury. If one were to judge from the size and magnificence of the tombs of the early Tibetan kings, which were built around golden inner chambers and looked after by “the living dead,” servants of the deceased, the palaces of the living king must have been fabulous.
According to one story, it took the princess two years to reach Yarlung. On the way she slept with Tongsten of Gar, Song-tsen Gampo’s chief minister, and had a child by him who died. Upon the arrival of his Chinese princess bride, the great Tibetan king accepted her. He then converted Tibet to Buddhism, the religion of both his wives. Scholars were sent to India to invite monks to come to Tibet, and in a spot known as Ra-sa, “the goat’s land,” a monastery was built by Nepalese artisans that would soon become the holiest shrine in Tibet and be rebaptized Lhasa, “the land of the Gods.” This early shrine is the famed Jokhang, the cathedral of Lhasa that still stands today in the heart of the holy city.
All this is to say that the antagonism between China and Tibet goes back to ancient times. For fourteen centuries Tibet and China have lived side by side, alternately as mortal enemies, rivals, and—on occasion—cordial trading partners.
Listening to Ling, we realized the present was a period of enmity. For Ling the Tibetans were ignorant and evil. To the Tibetans, the Chinese, particularly the Communists, were pigheaded and conceited pagans.
As we left Xining we followed the huge barbed-wired brick walls of countless “penal factories,” each with armed guards in little turrets. Running parallel to the road was a railroad track, the famed trans-Tibetan line whose construction was hailed as one of the great achievements of Mao’s positive thinking. Originally the line was supposed to go all the way to Lhasa, but, as it turned out, it stopped in the middle of the most deserted portion of eastern Qinghai at a place called Golmud. Experts from all over the world were called upon to figure out a way to push the line farther into the mountains. But there was no way to proceed without tunneling, and, because the mountains of this part of Tibet consisted of a loose mixture of earth, shale, and ice that melted on being exposed, boring tunnels was declared impossible. Thus it is that Golmud, a place meant to be a whistle-stop, remains today the end of the line, some seven hundred miles short of Lhasa.
Yet the railroad does serve the purpose of funneling to the many factories of Xining the rare metals and minerals in which the Tibetan highlands abound. For centuries Tibet was famed for its gold-bearing sands, but today it is lithium, lead, antimony, and other rare metals that are extracted for greater profit. There is still plenty of gold, however, and the latest gold rush has been on since 1980. Every spring close to one hundred thousand people from China, mostly from the Xining area, set out on tiny two-wheeled tractors linked to two-wheeled covered wagons laden with panning equipment and head southwest to the region of the source of the Yangtze River. Here gold dust abounds.
In the spring of 1993, along the very road we now traveled, I had encountered thousands of these gold diggers chugging out onto the great freezing plateau to make their fortunes. It is a gold rush that the Communist government can neither halt nor control, for gold fever in China is a very old and established disease. The Chinese people, much more than Europeans or other Asians, are what one might call “business-minded.” They are similar to North Americans in this respect, great entrepreneurs always seeking to make a yuan, and if they can, a buck. In this attribute they differ radically from the Tibetans, who despise petty commerce and have maintained instead a society of warrior agriculturalists similar to that of continental Europe in the Middle Ages.
Looking at the pointed straw hats of the peasants working in the neatly drawn fields fringed by poplar trees, we found it hard to believe that this was Tibetan territory and that the Tibetan language was still the “official” language of this Chinese province, insofar as every Chinese sign was supposed to be translated into Tibetan script.
Of course what we were witnessing was the Chinese-style “final solution” to the Tibetan problem, the mass introduction of Chinese settlers intended to drown out the Tibetans, a scheme largely successful in this part of Amdo, where the people of Tibet had now become a small minority in their own land. As our guidebook put it, somewhat crudely: “The province [of Qinghai] is a sort of Chinese Siberia where common criminals as well as political prisoners are incarcerated.”
Less than twenty-five miles out of Xining the trees began to disappear as we left the main road and railroad track to Golmud on our right and turned left and started to climb. In a few miles all trees had vanished, as did one barley field after another until, in low gear, we began climbing between grass-covered hills. Slowly we rose up to the Sun and Moon Pass, which marks the northern edge of the great Tibetan plateau. The pass is 12,468 feet high, and we were panting for breath as we stopped and tried out our GPS for the first time since reaching China. It took some time for the machine to locate the satellites and make its preliminary calculations.
