The Emperor Far Away (14 page)

Herding yaks and horses and moving across the grasslands in groups a few families strong, camping in set places depending on the time of year, the nomads are romantic figures but have a distinct edge to them. It is easy to see why they make the Chinese wary. Even now, they are still
shengfan
, or uncooked in the old Han classification of barbarians – people who have resisted all efforts to tame them. At night, when they roared into Litang on motorbikes decorated with Buddhist symbols, the long red tassels on their handlebars flying in the wind, police cars shadowed them.

Outside its few towns, Kham has always been a wild west. Before 1951 and the Chinese occupation of Tibet, it was a place where every man carried a gun or a sword and outlaws flourished by robbing both passing travellers and the locals. Many of those high-plateau highwaymen were people fleeing the bonded labour that all Tibetans – apart from the aristocratic landlords, officials and monks – spent part of each year performing in lieu of tax.

Old Tibet was a feudal society, one where most people lived in desperate poverty. In 2009, as part of the CCP’s efforts to remind Tibetans of what their lives had been like before 1951, a new public holiday was introduced, the ponderously titled ‘Serf Liberation Day’. Yet few of the former ‘slaves’ appear keen to celebrate it. By harking back to those times, the Chinese are just reinforcing the idea that Tibetans have always been subjugated by someone, while reminding them that Beijing is the new landlord.

Nothing about the nomads camped outside Litang suggested they were ever serfs, even if they remain poor by any standards. The knives in their belts are testament to the reputation the Khampa have among their fellow Tibetans for being especially unruly. It was the nomads of Kham who played a major part in the war of 1956–9. They launched brave, foolhardy and ultimately hopeless attacks on horseback armed with swords, antique rifles and amulets around their necks which they believed would deflect the PLA’s machine-gun bullets.

China still uses its superior technology to subdue Tibet and the autonomous prefectures. With 90 per cent of its 50,000 residents Tibetan, Litang is a town under permanent surveillance. CCTV cameras monitor every street, while a large contingent of Wu Jing are based conveniently close to the monastery. For Samphel and many others, the police searches of homes, and the need to hide any evidence of loyalty to the Dalai Lama, have become part of daily life.

It was a highly frustrating existence for Samphel, who struggled to contain his anger at the imposition of Beijing’s rules in the local schools and the monastery. Deeply cynical about the Han, he railed against the way the excruciating, pitted road that runs from Chengdu into Tibet was being turned into a smooth highway. ‘The Chinese say they are putting money into the area,’ said Samphel, ‘but the new road is only being built so Chinese companies can get here more easily to do their mining.’

My irritation with how China’s laws were affecting my movements was minor compared to the strictures Samphel faced, but the restrictions were still vexing. Litang was almost the end of the road for me in western Sichuan. I could travel on to the next town of Batang, a mere fifty kilometres from Tibet, but not beyond it because solo foreigners cannot cross Tibet’s land borders legally. It is another legacy of the 2008 protests. Just as parts of the borderlands are closed, so now almost all travel inside Tibet by westerners is in groups who arrive by air or train in Lhasa, armed with a folder full of permits that need to be negotiated in advance.

Before 1949, such constraints were unknown. The Tibetan government did not encourage visitors, often banning them outright, but those who wanted to get into Tibet could do so if they were hardy enough to cross the mountains that guarded it from the outside world. Colonel F. M. Bailey entered from Sikkim in India in 1913, five years before his sojourn in Xinjiang, to explore the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge and procure botanical specimens. He called the book that recounted his adventures
No Passport to Tibet
.

Some intrepid travellers do still try to get in on their own. Occasionally they succeed in visiting certain areas without getting caught, which would entail a fifteen-day prison term, a fine, a return at their own expense to inland China and sometimes deportation. It was difficult but I knew it was possible. I had done it myself, after paying a Han truck driver for a lift into south-eastern Tibet from the far north of Yunnan Province.

