The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

“I can’t wait to meet a Golok,” Sebastian said, and I admitted I had been equally keen to have a look at these men whose reputation had been conveyed to me from as far away as America. I had read that a Golok queen had had seventeen husbands, and that they ate human flesh. They were said by some to have killed thousands of Nationalist Chinese seeking shelter in their territory; others said they had killed ten thousand Communist troops. Rather than cross Golok territory, caravans preferred to make huge detours. The few caravans that dared enter their lands, an annual two-way tribute mission between the Dalai Lamas and the Chinese government among them, did so only under heavy escort. Yet the Golok sharpshooters were so effective that even the annual caravan was discontinued in the 1800s and replaced, for a while, by a triennial affair.

  In July 1993, I had crossed Golok territory. Three months later the press announced that the Goloks had distributed pamphlets calling for a free Tibet. The army was called in and hundreds were arrested, but the rebel spirit of the Goloks remains undaunted.

  The first three hours of our drive across the Tibetan plateau were tense in that we hadn’t yet gotten used to our white-gloved driver, a handsome man of about thirty, who looked far more mature and responsible than Ling.

  Ling was visibly nervous. This was his first time accompanying foreigners, and he confessed that he had never been south of Xining, previously having been a schoolteacher there. We began to suspect that he had, in fact, studied and failed at the police school for interpreters, from which my previous guide had come. In spite of his fears, it was obvious that he wanted our journey to be a success. He was overly eager to please—the only problem was that he didn’t seem to have a clue as to what our objectives were. When I mentioned the source of the Mekong he answered vaguely, “Don’t worry, whatever happens you will have a pleasant time. Our groups are always very pleased.” In vain I tried to explain to him that we weren’t a group of tourists out to have fun, that this was my third visit to Qinghai, that I was here to study Tibetan horses and locate the exact source of the Mekong River. He looked at me with a pained expression and then answered patronizingly, “Don’t worry, you will really enjoy yourself.”

  “Tonight we sleep at Madoi,” Ling announced. Madoi is a Chinese garrison guarding the upper Yellow River, which is known in Tibet as the Ma River, or Ma Chu. The Yellow River, or Hwang Ho in Mandarin, is the second-longest river of China after the Yangtze. Its huge basin is the cradle of China. Like the Nile, its annual floods fertilize and irrigate millions of acres. As such it is a symbol of life for the Chinese. Since very early times its source was the object of special veneration by the Chinese emperors. Where exactly the source lay no one was sure. In fact, the earliest maps of China, drawn with the help of French Jesuit astronomers and mathematicians in the eighteenth century, show the Yellow River as taking its source in the Taring and Oring Lakes, an assertion later contested because some claimed that both these lakes are salty.

  It seems that the source of the Yellow River actually lies in a grouping of marshes known as the “plain of the Stars.” It is here that every year in the name of the Chinese emperor a white horse and seven white sheep were to be sacrificed in the seventh moon, with a corresponding announcement in the Peking Gazette, as follows:

  “The worship of the source of the Yellow River at Odontala and the two snow-clad mountains of the Alang-Nor and Amne Machin was duly performed in the prescribed form.…”

  But unfortunately, according to the American explorer Rockhill, the money for the sacrifice was more often than not pocketed by corrupt officials, who found their own uses for it.

  Was the source of the Mekong the object of a similar devotion? I wondered.

  I knew that Madoi, the town we were supposed to reach that night, lay on the other side of the Amne Machin range, the home of the Goloks. It seemed to me quite improbable that we could travel that far on our first day.

  Having driven a couple of hours across a near-desert stretch of the high plateau, we stopped to lunch in Gonghe, a modern oasis town with green fields and groves of poplars. Here again the population seemed mostly Chinese, yet in the crowd I picked out a few Tibetans in homespun wine-red gowns, accompanied by women showing off well-greased pigtails studded with turquoise. They walked around with a slow gait as if strangers in the bustling Chinese city. I couldn’t resist approaching them to speak Tibetan. It had been a full year since I had last spoken the language. As before, I had trouble making myself understood by the Amdo Tibetans, whose dialect is very different from most of the others of Tibet.

