The Emperor Far Away (18 page)

Inside the land cruiser, I was insulated against the environment to some extent. But outside it took only moments for the altitude to make its unseen presence known. No matter that it was summer, the wind chilled and chapped me, even as the sun that was closer than ever before turned my skin red in a matter of minutes. Walking up gentle inclines became hard work, as did going up flights of stairs. I got a sore thumb from clicking countless lighters that refused to fire in the thin air.

Throughout this stage of the journey, the road climbed and dipped endlessly as we curled our way through the mountains. Only towards the end, as we dropped down to a plain of barley fields, did we run on the flat before arriving in Gyantse. Like Lhasa, Gyantse is sharply divided between a bigger new town and the Tibetan quarter. But the similarities end there. It is tranquil, a small country town, and I found it hard to believe it was once Tibet’s third-largest city.

Gyantse’s monastery dominates one end of the Tibetan old town, almost burrowing its way in to the hills behind it. At the other end, a ruined fort, or
dzong
, lies atop a precipitously rocky hill that rises incongruously close to the centre of town. It looms over low-rise Gyantse like a crumbling castle guarding a loch in Scotland. Between those two landmarks, the old town’s mostly car-free main street is lined by two- and three-storey white-stone houses. Their window frames and doors were outlined in black, some bearing the
gyung drung
, the Tibetan Buddhist swastika.

Women in long black dresses and
bangden
walked home with baskets of shopping, along with monks and people going to and from the monastery, prayer wheels in hand. A mix of Bollywood tunes, traditional Tibetan music and western pop – the Backstreet Boys – emanated from the shops on the street. There were few tourists here, and after Lhasa’s hectic old town it appeared idyllic.

Narrow lanes run parallel to the main street, leading on one side to nearby barley fields. The lanes are like mini-villages transported into the old town, adding to the bucolic feel. Cows were tethered outside almost every house, and there was forage for them along with piles of dung kept as fuel for cooking and heating. The sewage system was primitive, dogs skulked and slumbered everywhere and grimy-faced kids ran up shouting ‘Hello’ in English and wanting their pictures taken.

On the hillsides near the monastery are the remains of the other monasteries which had made Gyantse a key centre of Buddhist learning, until the Red Guards sacked them during the Cultural Revolution. As many as fifteen monasteries from three different schools of Tibetan Buddhism were located here, attracting monks from all over Tibet, as well as Bhutan and India. Now, only one survives and it is home to just seventy monks.

Bhutan lies eighty kilometres due south of Gyantse across a closed border that has never been fully demarcated. Over the years, the Bhutanese have accused the PLA of extending roads from Tibet into what they regard as their territory. With a similar language and religion, Bhutan and Tibet have long been intertwined, even if for much of their history Tibet, and now China, has done its best to dominate its smaller neighbour.

South-west from Gyantse, and not much further away than Bhutan, is the mountain pass of Nathu La and the frontier with the Indian state of Sikkim. Since 2006, Nathu La has become one of just three points along the 3,400-kilometre-long Chinese–Indian border that is open for traffic. It is for local trade only, like the other two border crossings, with Tibetan and Indian merchants allowed to venture a few kilometres in either direction to sell their goods at designated markets.

More than fifty years after the construction of Highway 219 from Xinjiang to Tibet led to the Sino-Indian War, there is no sign that either Beijing or New Delhi is willing to agree on what constitutes the boundary between China and India. Apart from the disputed territory of Aksai Chin close to Xinjiang, Beijing insists also that the Tawang region of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is sandwiched between Bhutan and Burma, belongs to Tibet.

Inhabited by the Monpa people, who are closely related to both the Tibetans and the Bhutanese and practise Tibetan Buddhism, Tawang was the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama. It was the British who ceded Tawang to India, when they imposed the McMahon Line as the frontier between their empire and Tibet in 1914. China has never accepted that definition of the border and continues to refer to Tawang as South Tibet. The 9,000 or so Monpa who live across the border in Tibet are known to the Chinese as the Monba, and are one of the smallest of the country’s minorities.

