All this was practically impossible to explain, and, no doubt, in the end, it would be up to us alone to travel along the Dza-chu, measuring the flow of each tributary as we went to establish which was the principal course of the river. We would carry out this quest in consultation with our satellite maps and with the help of any local nomads we were lucky enough to encounter, but we were really, in the strictest sense, on our own.
I was at a loss about hiring horses when someone told us that a track traveling south from Zadoi, up the valley of a river called the A, would lead us to a motorable trail that could, in turn, bring us over several high passes to a place called Moyun located on the upper Mekong. Further questioning and brief consultation of a Chinese map in the compound where we had slept confirmed that there had been, at one time, a track going up the A River; from there another cut back north to the Mekong and Moyun. I knew we couldn’t trust these maps, and when I inquired about the road, the local Chinese official claimed it was impassable because of the recent rain. Next, our drivers made some inquiries of their own and announced that it would be madness to take this dirt track because we would only get stuck.
Since the prospect of finding horses in Zadoi seemed slight, I was keen to get out and try the trail, were it only a few miles to the first nomad camps. Being stuck in the high pastures seemed a better fate than being stranded in Zadoi, a town I had begun to see as increasingly sinister.
“But Mr. Psl, we do not have enough petrol, and the Public Security Bureau…” I didn’t let Ling finish his sentence.
“We must get some petrol right away, and you know as well as I do that we have permission to go to the source, wherever that may be.”
Ling looked desperate and went into a huddle with the drivers. He then pronounced the cars too heavily loaded, whereupon I suggested that we leave behind some of our provisions and whatever else we could part with. That done, I again insisted that we go and find petrol right away.
It proved no easy matter. First we hunted down the only man who could give us the necessary written permission to buy petrol, a rare and expensive commodity there, thousands of miles away from the nearest oil well. Letter in hand, we drove to a huge hangar where a man rummaged among heavy folded black yak-hair tents to find a funnel, through which he finally pumped petrol from a rusty barrel into our jerry cans. This accomplished, puffing away and exhausted, with Sebastian and Jacques lugging our camera equipment, we again crossed the great bridge over the Mekong in a final attempt to talk to the headman of Zadoi. We still hoped that he might find us a reliable local man to help us on our way.
The headman had not returned, but as we marched back up the main dusty road of the town, we bumped into the old “English-speaking” Khamba and then into our monk friend. It seemed we knew everybody, and it was certain that everybody in town knew about us and our search for horses. When I addressed a small crowd of Tibetans who followed me into a general store, they shot back, “How much will you pay?” I avoided a direct answer. “Who has horses here?” I asked; none did.
Sitting on the cement steps of the porch of the barracks, I again had a long argument with Ling about the necessity of our setting off as soon as possible.
I understood that Ling was too young to impose his views on our drivers, who were at least ten years older than he and who had no intention of being told by a greenhorn where they should go and what they could do. Ling was at their mercy, and the drivers were not very amiable fellows.
In China there is a golden rule that probably stems from generations of living at near-starvation level: In a world where dog eats dog, if you have any leverage on a person, you use it for all it’s worth. Bullying, blackmail, and extortion are common practices in many parts of China. Even before the Communists and their rigid bureaucracy, the Chinese civil servant was a true tyrant if he had any leverage. Our drivers knew they had the upper hand with Ling—they might even have been his superiors in the complex internal hierarchy of the Qinghai Mountaineering Association.
Try as I could to convince everyone of the urgency of our mission, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit foolish. What would Burton or Speeke or those other explorers think of my paltry outfit, and of my dependence on recalcitrant drivers? I liked to think that what I had acquired from a year at the Harvard Business School was a special skill at haggling, but my negotiations with these jeep drivers were a total failure.
