The Emperor Far Away (17 page)

Zang piao
can be found running cafés in the old town, buying jewellery to sell in the cities they come from or working as singers and artists; creative Chinese have been travelling to Tibet in search of inspiration since the early 1980s. They are very different from the hundreds of millions of young Han who leave their homes in the countryside for jobs in factories and on building sites, or to work as security guards, waitresses and cleaners. If they come to Tibet, it is to open a tiny restaurant or shop because there is less competition there than in their home provinces.

Their more fortunate counterparts are drawn to Tibet not by economic prospects but by its reputation as an unsullied paradise, one where people don’t follow the same tenets as those of the Han, or anyone else. In many ways, the
zang piao
are similar to the westerners who idealise Tibet. Like them, they believe that Tibetans hold the key to a door that is locked for everyone else.

The customers at 798 were much more talkative than the people in the teahouses. ‘We don’t see many foreigners in here any more,’ one said to me. ‘There used to be more foreign tourists than Chinese in Lhasa, but in the last few years it’s been the other way around.’ His name was Pemba, and he was a teacher who had grown up in the old town. Now his parents rented out their house there and the family lived in a modern apartment in the west of Lhasa, a move increasingly made by Tibetans who can afford it.

‘Rent for shops and bars in the old town is very high now, because there are so many Han tourists. It’s a good thing to own a house here now,’ noted Pemba. But although he lived elsewhere, he still socialised in the old town. ‘I have to, because all the other parts of Lhasa are like a Chinese city. This is the only place where you’ll find Tibetan culture. We say Lhasa is divided into the old town and new town, like two different countries really.’

But 798 could have been a bar in any Chinese city, save for the Tibetan clientele and the prayer flags adorning the walls. And Pemba and his friends were graduates, who had travelled and studied in eastern China. They spoke fluent Mandarin and, for all their talk of the way Lhasa is changing, none appeared particularly upset by the Han influx into their country. Perhaps when they spoke among themselves they got angry, but their fatalism in public reminded me of the passive patrons of the teahouses.

I asked them where ordinary Tibetans went for a night out, apart from backstreet teahouses. ‘Well, there’s always the
nangma
,’ one said with an expression that was half grin and half grimace. They told me
nangma
are nightclubs, named after a classical Tibetan dance. Pemba looked down on them as unworthy. ‘I hardly ever go. I feel sad when I do, seeing young Tibetans getting so drunk. You know
nangma
were originally performances for high lamas? They used to be much more traditional. Now it’s just about drinking, dancing and sometimes fighting.’

His perception of the
nangma
is typical among educated Tibetans. When I told Tenzin I had visited one, he was shocked and immediately asked me if there had been any trouble. It is as if they have become a codeword for the way Tibetan society is being disconnected from its roots. They sounded less alarming to me, more like an outlet for the general unruliness of country Tibetans.

Pemba wouldn’t go with me to a
nangma
, but he did tell me where to find a popular one. It was outside the old town, up a long, steep flight of stairs at the top of which two bouncers in black jackets waited. As a foreigner, I was deemed safe and so not frisked for a knife. Inside, it looked like a scruffier version of a provincial Chinese nightclub, except that there was no dance floor. In its place was a stage lit by coloured neon lights opposite which were tables and behind them more comfortable booths.

A waitress showed me to a table towards the back. I was the oldest person present by some distance and the only one who wasn’t Tibetan. Like in any Chinese club, alcohol was ordered in bulk: beers came in groups of six or you could get a bottle of whisky or wine. I was allowed to get away with asking for a single beer. Bottles covered most of the tables and a few people were already slumped head down in their chairs, or sprawled out in a booth. But not everyone was drinking alcohol; cartons of orange juice seemed to be a popular choice as well.

Traditional Tibetan music, with an added electronic backbeat, started pumping out of the speakers and an MC appeared on stage dressed in smart nomad gear – baggy trousers tucked into high leather boots and a fancy
chuba
. He set about cheerleading the audience with a few jokes and songs. Confused, I wondered if I had wandered by mistake into a Tibetan version of the film
Cabaret
, with Lhasa substituting for Weimar-era Berlin.

