The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  In the desperate interview the young lama of Jeykundo went over the long list of horrors of the War of Kanting, and then begged the Dalai Lama to send troops, at long last, to help defend the people of Kham. Noel Barber reports that the Dalai Lama refused categorically.

  Upset and angry, the lama of Jeykundo dared say that “he did not believe the ministers of His Holiness’s cabinet understood what exactly the Chinese were doing to the people of Amdo and Kham.” In fact, as the Dalai Lama’s own memoirs confirm, he and his ministers were quite aware of the situation. The Dalai Lama was torn, as he declared himself, between his desire to do something and his aversion for violence. In the end, he offered no help whatsoever.

  Deeply upset and disappointed, the lama of Jeykundo complained that after six years of fighting alone to preserve their religion and customs, his people believed the Tibetan government didn’t give a damn about them. The courageous young Khamba made a last desperate appeal, stating that he couldn’t just stay there and watch as his people were being murdered. To this the Dalai Lama replied:

  “I can do nothing. Your people [meaning the Khambas] should show more tolerance and try and observe the seventeen-point agreement. I admire the courage of the Khambas but their deeds cause great harm to those of us who are seeking to coexist with the Chinese.”

  The Khambas now realized that they had no alternative but to force the Dalai Lama and his government to oppose China. Thus the stage was set for the rebellion of Lhasa—a Khamba-led rebellion of the people of Lhasa against both the Dalai Lama’s cabinet and the Chinese invaders.

  The event that triggered the rebellion occurred just two weeks after the disappointing interview: the Dalai Lama was invited by the Chinese to attend a play inside their headquarters in Lhasa. When, on the first of March, two Chinese soldiers asked the Dalai Lama to fix a date for his attendance, rumors spread that the Chinese were planning to kidnap him. On the ninth of March, a day before the show was to take place, the Khambas, followed by crowds of Lhasans, surrounded the summer residence of the Dalai Lama to prevent the god-king from going. Their fear was further justified when the Chinese, at the last minute, requested that the Dalai Lama attend without his usual bodyguards.

  The Khambas’ anger was directed particularly at the Dalai Lama’s ministers, among whom Nagbo the traitor—infamous for blowing up the Chamdo arsenal nine years before—was still prominent. Sensing the Khambas’ hostility, Nagbo slipped out of the summer palace where the ministers resided and sought asylum with the Chinese. Another minister, Samdrup Photrang, also known for his pro-Chinese leanings, had his jeep overturned as he drove to the summer palace and barely escaped with his life. A third Chinese sympathizer called Phakpa was not as fortunate. He was killed, stabbed to death by a Khamba, and his body was paraded in the streets of Lhasa.

  The rebels held the Dalai Lama’s government hostage in his summer palace and proclaimed themselves a Liberation Committee for Tibet. They declared the seventeen-point agreement void and dissolved the Dalai Lama’s cabinet, placing four of his ministers under house arrest. Desperate, the Dalai Lama wrote the first of three letters to General Tang, the Chinese military chief, in which he expressed his regret and condemnation of the actions of the Khambas. In the letters he assured the Chinese that he was trying to calm the evil reactionaries and would take refuge in the Chinese compound as soon as he could elude the rebels.

  These letters were later the source of much controversy, in that they confirmed that the Dalai Lama was held by the Khambas against his will, as the Chinese claimed, and it exposed for all the world the deep rift between the Dalai Lama’s entourage and the people of Tibet.

  The Dalai Lama was without a doubt a hostage of the Khambas in his own palace, and his captors smuggled him out of Lhasa to make certain that he couldn’t strike another agreement with the Chinese. They took him (he didn’t flee) to southern Tibet, where, at Lhünze Dzong, they persuaded him at long last to declare Tibet at war with China. The newly unified Tibet included Kham and Amdo, alongside central Tibet, as it had in the past.

  Only after the formal declaration of war, followed by the appropriate dances and protocol, was it decided that the Dalai Lama should leave Lhünze Dzong for India.

