Inside the clean and elegant, pale green, bright and roomy mess tent, all I could think of was stretching out and falling asleep, or at least sitting and examining our maps and having a quiet talk with Jacques and Sebastian without the ever-present and inquisitive Mr. Ling.
This was not to be. In no time the entrance to our tent was occupied by a small exotic crowd. Among those who stood staring at us were two women, their striking hair—or I should say, headdress—worthy of close examination. They were the wives of the two men living in the deserted garrison, and their hair shone with Dri butter and was braided into 108 long thin strands, that being a sacred number to Buddhists. The braids were tied together at their ends to form a stringy veil. More amazing still, the strands of hair at the women’s foreheads had been cut short and tied one by one to form what looked like the bill of a cap. The end of each hair being woven into the arc of a thin frontal braid, this peak served the purpose of filtering out the blistering sunlight, not much different from the screens of loosely woven yak hair that Tibetans make to act as sun goggles against snow blindness.
To enhance the women’s amazing hairstyle, their braids were crowned with a transversal red leather band crossed by another running down the central part of their heads. These bands were studded with two-inch, oval yellow-orange amber beads with pink coral knobs in their centers. Turquoises an inch wide framed by smaller coral beads ran down the central band to the middle of the women’s backs. These adornments, which must have weighed several pounds and cost a dozen yaks, were only a part of the women’s jewelry. More beads dangled from their necks, encumbered their wrists, and fell from their waists on bejeweled pouches and purses of various sizes. As a result, when I finally chased them away, they tinkled and rattled like a mule train.
The women of Tibet must surely be among the most adorned ladies of the world. This is hardly surprising as they wear their entire dowry on their heads, a habit, it would seem, born of their lifestyle, which seldom affords them a safe place to lock up their treasures. Yet the true reason may stem from the longstanding instability of feudal Tibet, when raids between tribes were numerous and women had to be ready at all times to run and hide themselves, jewels and all, from marauding parties of brigands. The most adorned of all women in Tibet are the nomads, no doubt because of their wealth, which is directly proportionate to the size of their herds. Here, in the high remote Ghegi region of Nangchen, the nomads were not very rich, unlike their cousins living on the rich grassy fringes of Lake Koko Nor. The tribal women near the lake have so many gold and silver ornaments that they wear them down their backs right to the ground. Dozens of silver and gold studs the size of oranges adorn their hair bands, each with huge knobs of coral, turquoise, and amber.
I had long been puzzled about where the coral and amber came from, as only turquoise is indigenous to Tibet. In Amdo I was told the amber came from the British, who brought it to Tibet in 1878 all the way from the Baltic Sea. Marco Polo, always keen to sniff out good business prospects, noted that the inhabitants of the region liked coral. Some of the coral is actually coralline, however, or fossilized coral, which is in fact indigenous to Tibet, coming as it does from the bed of the Thetys Sea.
Alongside the women stood an old man with an elegant white sheepskin cap and a dark blue silk robe. Through his belt loop was thrust a traditional Khamba sword. Had he never seen a European before? As he looked on, the aides to the drunk official entered our tent, and I set about questioning them about what lay ahead.
Now our research and exploration would begin in earnest. Ever since I had had the privilege to uncover lost temples in the coastal jungles of Yucatán, I had made it my duty to record in detail everything I encountered in unexplored regions.
It was now important that I find out all I could about this area, the names of the local districts and tribes, and the various tributaries of the Mekong, along with the Tibetan names of the wild animals. And then, of course, there was the matter of locating the principal source of the Mekong.
It is important to mention that I was well aware of the delicate nature of trying to determine “the source” of a river.
Whether there actually exists any such thing as a single source to a river is an interesting question. Rivers are, by definition, the sum total of their components—little streams, themselves composed of smaller rivulets. There are of course a few exceptions: rivers that spring up ready made from a huge underground source, or those that emerge as powerful torrents at the foot of glaciers, such as the Ganges. Short of such exceptions, however, most rivers start as a web of fine rivulets or a cluster of small tributaries. Can one therefore speak of a single source?