We set off early in the morning from the Nujiang Valley, a remote, little-visited region scrunched up against the borders with Myanmar and Tibet. The road was dire, the worst I had travelled in China – a stone and dirt track along which the truck pitched and yawed like a boat riding a heavy swell. There was a vertigo-inducing sheer drop down to the Nujiang River on one side, and I gave up counting how often the truck’s wheels spun perilously close to the edge. It took four hours to travel the forty kilometres to the border between Yunnan and Tibet.

The frontier was marked by a dilapidated yellow sign proclaiming, ‘Forbid Foreigner Turn into Strictlg’ in English and ‘Strictly Forbidden for Foreigners to Enter’ in Chinese. A few kilometres on, Han workers were tunnelling through the hills, building a new road to tie this part of Tibet closer to the motherland. The truck driver wanted to leave me with them; he was scared of what would happen if we encountered a police or Wu Jing patrol. Arms are sometimes smuggled across the border from Myanmar, destined for both Yunnan and Tibet, and trucks are routinely searched.

Refusing to get out, I accompanied the driver to a village where he was delivering building supplies. Glimpsed from the road, it looked idyllic compared to many of its Chinese counterparts. Golden barley fields that swayed with the wind and ran flush to the fast-flowing, steel-grey waters of the Nujiang surrounded substantial white-stone, flat-roofed houses with carefully painted, multi-coloured window frames. Overlooking them on a hill above the road, Buddhist prayer flags ringed a makeshift shrine and announced Tibet’s fundamental difference from Han China.

Up close, it was less appealing. There was no running water, just a well, and the only lights ran off car batteries. Most of the village turned out to unload the truck, with both men and women slinging the heavy sacks of cement and sand on to their backs and staggering down the steep path that led to their houses. They gazed at me with curiosity and smiled when they discovered where I was from, although few spoke Chinese. But everyone was dirty, their clothes stained and tattered, and they lived off what they grew and their animals. In the winter, when the road became impassable, they were completely cut off.

There was no point in me venturing on from the village. Further up the road was Cawarong, the first settlement of any size in south-eastern Tibet, a former stop on the Tea-Horse Road which once connected Yunnan to Tibet and India. Tea from the plantations in Xishuangbanna in the south of Yunnan travelled north, while prized Tibetan war horses went south, along with missionaries, monks and traders. During the Second World War, parts of the Tea-Horse Road became supply lines for the foreign and Chinese soldiers fighting the Japanese.

Only the odd truck travels the route now. But there is a Wu Jing base outside Cawarong and checkpoints before then which I would never get through. I was already ducking out of sight whenever I heard a vehicle engine, in case it was the police. After a few hours in the village, I climbed back into the truck and returned, even more slowly in the dying light, to where I had started that morning. I thought of how Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian climber, SS man and unofficial tutor to the Dalai Lama, spent seven years in Tibet. I had managed just one day.

What I wanted to do was travel from Lhasa to the far west of Tibet and Mount Kailash – the seat of gods and their attendants, the holiest mountain in the world for a billion Hindus and Buddhists. Travelling there would take me along 219, the road that connects Xinjiang and Tibet, while running close to the borders with India, Nepal and Bhutan. Sneaking across the frontier was not going to allow me to accomplish that journey. Travelling in Tibet officially, which meant with a guide, was my only realistic option.

But I was hampered by my journalist’s visa, a black spot handed down by Beijing. Tibet is the one part of China where foreign reporters cannot travel, except on trips run by the CCP’s propaganda department. The Chinese claim it is for our safety, as if we will be suborned by the natives when they see our notebooks and cameras. As long as my visa scarred my passport, revealing my occupation every time I checked into a hotel, I would never be given the permits to travel in Tibet.

A trump card appeared in the shape of another passport I possessed, one which the Chinese knew nothing about. It offered no clue that I was a China-based journalist, so I took a trip to a Chinese embassy in a neighbouring country and used it to apply for a standard tourist visa. Trusting that the details of my existence in Beijing would be filed away in the netherworld of Chinese cyberspace, I reasoned there was no way, nor any reason, to cross-check a routine visa application with the list of foreign reporters resident in China. I was right. Now it was time for Tibet.