  I inquired where we could buy the broad-brimmed felt hats that have become the hallmark of Tibetans for over a century. Originally they were imported from Italy, and are efficient at protecting the wearer from sun, rain, hail, and snow.

  I was led to a state-owned general store with its habitually poor array of goods: enamel basins, flashlights, cotton undershirts, plastic cans and buckets, flowery red and blue thermoses, and, more interestingly, sweets of every variety, on which I promptly stocked up. In one corner was a whole array of various Chinese brandies next to cans of preserved fruits and tinned pork.

  To one side we found great bolts of woolen cloth used by Tibetans for their gowns, and a stock of the felt ten-gallon hats we were looking for, in beige-black and in dark green, the color I chose. We all three now looked part of an Asian spaghetti Western as we marched proudly down the dusty main street under the ferocious, high-altitude midday sun. My GPS said we were twelve thousand feet above sea level, an altitude confirmed by my thumping heart and the great difficulty I had had climbing the stairs to the first floor of the government department store. After all, just twenty-four hours before, we had been at sea level in Beijing.

  Ling, the two drivers, and our cook had located a Muslim restaurant, where we were offered spicy dishes of beef and noodles, which we washed down with cups of tea made by pouring boiling water over lumps of crystallized sugar mixed with large berries of uncertain origin and what looked like tea leaves and orange blossoms.

  From now on, until we jumped off into the wild, we would stop to eat in Muslim teahouses, of which there were a great many, as the Muslims had followed the Chinese into Tibet to service the Chinese garrison towns and make their living as shopkeepers. The Muslims have a rather difficult time of it because they hate the Chinese, but not nearly as much as the Tibetans hate them. On the one hand, they have never forgiven the Chinese for the terrible massacres carried out against them between 1862 and 1878, and, on the other, the Tibetans think the worst of them, even to the point of believing that they serve human flesh in their restaurants, or so I’ve been told on numerous occasions by horrified Tibetans. This mistrust of Islam goes all the way back to Song-tsen Gampo himself, who fought the early Muslims in faraway Samarkand, then much later, at the beginning of the last century, when the Muslims of Kashmir attempted to invade Tibet.

  As Christians, we felt an affinity with the monotheist Muslims we encountered, but what mattered to us more than that was the fact that the food they prepared was excellent and cleaner than what we could get in the local Chinese or Tibetan teahouses.

  I didn’t linger long at the table and was able to sneak out before the end of the meal and have a long conversation with a Tibetan monk I found in a side-street market. He confirmed what was already evident—that here, as in many other parts of Qinghai, the Chinese had moved in “like bugs.” He asked me if I had any pictures of the Dalai Lama, but I didn’t.

  Happy at having entered Tibetan soil at last, I watched the straight road slip by as we headed south for Yushu, formerly Jeykundo, alias rGal-kun-mdo, the Chinese district capital of what had been until 1957 the ancient kingdom of Nangchen. Ling was insistent that we should sleep that night at Madoi, but we still had very far to go.

  As we left Gonghe the paved road gave way to dirt. In parts it was bordered by walls of dried mud that snaked for dozens of miles along each side of it, the remains of failed efforts by the Chinese in the more fanatical days of Chairman M
ao to fence in and settle the elusive nomadic inhabitants of Qinghai.

  The road narrowed just as we were struck by the first of many hailstorms. In what seemed a matter of minutes the clear blue sky clouded up and suddenly it hailed so hard that it was difficult to see, while our vehicle sounded like a steel drum pelted with gravel. In no time the green-brown plateau turned a wintry white, and the hills became snow-covered mountains. Why does it hail so much on the roof of the world? Meteorologists have yet to come up with an answer. What is certain, though, is that hailstorms in Tibet are fearful affairs, wiping out entire herds of yak, and killing humans caught away from their tents, their only protection on the high plateau. Hail is so feared that the holiest and most sought-after monks and shamans in Tibet are the sacred “hail men,” who are supposed to be able to ward off hailstorms. Hailstones the size of eggs are frequent, as a result of the considerable variations in temperature at these high altitudes.