Did the Mekong come from a glacier or from some spectacular spring? If it did, would that spring or glacier be the true source, the one farthest from the sea, or the tip of the branch with the greatest flow? And which was the historical source, the one considered the source by the locals?
On this subject I avidly cross-examined the two Tibetan administrators in our tent. It soon became evident that they didn’t know the river well at all, that they were not from here but had been sent here by the Chinese in Zadoi. We would have to ask the local nomads. Where are the locals? I asked. The men explained that they lived in tents everywhere and nowhere. A lot of good this was, and so I changed the subject and inquired after the wild animals of the region and their Tibetan names, and also the names of the various local districts.
I then broached the crucial subject of horses. Where could we find them? Could we hire a guide to take us upriver?
The men seemed hesitant at first but then asked how many horses?
I had made only a rough estimate. “Fifteen or twenty,” I ventured. They seemed perplexed.
“The Japanese have hired many already. We will have to send out to collect them.” At this they beckoned me to follow them outside.
Hard on their heels, I crossed the grassy parade ground. I noticed a gallows-like broken-down basketball hoop next to the gap in the garrison wall. We then walked around the stockade to a large solitary black yak-hair tent.
A fierce burly mastiff growled at our approach, then a young child popped out and grabbed it by the collar, while an old man stuck his face out, smiled, and waved us inside.
Bending down under the raised flap, I found myself in the vast tent surprised again at how light such tents were inside as the sun shone through the material. A pretty girl standing by the hearth stuck out what seemed a very large tongue at me in polite Tibetan greeting. The two officials addressed the old man and explained what I was looking for. He took off his sheepskin cap and scratched his head. A young man with his braids shoved into an oversized Chinese peaked cap came forward to say he would go out and find horses but that it would take at least a day or two as the other drok-pa (nomads) were far away and their animals would have to be rounded up.
Although frustrated by the delay, I was happy that our request had not been turned down. Hiring horses is always a tricky business in that, in general, nobody likes to lease horses that belong to them unless they are lame and useless. On nearly all my journeys the only horses I had been able to hire were made available to me through coercion. On my journey across Bhutan in 1968, for instance, a royal proclamation had allowed me to employ the hated Ulag, a tax that required peasants to supply horses or mules on the spot to carry officials and their baggage. Ulag was a Tibetan custom, and it was because of the absence of an official permit to obtain horses that most foreigners had been stopped from reaching Lhasa.
Today, however, in occupied Tibet, the Chinese have arrogated to themselves the same privileges as the princes, kings, and high lamas of old; with Ling among us, we were under the patronage of the Qinghai Mountaineering Association, an official Chinese entity, which, no doubt, would give us the right to secure horses.
For the first time I began to discuss seriously the location of the source of the Mekong. The young Tibetan who had volunteered to round up horses explained that there were two “w
ater heads” of the Dza Nak. One he called the “Drug-di chu-go,” the other the “Sag-ri chu-go.” Although I couldn’t be certain of it, the young man seemed to know the way.
I thought I had been ready for everything, but not for the notion of two sources. Which was the correct one? Were we even talking about the same thing? What did the young man understand by chu-go?
I was looking for the geographical source, the one the farthest from the sea, and—considering the lay of the land—the one farthest west from where we were. Yet how could I explain what we in the West understand by the geographical source of a river?
I took out my satellite map, hoping that would help—the extraordinary TPC G-8D, scale 1:500,000, published by the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center, St. Louis, Missouri, November 1989. As I opened its various folds the young man recoiled as if it might bite him, then very cautiously peered at what must have seemed pure mumbo jumbo and shook his head. It took me some time to figure out where we were exactly, by tracing the latitude and longitude reading I had taken a few hours before. Only by this cross-reference could I situate us on a map with practically no names on it. So far so good: my reading placed us on the right side of the little blue line that was the upper Mekong, a line that broke up into a fan of little streams marked as dotted lines less than approximately ninety miles to the west.