  The revolution was short-lived. In less than two years the Chinese succeeded in chasing the Khamba guerrillas out of central Tibet. Their ally Nagbo was placed at the head of a committee for the newly designated Autonomous Region of Tibet, a puppet of the Chinese government, of which the Panchen Lama was later made titular head. Tibet had lost its independence. The Khamba guerrillas who had survived regrouped in the little Tibetan principality of Mustang in northwest Nepal, from where, with aid and advisers from the CIA, they harassed Chinese convoys just over the border until 1972. That year Nixon met with Mao Zedong, and the CIA abandoned the Khambas, many of whom were killed in a joint Sino-Nepalese military operation to clear them out of Nepal. Some of the survivors joined the Indian frontier forces, but others committed suicide when the exiled Dalai Lama asked them once again to lay down their arms.

  Such was the desperate twenty-year struggle of the Khambas to uphold their faith and pride. Yet as I had observed in several journeys to Kham, the spirit that had animated their fathers was still very much alive. Now, however, as we neared what had been one of the most advanced strategic roads built to wipe out all Khamba resistance, I wondered whether the Chinese had finally won the war.

  I walked for a long time in the company of the second caravan we encountered, talking to the men and joking with the young women. With rifles and fine horses and grazing grounds that extended for thousands of miles, they were, I realized, barring their complete extinction, still free of most of the constraints of modern civilization.

  We bumped on along the trail, overtaking at last the caravan loaded with barley—enough grain for several families for a year. Three hours out of Zadoi, we were advancing only as fast as a horse’s plodding gait. We had begun to rise up a very narrow ledge, the left wheels of our vehicle just inches from a terrible drop, when suddenly the motor coughed and stalled.

  It refused to start up again. In minutes both drivers were under the hood talking excitedly. I was seriously worried. All along I had wondered what we would do if we had a breakdown. The simple answer was to keep going in one jeep, but I knew the drivers wouldn’t agree to that. The other solution was to wait for help, which might never come. The best solution would be for a few of us to find some horses to carry on, but I knew Ling well enough to appreciate that he would oppose our going on ahead without the others. Since we left Jeykundo, his reluctant manner had clearly showed that he wasn’t interested in what we were trying to do.

  While the drivers played with the motor, I went off some distance to take a reading of the GPS. We were at 15,600 feet and surrounded by pointed, rock-crested peaks, one of which was so conical as to seem volcanic. We were heading for a pass, but without a map showing the trail it was difficult to figure out where we were exactly. Only by transferring the GPS reading onto our map drawn from satellite photographs could we determine our location. The wind made it almost impossible to perform such an operation, however, and all I could do was huddle at the front of the jeep and proffer some lame advice about the motor.

  Fortunately, the engine started again. Apparently a condenser had blown, but Sebastian, not being fluent in Chinese mechanical terms, was unable to offer details. The breakdown had been a sobering experience, which we prayed wouldn’t further undermine the morale of our recalcitrant crew. One driver reiterated that it was late in the season to be on this road and that, were it to snow, our vehicles might not be able to get out for a full year—a prospect that made Ling turn white, but which I thought an exaggeration. It was, after all, only the beginning of September, and the Indian summer would soon be on us. In fact, to our knowledge, there were no weather charts for this remote region. I had tried in vain to secure anything like an indication of rainfall and temperatures for southern Qinghai. We were soon to find o
ut that the higher portion of the great plateau has a very strange climate all its own, one that, at this time of year, is characterized by hail and thunderstorms whose true level of violence we had yet to experience.

  Soon after our breakdown we reached the summit of a pass and began a descent beneath great cliffs, one of which harbored a huge cave halfway up its face. We were slowly descending toward a barren valley, fenced in on all sides by staggering red and garnet mountains coated in patches of pale green grass, a color combination so startling as to form one of the most pleasing and grandiose landscapes I had ever seen. The color of the earth reminded me of heather, and the combinations of the deep pinky-red with the green grass evoked, albeit on a far more dramatic scale, the mountainous moors of Scotland.

  Descending from the pass we looked back and saw another mountain, crested with towering bastions of rock, which we recognized from a photograph taken by Yamashita for the National Geographic article in which it was claimed, erroneously as it turned out, that he and O’Neill had found the source of the Mekong in 1992.