9

Lhasa

The midday flight from Chengdu to Lhasa was delayed, allowing time for contemplation. Other departure gates signalled their less glamorous destinations in red neon dots. I was smug in the knowledge that I was heading somewhere far more exotic. But although my passport and permits had been examined, I was not leaving China, not officially anyway, and I was travelling by air. I felt none of the exhilaration, the spurious sense of achievement, implicit in the crossing of a land border: walking out of a country, the slow march across stateless territory, an abrupt change of language, the dull thud of a new entry stamp.

Tenzin was waiting for me when I emerged from baggage claim. Slim and nervous, short wavy black hair showing flecks of dandruff, he offered a shy smile, hung a
katag
, the white scarf traditionally given by lay people to lamas, around my neck and said, ‘Welcome to Tibet.’ Moving towards the exit, we sized each other up with swift sideways glances. We would be together for a month – a lifetime in the wrong company.

As my appointed guide, Tenzin was required to accompany me to official tourist sites, such as monasteries and museums, when we travelled between towns, and on the Kora, the three-day pilgrim circuit around Mount Kailash that would be the climax of my trip. The rest of the time, in theory anyway, I could roam alone. Tenzin was Tibetan, and I hoped he would be relaxed about the solo wanderings I had planned. If he was officious or suspicious, he could make it difficult for me to slip away.

Little of the journey into Lhasa has stayed with me: a blurry image of barley fields beyond the car window. Just being here was befuddling. I had skirted the edges of the Tibetan Plateau, but Tibet itself was still an unknown – my first substantial journey into a region that takes up one-quarter of China’s landmass. And I couldn’t concentrate, not with such a massive sky over me. At 3,650 metres above sea level, Lhasa is actually lower than Litang. But Litang is notorious for its miserable weather and was covered in murky, grey cloud during my stay. Here the sky was a brilliant blue, stretching for ever and rendering everything below it puny in comparison.

Countryside gave way to the outskirts of Lhasa, rousing me from my dream daze. We passed the monolithic train station, opened with much fanfare in 2006, which connects Tibet to Qinghai and the rest of China. It is a source of great pride to the Chinese, who crow about how they laid the highest railway line in the world across the permafrost of the Tibetan Plateau. The locals are more circumspect about the achievement, because the trains bring not only tourists but increasing numbers of Han migrants.

We entered Lhasa at the western, Chinese end of town. Brighter and cleaner than many inland cities, it looked like a place eager to expand, with empty lots of land beckoning to be built on interspersed between the new office and apartment blocks. We drove down Beijing Road, past Han scurrying on their errands, shops and restaurants with Chinese characters dominant over the spidery script the Tibetan language uses. But then, like a hologram of ancient Tibet imposed on a new city, there was the Potala Palace on a small hill above the road, its white and red colours magnificent against the cloudless sky.

Dirty white Tibetan houses, no taller than three or four storeys and separated by tempting narrow streets and alleys, began to appear. Now there were far more Tibetans, some in their traditional garb but most in the same western clothes worn by the Chinese. We negotiated the first Wu Jing checkpoints and I realised we were in the old town, the Tibetan district of Lhasa.

My hotel was squirreled away in an alley close to the Muslim quarter, home to a small community of Hui, whose forebears began arriving in Tibet in the seventeenth century. Not bothering to unpack, I rushed out to experience Lhasa after being denied the chance for so long. I joined monks, urban Tibetans in jeans and trainers, nomads in long boots and
chubas
, Han and foreign tourists, all moving towards Barkhor Square, the centre of the city.

Within five minutes I ran headlong into crowds of pilgrims travelling in the opposite direction. Oblivious to everyone around them, they spun prayer wheels or fingered beads while chanting incomprehensible incantations. Overwhelmingly country Tibetans, their faces brown and leathery, most were wrapped up in
chubas
, but some men wore the utilitarian blue jackets and trousers ubiquitous across rural China until recently. Many of the women wore the brightly coloured, horizontally striped aprons called
bangden
over long black skirts.