The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

  It is likely that the coming millennium will see the disappearance of the last nomads of the upper Mekong, as a civilization of urban squalor and miserable masses is firmly established everywhere. This will certainly happen unless there is a reemergence of a race of men determined to fight, and to live free once again according to human nature.

  * * *

  In Zadoi we met Mr. Wu Jian Sheng of the travel office of the Chinese Academy of Science, who had organized the Japanese party composed of six members from the Agricultural University of Tokyo, under the leadership of Dr. Nakanishi Junichi, assisted by Dr. Kitamura Masayuki. We were told that they had not been looking for the source of the Mekong after all—a piece of news we would have preferred to hear at the outset. This was not the last we were to see or hear of Mr. Wu Jian Sheng of the Academy of Science, who had suddenly become most interested in our activities.

  It took us two days to reach Nangchen Dzong from Zadoi. En route we visited the small Nyingma-pa–sect monastery of Chos-ling overlooking the Mekong. Thirty-five monks were busy repairing and restoring the main chapel, which had been destroyed in 1957 in the course of the fighting between the Khambas and the People’s Liberation Army. That same night we slept in the huge Gelug-pa monastery of Nangchen, home to over one thousand monks whose parents are all nomads. According to the abbot, this monastery is the largest of all Tibetan monasteries in number of monks. We were proudly shown by my friend the abbot the chapels and assembly halls, built upon the ruins of the old monastery.

  “I receive no money from either the Chinese or the Dalai Lama,” explained the abbot with firm emphasis. The cost of his massive enterprise was paid for by the nomads, who are both highly religious and rich—because, devoid of needs and wants out on the tundra, they have no use for the money they get for their sheep and yaks.

  It should be mentioned that although in certain parts of Tibet the Red Guards are to blame for the destruction of the monasteries, in Amdo and Kham it was the People’s Liberation Army and the Communist cadres themselves who closed and destroyed the religious buildings between 1953 and 1959 during the Khambas’ armed rebellion against the Communists.

  These monasteries are now once again the schools and universities of Tibet, offering the study of medicine and animal husbandry along with theology, philosophy, and yogic arts. The monks pay for their own upkeep, with money given them by their families, or with what they earn working for the monastery, or for other monks, or by performing ceremonies for the laity. If they should choose to leave the monastery where they’ve started their studies, the monks can go on to another one (or quit completely if, for instance, they should wish to marry). They receive university-like academic degrees that are separate from any religious rank they might wish to attain, beginning with novice and rising to Khempo, or senior abbot. Each rank is accompanied by vows renouncing such things as drinking and eating meat.

  * * *

  Two days’ driving from Zadoi, as the sun was setting, we came across the Mekong once again. Here, less than two hundred miles from the source, it was already a great, broad river whose banks, at twelve thousand feet, were bordered by fields of barley and the first villages of the local Nangchen farming community, which supplies the nomads with grain.

  In Nangchen Dzong we tried in vain to hire horses, combing the bazaar, Jacques with his stethoscope searching to take the pulse of the local steeds. Everyone was dragging heels as we felt the aftereffect of our high-altitude marathon. In the end we drove yet more impossible roads to reach Nangchen Gar, the ancient capital. There we collected more information about how Nangchen was established as a kingdom in the eighth century, and how Mila Repa, the great Tibetan sage and poet, visited the realm.

  The wealth of Nangchen was built on the export of horses to the Ming emperors in the fourteenth century. The nomads welcomed the lamaist Buddhists, and at their height seventy-two monasteries flourished on the remote plains of Nangchen’s twenty-five tribes. This bears a marked contrast to the region just south of Nangchen, which remains today the fiercest stronghold of the pre-Buddhist Bon-po religion—a region still largely unexplored, as we were soon to find out.

  As much as we wished to investigate further the Nangchen region, ten days after reaching the source we were so exhausted that we announced to a delighted Mr. Ling that we would at last be heading back to Xining, six hundred miles away. The time had come to reveal our discovery to the outside world.