  As we reached the valley floor we sighted a blue fox. It wasn’t frightened in the least by our noisy arrival, and we were able to get out and film it as it trotted off on its errands, letting out a yelp before disappearing into a burrow. I had always believed the term blue to be an exaggeration, but there was no denying that that was the color of its tail. Was it a seasonal hue? Did it disappear on the pelts of dead animals? Whatever the case, I had never seen a fur hat made of blue fox on the heads of the Khambas or a blue fur stole around the neck of a Western lady.

  We next found ourselves driving up a broad valley bordered by the incredible red mountains with contrasting green cloaks of grass. Suddenly I spotted a herd of horses in the distance, a romantic sight in the majestic surroundings. A few miles on I glimpsed another herd of nearly thirty horses galloping up a steep grassy slope on the other side of the river. They were close enough for me to establish that they were of the typical fine Nangchen conformation: elegant animals with slim limbs, straight backs, long flowing manes and tails and, of course, with the characteristic barrel chest and huge lungs that gave them a body all too comically proportioned in relation to their limbs.

  Until roughly a hundred years ago in Europe and America, what constituted a good horse was a subject that was as important as, let’s say, the relative worth of various jet fighters today. The horse was for so many centuries not only the backbone of all armies—a strategic instrument—but also the essential mode of transport of everything from humans to building materials. The improvement of horse stock and horse blood was at the heart of the subject of countless treaties, studies, and experiments, with the result that in Europe and America there are literally hundreds of different breeds of horses. Some are natural breeds that have developed on their own in isolation in remote areas, but most often they have been created by man with a specific objective in mind: ponies to work underground in mines; horses to wage war, bred for a behavioral gene that makes them freeze instead of bolt when they hear an explosion; horses raised for speed or jumping, to pull heavy loads, or for endurance over long distances. They vary from the tall Clydesdale dray horse bred in Scotland to eighteen hands (six feet)—“to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution,” as one author put it—to the miniature horses bred in Argentina, which, at about six hands (2 feet), are too small to ride.

  In the age of genetic engineering, we tend to forget that horse breeders were way ahead of us in the art of manipulating DNA. Over the centuries, close observation had allowed European and Arab breeders to determine the characteristics that made a horse fast, among them a slim, long neck, large nostrils, high withers, long cannons, and oval hooves. Speed became a primary factor at the beginning of the last century when the European thoroughbred, or racehorse, was developed by crossing Arab thoroughbreds with horses from Russian Turkestan, Galway pony racers, and other assorted British and French horses.

  What is certain is that the best horses, be they Arabian or Turkomene, come from areas with little grass, where men were forced to feed and take care of them, and eventually to stable them, making it easier to select individual mares and stallions to be bred. This interference, or assistance, of man in the selection of stallions and mares is the cornerstone of fine breeding, and was unknown in the grasslands of Mongolia, for instance, where the horses ran free and bred according to their fancy. As a result, the Mongolian pony is a rather crude animal compared to the Arabian, or to the Caspian miniature thoroughbred, which was discovered in 1960 and which, it is believed, was developed by the Persians to pull their war chariots.

  What is interesting about the Nangchen horse is that, like the Arabian, it is a selected horse, because on the highest Tibetan plateau, there is not much grass and so many wolves and snow leopards that it could not have survived without the constant intervention of man. As it is, the nomads of Nangchen make coats for the young foals and feed their horses cheese, and occasionally meat, even when they themselves have little to eat. Most important, they choose the mares and stallions they wish to see reproduce, to meet their needs as yak herders and as mounted warriors who like nothing better than a good race.

  The end result is that the Nangchen horse is one of the few thoroughbred horses of the Far East, and possibly the finest.

  It is a horse with a long and very interesting history. As we drove, we admired what looked to us like wild horses galloping on the mountainsides. It was hard to believe that fourteen centuries ago, when Europe was in the darkest of the Dark Ages, the nomad inhabitants of this very region were already busy selecting and raising horses. More amazing still, they were writing about them—a fact that came to light in 1907, when Sir Aurel Stein made what must be considered one of the most remarkable archaeological finds of the century. In the deserts of Xinjiang he discovered four tons of ancient documents hidden in a walled-off section of a cave in the ancient cliff-face monastery of Tun-huang. There were manuscripts and painted scrolls that had been sealed up since the tenth century. The cave had just been opened by a Taoist monk, who, after much negotiation, agreed to sell some of the priceless manuscripts to Stein. A large portion of the rest was later purchased by the French linguist Paul Pelliot, leaving a remainder to be split up, sold piecemeal, pilfered, and lost.