However vague, from now on, this satellite map would be just what we needed to help us to plot our route. That said, I soon put it away, not wishing to frighten the nomads or overimpress the officials.
Sitting down to a cup of salty tea, I tried to tease the polite young lady who had stuck out her tongue. She was every bit as innocent and as shy as she had seemed at first. How many people had she met in her short, isolated life? I wondered.
In our promiscuous modern world we have trouble calling to mind the days when young women blushed naturally and cast down their eyes modestly when speaking to men. Similarly, proper men used to hesitate out of courtesy before staring into the face of a young woman.
Such customs as these, now considered so old-fashioned in the West, are still upheld in Tibet, where both purity and modesty are seen as virtues and not as conditions imposed by male chauvinism. Girls still blush when spoken to and complimented. Candor, in the old sense of the word (meaning “brightness”), is the attribute of not just women—young men are, in their own way, also shy. The greatest decorum is generally attendant upon conversations between boys and girls. I was, of course, considered either too old or too important a person to be engaged in the guarded humor of flirtation, and so I made little headway with the young woman. The old man, on the other hand, answered all my inquiries in a seemingly straightforward manner.
Just how straightforward he was, however, I couldn’t be certain. After all, the men who had brought me to this tent were officials of the Chinese administration.
Back in camp we had nothing to do but wait. It was now nearing six o’clock, Beijing Standard Time, and the sun, when it shone through the clouds, was still high.
I went for a long walk around the garrison with Sebastian, keeping an eye on the fast-darkening sky, which warned of yet another sudden hailstorm.
Sebastian is the age of my eldest son; as a result, I found it both strange and pleasant to have him along as a companion. This is not to say that I ever believed that I was so much as a year older than he. The way I see it, age is an abstraction, relative and ill defined. The only bitter truth is appearance, and I have always looked or tried to look older than my age. Only recently had it occurred to me that I was old enough now, perhaps, to try to look younger than I am.
The man I saw in the mirror with gray hair, a bulging stomach, and the demeanor of some decrepit member of a common cricket club was not really me. I felt better here in Tibet, away from mirrors, with a broad-brimmed hat, ankle-high boots, and a windbreaker.
Sebastian looked much more the part. Handsome, although maybe a little bit too short to be a prototypical cowboy, he sported an eagle feather in his tall hat and wore a jaunty leather waistcoat. At least his allure in our slides and film would help counterbalance my belly and the lurid stonewashed jeans and baseball cap of Mr. Ling.
Under the guise of a happy-go-lucky, self-deprecating young man, there hid in Sebastian a very sagacious, unassuming personality. Eton was obviously the best school at which to prepare for Himalayan exploration. Had not Mallory been there when its Victorian ethics matched those of my nanny, whose reverence of gratuitous glory against all reason had served as my own inspiration?
Everything interested Sebastian, from butterflies to plants, to horses and yaks, and his curiosity was a pleasure to behold as we entered this strange land where literally everything deserved special attention. We were in a region possibly never before seen by Europeans or, for that matter, anyone from the so-called First World, other than the Japanese who had preceded us by a few days.
“Maybe they’re not interested in the source of the river at all,” Sebastian ventured hopefully. I hoped that he was right and that the Japanese were interested only in beetles or flowers.
For his age Sebastian had already lived a momentous life. He had forfeited Oxford to study Chinese in Beijing in 1982, when China was still very much a land of dark blue proletarian jackets and baggy pants—a costume, it was said, that was borrowed from the French factory workers near Paris with whom Zhou Enlai and others worked and from whom they were said to have learned the tenets of Communism. But this is almost surely myth, if one considers that Zhou Enlai was a mandarin, a member of China’s highly educated elite. In fact, Mao was one of the few of the ascendant Communists who was not of a cultured mandarin heritage.