  “Bitten once by a snake, for ten years afraid of a rope” was the Chinese proverb that Ling thrust at me when I explained how dangerous such hailstorms could be. I told him of a hair-raising experience I had survived in southeastern Tibet. I had been in the front seat of a truck when it had started to hail so hard that the surrounding mountains became instantly white. Then for some reason the accumulated loose hail began to slide down the mountain slopes in an avalanche of mud that swept away the road in front of us. The driver slammed on the brakes but hit the mud at the very moment another mud slide hit the rear of our truck. Those in the back jumped out, among them a Tibetan woman. It was pelting hail as I ran from the truck’s cabin. The hills and mountains around us were all running, crashing down in a thousand rivulets. Looking up we could see large hailstones and rocks bounding down at us. We all ran out to the flat dry bed of a nearby stream, thinking that we would be safe there. No sooner had we reached the streambed, however, than a crashing sound made us look around to see a three-foot wall of liquid mud carrying bushes before it as it rushed toward us. We had just enough time to dodge the wave and scramble up a mound to which the Tibetan woman had directed us before the steeper hillsides around us collapsed into the raging, mud-filled torrent. Protecting ourselves from the hail as well as we could, we saw our truck buried and the road disappear entirely. We were fortunate not to have perished in the disaster. It took us three days’ walking to get away from where we were stranded, and I learned later that the road was down for two years afterward.

  There was no question about it. I was afraid of the proverbial rope, and more than concerned as the hailstorm seemed to be traveling along with us. We were now in sight of the Amne Machin range. Jagged gray rocks soared nineteen thousand feet above sea level, supporting sparse snowfields. According to the nineteenth-century French missionary Huc, the Goloks who make their home here were given to eating the hearts of their victims; they were Buddhists, but with “a divinity of banditry.” Huc and his companion Gabet had set out from Xining to Lhasa in 1845 with the Chinese emperor’s ambassador and three hundred soldiers in escort. But they dared not take the direct route across the Amne Machin range for which we were headed. They chose instead to travel west to avoid the Goloks, who had, the preceding year, attacked an official caravan traveling up from Lhasa and kidnapped and killed an emissary of the Dalai Lama.

  So much has been said about the Goloks as bandits and also as patriots that I am always intrigued upon meeting them, as if something in their faces will explain their reputation.

  In all my journeys I myself have been robbed only once, and in rather odd circumstances. I wasn’t attacked so much as inspected. My camp was simply invaded by Khamba guerrillas—too many to oppose—and they, with smiles on their faces, opened and examined my trunks, taking what they saw fit. They stopped just short of thanking me, and they were polite enough, besides, to give me a sort of Surgeon General’s Warning “that any resistance would cause serious injury.” I felt that the only proper thing to do was to collaborate and open my own bags for their picking.

  This episode left me with a strange impression, one very different from the ersatz violence of television to which I had become accustomed. Crooks, I now knew, didn’t necessarily look like crooks, but were generally normal people whose profession simply differs a little bit from the norm. In southern India, there are criminal tribes whose entire livelihood is theft. During the days of empire, the British were forced to create special courts for them, as they could not be judged by the general standard. Isolated in their mountains, at the constant mercy of yak rustlers, the Goloks would be naturally wary of foreigners and seek from them the material possessions they had no other means of acquiring: guns and gold, pots and pans. I doubted, however, that their monks actually endorsed crime, in spite of the proven existence in Tibet of “criminal monks,” who went about doing everything upside down—eating excrement, engaging in violence, and so on—to hammer in the great precept of lamaism: “Life is an illusion of the senses and therefore meaningless; truth and the absolute lie beyond our human reach.”

  In my journeys I had met many of the fiercest Khamba fighters, men branded like the Goloks as criminals. For the most part they had been tall, ferociously handsome, and amiable people. By contrast the Goloks were not impressive. Short, with small round faces, they seemed banal, even harmless.

  It was nearing six o’clock when we drove into the first Chinese garrison inside Golok territory.