Nangma
were once dances where troupes of beautiful women entertained aristocrats and senior monks, with most Tibetans excluded from viewing them. Here girls in white dresses danced elegantly while waving yellow prayer scarves, but solo female and male singers took to the stage to perform Tibetan folk songs too. Members of the audience could buy a
katag
and drape it around the singer’s neck to show their approval. Every so often, the audience was summoned on stage for a collective dance. Led by the MC, they shuffled left and right around the stage in a circle, arms waving, feet stamping.

Compared to what I had witnessed in clubs in Beijing, never mind London, it all seemed very innocent. I couldn’t equate what I was seeing with the gloomy view held by Pemba and his friends that the modern-day version of the
nangma
represents the decline and fall of Tibetan culture. Instead, the dances were simply being updated for a new audience. The setting might have been modern, but the songs were the same and the young crowd knew all the lyrics.

Spending their nights listening to such music actually marked them out as rather more conventional than the people in 798. They weren’t in a bar named after a Beijing neighbourhood, listening to American rock and talking to
zang piao
and stray westerners. For all their superficial similarities to the nightclubs of inland China, there is nothing remotely Han or foreign about the
nangma
, unless you believe that alcohol abuse is a Chinese or overseas import to Tibet.

Class snobbery inspires much of the disdain for the
nangma
. The aristocracy may have been displaced by the events of the last sixty years, but in Lhasa there is a clear divide between urban Tibetans and those who have migrated from the countryside. In the
nangma
, the clothes of most of the people indicated they were recent arrivals in Lhasa. Their high-crowned baseball caps, mysteriously popular in rural Tibet, fake low-end western labels and no-name jeans gave them away as surely as if they were pilgrims on the Barkhor Kora with braided hair, wearing
chubas
and spinning prayer wheels.

Chinese from the country use the term
chuqu
– ‘to go out’ – to describe their move to the cities. Often, it is boredom as much as the lack of economic opportunities which inspires them to leave. For young Tibetans, the sheer harshness of life on the grasslands makes the cities of Tibet and the borderlands very attractive. Some are choosing to go further afield; around 50,000 Tibetans are now estimated to live in the Sichuan capital Chengdu.

Many end up unemployed, like the Uighur migrants in Urumqi from southern Xinjiang. For a growing minority, crime is the only way to survive, and conning and robbing tourists is a thriving industry. Lhasa’s sex trade, too, is as demarcated as the divide between the Chinese city and the old town, with the Tibetan brothels populated exclusively by teenage girls from the countryside. With prospects like that, a night in the
nangma
, drinking and watching dances their forebears were not considered worthy enough to glimpse seemed to me more like a reaffirmation of their roots than a rejection of them.

11

U-Tsang

Tenzin was singing as his chum Lopa casually steered the land cruiser one-handed out of Lhasa on the first stage of our 1,900-kilometre odyssey to the far west. We were all buoyed up to be leaving, even if we would be crammed together in a white Toyota jeep for much of the time. I hadn’t travelled in such close proximity with strangers for so long a journey in years. But Tenzin’s high spirits and the bright-blue sky made it easy to relegate any uneasiness to the back of my mind.

Apart from trucks and buses, the traffic was all land cruisers like ours ferrying tourists. Most were bound for Mount Everest, right on the border with Nepal, although the Tibetans and Chinese don’t know it by that name and call it Qomolangma. For many visitors to Tibet, a visit to Everest base camp is obligatory and the week-long run there from Lhasa follows a well-worn route that gets crowded in the summer.

Our destination was a very different mountain: Mount Kailash. Known to Tibetans as ‘The Precious Jewel of Snows’ and standing in majestic isolation in Tibet’s western reaches, close to the borders with India and Nepal, Kailash is the centre of the universe for over a billion people, as well as the source of four of Asia’s longest rivers. No Buddhist’s or Hindu’s life can be considered complete until they have made the Kora around Kailash. It is a journey that takes the pilgrims over 5,600 metres, as high as they can go on a mountain so sacred it cannot be climbed by mortals, its summit reserved for gods only.

