I could not hope to fully grasp or visualize such a varied and amazing course, measured arbitrarily at between twenty-six hundred and three thousand miles in length. The truth of the matter is that no one has ever been allowed to follow the river along the whole of its course; so that meant that not only was the location of the source undetermined but so was the river’s actual length.
It is impossible to establish how many millions of people inhabit the Mekong basin, but it is certain that no other river in the world has such importance for so many different nations. Today the Mekong is seen by the United Nations as an axis for the economic development of Southeast Asia. Efforts are being made to try to regulate the construction of dams, both for hydraulic power and for irrigation, not to mention modifications to improve navigation along this lifeline to seven nations.
The specter of war in Cambodia, of strife between Laos and Thailand, the ancestral antagonism between China and Vietnam, and the political instability of Burma are all obstacles to a happy settlement of differences regarding how the waters of the lower Mekong should be used.
* * *
Night being upon us, I could find no alternative to Ling’s insistence that we proceed to Zadoi in the dark.
Thus we began to negotiate the deadly ledge above the mighty river, but it was so dark that we could no more see the river than guess where the dreaded void began, somewhere just beyond the sandy yellow strip of road lit by the high beams of our vehicles. Hugging the cliff, our wheels a few feet from disaster, we wound our way up the Mekong’s gorge. Occasionally the headlights caught the form of a lone juniper, a reminder that just enough humidity to support trees traveled up from distant Yunnan—over six hundred miles away. These junipers were surely the only ones to be found in the whole of southern Qinghai.
I had admired these trees with enthusiasm the year before. The sight of something tall and green, however scraggly, was extraordinary after the endless barren plateau. Even more delightful was the fact that they were junipers, sacred to Tibetans in so many ways. The oldest pre-Buddhist beliefs claim the juniper tree to be the abode and symbol of the goddess of fertility, number two after the divine goddess of fortune. Juniper twigs are the symbol of life, and to break a twig is symbolic of death; the incense of juniper is the perfume of the gods, and it is the juniper branches that are burnt as incense in all the monasteries of Tibet. In the Himalayas water mills rub juniper wood back and forth against rugged stones, resulting in a pulp that is then collected in cloth sieves and dried to form thin incense sticks that are burnt night and day in chapels all over Tibet.
When sacrificing a goat to the goddess of fortune in far western Tibet, the pagan priests hold a twig of juniper in their teeth. If the twig breaks, it is taken as the worst of omens. Juniper is all important as a symbol and as an ever-present fragrance all over Tibet, yet juniper forests are all too rare.
Ancient texts and stumps indicate that juniper forests might once have covered much of Tibet not so long ago. I have seen the reduced traces of such forests in Mustang and elsewhere—gnarled trees hundreds of years old, these “pencil cedars,” as some botanists call them, are slow-growing trees. Even in Beijing they are the favored trees of the ancient courtyards in palaces and monasteries. Some of these junipers are believed to be over five hundred years old.
In western Ladakh the beams and posts of houses are occasionally of juniper, forming twisted columns that recall the baroque homes of imaginary gnomes and elves. In treeless Zanskar a log of juniper is worth a fortune.
It soon began to hail, and once again we were peering anxiously into the dark, driving at a snail’s pace through slush as the hailstones hammered the roof of our vehicle. I prayed that we would not find ourselves at the bottom of the gorge before we had had a chance to make a run for the source of the river.
At eleven that evening we were all exhausted when we floundered down the muddy dark main street of what seemed like a frontier town of the American West. We had reached Zadoi, the last town on the map before the Mekong trailed off into the unknown.
There is no describing the agony of sleeping in a Chinese garrison. To begin, one drives through a portal dominated by the red star of the People’s Liberation Army. Be it in Madoi or Zadoi or Zaidoi, they are always the same—row upon row of one-story barracks made up of stable-like blocks of one-window, one-door cells, the basic housing unit that serves equally ill as a home for one Chinese family, a three-bed bedroom for passing travelers, or a four-bed barrack for local occupation troops. The roofs are of machine-made dirty red tiles, the walls of whitewashed adobe, the floors of the same rough planks that make up the beds upon which one lays one’s sleeping bag.
