What made the fairs in Nangchen all the more spectacular were the horse races and other demonstrations of the agility of the local riders, not to speak of the stamina of the local breeds, which were the finest in Tibet.
It was the fabled Nangchen horse that as much as the Mekong had motivated my return to this kingdom. With childish pride I showed the horses in the bazaar to Sebastian and tried hard to persuade Jacques to appreciate their beauty.
“Note the small ears and fine manes,” I said, teaching my companions two of the characteristics marking horses “of blood” according to ancient Arab beliefs. Jacques seemed doubtful. More versed in human anatomy, he was, as he had admitted, a stranger to horses and basically afraid of them. On the other hand, Sebastian nodded in consent as I went over the finer points of the Nangchen horses before us. The thin legs, the hard oval feet, the delicate necks, the straight backs and, of course, the barrel chest that housed the enlarged lungs, a genetic evolution that adapted these horses to the roof of the world.
The Chinese hadn’t failed to appreciate the remarkable conformation of these beasts, which they called the “Yushu horse.” A year before I had read a detailed report prepared for the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing that began enthusiastically, but then led to a rather dim conclusion. “In spite of the excellent ratio of meat to bone of the Yushu horse,” it was deemed not a particularly desirable food item for modern China. Consequently, the report stated, the nomads should be encouraged to stop raising them in favor of yaks, which the Chinese considered a far more profitable beast for the motherland.
It is estimated that as many as five hundred thousand Khambas had preferred to die during the War of Kanting rather than give up their rifles and their right to carry their traditional silver-sheathed knives. It seemed to me unlikely that they would now give up their horses.
In 1993, with Caroline Puel, I had covered almost twenty-five hundred miles all over Nangchen trying to locate the best sub-breeds of the Nangchen horse. These we found to be raised in the district of Ghegi, close to the region where we were going in search of the source of the Mekong. The Ghegi do-ta, literally the stone horse of Ghegi, is distinguished for being markedly taller and more robust than the rest.
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It was ten o’clock when we set out for Zadoi. Both jeeps were packed, the roof racks piled high with our mess and kitchen tents, pots and pans and food. Sebastian, Jacques, Ling, the driver, and I rode together in the lead vehicle; the cook and the second driver followed behind. Despite exhaustion from two rough days on the road we tried our best to face this third day in good spirits. Just outside of Yushu we reached a broad valley called Ba thang, or “plain of the Ba,” the Tibetan tents of black yak hair. There are many Ba thangs in Tibet, of which one is a large town in Kham. The Tibetans are not terribly creative when it comes to names: All major rivers are called the Tsang-po—“the clear ones”—when not simply called chu, which means both “river” and “water,” or dam chu, meaning “marshy river.”
Before us lay a broad green valley hedged in by majestic mountains crested with rocky pinnacles. One could see for miles across this immense, luxurious lawn peppered with large black rectangular tents, each accompanied by a smaller white one—the private tent reserved for the one son in each family whose life had been dedicated to religion and the study of the Tibetan canon. These would-be young monks are attached to a monastery, but spend a lot of time at home with their families sleeping in their private little tents. We now began driving down into the rich valley, noting along the way that the tents were set about two miles apart. All these tents belonged to the same tribe—one of the twenty-five that make up the kingdom of Nangchen. Each tribe keeps to its own particular valleys in a well-defined territory divided roughly into winter and summer pastures. The summer pastures are generally higher up than the winter pastures, though not always. In certain places the snow melts more quickly at higher altitudes because of the strength of the sun; as a result, sometimes in winter there is grass high up where the snow and ice have melted, while down in the valley the ground remains frozen under a blanket of snow.
Depending on the lay of the land, the size of their pastures, and the abundance of grass, the nomads may have to move their tents up to ten times a year. Rarely are two tents seen side by side, and, all told, the life of the yak herder is a lonely one centered very much on the family, with little outside social interaction.
