Traveling with Chinese citizens in a Chinese vehicle, we ourselves became the enemy, allied with those who had killed his brothers, uncles, aunts, and children, and who had burned the libraries of his people’s monasteries.
It was going to be hard to persuade him that we were friends—even if we had no sympathy for China and disapproved of the invasion, were we not ourselves the spearhead of another invasion, with its devastating effect on his way of life?
Just by being here with our clothes, our cameras, and our money, we were the vanguard of an alternate lifestyle that has swept the globe and has stamped out many of the traditional customs of the people of Asia, in particular. A self-indulgent way of life, and so easy to join, all one has to do is shave one’s pigtails, buy a pair of designer blue jeans, a cheap T-shirt, black sunglasses, and racy-looking sneakers, and to start smoking cigarettes and drinking carbonated sodas. Eventually one would exchange one’s freedom for a job, any job, as long as it paid.
“Do you want Tibet to become a human zoo, to refuse all progress?” Jacques asked.
Although I never dared admit it, I had been tempted years ago by idealistic projects such as establishing ecological reserves in Amazonia and “knitting my own windmill.” In the comfort of my Paris flat, its central heating generated by nuclear power, I would often dream of the delights of going back to live in a lovely damp cave. How I wished to sleep on the skin of a bear I had killed without fear of being awakened by the telephone.
No, I was an idealist no more, and I knew that in penetrating the isolated world of the remotest inhabitants of Nangchen, even as a friend, my visit would be destructive. I knew that the Tibetans in the nineteenth century had been right to close their frontiers, for it was true that explorers, missionaries, and scholars were as much to be feared as soldiers, and all of them were emissaries of a different way of life that would make others doubt the validity of their own.
Today in Lhasa or Yushu, and even in remote places like our next stop, Zadoi, Tibetan youth in black sunglasses are wasting their time playing billiards and drinking Chinese-imported Coca-Cola. These handsome, clever boys, sent to town to join the local monasteries (the universities of Tibet), have become a major problem in Lhasa, in particular: having nothing productive to do, they form a large, uneducated, unstable population that may prove China’s best ally yet in obliterating Tibetan society and culture.
As we headed to the limits of explored territory, I could not help feeling that I was approaching the last frontier of two worlds. Here was the very last place on earth where two worlds and two civilizations are face-to-face. Everywhere else, in America, the Amazon, New Guinea, Africa, and Australia, the aborigines have lost out to the modern world. But somehow, desperately, I hoped that here in Tibet the natives would win, as they had in the past, vanquishing, against all probability, the most advanced civilizations. Had not Beijing, Rome, Babylon, and Byzantium, for all their splendor, might, and sophistication, been overrun by barbarians born in tents and yurts?
Could it be that in the last years of the twentieth century the spirit of those barbarians, the only force ever to challenge on a grand scale what we call civilization, will be forever obliterated? Or will they win out and once again bring to our decadent societies the dynamics of their reckless innocence?
One look at men like Lama Urgyen, the cathedral builder of Nangchen, one conversation with the strong, proud, and intelligent Khambas, and it is hard to believe that they will fall for the cheap glitter or the ideals of a Western world.
As the Khamba horseman turned and proudly rode away from our jeep, I secretly looked for a sign that an ongoing fight by his brothers and cousins, the last barbarians, was about to break out, and would once again shame what we call the civilized world.
* * *
Lulled by the roar of the engine, I dozed off, dreaming of the wild barbarians of my childhood tales—the Goths and Visigoths; the Heptalites, the mysterious “white Huns” described by Procope, the fifth-century Byzantine historian, as “barbarian in their manner but with human faces”; the Francs who invaded the Celts, a tribe considered by some to have come from the East; the Vandals who ended up in (V)Andalusia; then there was Attila and, later, in the year 1000, the Magyars who invaded the French Riviera, a rather sophisticated destination for barbarians, I thought. I was awakened when the jeep suddenly swerved and skidded sideways. Mud and water were flooding the road, confined within the rocky cliffs of a high, narrow gorge.