All this would not be so sinister were it not for the dirt: the dusty floors, the spit-stained walls, the broken doors that won’t shut and then won’t open, and last but not least, the all-pervading smell of the garrison toilet—a beast whose reputation is, thank God, too well established to need description here. As if all this weren’t enough, one must add the invariably cross Chinese commissars who run these prison-like camps.
We were too exhausted by our marathon across Qinghai to bother to light the yak dung that lay waiting in a tin can stove in our room.
I awoke the next morning to note through the dirty windows that it was gray outside. Having at last reached Zadoi, the end of the road, almost, I went over our next step with Sebastian and Jacques. We would seek to encounter Tibetans, monks or laymen, in the hopes of finding one or two to accompany us. Their immediate mission would be to hire horses to carry us on up the river.
My satellite map showed the dotted line of the Mekong ending some 125 to 155 miles away. I knew, however, that we should count on a 190-mile ride, approximately, as we could not hope to follow the river through all the gorges it must take.
This meant that we were faced with between eight and ten days’ riding. After yet another dismal breakfast, I mustered my optimism and decided we should set off to the local monasteries because monks, I explained, are the best guides and companions. Free of family obligations, generally erudite and moral, they had in the past proven to be reliable and pleasant company.
Finding a monk seemed easy—search for a monastery. There were two near Zadoi, and it was their presence that had determined the establishment of the Chinese garrison in the area, for before the occupation there had been neither town nor hamlet in the vicinity. We were now in the heart of the Ghegi district, the pastoral homeland of the Ghegi tribe, whose horses are the best of the Nangchen breed.
Finding horses would be less of a problem than finding monks, and, as if to confirm my suspicion, we passed dozens of horse-riding Khambas leading a short string of pack ponies—some fine animals and others less so. I was convinced all we needed was a nice honest young Tibetan to help us negotiate the hire of the animals, and soon we would be rid of the two Chinese drivers and traveling off the beaten path.
We drove off in one of our vehicles to the monastery of Dzer, belonging to the Kargyu sect. To reach it we drove along a little ledge that gave us our first daylight view of the Mekong River. It was like meeting a long-lost friend. At last, what had been but a word during the preceding year was now a reality. Although we were close to the source, the river flowed fully one hundred yards wide, the swirling waters a deep, rich, milky red. Filling the riverbed, the water was high as a result of the preceding day’s rains. It was also swift but it did not break, being too deep here for waves. Looking down into the gorge we saw a long cement bridge linking both halves of Zadoi sprawled out on the banks of the river.
The road we had followed to get here was now but a very narrow track that, to our surprise, entered a short tunnel in its effort to skirt a cliff dominating the great river. From the tunnel we emerged on a grassy slope, home to the white buildings of the partially restored monastery, which surrounded a squat, dark red assembly hall. In no time we were standing in front of the buildings looking out upon the magnificent panorama of rock-crested mountains. The gre
at river ran off to the west and out of sight between two grassy slopes.
I was elated in anticipation as a crowd of young monks came to greet us. I had some trouble making myself understood until I singled out a great, burly, handsome middle-aged monk with a shaved head who spoke a form of Tibetan I could clearly understand. His smiling round face reassured me that here at last was someone I could trust with my plans.
Would he help us find some horses? I asked. He would. Soon he was riding back to town with us. We stopped upon reaching the main street, the one and only road in Zadoi, a broad earth and gravel expanse bordered by the high walls enclosing the garrison’s various barracks. Scattered before little hovelly restaurants and teahouses by the side of the road were a half-dozen billiard tables. It seems that billiards is the great gift of the Chinese to Tibet. These are not full-sized billiard tables but half-size pool tables with six pockets and the same numbered balls used in America. The tables are left outside at night, protected against hail and rain with simple, ugly, clear plastic covers weighted down with stones.
