Jacques was not impressed by Tibetans. A doctor, he was almost Victorian in his aversion to dirt, which in our low warmer lands is equated with bacteria and disease. Because Tibet is so high, both the cold and the ultraviolet rays act as a natural sterilizer, killing most bacteria. As a result the people don’t have to wash to be clean, and indeed they often don’t. The result is that most Tibetans are dirty, yet healthy, and therefore cleaner than they look. Of course there are exceptions. A well-scrubbed Tibetan maiden, her shiny pigtails anointed with fresh yak butter, is a true pleasure to behold, with rosy cheeks and clear white skin. The generally darker appearance of the Tibetan is, in fact, due to sunburn and plain grime: their legs and other parts of the body not exposed to sunlight are surprisingly white in contrast to the skin of most Asians. Fair ladies go to great trouble to escape being suntanned by covering their faces with a mixture of water and ground burnt goat’s horn, a black paste that makes a hideous mask, to which can be glued dabs of wool. Thus one occasionally meets hairy black monsters, wholly unrecognizable as pretty ladies just taking care of their complexion.
* * *
Three men alone, bumping our way hour after hour on the road to Yushu, we inevitably gravitated to women as one of our favorite subjects. Ling, unlike my previous QMA guide, was not much of a ladies’ man. That notwithstanding, when it comes to talking about women, the Chinese are very much like the French. Perhaps this is no coincidence that the Chinese and the French also share a passion for food and especially for talking about it. Sensuality in China, as in France, is as much in the realm of the mind as it is in the realm of the flesh. It was not until Rousseau, with his back-to-nature ideas (combined with puritanism), that wit was separated from love, and love was reduced all too often to just plain sex.
The Tibetans also have a humorous approach to love, in which flirtation is seen as a game of wits. As is common in several Asian cultures, girls and boys will congregate in opposing teams to exchange teases in song or verse. The boy or girl with the wittiest repartee is considered the most seductive.
“Even Great Lamas have fleas” is a popular Tibetan proverb, to which one might add that some are bitten by the bug of love. The libertine sixth Dalai Lama, for instance, is famous for his attempts to reconcile in verse his spiritual calling with his powerful attraction to young maidens:
If I unite with the heart of a maiden
The religious merit of my life will end,
If I turn to the hermit’s cave
I will go contrary to the maiden’s heart.
In the end, the maidens had his attentions at night, and the monastery during the day. He seems to have managed his double calling quite well until he was murdered by an invading Mongol force in 1706, leaving to history a collection of his naughty love songs.
Lamaists are extremely tolerant, and the sixth Dalai Lama is revered today as much as, if not more than, his chaste brothers in reincarnation. Of course one should know that some Tibetans actually strive to perfect the sexual orgasm, in the belief that it is the best attainable approximation to nirvana. All this, of course, is difficult to understand for those of us of the Western religions, in which sensuality has little or no role to play.
Can we truly hope to understand a world as far removed from ours as the world of Tibet? For years I believed that I understood the Tibetans, and yet on this journey I began to appreciate for the first time how little I actually knew of the manner in which they perceive us as foreigners.
Whether in the case of the American Indian of the Wild West, the inhabitants of New Guinea, or the Tibetans confronted by the Chinese, the reactions of invaded peoples seem historically to have certain basic similarities. Faced by a culture with superior technology, whose objectives (gold, land) are incomprehensible to them, the indigenous population can do nothing to avoid being overrun and destroyed.
In general, the foreigners are welcomed initially, but when their true purposes become evident, it is too late and the native high priests and aristocracy are either killed or exiled if they object. Deprived of spiritual and political leadership, demoralized at having lost their pride and identity, the victims often abandon themselves to alcohol. Thus many once-brilliant people become despondent and “ignorant fatalists, resigned to their plight,” as American Indians are often described. Much of Tibet is now at the beginning of this funeral process. Their leaders in exile, forced to work for the Chinese, many central Tibetans are beginning to have the resigned and hopeless look of the downtrodden American Indian.