The idea of a peak so remote yet so venerated and which is also the fount of life for much of the subcontinent, through the mighty rivers that begin at its untouched glaciers, fascinated me. I thought, too, that its significance to both Buddhists and Hindus encapsulates the way cultures and religions take precedence over mere nationality at the far edges of the Chinese empire.

Kailash imposes itself even just outside Lhasa. The road we were on hugs the Yarlung Tsangpo, the highest river in the world. Its source is in the Kailash region. After tumbling off the mountains of the far west, the Yarlung flows through central Tibet. It then turns south and enters north-east India, where it becomes the Brahmaputra River, before crossing Bangladesh and emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Here, far removed from the snow and ice of Kailash, it was sluggish and mud-coloured, its current broken up by mud banks and outcrops of small trees.

Feeding the valleys of U-Tsang, the central province of Tibet we were passing through, the Yarlung’s waters render the landscape very different from the bleak high-altitude desert that awaited us further west. This part of U-Tsang is the most fertile area of Tibet, known for the quality of its
tsampa
, and all around were neat barley fields broken up by small settlements of white-stone houses.

An hour and a half from Lhasa we started to climb past grassland away from the Yarlung, before cresting a pass at 4,800 metres. Below us was Yamdrok-Tso, a huge azure salt lake that winds for over seventy kilometres through a valley towards giant peaks that sit off in the far distance. We descended to the lakeshore, where deposits of salt were piled up on its banks, avoiding the piles of rocks that had broken away from the mountainsides and crashed on to the road, and started to circle around it.

For Tenzin, this was the journey home; he was from a village in U-Tsang. Now twenty-nine, he had left at fourteen to walk across the Himalayas to Nepal, and then on to India and Dharamsala. ‘I was a pilgrim. I stayed for five years. That’s where I got the chance to really study Tibetan, as well as learning English,’ he said. Tenzin had also been taught how to paint
thangka
, the scroll paintings of Buddhist deities and scenes from the life of the Buddha which hang in every Tibetan and Nepalese monastery.

Later, he tried his luck as a
thangka
painter in Kathmandu for a year and a half, before returning to Tibet. For Tibetans of his age, or slightly older, such a journey was not uncommon. In the 1990s, many chose to spend time in India and Nepal, sometimes for religious reasons but often as a way out of farming on the high plateau. It was a chance to experience a different life in countries where Tibetans are not subject to the whims of the Chinese.

Crossing the frontier was still straightforward when Tenzin was a teenager. ‘You either went across the mountains or paid the border guards,’ he recalled. ‘It’s much harder now. There are more soldiers and you can’t pay to get across any more. You need a passport and they are very hard for young Tibetans to get.’ Up to 3,000 Tibetans a year once travelled to Dharamsala. Now, around fifty a month arrive – a similar number reaching Nepal – and the Wu Jing open fire if they spot them trying to leave Tibet. Only the most religious migrants still aim for India. The less devout are turning towards inland China.

Even without the risk of being shot, Tenzin’s journey was a remarkable one for a fourteen-year-old boy to attempt. But he brushed off the difficulties, making crossing the Himalayas sound like a stroll in Barkhor Square, as if traversing 7,000-metre passes, where in the winter you can sink up to your waist in snow, and sleeping on mountainsides for weeks was easy. Maybe it is for Tibetans, because nuns and schoolgirls manage the trip. I read of one crippled monk who crawled most of the way to Dharamsala. Put it down to growing up on the roof of the world, but Tenzin’s story was a reminder of just how tough Tibetans are.

Past Yamdrok-Tso, the road rose again and we crossed a 5,000-metre pass, the highest I had ever been. After my time in Litang and Lhasa, I assumed I was more or less acclimatised to the altitude. But we were now 1,300 metres above Lhasa, and a headache made it clear that I was not yet used to being so high. Some people dose themselves with pills to counter the effects of mountain life. I was relying on the time it would take to get to Kailash, during which we would ascend each day, to adapt to the lofty elevations of western Tibet.