Some people criticize the Chinese for having brought idleness to Tibet’s youth, but it is hard to tell whether this accusation is true. It is clear that the Tibetans have little to do when visiting these dismal garrisons other than to shop and sell their butter, wool, and dried meat. In Lhasa, on the other hand, the problem of idleness among the young is on the rise, as the Chinese give the Tibetans fewer and fewer jobs. Today the garrisons even import coolies from China to perform menial tasks. As for education, in spite of what is claimed, few Tibetans get any serious schooling.
Loaded yaks and ponies circulated between the billiard tables, pushed or pulled by their owners, who had come to town from their remote camps. These herders walked at a slow pace, their legs slightly apart, plodding along with a steady assurance. Some had rosaries in their hands, others clung to yak-cloth bags as they peered through the square opening of the stalls in which cloth and hats were stacked along with stirrups and reins, thermos bottles and batteries, matches, sweets, plastic mugs, enamel flowered wash basins, plastic shoes, and a variety of aluminum pots and pans.
Our monk talked to several of the shoppers and then encountered some colleagues before explaining to us that it might prove difficult to find the horses we needed. When I asked him again if he himself would come with us, he began to explain in a circuitous manner that he could not. I encouraged him to keep searching while I decided to try to find the local Tibetan administrator. I surmised that if there were any horses to be had (and we needed about two dozen), they might be most easily collected from the nomad camps outside Zadoi.
As one man put it, “Here we have bicycles and jeeps—the cattle are in the mountains.” In vain I searched the surrounding slopes with my eyes—not a tent in sight. I was no luckier in seeking out the headman of Zadoi.
“He is absent,” his wife assured me, holding on to a great mastiff that roared and barked before the walled compound of a rather large house.
As I stomped back toward the bridge, to my surprise I was accosted in English.
“Good morning, sir.”
I wheeled around to face a small, shriveled Tibetan with long hair. Upon discovering that he had exhausted his English vocabulary, I carried on in Tibetan, and he understood me as perfectly as I did his replies. In a second I had established that he had fled to India and lived there for several decades, having just returned to Kham. He seemed unconcerned that the Chinese knew of his escapade, and I remembered meeting several Khamba guerrillas who had returned home in their old age. The Chinese had spread the word in India and Nepal that all Tibetans would be welcomed back. Not many refugees returned, but more did than it is generally presumed abroad. Most of those who return were disillusioned by life in India, or afraid of the prospect of being separated forever from those who remained behind. Many just want to die in the land of their birth. Some of those who return gain positions of importance in the Chinese-run Tibetan administration.
This old man seemed reliable enough, and so I asked that he help us find the horses we needed. By then it was midday, and we made for the local Muslim restaurant, where we found a rowdy crowd of Tibetan schoolteachers from the local boarding school set up to teach nomads’ children. Later we were shown the building where the boys (no girls) resided as their parents roamed the plains. This was one of the few schools of its kind I had ever seen, and I took note that it had very few students, considering the population it served.
The reason is simple, explained a Tibetan teacher from Xining: In Nangchen today, as in the past, the second sons are sent to the local monastery, while the eldest sons are kept at home to help with the cattle and learn the skills of their fathers. Thus, the idea of a lay monastery-like boarding school does not have many adherents.
In the restaurant I also met an old lady who volunteered to help us; only later when she followed us everywhere acting as a rather noisy public relations manager, keeping all informed about our actions and intentions, did I realize that she was a little crazy. We enjoyed no privacy as our little group was constantly followed by dozens of children who stared at us, amazed, as though we were the first foreigners to reach Zadoi.