The Ba is no ordinary tent but rather the Tibetan counterpart to the Mongol yurt. While the yurt is a white, very warm but heavy and cumbersome felt tent that is stretched across a lattice of willow stakes, the Tibetan Ba is much lighter and made of twelve-inch strips of loosely woven yak hair, sewn together side by side. The tents vary in size and shape from one tribe to the next, but are generally rectangular. Here, near Jeykundo, they are large, measuring twenty-six by thirty-three feet. Only two wooden posts support the tent on the inside, while between six and twelve posts hold up the sides and corners of the tent from the outside. Ropes of braided yak hair, alternating with stronger ropes of yak sinew, are run from the tent over the top of the outside poles and then down to the ground, resulting in tents that look like gigantic black spiders.
Softening this image, many of the support ropes of the tents we saw were festooned with white prayer flags of cotton cloth, printed with mantras and holy images.
To enter a nomad tent is a privilege that can be earned only on special invitation, as each tent is guarded by at least two and as many as four ferocious mastiffs. The immense popularity in the West of Tibetan lapdogs—the Lhasa apso and shih tzu, or kyi-tsu (which, incidentally, just means “small dog” in Tibetan)—makes one forget that Tibet is primarily the home of large guard dogs. Some Tibetan mastiffs are truly enormous, and nearly all are trained to be vicious. Leashed to long steel chains by day, they guard their owner’s tent and his cattle. Trained to attack strangers, wolves, snow leopards, and bears, many are so wild that even their owners can barely enter their tents, having to throw the rogues food to be able to slip by unmolested.
Upon entering a nomad’s tent for the first time, I was surprised to discover how bright it was inside, as sunlight percolates through the loose weave of the yak-hair cloth. For some strange reason, maybe due to smoke black or capillarity, rain and snow do not come through the translucent material. In spite of their flimsy, drafty appearance, the tents are surprisingly warm, as their black color absorbs solar heat by day, and a yak dung fire lit in a clay hearth helps heat them by night. The hearth is set to the left as one enters the tent. Hearths in Tibet are considered the doors to the earth and the underworld, while the door to the sky is the chimney, or rather slit, in the tent’s roof between the two inner poles. This opening can be closed when it rains or snows by letting down flaps of cloth attached to the tent.
Each tent—poles, ropes, and yak-hair strips—weighs some five hundred pounds, and it takes two yaks to carry one tent. Every year the nomads weave three new foot-wide strips of yak hair, each strip as long as the tent is wide. These three strips of cloth are then sewn onto the back edge of the tent, while three old and worn strips on the front of the tent are cut off. Thus, while it may take ten years or so for all the tent’s strips to be replaced, the constant renewal assures that the tents last indefinitely, all the while remaining in good repair. It is bewildering to think that the tents one sees in Nangchen are the very same that one might have seen hundreds or even a thousand years ago.
I wanted to show Jacques one of these architectural wonders, but at my suggestion that we stop, Ling became livid and started mumbling something about not talking to the local people, adding that it was, in fact, forbidden! Instead we stopped in a barren spot to have a rather dismal lunch of cheese and bread that we had picked up in Yushu.
It took us two hours to cross the great grassy valley before we found ourselves climbing once again up a steep pass. Just as we reached the summit, marked by sticks flying red and white prayer flags stuck into a cairn of stones
, the sky suddenly darkened and it began to hail. In an instant the mountains were white and it seemed that winter had surprised us, but shortly afterward the sun reappeared and everything began to melt, causing rushes of water to run down the dirt trail.
On the other side of the pass we descended into yet another broad valley hemmed in by great hills and mountains. In the middle of the valley the trail split in two, one branch turning south leading to Nangchen Dzong some 190 miles away. Dzong means “fort” in Tibetan and was the word used to designate a large stronghold of the kings of Nangchen. Today, Nangchen Dzong is surrounded by Chinese army barracks. Once a mere village, it has become a small town and the new capital of the region, as the old royal campsite of Nangchen Gar, the true capital, is too remote and inaccessible.