  The road was lined on both sides with one-story earth-brick stalls and shacks. While our drivers went to buy diesel fuel, I approached a group of Goloks on the side of the road. A young man with long hair stood beside a woman and two girls. As I talked to the man, one of the girls squealed with delight at the hair on the back of my hand. Laughing and amazed, she called her sister to come and see. I was one of those “dog-faced” barbarians she had heard about: a hairy monster, even though I didn’t have a beard. We all too often forget that European men are an exception among the people of the world, in that we are, indeed, hairy-faced. Today, Europeans are less conspicuous in Asia than they once were, with their huge and rather ugly thatches of hair around their mouths—the dog faces that shocked and disgusted so many Asians. To them, only our women were human-looking, in spite of their funny, pointed noses.

  “You should not speak to these people, Mr. Psl,” Ling warned me as I joined him in a teahouse. “They are ignorant, dangerous, and cannot be trusted.” At first I thought that he said this because of the Goloks’ reputation, but soon I discovered that his wariness extended to all Tibetans.

  It was late when we got back to the cars and began our climb into the heart of the Amne Machin range, so little known that in 1949 an American pilot named Clark was able to persuade many geographers that it contained a peak higher than Everest. His conclusions were based on reports by pilots who had strayed there during the Second World War, but who had clearly erred in their altimeter readings.

  The Goloks, who had for so long been feared as bandits, were to become in many ways heroes in Tibet’s unsung struggle for independence. When Mao came to power in 1950, his first speech was to announce that China’s main duty was to “liberate” Formosa and Tibet. No one has ever quite understood whom he intended to liberate Tibet from. In those days there were only a handful of foreigners residing in the country, most of them missionaries settled on the borders of Kham and Sichuan. As for the Goloks, they had never been anything but their own masters. In fact, when fleeing the advancing Communists, a detachment of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese entered Golok territory in the eastern sector of the Amne Machin range and were ruthlessly cut to pieces. Likewise the People’s Liberation Army suffered terrible casualties when they first moved into the land of the Goloks. It took ten years and the massacre of thousands of tribesmen before the Chinese considered this area safe. In 1986, several tourist groups were even allowed to tour the range on horseback. Yet in September 1993, as mentioned, the Goloks distributed a massive number of leaflets calling for the expulsion of the Chinese and dem
onstrating that they were not reconciled to defeat, after all.

  * * *

  It was dark when we reached the foot of the 17,060-foot main pass through the mountains. In vain I tried to convince Ling that we should stop and sleep before pushing on for Madoi, which still lay far ahead. To drive by night amid the hail and the rainstorms could prove a very dangerous enterprise.

  He refused to listen, arguing that it was more dangerous still to stop in Golok country and that, in any case, we were expected by the police at Madoi, and they would send out after us if we failed to arrive as expected.

  As if to reinforce my argument, it suddenly began to rain so heavily that we could barely see beyond the hood of the car. Water washed over the road, and I was afraid that we might at any moment be engulfed by a landslide.

  Slowly, in the dark, under torrents of rain, we headed onto the upper reaches of the plateau, plowing our way through mud, our vision confined to the narrow beams of the headlights illuminating the wind-driven rain mixed with hail.

  It was close to midnight when, against all expectations, having barely escaped breaking down, we finally made it to the walls of the barracks at Madoi. Everyone was asleep, and it took a long while to find anyone to let us into the cell-like rooms of the local government guest house.

  Panting, we lay down in our sleeping bags on top of wooden beds like tables. We were exhausted from the lack of oxygen and from fourteen hours of bumping our way south. We had covered 280 miles—over half the distance between Xining and Yushu—a journey that would have taken fifteen days or more forty years ago.

  How I hated these sinister garrisons, perpetual reminders of our forcible collusion with the enemy. If only we could be without escort, or were allowed to have Tibetan escorts. A small consolation lay in thinking that we would soon find ourselves off the beaten track.

  My strategy was simple enough: We would try to go as far as we could by jeep, and then transfer to horses and follow the bed of the Mekong to its very end; this, in spite of the fact that our maps were vague and contradictory, and they all disagreed as to how far and by what course the roads extended.