Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (38 page)

“No passport,” Goba said. “No Lhasa Tibetan with passport.”

In the near distance was a snowcapped mountain that towered above 20,000 feet, and on its lower slopes rested a village with stony, terraced fields and fluttering prayer flags. They are everywhere in Tibet, long strings with colorful flags draped over mountainsides or hanging from masts like ships’ pendants.

“Tibetan,” Goba said, pointing to the village. “Very beautiful.”

How, I wondered, did these people manage to live here? True, there was a haunting, austere beauty to the land. There was something elemental in Tibet that I had not experienced before. The sky disappeared into an endless blue-black void; the mountains were venerable, and the land hard. Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen, but in Tibet I felt near to something profound and powerful. It did not leave me with soft and fuzzy feelings. Instead, I felt something very like awe, a deep, primordial awe.

But few places could possibly be more inhospitable to human habitation than Tibet. There is, of course, the extreme altitude. But Tibetans have solved that problem by simply having stronger lungs than lowlanders. They’ve adapted and evolved, and now the average Tibetan has a far greater lung capacity than just about any other person on Earth. While I gasped at my first exposure to the altitude in Lhasa, my pedicab driver could merrily pedal and smoke without breaking a sweat. But still, there remained in Tibet a vast and challenging landscape that was ill-suited to human habitation. Little grows in such conditions. Tibet is essentially the final frontier of human civilization.

We had come to a fork in the road. We could continue following the paved road that would eventually wind up on the doorstep of Mount Everest. Or we could follow a dirt track that, from what I could see, led into a valley of desolation. We took the dirt trail.

Goba drove as if this was the Paris-Dakar road rally. But for once I didn’t mind; there’s something about off-road driving that brings out the inner twelve-year-old in every man. We passed through a small village of mud-brick houses and waving children, and then, over a small rise, we crossed the pass and entered a widening desert of stones. It was the strangest landscape, extraterrestrial. I’d been to a few remote corners of the world, but here, high up on the Tibetan Plateau, I felt like I’d taken leave of the planet. I was above 15,000 feet, higher than I’d ever been, but if there was one place on earth that I could compare it to, it would be one of the very lowest: Death Valley.

Soon, we found ourselves back on a paved road, passing Tibetan farmers on donkey carts laden with wheat, one of the few things to grow in Tibet. But, apparently, they could grow watermelons here too. We paused to buy one from a boy on the side of the road.

“Is good?” Goba inquired after he’d cut out a slice with his pocketknife.

“Is good,” I replied. And also extremely small. I’d never beheld a watermelon the size of an orange. Considering the environment, however, it was a wonder that watermelons could be cultivated at all.

Finally, we pulled into the small town of Gyantse, where I was dropped off at the gate of the Pelkor Chode Monastery. Built in the fifteenth century, the complex is awash in whites and pinks, and is notable for housing monks from different sects within Tibetan Buddhism. I could only imagine what their debates must be like. Inside, monks in maroon robes were chanting. Others were at the gong. And one was both chanting and gonging. The incense smelled strangely like cannabis, and I watched pilgrims depositing their yak butter, which smelled like popcorn. Hey, I thought, cannabis and popcorn. Now, there was a combination worth traveling up to 15,000 feet for.

The monastery was renowned for its Kumbum
stupa,
a five-story octagonal pyramid with a golden dome containing 108 cavelike chapels with 10,000 painted images. It is the largest
stupa
in Tibet. I walked up and poked my head into the various chapels, which had all been decorated with Buddhist murals. From the top, there was an extraordinary view of the Dzong, a fourteenth-century fort that looms over the monastery, and the expansive, barren Nyang-chu Valley that stretched toward the mountains in the far distance. If you want to get away from it all, do a little meditating, Gyantse is a good place for it.