As it happens, I hated jeeps, Land Cruisers, Range Rovers, and every other type of four-wheel-drive vehicle. I am strictly what you might call a foot and horse man. I’ve always ridiculed the latter-day Marlboro-man explorer, smoking cigarettes in his muddy Range Rover, roof stacked with spare tires. Since there are no roads into the unknown, such vehicles are really made for safari parks or for driving to suburban supermarkets. For my part, I wanted nothing so much as to get rid of our vehicles and their drivers in exchange for the only really effective means of off-road transport: the overhead-twin-eared, four-legged, lead-free, hay-eating Equus caballus. We were, after all, in the home country of the finest breed of horse in the whole of the Tibetan highlands. But where were the horses?
Breathing the fetid air of our compound, I was negotiating our departure for the following morning when two civilized-looking young Chinese men drove up in a jeep. They weren’t policemen looking for us, as I thought they might be at first, but part of the backup team of our rivals—members of the Sino-Japanese expedition to the headwaters of the Mekong. They didn’t immediately identify themselves, however, and it was only later that we discovered who they were. We learned, nevertheless, that their Japanese team was from the Department of Agriculture of the University of Tokyo and was currently ten days ahead of us, information that did little to boost our morale. Even Sebastian lost his good humor momentarily, and Jacques, always in the same state of calm, seemed for a fleeting moment positively catatonic.
It might have been advisable to rest a few days, but we couldn’t afford to hang around, even though we didn’t know for sure that the Japanese were also looking for the river’s source.
At 9:30 A.M. the following morning we drove out of Zadoi across the mighty two-lane cement bridge over the Mekong. Our hopes renewed, we looked west up the gorge from which the river emerged, its red waters flowing swiftly, at the beginning of their twenty-seven-hundred-mile course to the South China Sea.
* * *
If rivers and their valleys form ideal routes of travel in the lowlands, they are far from that in the mountains. We could no more follow the river that slithered out of sight between two rusty cliffs of rock than we could say we knew exactly where it led.
A mile out of Zadoi we turned south and began to climb up a narrow rocky valley dwarfed by pointed gray peaks. The road was nothing more than two ruts of caked earth cutting across the grassy landscape with no trace of tires. Could it be that the road was closed, after all?
I was happy to be leaving Zadoi, and now especially so, as I saw coming toward us a large herd of yaks driven by three handsome young men on horseback, each with a rifle over his shoulder. We stopped as the burly yaks, loaded with great bales of sheep’s wool, brushed past us, prodded forward by the cries and whistles of the arrogant Khamba cowboys. They were off to sell the wool in Zadoi, and the fact that they were armed surprised my companions, not used to seeing men with rifles who weren’t hunters or soldiers. Mounted on the fine local horses, draped in ample sheepskin gowns with one sleeve hanging at their backs, fox-fur hats on their heads, the men with their rifles cut romantic, aggressive figures. The yaks advanced ten abreast, jostling each other in a disorderly fashion.
The men had long hair and Amerindian features, thin noses, and slightly slanted dark eyes. For once Ling was perhaps right—there was good reason to fear such men. Even if the Khambas had officially been defeated, they hadn’t laid down their arms. In fact, in 1953, efforts by the Chinese to disarm the Khambas had been what triggered the War of Kanting, the secret war that pitted the Khambas of eastern Tibet against the Peopl
e’s Liberation Army.
From firsthand reports collected some years later in Mustang, the Khamba guerrillas’ last headquarters, I had patched together the first account of that war. Now, in the heart of the remotest province of Kham, I hoped to find the sites of the unsung battles, and to meet the last survivors of the secret war that had raged for six years in the mountains.
Judging from news of the recurrent uprisings and the arrogance of many of the men we had met, the Khambas of Nangchen have not, it seems, entirely given up their struggle.
If the men of Kham proved to be excellent warriors, the reason wasn’t the quality of their arms—in 1953, most of them had only archaic muzzle-loading matchlocks—nor were their successes due to discipline and training.
Looking at the self-assured, handsome men brushing past our vehicles with their rifles, I felt that the secret to their endurance might be found in the very nature of their life on the high plateau.
The nomads’ survival depends on their herds, whose size depends, in turn, on the amount of territory they control. To have and keep a definite territory, one must be able to defend it. Whole books have been written about the “territorial imperative,” yet little attention has been paid to the difference between a herder’s notion of territory and that of agricultural societies.
