The Emperor Far Away (13 page)

Midnight approached with everyone sitting in the truck trying to stay warm. The geologists and the driver carried on talking about ways to extricate us, as if the last couple of hours hadn’t made it obvious we were going nowhere until another vehicle hauled us clear. Ma and I looked at each other and, for the only time in our travels together, I agreed wholeheartedly with what I could read in his eyes. Without saying a word we slipped out of the truck, grabbed our bags and made for the road.

Guli was our saviour, a Uighur housewife in a headscarf driving a red hatchback. She went past as we reached the road and I shouted at her to stop, although the words came out of my mouth as a high-pitched scream. Amazingly, she pulled up. We sprinted to the car and explained our situation. I offered 100 yuan, and she agreed to turn around and drive us to Huatugou. My last sight of the geologists was of them illuminated by the truck’s headlights, still trying to excavate the wheels as if they were digging deep for minerals.

Huatugou was a village until oil was discovered beneath its mountain mud. Now, it is a scruffy, fast-growing town. As we approached, the winking lights of the derricks pumping away around the clock looked like stars which had descended from the night sky. Then we turned on to the main street and ran headlong into a swirling gale that flung debris at the windscreen. When Guli dropped us off, we were enveloped by huge clouds of dust coming from the partially constructed buildings all around.

Most of the hotels refused to take foreigners. While Ma disappeared quickly to a bed in a dormitory by the bus station, I walked the unlit, empty streets for what seemed like for ever before finding a place that condescended to admit a westerner. Lying on the bed at three in the morning in a room with no hot water and too tired and cold to take off my clothes, I cursed myself for not ignoring Ma and staying the night in Charklik.

Yet I couldn’t really blame him. Like so many ordinary Chinese I’d met, the future wasn’t something he planned for: things just happened, good or bad, whether you liked them or not. Mostly, they were bad. You lost your job, your salary was cut or you were injured working like Ma had been. Maybe the local government and a property developer conspired to take the land your family had lived on for generations in return for a pittance. China is a cruel and unpredictable country, so it is understandable why most of its people concentrate on the immediate – the next meal, the next bus ride – and leave the rest to fate.

Five hours later, I was at the bus station. Ma was waiting for me. ‘The tickets for the morning bus to Golmud are sold out, but I’ve found someone who’ll take us in a car,’ he said. I decided it was time to end our brief acquaintance, and turned around and walked out. My ride to Golmud was uneventful, and I know for sure that if Ma had been with me we’d have broken down or had a puncture or been delayed somehow. Ma was a Jonah, and proof that it is nearly always better to travel alone.

Part II

TIBET – THE WILD WEST

We can see that for Chinese with respect to barbarians, to slaughter them is not an unbenevolent act, to deceive them is not untrustworthy and to steal their land and wealth is not unrighteous.

Wang Fuzhi, seventeenth-century Han philosopher

8

The Tibetan Borderlands

Samphel’s home was a temple of Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule. The two-room house was squeezed between other similar dwellings in an unpaved alley in the lee of Litang’s monastery. One room was given over to prayers, the other served as the living room, kitchen and bedroom for Samphel, his mother and two brothers when they were around. Outside, a satellite dish rusted slowly in the tiny yard.

I perched on a low stool opposite his mum, a smiling, fat woman with cropped hair who constantly spun the prayer wheel she clutched in her left hand. Samphel sat next to me, tall and broad-shouldered in his crimson monk’s robes. A TV tuned to Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan channel murmured softly in the background. On the far wall, pictures of the Dalai Lama and the former Panchen Lama, the second most senior monk in Tibet, hung side by side.

Almost all Tibetans refuse to recognise the current Panchen Lama, who was selected by the CCP after it rejected the Dalai Lama’s choice of a six-year-old boy as the Panchen’s next reincarnation. Three days after the Dalai Lama named him in May 1995, he was taken away by the Chinese authorities and hasn’t been seen since. ‘He is under arrest,’ said Samphel, bringing his two wrists together to indicate someone handcuffed. His replacement lives in Beijing and makes occasional, stage-managed visits to Tibet during which he invariably praises the religious freedom enjoyed by Tibetans under the CCP’s benevolent reign.

In Litang, there is little sign of such tolerance. ‘We have to hide the pictures and our satellite dish when the police come to check the houses,’ Samphel told me. ‘They do the same up at the monastery.’ Earlier that day, I had been astounded to see a near-life-size photo of the Dalai Lama in the prayer hall of Litang’s monastery. It was propped up next to the empty throne all Tibetan monasteries maintain in case he should ever return from exile in Dharamsala in northern India.

Just possessing a picture of the Dalai Lama can lead to arrest for any Tibetan. If the monastery was found to be displaying one, then the senior lamas would likely disappear and the other 600 monks consigned to yet more of the re-education classes the CCP requires them to attend on a regular basis. Listening to Radio Free Asia for the latest news of the Dalai Lama’s activities, or the statements of the Tibetan government-in-exile, is a punishable offence too. But many of Litang’s policemen are Tibetans, and I suspected the monastery received advance warning when they were about to make their rounds.

‘Do you eat
tsampa
?’ asked Samphel. He offered me a paper cup half full of the barley flour which is the staple dish of Tibetans. He poured in some yak-butter tea – yaks rather than cows provide many Tibetans with meat and milk – and I used a chopstick to churn it into the sticky, porridge-like paste it needs to become before it can be consumed. We ate it with
gori
, doughy Tibetan flatbread, drinking hot water to wash it down. A diet of
tsampa
alone swiftly becomes tedious. But the last time I had eaten it was in a restaurant in Beijing, where Tibetan dancers circled the tables of the mostly foreign and Han diners. It tasted better in Litang.