It was only five o’clock, but dark clouds smothered the sky. I knew there was no hope of our reaching Zadoi by daylight. I was worried because I recalled that the last fifty miles of road lay on a narrow shelf overlooking the upper Mekong, a dangerous and slippery ledge. I am generally not afraid of bad roads, or even of bad drivers. Ever since I became interested in the Himalayas, bad roads have been an integral part of all my expeditions. But why risk an accident? I decided after conferring with Jacques and Sebastian that we should stop before dark. Aside from the risk factor, experience has taught me that one should always set up camp well before nightfall.
Liquid mud is no help at all in securing tent pegs, so I became hopeful when I spotted a stone shelter ahead. Leading up to it, the road continued to deteriorate, and I was hardly surprised when we came upon a road gang out to repair the track. The men, mostly Tibetans, had sought shelter from the hail in their canvas tents by the roadside.
I asked the driver to stop. Ling wanted to know why, and I explained that I wanted to ask whether the road was this bad all the way to Zadoi, and where we might find shelter. The driver stopped, but as I opened the door Ling shouted frantically, “No, no, do not go out, these people are dangerous, they are all liars! We must go on!”
We were all surprised by this outburst. I was worried because our journey was only beginning, and I wondered what Ling would think of the rough muleteers we would have to hire at the end of the road. How would he react to the truly arrogant tribesmen? Only then did it occur to me that maybe Mr. Ling had no idea what lay ahead, or worse, had no intention of allowing us to strike out into nomad territory on horseback in search of the source of the Mekong.
Slipping and sliding for a long hour, we lurched across the muddy trail, looking back to make sure the other car was following. I was amazed by the calm professional manner of our driver, a man far more self-possessed than the excitable Ling. The driver spoke a few words of Amdo Tibetan, although he did not want Ling to know it.
It was practically dark when we reached the foot of a high gray rocky mountain where a row of barracks stood, set within a walled enclosure. The hail had abated, and although the ground was still white and soaked in patches, I had the driver stop. Again Ling began to protest as I got out to talk to a small crowd of Tibetans. There were nomads in great red fleecelined chubas (the traditional Tibetan toga-like garment), and with them a few official-looking men with assorted Chinese Army surplus clothes. As usual, it took some time before someone realized that I was actually speaking Tibetan. Tibetans are so certain that no foreigner can speak their language and are generally so surprised at our odd appearance (long noses and yellow eyes) that they never think of paying attention to what I am saying, convinced that they will not be able to understand. I have to repeat a phrase over and over before someone exclaims, “But he’s speaking Tibetan,” upon which they all lend an ear.
“Is the road as bad as this all the way to Zadoi?” I asked. “Will there be snow?” The men assured me that the road actually got much better a little farther on, at the foot of the pass, but that we were still a good four or five hours from our destination.
As I spoke, Ling got out of the jeep and stood beside me, glaring and repeating angrily in his broken English, “These people cannot be trusted.”
“Maybe we should try to spend the night here,” I suggested, at which Ling again completely lost control of himself. “No, no,” he said, “these people will steal, we must go on.” I tried to reason with him about the danger of driving over the pa
ss in the dark, along the cliffs overlooking the Mekong. Once again he argued that we were “not allowed to stop in any place not protected by the Public Security Bureau,” adding that at Yushu they would have phoned (via satellite) the police of the Zadoi garrison to inform them of our imminent arrival.
When the Tibetans explained that there was no room for us to stay in the old barracks, I rather foolishly agreed to hurry on and try to cross the high pass before nightfall.
At least the Tibetans had been right: After a few miles the road improved and appeared newly repaired. We began to rise quickly, bend after bend, through the pass. Below us the scenery opened up, revealing vistas of distant great peaks in a chaos of snow-covered ranges. We were approaching the southern edge of the high flat plateau of Qinghai, where the ravined, tormented mountains that form eastern Tibet begin their thousand-mile stretch to the south. This web of ranges separates isolated valleys that go on to become the parallel, deeper valleys of the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Salween Rivers as they make their way south across Tibet.
Our satellite map showed us clearly the high-level plateau, studded, like a glacier, with gigantic fragments of many mountains and cut by deep gorges—the inaccessible home of the Khambas.