I would have loved to venture into Tawang to explore the Tibetan borderlands in India. But, as with Xinjiang’s border with Afghanistan, I was not allowed to get close; the Tibetan side of the frontier with Tawang is barred to foreigners. So is the road south from Gyantse, ruling out a visit to the Nathu La Pass. It was yet another route that Francis Younghusband had travelled. He led his invasion force of British, Indian and Gurkha soldiers through the pass in late 1903.

From the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Qing’s hold on power grew progressively weaker, the British were able to sidle into Tibet, motivated by its proximity to India and fears that the Russians might use it as a backdoor route to undermine the British empire. They mapped the country secretly and in 1903 sent Younghusband and his soldiers to force the Dalai Lama to agree to a trade treaty. In March 1904, outside Gyantse, they ran into a 3,000-strong Tibetan force armed with ancient matchlock muskets, weapons over 200 years out of date. The British carried machine guns, and in a matter of minutes they left around 700 Tibetans dead.

Four months later, Gyantse was the site of a more glorious battle. The town’s
dzong
, the best-fortified fort in Tibet, guarded the road to Lhasa. Two soldiers won the Victoria Cross for leading the assault up the near-vertical slopes which led to its surrender. An inscription at the bottom of the hill records the event, and condemns Younghusband and his troops for their colonial arrogance. While I was gazing at it, two young Han tourists asked me why the British had come to Tibet. It was a hard question to answer. ‘Because it was next to India,’ I said finally. I thought they might understand, now that China is the imperial power in Tibet.

After Gyantse’s mellow charms, Shigatse is a harbinger of what all Tibetan towns and cities will look like if Beijing continues to develop Tibet in the image of Han China. Tibet’s second city is a sprawling work in progress, its roads and buildings being hastily refashioned in the untidy and anonymous style common to all provincial Chinese cities. Even the tiny Tibetan neighbourhood is modern in comparison to the old towns of Lhasa and Gyantse. It is dwarfed anyway by the Chinese town, and the Han are far more of a presence here than anywhere else in Tibet apart from Lhasa.

They are recent arrivals. Until the CCP took control of Tibet, Chinese settlers rarely ventured any further than Lhasa. In old Tibet, Shigatse was a trading centre and meeting point for Indian and Nepali traders, as well as Mongolians and Uighurs. It was where Tibet encountered the rest of Asia, and far-off China was an irrelevance. Now Shigatse’s location on the Friendship Highway, which links Lhasa to Kathmandu, makes it a stop on the tourist route that runs through central Tibet. Apart from small convenience stores and a few restaurants in the Tibetan district, it is Chinese businesses that dominate.

That is partly due to Tibet’s rural heritage. ‘You have to remember most Tibetans are farmers,’ Pemba had told me in Lhasa. ‘Only a few do business. So it’s mostly the Chinese who run companies, hotels, restaurants. They’ve taken over nearly all the tourist trade and almost all the money from tourism goes to the Chinese.’ But as Shigatse’s history indicated, the Tibetans in this part of U-Tsang were once traders. By closing the border with India, the CCP hasn’t just sealed off Tibet from foreign influence, it has driven the Tibetans here back to the land.

Shigatse’s fifteenth-century
dzong
, supposedly the model for the Potala Palace, was completely destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and has since been rebuilt, using cement rather than Tibetan stone. The Tashilhunpo Monastery, Shigatse’s other landmark, is rather more authentic. Like Sera, it is the size of a village and as much a university as a monastery. As the traditional seat of the Panchen Lamas, it is the only place in Tibet and the borderlands where I saw the young, bespectacled face of the present, disputed Panchen Lama on display.

Everywhere else it is the chubby, double-chinned face of his predecessor, with his cropped, receding hair, which stares down at you in restaurants, shops and houses. He is hugely respected by Tibetans for his steadfast opposition to China’s presence in Tibet, and probably more deserving than the Dalai Lama of veneration because of his courage in challenging the Chinese and the suffering it caused him.

In 1962, he submitted a damning report to Beijing on life in Tibet. It became known subsequently as the ‘70,000-character petition’, for the number of Chinese characters it took to write it. The Panchen Lama criticised the way the monasteries were being stripped of their traditional roles and sidelined, with monks unable to debate and study and sometimes being sent to work in the fields.