7
THE WAR OF KANTING
Very few foreigners have ever been allowed into Zadoi. Apart from my own visit the preceding year, a British zoologist had come recently, and the National Geographic writer-photographer team of Thomas O’Neill and Mike Yamashita had arrived in late spring of 1992 on the first leg of a journey they hoped would take them down the entire course of the Mekong. They traveled through Zadoi as far up the Mekong as possible, led by a Tibetan nomad who, upon arrival at a certain snow field, told them they had reached the sacred spring, one of the sources of the Mekong. In a February 1993 article in National Geographic, O’Neill wrote, “We rode behind the mountain and found in a shallow draw a sheet of ice some 300 yards long—shaped like an hourglass. Crouching down on the frozen surface, I could hear below a trickle of water. It was the beginning notes of the Mekong. Mike and I were, as far as I can discover, the first Western journalists to hear them.”
This rather loose claim to finding the source was tempered when their guide explained, “There are two sources. There is the mountain source high on a glacier—no one goes there—and there is a spiritual source behind a holy mountain.” The journalists and their guide had reached the spiritual source. No other details were given, such as latitude or longitude, or even the name of the mountain. Prior to my own departure, I had called the National Geographic Society to obtain details of O’Neill’s findings, and had been informed that his claim to the discovery of the source had not been pressed or recorded. Moreover, the photographs published with the article, which showed the Tangla range to the southwest, seem to suggest that the journalists had been misled by their guide. It was clear to me that the true source had yet to be found.
As the day slipped by I began to wonder whether we would fare any better. The old Khamba from India returned to tell us that he had been unable to find any horses, and that our only hope was to secure them directly from the nomads in the high pastures, wherever they might be. It might take several days just to locate them. This rather discouraging news was followed by a final declaration from the handsome monk that neither he nor any of his colleagues of the Kargyu monastery could accompany us. Without a local to help us gain the nomads’ trust, we stood little chance of hiring any animals at all.
I decided, therefore, that we should try to meet the abbot of Zadoi’s other monastery, a larger institution of the reformed yellow-hat sect of the Dalai Lama. This other monastery stood several miles away up a trail inaccessible to our vehicles, so we were directed to the abbot’s town residence. Panting and out of breath (Zadoi is 15,400 feet above sea level), we entered a long, one-story mud-brick building overlooking the town. Wooden latticework windows faced a walled yard. Atop a tall pole, a white prayer flag fluttered. A young man wearing Western clothes invited us in and offered us cups of salt
y tea, asking us to sit down on low-lying mattresses covered with blue, orange, and white Tibetan carpets. The young man, the lama’s secretary, informed us that His Holiness was away on a pilgrimage. He said he doubted that anyone could accompany us in search of the chu-go (which means literally “the head of the river,” as opposed to the word chu-mik, which means “water eye, or spring”).
In talking to the erudite young man, who spoke the sophisticated Tibetan of Lhasa, I began to grasp how much I had taken it for granted that everyone in Tibet would understand what I meant by the source of the Mekong. Even in Europe, there had been discussion about what could rightly be claimed as the source of any given river.
Was it the spring farthest from the sea, or the end of the branch with the greatest flow of water? Or was it simply the historical source, the source recognized by the locals? The official source of the Mississippi is neither the one farthest from the sea (that being the source of the Missouri River) nor the branch with the greatest flow. In the case of the Mississippi it is the historical, traditional source that has prevailed in atlases, as opposed to what geographers and hydrologists might have preferred.
My knowledge of Tibetan was essential in determining the historical source of the Mekong, but it would probably not help me to explain to the local people what modern geographers consider to be the true source of a river. To begin with, I would have to explain what a sea was. The only seas the Tibetans in this area know are large lakes, the only oceans, the mythical ocean that surrounds Mount Meru, the epicenter of a universe that the local lamas believe to be flat and formed in the shape of the shoulder blade of a sheep. Needless to say, nobody here knew how far the Dza-chu actually flowed or that it was called Lancang by the Chinese and Mekong by us.
The Last Barbarians Page 11