* * *
Such thoughts assailed my mind as we drove across seemingly endless grass-covered valleys running between low hills, occasionally cut by slightly higher snow-crested ranges. Black tents surrounded by great antlike herds of yaks were all around.
We were nearing the heart of Qinghai, the remotest portion of the Tibetan highlands, the ultimate frontier, where the confrontation I have described is still in its first stages, as the Chinese meet the last of the free men of central Asia. Planning to go beyond where the Chinese had traveled, I hoped to be able to grasp the true spirit of a people yet unspoiled.
Night was falling as we crossed the sixteen-thousand-foot Karong pass and began a slow descent toward the upper Yangtze River. We were following a shallow torrent meandering in a broad green valley hedged in by mountains. Here at dusk the previous year I had witnessed a timeless tragic scene. A yellow wolf with gleaming golden eyes was stalking a delicate Tibetan gazelle. I saw both the wolf slinking along and the gazelle, ill at ease, unsure of where exactly the danger was that it could smell but couldn’t see. Predator and prey: the same drama played out today on the high plateau between Chinese and Tibetans.
I wasn’t so much concerned with who was right and who was wrong, not believing in the simplistic Manichean interpretation of history, as I was curious to know if perhaps today, as we approach the end of the millennium, the nomads might once again stand a chance of being victorious over “civilization,” as they always had been in the past.
I believe that the confrontation taking place on the highlands of Tibet is not just a battle between the Chinese and the Tibetans, but the last great confrontation of our planet between two totally different concepts of existence: a confrontation made all the more cruel by the fact that it is occurring at a time when many of us are questioning the ideals of modern society, and expressing serious doubts about the worth of what we call progress.
This century began with great hopes that science and technology would free man from ignorance, hunger, hard and inhuman labor, disease, and the horrors of war. But no such thing has happened, and some now, on the contrary, look to Tibet for an answer to the unkept promises of our technological society. Maybe in the ancient world of Tibet are to be found the solutions to our overworked, overpopulated, violent, and slum-riddled new world.
* * *
In setting out to find the source of the Mekong, I was treading in the footsteps of those early Victorian explorers I had once admired, men who had, in fact, been the unknowing spearheads of a destructive process. Could I escape repeating that process now?
Regardless of what happened ultimately, the irony was that I was enacting all over again the same ritual that had led to the results I deplored.
It was dark and hailing when we took the great Chinese bridge over the upper Yangtze and began our short but steep ascent toward Yushu.
At eleven o’clock, drenched to the bone, we reached the darkened hostel of the Public Security Bureau, a dismal cement building on the main thoroughfare of the sprawling Chinese garrison town.
Exhausted from the altitude, the three of us panted up two flights of stairs, hauling our bags to the cell-like rooms allotted to us. These were on either side of a smelly cement corridor lined with spittoons. We shuffled about this corridor by candlelight, the town’s electric generator having been shut down. I was surprised to hear French spoken down the hallway, and found the rooms occupied by a party of French and Chinese scholars, members of the team th
at since 1980 has been studying the geology of Tibet and the composition of the earth’s crust beneath the high plateau—a detailed, multidisciplinary research project involving experts in plate tectonics, paleomagneticisms, geo-chronology, and seismology. From the formidable work of this team, which has explored virtually all Tibet’s last “empty quarters,” we are beginning today to understand the mechanisms of the formation of the Tibetan highlands.
I paid a brief visit to the head of the mission, Professor Paul Tapponnier, and his American wife, Kevin Kling, the author of several beautiful picture books on Tibet. Dr. Tapponnier’s present mission was to study the upper basin of the Yangtze River. He informed us that to his knowledge no such study of our destination, the upper Mekong, had ever been undertaken. He had no news or details of the Sino-Japanese expedition, our potential rivals, whose exact purpose we had still not been able to determine.
That night, once again agitated by the lack of oxygen and exhausted by the long day’s drive, I went over our plans. So far, so good: our two vehicles seemed in excellent condition. Our weak points were that our provisions were both inadequate and insufficient. Our last chance to find anything like a can of pork, Chinese noodles, sugar, or rice, would be here in Yushu. I also hoped to be able to buy surplus Chinese saddles, as I still carried around last year’s scars, inflicted by Tibetan saddles, which, as elegant as they are to the eye, can be far from gentle to one’s seat.