Sebastian had studied in Beijing for a short while only, leaving to go to Geneva, and then to Frankfurt, where he set up an art gallery. This apparent non sequitur had caused him to become a bit of a globe-trotter, and to travel to Tibet and to the rather more delightful backwaters of Bali in search of art.
By contrast, Victorian explorers had no personal lives, being, in that respect, rather like the dead. As to their having feelings, that—well, that was nobody’s business. A schoolboy’s jocular humor was meant to brush away whatever sentiment or anguish he might feel. Fortunately, Sebastian had a warm Gaelic (or was it Latin?) stamp and we were able to share much that is lacking in Victorian Himalayan literature: our opinions on women, love, and life in general—a nexus of subjects that we dared not broach with Jacques, as it was hard to imagine that he had ever given it much thought. We did know that he was married and expecting a second son, hopefully in the week of our return. Jacques was unquestionably more of a Victorian than either Sebastian or I.
Much of the world today is in crisis in terms of its values. Few people in the twentieth century have been spared seeing the certitudes, traditions, principles, customs, and institutions that were attendant upon their childhood all blown away. This applies equally to the mandarin who exchanged his embroidered silk and gold brocades for the blue cotton of French factory workers, and to the Etonian who traded in his tails for blue jeans once out of school. As for matrimonial institutions, how many Muslims have had to give up their many wives, and how many wives have let go their monogamous husbands in the frenzy of newborn social values?
Even here, in the remotest corner of our planet the tide had turned. We had blithely arrived, by motor vehicle, in a place that for centuries was traversed only on foot or on horseback.
Having been on the run ever since we landed in Beijing, we found it extremely painful to have to sit around for a full day waiting for horses to materialize from the broad empty plateau that surrounded the little garrison of Moyun.
We had no trouble imagining how the Chinese soldiers must have felt cooped up behind the earthen bastion of this little outpost, surrounded by elusive “wild men,” barbarian nomads whom they had been taught to fear since childhood. Their fear was akin to that which the half-naked American Indians inspired in the early colonists of America. The top-hatted immigrants
to the New World, moving west to start a new life, were a people who plainly understood that their fortunes depended on ridding the land of such people. To rob the Indians and remain at peace with their consciences, they had no choice but to proclaim them evil.
While Spanish priests had sought, often forcibly, to “convert” the Indians of Mexico, the Protestants of North America were less concerned with the souls of the natives or maybe just less hypocritical. Like the Chinese, the New World Protestants were firmly persuaded that their people and their culture could never mix with the natives’ way of life.
The history of the confrontation in North America is well known, and the Indians have for the most part been exterminated, their remaining number relegated to reservations whose boundaries were respected, to begin with, only as long as their inhabitants didn’t interfere with the interests or greed of the white man.
In China and Tibet, no such racial cleavage exists. Instead the line is drawn between barbarian and Chinese, and it must be said, to their credit, that many young Chinese truly believe their mission in Tibet (and in other provinces with large minority populations) to be a civilizing one. It is, however, the same civilizing mission the British and French colonialists laid claim to one hundred years ago as they subdued the world by the sword for its own good.
It is quite easy to establish how sincere the Chinese in Tibet really are. Forty-five years after having come to tame the land and liberate it from itself, the Chinese have seen their Tibetan subjects become poorer and less educated than they once were. The greater part of their monuments, libraries, institutions of learning, monasteries, and shrines have been destroyed. Famine, once unknown, is now frequent, and disillusionment is widespread. Every year since 1950 has been marked by outbreaks of violence as the Tibetans have again and again cried out for freedom.
Why, then, was the fort at Moyun abandoned? The answer lay with the Chinese themselves. In 1982, Beijing began to see that the cost of turning the Tibetans into docile Communists was as prohibitive as the outcome was doubtful.
The Last Barbarians Page 17