The earliest written Tibetan documents tell us that the nomadic tribes were arrogant and proud, yet dedicated to their leaders, who were rarely questioned. Loyalty to them was instilled and maintained by pledges of allegiance that were the very basis of the tribes’ military strength. This social system stands in contrast to that of agricultural communities of the same period, whose leaders’ power was derived from their ownership of land and of serfs, not from the trust of their kinsmen. The nomads ruled over kinsmen as relatives; the agriculturalists ruled over farmers as subjects. Therein lies one of the capital advantages of nomadic warrior societies over feudal agricultural states run by landed princes. Machiavelli, no doubt the best analyst of what constituted the power of princes, clearly appreciated that their vulnerability lay in the fact that any loss of their land meant the loss of their subjects. Farmers changed their allegiances as fast as their fields changed hands. Not so with the nomads, for their land belonged not to the prince but to the tribe. Traditionally the leaders of each Tibetan nomad tribe owned 10 percent of all the animals belonging to the tribe, and the tribesmen were to care for these animals as their own. To guarantee that there was no favoritism, the chief could choose any animals he wished (presumably the best). This was an accepted custom, and in return the chief was responsible for the tribe’s defense, and for the observation of tribal laws.
Rifles were the private property of the nomads, necessary to protect their cattle from wolves, snow leopards, bears, and rustlers from neighboring tribes. Needless to say, it was now advisable for us to be on the good side of these armed men before us. (A lesson poor Dutreuil de Rhins learned the hard way just before he died.) I tried to feel at ease, protected, I hoped, by the fact that I spoke Tibetan.
Having passed the first group of Khambas, we ran into another herd of yaks blocking our way, nomads on their way back from Zadoi, their animals laden with brown and white goat’s-wool bags of barley. It was useless to try to overtake them because the road ran between a cliff and the raging waters of the A River. I decided, instead, to get out of the jeep and walk along with them. They were happy to chat with me and asked the usual questions: Had I met the Dalai Lama? Where had I learned Tibetan? Where was I from? And, of course, what were we doing here? When I said that I had taken my first Tibetan lesson from the elder brother of the Dalai Lama, Tagster Rimpoche himself, I was looked upon with open admiration, and that was heightened when I explained I had also met the Dalai Lama.
The encounter, which occurred by accident and was anything but glamorous, was at the Harvard Center for World Religions in 1980. Over the years I had never sought to meet His Holiness, mostly to avoid being noticed by the various intelligence services that spied on his activities in India. I knew the Dalai Lama must have been aware of my book on the Khambas, a book in which I had perhaps been a little bit too critical in condemning the lenient attitude of his entourage toward the Chinese between 1950 and 1959, not to speak of his own.
When we were introduced, His Holiness jumped in surprise, but then he and his assistants and I had an animated conversation. I asked for his forgiveness for having been a little bit harsh in an article published that very same day in the Boston Globe, in which I wrote that “the Dalai Lama must be reminded that it is his duty to instigate political action for the liberation of Tibet during this visit to the United States.” The Carter administration had demanded that he not make any political statements during his visit, and he had agreed not to, which I and others had considered unacceptable, given that he was the political leader of Tibet.
The Dalai Lama’s reluctance to oppose the Chinese has caused much ill will in Tibet and elsewhere, especially between his entourage and the Khambas, who had to fight the People’s Liberation Army alone between 1950 and 1959, while the Dalai Lama and his entourage, ministers, abbots, and the aristocrats of Lhasa, collaborated with the Chinese in order to hold onto their privileges.
The rift between Khambas and Lhasans was an old one, stemming from the Khambas’ longtime refusal to recognize the Dalai Lama as their political leader. The rift was deepened after October 6, 1950, the date the Chinese invaded Tibet by attacking Denko, a garrison on the border of Kham, and Amdo, ninety-five miles southeast of Jeykundo. Under the leadership of the local Khamba military chief, Muha, the Tibetans counterattacked and momentarily stalled the Chinese.