  We all felt good about our achievement and had imagined that somewhere it might be appreciated. It was with great care that I worded the letter I faxed to the French embassy in Beijing from the post office in Gonghe, the last town on the high plateau before Xining. In the note I proudly communicated our discovery to the counselor, recounting how the quest had been started in France in 1866. I asked him to advise the ambassador. That done, we returned to Xining exactly one month after having left it.

  * * *

  In our eagerness, we had expected if not a full-fledged triumphal return, at least a little enthusiasm. Of course, given that we were no longer in the Age of Exploration, our reception was bound to be mixed, to say the least. The French embassy didn’t bat an eye. In fact, the counselor seemed to have kept the information of my fax completely to himself.

  Back in Beijing we wrote two press releases, and, to our satisfaction, several newspapers around the world echoed the news in tiny print. The immediate result of these dispatches was a visit, to our hotel, by Mr. Wu Jian Sheng of the travel office of the Academy of Science. With one of his colleagues in tow, he informed us rather crossly that we should have asked the Chinese Academy for permission to discover the source. Having said that, he explained that, for a price, the Academy of Science would be glad to arrange our future expeditions. We thanked Mr. Wu for his advice and informed him that we had been officially allowed into the region by the QMA.

  Later, upon my return to Paris, I received a visit from Professor Cai Zongxia, a member of the Geographical Institute of the Academy of Science of China, to whom I gave a map of our findings.

  Thinking it the correct thing to do upon reaching Paris, I advised the Institut Géographique National de France of our find, and received back a very brief letter thanking us for the information and congratulating us for the discovery. In the second paragraph, however, we were advised that we should communicate our finding to the National Bureau of Cartography in Beijing, as a record of the source of the Mekong was none of their business.

  The Royal Geographical Society was more enthusiastic, and its director and secretary, Dr. John Hemming, wrote us a letter that was both warm and encouraging.

  “Many congratulations on your achievement in reaching and locating the source of the Mekong River.” He asked for further details.

  In the meantime, Paris-Match printed a six-page article on our find in its December issue; this was followed by articles in Liberation and Le Figaro. The last of these was written in a slightly skeptical tone, with one expert (who had never been to Asia) declaring that modern geographers preferred to consider a cluster of sources rather than a single source for major rivers, and a grumpy general (who had written a paper on the Mekong) asserting, “No doubt other expeditions would be necessary, perhaps with a little more means, to register precisely all the sources of the river.” No doubt he was right, but in the meantime we had paved the way for others.

  By the end of December it seemed that everyone had forgotten us, and we were left to mull over the sad fact that the days of territorial exploration were no more. Our achievement had been met with only the slightest bit of public recognition and much disbelief.

  Here our journey would have ended on a rather low note—we were frustrated by the thought that those who had failed before us were given heroes’ welcomes, but we had received not so much as a handshake.

  Suddenly, however, as if by magic, we ceased to be invisible. An article appeared in April 1995 in the Geographical Magazine, and then an item in the prestigious Geographical Journal started a wa
ve of interest worldwide. It was as if we had discovered the Mekong all over again. With the tacit approval and publicity of the Royal Geographical Society, the skeptics were convinced at last.

  A Reuters dispatch, followed by a dispatch from France-Presse, triggered a whole series of articles, not the least of which was a front-page article in the New York Times on the seventeenth of April, titled “In Wild Asia, Caravan to a River’s Source.” The piece was written by Marlise Simons and featured a photograph of me straddling the unspectacular baby Mekong. This was followed by a front-page article in the International Herald-Tribune the next day. Then came a flood of articles from Australia to Zanzibar, our find being declared by some as “the solving of the last great geographic enigma of the planet.” The Sunday Times of London titled their piece “Guinness Heir Wins Mekong River Race,” while the Independent hailed a “New Era of Exploration.”