“It is here,” Ling explained, “that the Chinese princess shed tears as she set off to marry the king of Tibet.” We now received a very Chinese version of early Tibetan history, of how the barbarians had abducted the fair lady and how she had cried all the way to Lhasa in the arms of Gar, the minister who had enlivened her journey. We looked with awe at the scene that stretched before us. As far as we could see, which was very, very far in the crisp, bright, high altitude, there loomed chain upon chain of mountain ranges linked by a seemingly endless stretch of sparse grass, giving way here and there to sandy, dunelike patches of desert.
Camels were very common in this region as a means of transport, and it was on such beasts that the two French missionaries Huc and Gabet had ridden, just as Przewalski and Rockhill had after them.
Our mechanized transport was less romantic, to be sure, but because of it we hoped to be able later to travel on foot farther into the unknown than our predecessors had ever reached.
As we stared ahead into what travelers have described as a “dreaded void,” I looked at Jacques and Sebastian, curious to know what their reactions might be.
“Well here it begins, I guess,” Sebastian said. Jacques was busy filming.
Although I was still uncertain as to the impact of the high plateau on my companions, its effect on me was clear. I took one deep breath and was filled with bliss. I was home again, at long last, and in no time reminded Mr. Ling that from now on it was I who spoke the native language.
As we stood there getting our bearings, a man rode up over a near
by crest draped in a great sheepskin gown; beside him were the large black masses of a dozen yaks. We had entered a new world.
* * *
When I was small I couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t live on the sunny beaches of tropical islands, and why the Eskimos had not all moved to Florida. It was a mystery to me why Greeks, after having made their fortunes, would elect to return to the rocky, barren, sun-bleached islands where they were born. How is it that the Scots love haggis and the French snails, and that Tibetans are happy in a climate and landscape that makes others shudder?
But now I knew. I understood that beauty has to do less with looks than with love. And love is a question of time.
Shah Jahan, the great Mogul emperor who built the Taj Mahal, said when describing the delightful tree-shaded lakes of Kashmir, “If there is a paradise on earth it is here, it is here, it is here.…” Maybe he was right, and most foreigners, by the same standards, would describe the great Tibetan plateau as “hell on earth” unless for them it was a land of sweet memories, the desert and the void and frigid ranges populated by the smiles of friends and the glitter of stars so much more brilliant and real than those in the rest of the world. That’s the way it was for me.
It took me a long time to understand that in the open desert one’s interior landscape becomes sharper and much easier to read, as if the desert were a limpid screen upon which one’s thoughts can be projected.
Tibetan folklore and religion, with colorful good and evil deities, provides the loneliest of nomads with ample scope for the play of his imagination.
For all too many of us in the West, Tibet is no more than an exotic word that conjures up images of strange, red-robed monks, of jagged peaks and the abominable snowman. Few appreciate that Tibet is not just a country but a civilization that spills across geographical boundaries to form a vast cultural and linguistic family, a holy Tibetan empire of sorts.
Tibetans, one should remember, are the only people among those of Europe, Africa, or Asia who can walk two thousand miles in a straight line and be understood in their mother tongue all the way. Today, fourteen centuries after King Song-tsen Gampo came to power, his language, writing, and “lamaism,” the religion he helped spread, are still the means of communication and worship for almost the entire territory that was once his. No other empire has lasted as long on such a vast scale. The empire of Alexander lasted a mere five years, that of Napoléon two decades, the British Empire two centuries, the Roman barely five.
In concrete terms this meant that from now on, fifty miles out of Xining, I would encounter the same customs as those of faraway Ladakh.
Somewhere deep in my heart I feel truly Tibetan, connected in spite of myself to a certain basic humor and a broad-minded approach to existence. Tibetans are a friendly, no-nonsense sort of people, without any of the pomposity that comes from being British, or any of the affectation associated with the “superior” Chinese. Tibetans are just straightforward, fun-loving optimists.
How much of their attitude toward life is due to their culture, how much to their religion, and how much to their tough way of life is hard to say. What is evident, as Hugh Richardson points out in his Short History of Tibet, is that “Western visitors so diverse in personality and objective as the Jesuit fathers Francisco D’Azvedo … and Ippolito Desideri…, the British emissaries George Bogle and Samuel Turner…, and the Indian Civil Servant Sir Charles Bell … all agree in describing the Tibetans as kind, gentle, honest, open, and cheerful.”