  This extraordinary treasure of ancient documents included texts in three forgotten languages and even a book dating from 868, which is believed to be the oldest printed book in existence. Most of the manuscripts were in Tibetan and Chinese because the caves of Tun-huang were a part of what had been Tibet in the ninth century. Tun-huang is located on the famous Horse Road, which links China to Turkestan—Turkestan being, with Arabia, home to the finest horses of the Middle East.

  Among the documents discovered in Tun-huang were several thousand-year-old treatises relating to horse care and horse breeding in Tibet. Many of these documents were classified, translated, and analyzed by Anne Marie Blondeau, with whom I had attended the lectures of Professor Rolf Stein (no relation to Aurel), the eminent French Tibetan scholar and linguist.

  Needless to say, I was fascinated by Dr. Blondeau’s thesis on horse breeding and care in ancient Tibet. In the Tun-huang documents, it was clearly established that the Tibetans had been keen horse breeders, and that for ten centuries or more the blood stock of the Tibetan horses was very different from that of the horses of the Asa, an ancient Turkic people inhabiting the Silk (or Horse) Road. In other words, the blood stock of Tibet’s horses was not Turkic or Arabic, but indigenous.

  When I first read Blondeau’s translations in 1992 and began my own field research into Tibetan breeds, it was still generally assumed by equine zoologists worldwide that the only horses of Tibet were the crude ponies of the Himalayas—ponies accurately described as “rough, hardy, rustic small creatures.” No one had bothered to search beyond the mixed-blood mountain ponies for the finer breeds that Tibet had to offer, horses whose reputations had once spread far and wide, east to China and west to dista
nt Pakistan.

  In 1983 I visited the northern Pakistan province of Baltistan (the ancient Tibetan province of Bolor), where the Muslim population still speaks an archaic strain of Tibetan. Locals there told me that the best horses came not from nearby Chinese Turkestan or Samarkand but from Siling—“Siling” being the ancient way of pronouncing “Xining.”

  Which horse was this? I wondered. Had it survived in Tibet for thirteen hundred years since it was introduced in the seventh century into northern Pakistan, or was it simply a horse from Xining, the capital of Qinghai—in other words, just a horse from the Horse Road, one with Turkish, Arabian, or Mongolian blood? The only other possibility I could think of was that it was a specifically Tibetan thoroughbred that had been lost to history, that came not from Xining but from Amdo (the term Sining, or Siling, often being used to describe the whole region).

  It had taken me three journeys traveling all over Tibet to answer this question. One by one I had eliminated the various sub-breeds of horses found in the border regions, horses whose bloodlines were mixed with those of India, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, or Turkestan. This left six specifically Tibetan breeds, and even some of those might have had Mongol blood in them, introduced by the many Mongol incursions into Tibet starting in the sixteenth century.

  Only in 1993 did it become clear to me that the Nangchen horse was the finest and the most unusual Tibetan horse, the “Siling” horse mentioned to me in Pakistan.

  It was the finest because its conformation matched what Europeans and Arabs alike have come to agree constitutes an excellent horse—the thin neck, essential for speed; the large nostrils; the fine-haired forelock and long mane and tail; the flat back and straight hocks. It was the finest also for its spirit and stamina, to which I could attest after a five-day, 250-mile ride I had made the preceding year over three passes above sixteen thousand feet. With seven horses selected near Nangchen Dzong, I had ridden up and out of the middle valley of the upper Mekong to visit Nangchen Gar, the virtually impregnable ancient camp of the kings of Nangchen. I had traveled up and over the sixteen-thousand-foot rim of the circus of mountains that hem in the royal campsite. The horses actually galloped to the summit, fighting to be the first, a remarkable—not to say staggering—feat at an altitude where most beasts would be utterly out of breath.