  For once a story involving the Mekong had a happy ending. The Chinese press reported our discovery, and, unlike the case of the Nile and so many other rivers, there was no challenge by any other party. Many awoke to a fact that I had known and believed all along, that there is, indeed, something left to explore on our planet if the spirit is there.

  Of course we were aware that others could probably have done a better job. But at the end of the day, I confess, there is nothing quite like being the first. When Sebastian and I addressed a full house at the Royal Geographical Society, we were overwhelmed at the crowd’s enthusiastic response.

  Our true reward, however, was the privilege of having reached the place where dreams and reality meet. Having done that I felt vindicated for the thirty-seven years I had spent roaming the remoter parts of a very often indifferent planet.

  This book should end here, but as is the case with growing leeks or playing the stock market, in exploring, tomorrow is another day, and explorers just have to carry on.

  POSTSCRIPT: A LIVING FOSSIL

  The film of our Mekong expedition made from Jacques’s ten hours of videotape had not yet aired in the United States, when, putting the Mekong aside for a while, Sebastian and I prepared in September 1995 to set off again for Tibet, this time with a larger party to study the Nangchen horses.

  My idea was to have a zoologist who specialized in equine physiology make a study of the Nangchen horse. We wished to examine in detail the horse’s specific adaptation to high altitudes. I hoped, too, to be allowed to bring some of these horses back to Europe or America. Sebastian was the first to join the project.

  As I boldly announced to David Smadja, our young and enthusiastic sponsor, we would travel this time from Lhasa to the remotest northeastern province of occupied Tibet. There, on the southern borders of Qinghai’s Nangchen district, we planned to purchase the finest specimens of the Nangchen horse, and then to drive and ride the horses six hundred–odd miles across the whole of central Tibet all the way back to Lhasa. Having done all that, we would have horses at our disposal for further study and eventual export.

  En route, the equine specialist of our team would perform a study of the horses under stress at various altitudes. This involved, among other tests, the monitoring of their heart rates before and after climbing through passes. As with the preceding expedition, this one would be filmed, but not by our friend Jacques Falck; Jerome Nouvelle, a professional cameraman, would be assisted by Sylvain Carellas. Both men were selected by our sponsor.

  Dr. Harris of the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket, one of the world’s foremost research centers specializing in equine physiology, recommended that we take along a brilliant young researcher by the name of Dr. Ignasi Casas.

  Dr. Casas, who had worked for years with the Animal Health Trust, was Catalan. My son Jocelyn, just out of university in Barcelona, joined our party as a photographer, with the interesting result that four out of six of us spoke Catalan, a language nearly as esoteric as Tibetan. Sebastian and I had learned ours over the course of many summers in Cadaques, a coastal town north of Barcelona where we both had summer houses.

  As I was researching this expedition, one of the first things that struck me was how little was known of the north-central part of Tibet, by virtue of the fact that it lay outside the two major trade routes that linked Amdo and Kham with Lhasa. I could find no account of a journey into the region by Europeans, Americans, or Japanese. It seemed travelers in the past had nearly always stuck to the major trade routes. It never occurred to me that there may have been an excellent reason. Not being very good at listening to other people’s advice, I was going to have to learn the hard way.

  “The area is inhabited by wild men,” Rinzing, our Tibetan assistant, advised us on our arrival in Lhasa. Although he had never been there himself, he was aware of the ferocious reputation of the people of the area, on the one hand because they were Khambas, considered by the Lhasans as aggressive if not outright wild, and on the other hand because they weren’t Buddhists but believers in Bon—in other words, they were primitive heathens. They had resisted conversion to lamaism for fourteen centuries.

  I laughed at such warnings. I had spent years among the Khambas, and I felt I had nothing to fear. That said, we set off on the first leg of our long journey, a rugged 750-mile drive to the extreme northeast of Tibet, a region officially closed to all foreigners, and our jumping-off point. It had taken me two years of lengthy negotiations with the authorities in Lhasa to secure permission from the Chinese military to travel to the area. I was particularly interested in the prospect of exploring virgin territory. There was no telling what we might encounter.