In spite of the late hour, when the clouds cleared, it became light again, a reminder that in Tibet the sun doesn’t usually set until 10 P.M. This oddity is a result not of its northern latitude but of a “democratic” decree that the whole of China should keep time by the clocks in Beijing, regardless of the fact that the country spans four time zones.
When we reached the summit of the pass, at over sixteen thousand feet, before us stretched a horizon that early explorers called “a frightful desolation.” A crowd of jagged peaks hiding and peering out from behind one another packed in the full 360 degrees of the compass, a true petrified ocean out to drown us in sinister gray waves crested with white snow.
I suppose this stark scene reflected what was in my heart as much as it did a daunting landscape. On this, the eve of our third horrible day bumping across Qinghai, I felt tired and depressed. Depressed because Ling had become so unpleasant; depressed because of the menacing thought that our thrust to the Mekong might prove an absurd comedy if we were beaten to the source; depressed because now, seen from these heights, the very motivation for this journey appeared picayune. What on earth was I doing here, I who had never really been interested in the sources of rivers? I hated traveling by jeep and longed secretly for my past expeditions, when I had traveled on foot alone or in the company of a monk or with some other Tibetan with whom to share the arid beauty of the rugged land. Granted, I found Sebastian good company—an Etonian, he was cultured and pleasant and as keen as I was about Tibet. Jacques, although a bit dour, was fascinating to talk to for his detached and analytical frame of mind. Yet what was I really hoping to achieve in Tibet without the company of so much as one Tibetan?
I took pleasure in seeing myself as some sort of romantic adventurer in the tradition of Hodgson and Moorcroft. I had lived so long in the shadow of those semimythical characters, on adventures similar to theirs in remote, romantic areas of Tibet reached only by caravans. Now, I was a little bit upset at being confined to a short-wheelbase Mitsubishi Pájaro four-wheel-drive motor vehicle, in the company of four Chinese plainclothes police officers-cum-guides, an Irishman, and a doctor of medicine and cinematography. I was, to say the least, far removed from my romantic ideals.
Where was the man of thirty years before, his hair blowing in the wind (I am now balding), struggling alone behind a recalcitrant yak, and headed for the unknown on a trail so narrow as to be almost unnegotiable? Had I changed or had Tibet?
Here in the same pass the year before I had seen a wolf stalk a flock of sheep in the snow. Today the rocks were wet and deserted as they tumbled down into a stony vale, beyond which, somewhere before us, bordered by rocks, flowed the Mekong.
Slowly, as we began to sway around endless hairpin turns, darkness descended until it was practically night when we came upon the edge of the great river. Hardly visible, a black expanse in the dark night, yet moving, it flowed swiftly, mysteriously, not with a roar, but with a rustle that broke in swirling twirls upon the surface—tokens of great strength, of great depth, that spoke of urgency, as the water ran past us in the dark on its long, long road to the sea.
If there is magic in words, there is mystery in names. A name lights up with a thousand impressions. As I looked upon the dark waters, my mind was flooded with visions of war. Ever since I was young the word Mekong had evoked in my mind sampans bristling with guns, water clogged with dead bodies, marshes hiding snipers, and banks torn by mortar shells.
More than anything, great rivers are associated with power, and power with violence, the decline and fall of those civilizations born of the abundance of water that floods and fertilizes the fields. The ruins of Babylon and Karnak, the lands of the pharaohs and tyrants whose temples, forts, and wealth sooner or later inspired the envy and strife that would topple them. Thus, over centuries, the same waters that brought life and wealth would drown the victims of their own greed.
6
GOLDEN PRISONS
More than any other river in the world, the Mekong has a variety of cultures flourishing upon its banks. Today it crosses seven countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Chinese Yunnan, Tibet, and, of course, lower Qinghai—the kingdom of Nangchen.