He attacked the CCP’s agricultural policies, including the enforced collectivisation of farms, which created chronic food shortages in many areas. He argued that the CCP’s reforms to Tibetan society were leading to ‘the death of Tibetan nationality’ and that traditional Tibetan culture was derided by Han officials as ‘backward’. He called for the release of the many innocent Tibetans who had been rounded up and imprisoned during the revolt of 1956–9.

Mao described the Panchen Lama’s petition as a ‘poisoned arrow’, and it was just a question of time before he was purged. In 1964, he was pilloried as an atavistic remnant of feudal Tibet, a ‘capitalist serf owner’. For the next fourteen years, he was imprisoned in Beijing. With the Dalai Lama in exile, Tibet had lost its one other leader capable of standing up to the Chinese. It was not until 1982 that the Panchen Lama was allowed to visit Tibet again. But his years of imprisonment had not cowed him. Just five days before his death in 1989, he stated bluntly that the price Tibet had paid for its development under the CCP was greater than the gains.

Like a surprising number of
tulku
throughout Tibetan history, the former Panchen Lama did not conform to the western stereotype of an ascetic monk interested only in arcane spiritual matters. Before his death he got married, to a Han woman, and had a daughter, while his double chin was testament to his reputation as a bon viveur. I wondered where in Shigatse it was possible to party like a Panchen Lama, as Gyantse had been dead at night apart from a few teahouses and Shigatse seemed to be home only to Chinese karaoke bars.

A tip from a Tibetan taxi driver took me one evening to a park on the Han side of town. He pointed into the darkness and told me to start walking. I stumbled around for twenty minutes before I discovered dozens of tents pitched close together. This was Shigatse’s Tibetan nightlife district, its temporary status an ominous sign of how Tibet’s second city is becoming a Han settlement.

Stepping inside one of the tents was like walking into the sort of remote English country pub where all the drinkers are related to each other and strangers are automatically suspect. One of the waitress’s mouths was hanging open as I ordered a beer. But the customers recovered their poise quickly enough and I was invited to join a game of Sho, a Tibetan dice game, the rules of which I failed to grasp on every occasion I played it.

All I could do was the easy bit, which involves slamming two dice down on a pad made of yak leather. I had no idea what that indicated in terms of shuffling around the shells and old Tibetan coins used to play Sho. That was left to my partner, a grinning middle-aged woman. I told her I was on my way to Kailash. She had never been, but then as a gambler and drinker she wasn’t an obvious pilgrim. It didn’t take me long to realise that the conversation was going to be as unenlightening as it had been in the Lhasa teahouses. I gave in to the flow of the game and carried on downing beers. That was what we were all here for.

12

High Plateau Drifter

The further west we travelled, the more the contrast between the scenery around us and the towns and villages we stopped in became apparent. It is a huge anomaly that western Tibet’s mostly untouched landscape of soaring mountains, shimmering lakes and grassland that rolls on and on, all under an immense, mesmerising sky, is broken up by some of the most dismal settlements I have ever visited. Everywhere we went past Shigatse took me back with a shudder to squalid Shimiankuang on the border with Xinjiang and Qinghai, only without the asbestos dust in the air.

Saga was typical. One of only two towns of any size in Ngari, the province that covers western Tibet, its main road was a potholed mudbath along which trucks and land cruisers churned their way further west. It was lined by broken pavements and poorly constructed buildings which housed tiny shops and the odd restaurant. All the locals were covered in dust and dirt. The men pissed outside, rather than braving the pit toilets, with their mini-mountains of human refuse beneath them, which substitute for proper plumbing in Ngari. At night, packs of feral dogs took control of what passed for the streets.

Yet the drive to Saga was sublime – chasing the Yarlung Tsangpo across fields of barley and yellow mustard until we reached Lhatse. There the Friendship Highway forks. We swung right towards Kailash, while most of the convoy of land cruisers we had been part of since Lhasa went the other way towards Everest and Nepal. Now we were on Highway 219, which winds up through Aksai Chin to Xinjiang.