  Our first surprise was that the Indian summer we had hoped for failed to materialize. Two days out of Lhasa it began to snow as we left Nakchu-ka heading east along the Trans-Tibetan Highway linking Lhasa to Chengdu, the capital of Chinese Sichuan. This strategic route across Khamba territory was carved through Tibet in 1954 and played a key role in the suppression of the Khamba uprising. Forty years later, still a narrow dirt road, it took us slowly across snowbound pass after snowbound pass toward Sogchen, the site of a huge fortress and monastery that mark the limits of Buddhism on the frontier of Kham. Beyond Sogchen lay the land of the heathen Bon people.

  The third day out of Lhasa our truck and two jeeps reached the remote Serchu valley, dotted with little hamlets composed of clusters of flat-roofed houses. Here, in the last week of September, the barley had been harvested and the fields were covered with a stubble of straw. Hundreds of the finest Nangchen horses we had ever seen were grazing happily all around. Nangchen itself and the upper valley of the Mekong lay just beyond the northern ranges from which we were overlooking the Serchu valley.

  With great satisfaction I witnessed Dr. Casas’s enthusiasm at the sight of “our” Nangchen horse. I was afraid that I might have been a little bit carried away in the manner in which I had been extolling its unique conformation and qualities to him since the time of our first meeting weeks before.

  Upon leaving the valley and driving two days farther east, we noticed that the horses were getting smaller and less remarkable. A day’s drive from the monastery of Riwoche, we decided, therefore, to stop our quest and go back to the Serchu valley and make it our base.

  At Serchu we were in the heart of Bon territory, but we didn’t realize at first what that meant. The local Khambas looked like tall, handsome “red Indians,” and wore their hair long in braids intertwined with red silk threads. They cut fine figures on their elegant mounts, and we weren’t shy about telling them that we were interested in renting and buying horses. We were also looking for men to accompany us on our long way south to Lhasa, we explained.

  The day after we pitched our tents, our camp was surrounded by farmers with horses for sale. Obviously the crafty locals thought they could pull a fast one on us, as most of the horses were ugly and many were lame or blind in one eye.

  Dr. Casas weeded out the animals with major defects and established that we were not to be taken in so easily. In spite of the many horses offered to us, none were as fine as the
ones we had seen in the fields. The farmers said all the good horses belonged to relatives who didn’t want to sell. When I singled out one particularly elegant mount I was told by the owner that he would not sell it for less than two thousand yuan (four thousand dollars), an exorbitant price considering that the average local horse was worth two or three hundred dollars. But the man wasn’t joking. Just to test him I bid up to six thousand dollars, a sum with which I might have been able to buy up much of the hamlet where the farmer lived. Still no sale.

  “They are our pride,” the Khamba said forcefully, at which I was moved to recall that not so long ago in Europe not everything was for sale either, although it seems to be today.

  The sedentary pagan Khambas were just as aggressive and arrogant as the nomads of Nangchen. Like the nomads, they lived for the annual fair that attracted the region’s best horses to Serchu to compete in races and displays of skill. To own an excellent horse was to be famous, envied, feared, and respected. No one would part with their finer animals.

  We soon discovered that the proud villagers were also unwilling to accompany us south, we thought because they were busy plowing their fields and threshing the harvest. We were quite oblivious to the fact that the journey we planned to take was dangerous, if not outright impossible.

  We had already purchased three horses, which I now had to sell back to their former owners at a loss as we decided to seek better fortune in the town of Dengchen, a day’s drive east. In Dengchen there was a large Chinese garrison, and, with the help of the local officials, we were at last able to hire the appropriate horses to take us on the road south. These horses were prime examples of the Nangchen breed, and Dr. Casas set about immediately to study their heart rhythms.