The great delta of the Mekong in Vietnam has nine branches, the nine dragons of the river according to local tradition. Every year these branches pour hundreds of thousands of tons of alluvial sand into the sea, some of which hails from the distant plateau of Nangchen. Every year the Mekong adds between 200 and 330 feet more land to Vietnam, extending its course that much farther into the South China Sea. The great delta region is one of the most fertile in Asia, as it benefits from a tropical climate reaching south of the tenth degree of latitude—as far south as the southern tip of India or the Panama Canal.
Flowing from north to south the Mekong experiences a great variety of climatic zones, from the Arctic cold of the high Tibetan plateau where we stood, right down to the sweltering tropics of southern Vietnam.
A journey up the Mekong to Nangchen is impossible for both geographical and political reasons.
In the delta—peaceful at last after five decades of war—the nine dragons are easy to navigate, slipping by the protruding wrecks of sunken vessels, monuments to the tragic past. The nine branches unite as they enter Cambodia, some 150 miles from the sea. The Mekong then flows 220 miles through the heart of Cambodia, just now emerging from the bloody rule of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. In Cambodia the Mekong leads right to the capital, Phnom Penh, once the most beautiful and charming of the French colonial towns.
In 1975, refugees fleeing the Communists brought its population to a teeming two million. A few months later Pol Pot’s guerrillas entered the town and the massacre began. The entire population was ordered to leave to work the land as farmers. Intellectuals and those who simply happened to own reading glasses, along with those who did not evacuate the city fast enough, were murdered on the spot. The city became a ghost town reeking of decomposed bodies. Over a sixth of the population of Cambodia died in the following years, many of their bodies swept away by the Mekong.
Phnom Penh is built where the river leading to the Tonle Sap enters the Mekong from the north. The Tonle Sap is a huge inland lake whose outlet flows south for about sixty miles before reaching the Mekong at Phnom Penh during the dry season. During the rainy season, when the Mekong is high, this river reverses its course, flowing north to fill up the lake. Few rivers I am aware of flow in two directions, and in many ways this two-way natural canal is an integral part of the Mekong River. Ankor Wat, the ancient capital of the Khmer kingdom, lies just north of the Tonle Sap. After flowing peacefully across Cambodia, the Mekong enters southern Laos at the foot of the Khone falls, the first serious obstacle for ships heading north. Thousands of tons of water roar ov
er huge gray boulders falling down steps fifteen feet high like surf breaking upon a rocky beach.
Past this closed door the waters of the Mekong become the official border between Thailand and Laos for hundreds of miles. In this stretch of river one finds a frightening but harmless dragon, the monstrous Pla Buk, a giant catfish, which can grow to be fully ten feet long and weigh up to 550 pounds. Today it is the largest freshwater fish in the world, since the extinction of its cousin, the even greater European catfish, the Silure of the Danube.
In Laos, the Mekong flows past the land’s new capital, Vientiane, where more rapids are encountered. Leaving the Thai frontier briefly, the Mekong cuts into northern Laos to flow between jungle-covered hillocks past the ancient royal capital of Louangphrabang, a sleepy town whose old Buddhist temples and stupas are located on a bluff above the great river. Farther north the Mekong again becomes the border between Thailand and Laos before forming the extreme eastern frontier of Burma, with Laos along the eastern edge of the infamous Golden Triangle. Here the Mekong is an ally to the opium trade, a witness to violence on both sides. After this the Mekong enters Yunnan, today a province of China, and the river takes on its Chinese name of Lancang.
In Yunnan the river banks are inhabited by various colorful hill tribes whose languages are related to Tibetan. It is in Yunnan that one first encounters the narrow gorge through which the Mekong has flowed for approximately six hundred miles, receiving very little water from tributaries. This canal-like deep gorge crosses the whole of eastern Tibet, spanned here and there by terrifying chain-link swing bridges. Eventually it reaches Chamdo, the second-largest town in Tibet. Once a monastic city ruled by monks, Chamdo today is but a huge, bustling, ugly, polluted Chinese garrison, the headquarters of China’s eastern command and the key to the control of Tibet. At Chamdo the Mekong splits in two, the southern branch flowing past the monastery of Riwoche, and the longer, northern branch running up into Qinghai where it turns west, flowing past Nangchen Dzong before heading toward Zadoi.
The Last Barbarians Page 10