Come what may, I wanted to avoid spending another night in Yushu, lest someone else reach the source of the Mekong before us.
5
THE KINGDOM OF NANGCHEN
The following morning Sebastian announced that I had snored. Jacques had a splitting headache again, and Ling thought it a good idea for us to stay in Yushu and enjoy ourselves. I drove everyone to the market to buy all we would need for the last leg before the Mekong.
Yushu is dominated by the impressive fortlike cluster of the Jeykundo monastery of the Sakya-pa sect, a sect whose monks converted the Mongols to lamaism in the early twelfth century. The Sakya-pa, although considered a “red hat” sect of the old school, is, in many ways, the most intellectual of all the sects of lamaism, each sect (and there are seventeen of them) having its own particular religious texts or commentaries. For the Sakya-pa, the text is the Sakya-kha-bum, or one hundred thousand words of Sakya.
Jeykundo (today’s Yushu) has always been an important, although remote, staging point for the few travelers to northeastern Tibet. The monastery and town stand at a major crossroads. Here the trail south from Xining splits in three: One branch goes southeast across the kingdoms of Kham to Chinese Sichuan, another due south across Nangchen to Chamdo, the capital of eastern Tibet, and a third trail heads out to the gold fields of the upper Yangtze and, from there, to the main trail leading from Xining to Lhasa across western Qinghai.
It is here at Jeykundo that many a past traveler has been turned back from entering central Tibet, among them the American Rockhill in 1889, and Mrs. Alexandra David-Neel in the 1920s. To my knowledge, no foreigner has ever succeeded in reaching Lhasa by this route. In fact, as we would discover the following year, the difficult northern route to Lhasa from Jeykundo, across both the Mekong and the upper Salween, remains unexplored to this day.
The only foreigners on record as having entered northeastern Tibet by crossing Nangchen are the Russian explorer and scientist P. K. Kosloff and Sir Eric Teichman, the remarkable British consul in Chengdu who, in 1913, single-handedly traveled among the warrior tribes of Kham and successfully pacified them, at least temporarily, in what has been described as one of the most daring and remarkable diplomatic feats of recent times.
A third person, the German Albert Tafel, gave us the only account we have of the political organization of the kingdom of Nangchen in a book he wrote of his travels in 1914. He himself, however, never traveled much beyond Jeykundo.
It was a day’s riding east of Jeykundo where, exactly a century before us, in June of 1894, Dutreuil de Rhins’s small caravan was attacked, leaving dead the man who first claimed to have discovered the source of the Mekong. De Rhins’s claim had been challenged by others, but no one had actually formally proven it right or wrong by checking it out on the spot. It was now up to us to settle the matter, as long as all went well and the Chinese authorities didn’t change their minds, and someone didn’t beat us to it.
* * *
As we sat down to yet another breakfast of raw dough in a little teahouse near the Yushu hostel, Ling mumbled that he had to go to the police to register us and obtain clearance for us to proceed to Zadoi, the remote garrison town set up to control the nomads of the upper Mekong basin.
The preceding year, thanks to the patronage of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, I had been among the very first foreigners allowed to travel to Zadoi and three other garrisons in the modern Chinese district of Yushu. My quest not only had led me to record the region’s finest thoroughbred horses, but also allowed me to make my first contact, however brief, with the various tribes of Nangchen.
I had used Yushu as a base, setting out systematically to the four corners of the ancient kingdom. Founded in the eighth century A.D., Nangchen had been brutally erased from the map in 1958 before any European had had the chance to explore its immense territory, which is populated by twenty-five distinct nomadic Khamba tribes.
The events that were to lead to the destruction of the kingdom began in 1950, when news reached the king in his mountain retreat of Nangchen Gar that a new breed of Chinese was coming—an army that neither looted nor stole but had come to right the wrongs of the ruthless opium-smuggling warlords.