Scholars believe that this attitude was common to Europe in the Middle Ages, in the days when all things were either black or white, when people were good or evil, and both behaviors were accepted as normal. People lived with greater intensity and passion, for good or ill, because in those days in Europe, the future always seemed uncertain, as it does today in Tibet.
What has happened in the West is that our technicians and scientists have put an enormous effort into predicting the future and thereby reducing the uncertainty that was the daily lot of previous civilizations. The telephone and other means of communication—maps, weather forecasts, planes, medical checkups, statistics, indexes, news bulletins, et cetera—are all designed to lessen our anxiety about what lies ahead.
In Tibet when somebody walks out a door he might as well have disappeared for good. There is no way to know where he is going (no maps), or when he will come back (no phone), no way to contact him (no addresses or mail): not even his name is much use because all Tibetans share a few first names (Tsering, Dawa, Nyma, and so on), and hardly anybody knows the names of people’s homes and villages, the only means of identification that are specific to an individual.
All this breeds an intensity in human relations. In the absence of newspapers, all information is relayed during chance encounters. When two Tibetans meet they exchange not just gossip but everything they know or have recently seen or heard: the price of barley in the next valley, the cost of yaks and horses, the health of distant friends and relations. Every encounter thus becomes an important moment in the knitting-together of a far-flung society without the aid of newspapers, radio, television, or telephone.
Tibetans are well aware of the great size and scope of their world. They all know and care about Ladakh and the Tibetan districts of Ganan in China’s Gansu Province, although they are fifteen hundred miles apart.
Stepping onto the plateau I felt at home, as if I were once again in Mustang, Zanskar, or Bhutan. All my earlier Tibetan experiences came flooding back, and even though the Amdo herders spoke with a strange accent, we were instant friends because of our shared appreciation of the land they lived in.
I looked at the road, which headed south as straight as a dart and cut the landscape in two, along the ancient trade route linking Xining with both Tibet and Sichuan.
* * *
The control of such vast and mountainous lands was conceivable only to a horse-riding people.
A tomb found recently on the edge of the Black Sea contains the skeletons of small horses whose teeth bear the irrefutable signs of the bit, fixing at 6000 B.C. the earliest known date at which man first domesticated the horse. Just how important it was for man to be able to ride a horse can best be judged by thinking how important airplanes are to us today. Seventy years ago, before the coming of the commercial airlines, the world was a very different place. It took seven weeks to two months to get to Australia from Britain. America and Europe were at best seven days apart. And since time is money, travel over large distances was for most people prohibitively expensive.
Just as planes changed the geography and in many ways the politics of the globe, so did horses. Moreover, along with domesticated horses, there arose a different breed of man, the cavalier—a mounted elite that had the upper hand over ordinary people. Except in China, a notable and sizeable exception, around the world society was divided between those who rode and those who got about on foot, between cavalry and infantry. Nobles were cavaliers and their vision of the world expanded accordingly.
Today, surprisingly, the possession of horses is still very much associated with social prestige in the West. There is the hunt club society, and the very different cosmopolitan polo set. Then there are those involved in show jumping and dressage, a different group from the sulky and trotter crowd; the breeders and thoroughbred racers; the cross-country horseback riders and, finally, the would-be cowboys who put on costumes of a weekend and ride “Western style”—all compose separate and often antagonistic social groups.
Tibetan society, on the other hand, would not exist at all were it not for horses. Every Tibetan has in him the mentality of a cavalier. Accustomed to travel, assured of a certain dominance over nature, and open to external ideas, his innate broad-mindedness is in direct proportion to the vast horizons that spread out before him from birth.
We who, for the most part, live in cramped and overpopulated cities, have developed a certain antagonism to our fellow man, whom we are just as likely to consider an enemy or a rival
as a friend.
In sparsely populated Tibet, human relations are quite different—people are generally thrilled to meet each other, to talk and to share.
I say “generally” because as the road sped south we were heading straight for the Amne Machin range, the home of the Goloks, who, more than anyone else, had rendered access to the source of the Mekong all but impossible. The word Golok has always spread fear in the hearts of Tibetans and abject terror among all foreigners, Chinese or Europeans, who dared venture into their parts of the high plateau.
The Last Barbarians Page 5