In the meantime, the Dalai Lama sent a minister by the name of Nawang Nagbo to Chamdo, the Khamba capital of eastern Tibet. Nagbo the traitor, as he is now generally known, was a firm believer that Tibet should cooperate with the Communists. When news reached him that Chinese troops had overrun Denko and were heading for Chamdo, Nagbo refused to open the city’s arsenal and arm the local Khambas in their own defense. Instead, he blew up the arsenal and fled the town. Later he gave himself up to Chinese troops without a struggle—to troops that had entered Tibet unopposed. Seven months later in Beijing he signed the infamous seventeen-point agreement, a sellout allowing the Chinese to enter Lhasa and the Lhasans to keep their privileges under Chinese rule, but at the cost of their independence.
Then sixteen years old, the Dalai Lama had been unable to muster the support he needed to oppose his minister or, for that matter, to expose the Chinese, who falsified the Tibetan seal that was stamped on the seventeen-point agreement.
When, by 1953, the Chinese had consolidated their foothold in Tibet by building strategic roads, they believed that the time had come for the application of Communist-style reforms in the territories no longer under the Dalai Lama’s control. The reforms in question called for the destitution of the traditional tribal leaders of Kham and Amdo, who were declared to be “corrupt enemies of the people.” Then came the attacks on monks and monasteries, those peddlers of religion, the “opiate of the masses.”
The Khambas, as we have seen, were quick to rise up against such “reforms” and back their tribal leaders. The day the War of Kanting broke out, appeals were sent to the Dalai Lama and to his government for support. The answer was more than disappointing: Lhasa advised the Khambas to lay down their arms and try to get along with the enemy.
I have recorded elsewhere the atrocities the Khambas had to suffer, and the long and bitter efforts they made to get the Dalai Lama to back their struggle.
Having seen their country invaded and their monasteries destroyed, the Khamba guerrilla fighters took refuge in the mountains and great plains, from which they continued to harass the Chinese. Outnumbered, outgunned, and forever chased farther into the barren wilds, the Khambas were constantly on the run as the Chinese slowly extended their network of roads, forts, and garrisons, flooding the countryside with three hundred thousand troops.
By early 1959 the
Khamba soldiers, along with thousands of civilians, were forced to seek refuge in the Dalai Lama’s “Tibetan Autonomous Region,” which had remained neutral. Lhasa, the holy city, was by then full of angry, frustrated, and armed Khamba freedom fighters—men hoping that the Lhasans would at long last join them in their desperate struggle against the Chinese.
In February, the hopes of the Khambas were relayed to the Dalai Lama himself by the much-esteemed young lama of Jeykundo, Chime Yudong, who had reached Lhasa after fighting his way across Nangchen. His escort of one thousand Khambas had been machine-gunned from the air by Chinese planes and repeatedly ambushed, and over half his men had been killed. As spokesman for all the Khambas, Chime Yudong asked to be received by the Dalai Lama to make the ultimate plea for assistance.
Their meeting on February 16, 1959, as recorded by the British journalist-author Noel Barber in his book, The Land of Lost Content, was one of the most dramatic and perhaps tragic events in Tibet’s recent history. Here were two young men, both from Amdo, both reincarnated monks, who could not have been more different. One of them, Lama Chime, had for six years opposed the Chinese and had seen them bomb and destroy monasteries from the air, killing thousands more in murderous raids in the mountains, while women and children were imprisoned or deported to China. The other, the Dalai Lama, was a pious and relatively shy young man of twenty-five who was torn between his religious duty to oppose all violence and his moral obligation to save his countrymen from Chinese aggression. Since 1950 the Dalai Lama had lived a sheltered yet difficult life. Courted by the Chinese, he had involuntarily been drawn into tacit collaboration with their plan to seize the whole of Tibet.
The young Dalai Lama had, to a certain extent, been brainwashed by the Chinese. While in Beijing in 1954, he was induced to write an ode to the glory of Mao in which he compared the Communist leader, murderer of so many Tibetans, to “a person like the sun that enlightens the world, born of an infinite number of good deeds.”
The Last Barbarians Page 12