Back in the courtyard, there were dozens of listless dogs. Or perhaps they were just meditating. The flies, however, were quite active, and so, too, were the child beggars. In fact, I had never been besieged by so many child beggars, and I had been besieged by countless child beggars in China. Soon, I had run out of small money, and they followed me to the waiting car and surrounded it, whereupon Goba gave them his small money. But still, they persisted. I couldn’t close the doors. And then Goba ran out, and yelled and threatened and made all sorts of scramlike motions.

Sadly, I wouldn’t be staying in Gyantse. Despite the urchins, I found that in Gyantse it was possible to imagine the Tibet of yesteryear, its haunting austerity and those who regarded it as holy. On the road to Shigatse, Goba pointed to a mound of ruins on a hillside.

“Old monastery,” he said. “Chinese. Boom, boom.”

A few miles farther, there was another monastery that lay in ruins. “Boom, boom.”

I counted three more monasteries that had gone boom boom. That was the grim reality of Tibet. True, there are more monasteries and monks today than even twenty years ago. But the sad fact remains that the Chinese have all but obliterated one of the world’s most unique cultures. In the years following China’s invasion of Tibet and continuing on into the Cultural Revolution, more than 6,000 monasteries were shelled into oblivion. All religious activity was banned. Land was confiscated. And China swallowed Tibet. And while a few monasteries have reopened, they operate under the strict control of the Communist Party. It is still illegal to carry even a photo of the Dalai Lama in Tibet. It is no wonder that, months later, Tibet would erupt as thousands of Tibetans took to the streets to protest Chinese rule, an act of defiance that, unsurprisingly, was crushed by Chinese troops.

As we drove on through the valley, we passed hardy farmers separating wheat from chaff and dozens of donkey carts; in turn, we were passed by a military convoy. And then, around a bend, we were flagged down by the police and told to line up with several other cars. Goba was not happy. He was told to get out of the car, and I followed. We were instructed to go to the police SUV, which was surrounded by a half-dozen other Tibetan drivers who had also been pulled over. We huddled around the window. Inside were four officious-looking policemen. Goba handed them 300 yuan.

“Why?” I asked back in the car.

“Say speeding. But no speeding.”

True, Goba had been speeding everywhere else in central Tibet, but he had not been speeding here. Indeed, as we had curved around the bend, we could not have been going more than thirty miles an hour.

Goba gestured. “Police. Money.” And he demonstrated how they put it into their pocket. “Chinese no good.”

We passed a People’s Liberation Army barracks on the outskirts of Shigatse, and as we entered the town itself, I was disheartened to find this home of the Panchen Lama and one of the great monasteries of Tibet had become just another unsightly urban sore in China. Shigatse is the second-largest town in Tibet after Lhasa and its traditional rival. And yet there was nothing here like the old town in Lhasa. It had been bulldozed in favor of a Han city of apartment blocks and electronics stores.

Goba dropped me off at a seedy hotel near the monastery. He would stay elsewhere for the evening, and I went to check in only to find that the hotel was run by the police. I dropped my backpack off in a vile room and walked through town, trying to find something to recommend it. But I couldn’t. My opinion would rise—slightly—the following day, after I viewed the eighty-foot statue of Buddha inside the splendid Tashilumpo Monastery, but for now I was dismayed to find myself here. I’m in Tibet, I thought, the very distant rooftop of the world, and I’ve was in a fly-ridden Chinese restaurant pecking at a gloppy chop suey. But, I consoled myself, the restaurant did have yak milk. I took cautious sips of the bitter, buttery brew. Something this bad, I thought, could only be good for you.

18

I
curse you, Dan Brown!

This was my thought as I awoke, bleary-eyed, early on a frosty morning in Lhasa. I’d gone to the book exchange at the guesthouse the night before and rummaged through its quirky offerings. I left behind an exceptionally boring book about Shanghai—a real drudgery, makes-you-think-of-homework kind of book—and picked up
Angels and Demons
by Dan Brown, because when confronted by a forty-eight-hour train trip to Chengdu it’s good to have a fat, plot-intensive book. But it was just too tasty. Just one more chapter, I thought as the clock ticked past 2
A.M.
It was only when the power failed at 3:30 in the morning and my room plunged into darkness that I finally set the book aside. But the damage had been done. I had little more than 100 pages left.