As we ate, Samphel told me about his life. He was nineteen and a student monk. ‘I want to teach Tibetan history and language at the monastery,’ he said. In a mix of fractured English and passable Mandarin, he told me how happy he was to speak with a foreigner. ‘I envy your lifestyle and the fact you can talk in your mother tongue with freedom.’ Like all people in China his age, Samphel had attended a Mandarin-speaking school, but Tibetan was his first language. He asked if I had met the Dalai Lama or been to Dharamsala. ‘One of my brothers lives there,’ he said. Samphel’s siblings were monks too.

He dug out a prized photo taken in Barkhor Square, the heart of the Tibetan capital Lhasa. In jeans and a T-shirt and with a broad grin on his face, Samphel looked like any carefree teenager on holiday rather than the serious monk sitting next to me. I wondered why he was in mufti, rather than his robes. ‘The Chinese don’t like monks going to Tibet. I had to go dressed in normal clothes,’ he explained.

That trip was the only time Samphel had visited Tibet as China defines it. Officially, his hometown of Litang is in the far west of Sichuan Province. The actual border with Tibet is another 160 kilometres away across the grasslands and mountains that encircle the town. But this is still the Tibetan Plateau, the roof of the world, which stretches for almost 2.5 million square kilometres in all directions, and Litang is over 4,000 metres high. I had come from much lower Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, and the sudden jump in altitude had left me with a headache and gasping in the thin air.

To the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala and its numerous supporters overseas, Tibet extends far beyond its present-day frontiers, pushing into the neighbouring provinces of Qinghai and Gansu to the north-east, Sichuan in the east and Yunnan in the south-east. Their version of Tibet dates back to a 1914 interpretation of the borders, and is almost double the size of the land Beijing currently recognises. It includes the areas in the neighbouring provinces, like Litang, which are historically part of Amdo and Kham, pronounced ‘Cham’, two of the four regions Tibet is divided into.

Those borderlands are designated Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures, as opposed to Tibet itself, which is classified as an Autonomous Region like Xinjiang. The prefectures are overwhelmingly populated by Tibetans. So many live in them, around three million, they outnumber the 2.7 million Tibetans who reside inside Tibet. Another 150,000 or so are in exile, mostly in India and Nepal.

Tibetans in the borderlands regard themselves as still living within Tibet – the Dalai Lama was born in an area of Qinghai that is traditionally part of Amdo – even if both Kham and Amdo functioned as semi-independent states largely outside of Lhasa’s control in the time before Beijing ran Tibet. They ignore the fact that their country’s frontiers have fluctuated, just as the fortunes of the Tibetans have, and many still identify themselves by the region they come from. ‘The Chinese say we are Sichuan people. But we are Khampa,’ stressed Samphel, his voice rising as he used the Tibetan word for those from Kham.

His vehemence didn’t surprise me. Litang has long been associated with a particularly militant form of Tibetan nationalism. As well as being the hometown of the seventh and tenth Dalai Lamas – the present one is the fourteenth – Litang was the site of a fierce battle in 1956. The Khampa had risen up against the Chinese who had marched into Lhasa five years earlier and ended Tibet’s brief period of de facto independence. Litang’s monastery was besieged for a month, before the PLA resorted to bombing it from the air. The revolt went on to become a Tibet-wide uprising. It ended in defeat three years later, resulting in the Dalai Lama escaping into exile.

Exactly how many Tibetans were killed during the 1956–9 rebellion is unknown. Exile groups in Dharamsala put the number at around 85,000, based on what they say are captured Chinese documents. Many historians dispute that figure, but there is little doubt that tens of thousands died and that thousands more were subsequently imprisoned in the harshest of conditions. For a country with such a small population, Tibet paid a very high price for its refusal to bow to Beijing.

Litang remains a place the CCP is deeply suspicious of. Since March 2008, when protests against the Chinese erupted in Lhasa, prompting demonstrations elsewhere across greater Tibet, it has been periodically barred to visitors. Many other parts of western Sichuan are permanently closed. Tibetans in the autonomous prefectures suffer the double indignity of being under Chinese sway and not considered to be living in Tibet itself – reasons for many to resist Beijing’s rule.

Foreigners had been banned from Litang until a few days before I arrived, because monks from all over Tibet and the borderlands were gathered at the monastery for debates. Samphel had returned for them; he was temporarily studying at another monastery. He thought 3,000 had come to Litang, enough to spark fears among the authorities that disgruntled lamas might publicly express their dissatisfaction with China’s occupation of Tibet.

Litang’s annual horse-racing festival had been cancelled again as well. The week of races and horse-trading is the social highlight of the year for the locals, but has taken place only once since 2008 and then just for a single day. Even if they aren’t waving pictures of the Dalai Lama, the nomads from across Kham who descend on Litang for the festival have a habit of fighting over the race results.

Many nomads had travelled to Litang anyway and their tents were pitched outside town on the grassland. Grazing yaks stood as unofficial sentries, while wild-looking horses whinnied and mean mastiffs barked ferociously at the approach of a stranger, straining at the ropes and chains that tethered them. I learned quickly that it is best to announce your arrival at a nomad settlement by yelling from afar ‘
Tashi Delek
’, the Tibetan for ‘Hello’, so that the nomads can keep any loose dogs under control.

They looked nothing like any Tibetans I had encountered before. The long-haired men were haughty and appeared almost piratical, with gold teeth glinting out of their brown faces and knives tucked into the belts or sashes that held in place their
chuba
, the thick woollen cloak worn by rural Tibetans at all times of the year. Every so often, they swung themselves easily up on to the horses and galloped them around bareback. Their women had pony-tailed hair dangling almost to their waists, and were bundled up in so many layers their bodies seemed shapeless.