Qinghai was then still dominated by the fearful Muslim warlord, General Ma Pu-feng, a man with dozens of concubines, who at the time was planning his escape, hoping to take with him his wives and a fortune in gold and jewelry. The king of Nangchen thought it appropriate to give his support to the apparently honest and sincere People’s Liberation Army and offered one thousand soldiers to help the Communists rid the land of the terrible General Ma.
Thus, like many other Khamba leaders, the leader of Nangchen had at first been in favor of the Communists and had hoped they would drive off the corrupt officials who had plagued the remote borderlands for dozens of years. How could a tribal king have understood the hypocrisy underlying the tactics of Mao Zedong? Mao had sworn to bring Tibet and its tribes to heel, to achieve what no other emperor—and no wall, however great—had ever achieved.
However, no sooner had General Ma’s ten DC-3 planes, loaded with his women and his gold, lifted off from the grassy airstrip at Xining, ultimately headed for Cairo (where the warlord would end his days in luxury), than the People’s Liberation Army turned around and trained their guns on the Khambas, whose leaders they branded as feudal tyrants. Calling for social reforms, which would have resulted in the overthrow of the local aristocracy and the destruction of Tibetan Buddhism, the fanatics of the PLA triggered a secret war to dominate Kham and unleashed the modern Chinese Army against the primitive Khamba cavalry. This six-year war, known as the War of Kanting, went largely unreported and lasted until 1959, when the Khambas, falling back on Lhasa, forced the Dalai Lama to back their struggle in a last-ditch, hopeless effort to oppose the Chinese.
To establish their control over Nangchen, the Chinese set up their headquarters in Yushu and began to fight their way west, deploying a smaller garrison in the Mekong River valley at Zadoi. The PLA pushed on, chasing the Khamba leaders before them into the deserted and uninhabitable wilds, where hundreds would die. Farther north up the Yangtze at Zaidoi (pronounced, in fact, “Driduo,” and not to be confused with Zadoi), the Communists established their second fort, and then, at Nangchen Dzong, site of the winter residence of the kings of Nangchen, they built a third. I visited all three of these garrisons in 1993, but I was forbidden to proceed farther west toward the source of the Mekong. Instead, I traveled back downstream to the ruins of the summer capital of the kings of Nangchen, a vast campsite beside a m
onastery and the kings’ former fortress. The spot is strategically set in a circle of towering mountains and is accessible only through a narrow pass, which was ideal for the traditional annual gathering of the leaders of the region’s twenty-five nomadic tribes, who would set up their black tents and pay homage to the king.
In the recently rebuilt monastery, behind closed doors, I was read pages from the history of the once-glorious kingdom. I was eager to learn more, but I had at the time already set my sights on the source of the Mekong.
* * *
After breakfast, we hurriedly set about combing the bazaar in our last chance to purchase anything we might still need for the road ahead. Yushu/Jeykundo has always been more than a simple crossroads: today, it is the main market town for two hundred thousand nomads, who sell the hides and wool of their sheep and yaks there and also the meat of their herds. More important still, it is host to the greatest of the great annual fairs of Kham. Each July the finest riders of the country flock to Jeykundo with their best mounts to compete in violent equestrian sports against the other tribes. During the three-week meet events range from straight horse racing to target shooting with guns and bows and arrows at full gallop. In the past, many of the tribes were locked in bitter blood feuds that led to murderous retaliations. No amount of money could bring to a halt the killings, as deep hatreds and quests for revenge were passed down from generation to generation. Yet, according to tradition, the great fairs of the land—Jeykundo’s in particular—came under the protection of a truce, which lasted for the duration of each fair. These annual gatherings were vital to the survival of the nomads in more ways than one—as markets where they could buy the grain they needed and as occasions for them to find wives from other often-antagonistic tribes, thereby avoiding the damage of inbreeding over the years. Girls were enticed by various traditions ranging from flirtatious singing competitions to outright wild girl chases on horseback. Abduction was also not unusual.
The Last Barbarians Page 8