Curses!

“Do you need a taxi?” asked the Tibetan woman at the front desk.

“Yes.”

“I will help you.”

Very kind, these Tibetans, I thought.

“Forty yuan,” she informed me as I hopped into a taxi. And then the driver began a long, haranguing monologue.

“Forty-two yuan,” she updated me.

I agreed to the price, and soon I was barreling through the outskirts of Lhasa, crossing a bridge guarded by soldiers, speeding past a large military base where the People’s Liberation Army could be heard going through their morning drills as the Potala Palace shimmered in the near distance. Outside of China, it’s possible to believe that Tibet is simply a colorful province in a larger country. Inside Tibet, however, it can only be seen as a military occupation of a foreign land.

But not just a military occupation. The Lhasa train station, the ultimate terminus, is the means by which Tibet will finally become swallowed by China.
Lhasa, four Chinese, one Tibetan. Shigatse, two Chinese, one Tibetan,
Goba had observed. However, this is just the beginning. The new train to Lhasa, which began running in 2006, will enable hundreds of thousands more Chinese to come up high into the mountains of Tibet in pursuit of work opportunities. Clearly, the government really wanted this train. Indeed, they had spent more than $4 billion completing the project and more than 14,000 rail workers had been sent to the hospital with altitude sickness as they worked to lay the tracks. By the end of its very first year of operation, the Lhasa Express had already carried more than 1.5 million passengers into Tibet. The Chinese government regards this wonder of engineering as their gift to the Tibetans, as the train will bring opportunities, money, development, and economic progress to this poorest corner of China. They refer to themselves as a kindly benefactor generously helping the needy locals. Possibly, they even believe it. But the Tibetans don’t want this train. They just want to be left alone.

Inside the new train station, it was the familiar bedlam as we boarded.
But we have assigned seats!
I thought. At least some of us did. I’d learned that hard-seat class operated on a first-come, first-served basis, and as I pondered the crowds battering one another to get on board, I reflected that I too would batter people for a seat on a forty-eight-hour train journey. Fortunately, I had paid a little more than a hundred dollars for soft sleeper class, and as I found my four-person sleeper cabin, it seemed positively deluxe compared to those of the other Chinese trains I’d been on—admittedly a low bar, but still. Each bed had its own flat-screen TV. And there were oxygen-supply units for every passenger, which was thoughtful. And necessary, of course, for those traveling from the other direction, coming from the flatlands below and rolling up to nearly 16,000 feet. Bodies don’t like that. The head doesn’t like it. Nor the heart. Nor the stomach. And thus the oxygen dispensers. It was a very tight fit for four, however, and I lived in hope that I’d have the compartment to myself. Meanwhile, through the window, two Tibetans in fur hats peered into my cabin. I waved. Nothing. Apparently, the glass was reflective. I put my nose to the window. I was an Eskimo kissing a Tibetan. But there was nothing.

“Nihao.”

Damn.

A couple entered. And then another man. We would be full up for this journey across the Tibetan Plateau, a trip that would take us up to the Tanggula Pass, the highest railway pass in the world at nearly 16,000 feet, before finally descending through the arid steppes of Qinghai Province and on into the Sichuan Basin and eventually Chengdu. As we departed Lhasa, a train attendant popped in to explain the usage and mysteries of the oxygen-supply units. Outside, I watched a farmer plow his field with yaks. The sky was a deep blue and there was a full moon. I’m on Mars, I thought for the umpteenth time. But Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” was wafting over the speakers. No, I realized, this was weirder than Mars. I searched for an off button. Surely, we, the four of us inside this small compartment, could agree that Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” was unacceptable music for a journey over the Tibetan Plateau. I finally found the off button and switched it off, raising my eyebrows, expecting to be praised for this quick communal resolution to an irritation.