There is a certain amount of controversy as to the exact meaning of Nangchen. One etymology has it as “many faithful” or “land of great faith.” Whatever the case, there were, at one time, seventy-two monasteries in Nangchen, which is a large number if one believes the old estimates of Nangchen’s population. Today the total population is estimated by the Chinese to be 250,000, of which 200,000 are nomads. There are no precise early figures, although in the 1930s one estimate fixed the population of the nomad tribes at 12,133 families, or 71,410 souls. This figure was recorded by Ma Ho-t’ien, a Chinese who accompanied the Panchen Lama on his journey back to Tibet from China, a journey on which the Panchen Lama died. It seems Ma Ho-t’ien received his census figures from a Chinese resident of Jeykundo, whose connections to the nomad chiefs and the king of Nangchen were tenuous at best.
A few hours south of the split in the trail lies a large monastery of the Gelug-pa sect, which is today home to nearly one thousand monks, making it the most populated monastery in Tibet, the large monasteries of Lhasa having been disbanded in 1959. According to the abbot, the monastery in question had had close to three thousand monks in years past.
The monastery, like so many others in Nangchen, appears to have been air-dropped into open pastures at the edge of the foothills of the large mountains looming above it. The monks’ assembly halls are the only rigid structures of the high plateau and are unexpected monuments to the faith, and to the architectural ability of the nomads, who themselves have never lived in anything but yak-hair tents. These monasteries are the only anchors of the nomadic tribes and in them one finds tangible evidence of the herders’ wealth, a wealth that has increased now that the Chinese purchase much of Tibet’s beef, mutton, and wool.
The present abbot of the large Gelug-pa monastery, a man in his early fifties, is a cathedral builder, a true heir to the abbots of the Middle Ages. He has entirely rebuilt his monastery, which was completely destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army. Starting in 1984, the year in which Tibetan monks were once again allowed to practice their faith and build or restore their monasteries, the lama collected vast sums of money from the nomads; he then hired Chinese coolies, along with architects and engineers, and began to rebuild with an eye to the future. Some of the buildings are made of the dry earth bricks that appear all across Tibet, but others are of steel-reinforced concrete, chosen for a longer life, as they are both fireproof and earthquake safe. The reinforced-concrete beams are sculpted in true Tibetan style with flower designs intertwined with dragons that are lacquered and gilt. The lama hopes to have some fifteen hundred to two thousand monks soon.
More than anyone I met, the Gelug-pa abbot symbolized the cunning, endurance, and dynamism of Tibetans, who adapt overnight to new customs and techniques while preserving unspoiled their character and culture. It is this versatility that is the hallmark of the people of Tibet, a land where the young are admired and encouraged, and, at an early age, given both political and economic responsibility. In this respect, Tibet is the opposite of China, where ancestor worship and reverence for the elderly has long bred a slow-moving traditionalist society. The earliest Chinese chronicles mentioning Tibet expressed shock at the Tibetans’ unusual respect and admiration for the young.
In Tibet, when a young man marries he takes over outright his father’s estate and his father’s responsibilities. We in the West, as heirs to an agricultural tradition in which power and money rest in the hands of the old, have a lot to learn from Tibet. Ironically, we too seem to worship youth in our magazines and movies and in the world of fashion, yet most people still have to wait until they are well into middle age before they can inherit and/or play a significant role in politics or business.
The Tibetan custom of favoring youth no doubt comes from the ancient hunter-gatherer tradition. Around the world tribes that hunt for a living reward skill and speed—the virtues of youth—and consider them more useful than wisdom and experience.
As we drove on I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the advent of agriculture hadn’t been such a good thing for humanity, after all.
There are two ways of looking at agriculture. Some believe it was a great step forward for humanity because, with the planting of crops, one could support a larger population on a smaller territory—a dubious blessing that led to crowding, eventually overpopulation, and, in the case of a crop failure, famine.
I am among those who believe that stable agriculture brought about worse evils still, among them the universal and often ruthless exploitation of farmers worldwide by those who seized control of the farmland.
At best, farming was tedious and boring for a species that had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers. Humans were long accustomed to roaming free and putting to use their wits and physical skill in the exciting pursuit of something to eat—in the course of which they felt challenged, and developed a genetic loathing for routines and immobility.
One doesn’t need 20/20 vision to watch leeks grow, nor does it require much intelligence or wit to fatten a pig or, for that matter, to milk a Dri. It seems that what we call progress has been achieved by exchanging freedom for comfort, excitement for security, and intelligence for diligence.
The Tibetan nomads of Nangchen, though they are herders, still hunt for a living and need all their wits about them to survive in the high-altitude tundra. To be smart and quick, fast and keen, young and alert, rather than old and wise, are the virtues they most need to survive.
A real man does not live in comfort.
A goat does not dwell on level plains.
So goes a popular Tibetan saying, and anyone who has traveled in Tibet knows that comfort is unknown except, to a limited extent, in Lhasa.
Those who love not comfort, can do a thousand deeds.
Those who cannot love hardship, cannot do one deed.
This is another of the Tibetan proverbs collected by missionary Marion Duncan, who lived in Kham from 1921 to 1936.
Ever since I first explored remote Tibetan regions thirty-seven years ago, I have been struck by how quick and clever the people are, how keen and enthusiastic, how much smarter they seem compared to the slow and stolid farmers of central France, not to mention the affectless peasants of India. But more surprising—even a little bit aggravating—I have encountered many young Tibetans who seemed to be smarter than I. What was I to make of that? Were we in the West not an “advanced people”? Weren’t primitive people supposed to be “backward”?
Many would argue that intelligence is inherited—genetically determined. Others claim that environmental factors play a role in it. I decline to enter the fray here, but one thing I am sure of is that there has not been a major biological mutation in man for thousands of years. This means that Stone Age man was certainly every bit as intelligent as we are in the twentieth century. As to the effect of acculturation on the sharpening of our intelligence, Stone Age man, like the nomads of Nangchen, lived in a world where skill and wit were essential for survival. How much skill and wit is needed to serve hamburgers and French fries with medium Cokes? Today many of our daily work activities are pathetically simple, and if one adds to the equation an average of five hours of mediocre television, it is hardly surprisi
ng that our innate powers of reasoning should compare unfavorably with those of our oldest ancestors.
The streetwise children of our flourishing ghettoes are perhaps our last hope. Living by their wits and on their own, they have to be sharper and smarter than the office clerk or the farmhand.
But of course we aren’t allowed to say such things. To be judgmental is forbidden, and it is taboo to insinuate disparities in intelligence levels among people of different races and cultures. Why? The answer, again, is found in the West, where skill and intelligence are more feared than appreciated. In an overpopulated world, discipline and homogeneity are virtues, and the innovations of the mind and the unpredictability of the independent thinker are thought to be disruptive and fearful.
In short, there is nothing organized society fears more than the intrusion of smart, carefree, gutsy, horseback-riding “barbarians” of the sort who have come down from the central Asian highlands for the last six thousand years to shake up the sedentary “civilizations” of China, India, and Europe in wave after wave of conquest. All these so-called barbarians came either from Nangchen or from similar adjacent pastoral regions of Tibet and Mongolia.
While I harangued Jacques and Sebastian with my theories on native intelligence, I was unaware of a lone handsome Khamba riding on the open plain, a gun on his shoulder, a silver knife in his belt, eyeing our vehicle with hatred and suspicion. Our four-wheel-drive jeep was a symbol of China’s domination of his land, a reminder to all that his people had lost a war for the first time in their history.
The Last Barbarians Page 9