The Emperor Far Away (22 page)
Read The Emperor Far Away Online
Authors: David Eimer
I enjoyed the peaceful existence by the lake. Each morning, I climbed up to Chiu’s monastery under the near-perfect blue skies that now appeared every day. Perched precariously on top of a prayer-flag-covered hill that offered spectacular views over Manasarovar and towards Kailash, it was home to six ancient monks. Hundreds of similar monasteries – tiny and isolated – are scattered across Tibet, manned by skeleton crews of lamas determinedly maintaining them despite the CCP’s constraints on their numbers and practices.
Before the Cultural Revolution, there were eight monasteries sited around Manasarovar. Now, the five left are mere shadows of what they once were, even if Tibetan pilgrims still circumnavigate the lake on a Kora route that hasn’t changed for thousands of years. But Chiu’s temple was a superb vantage point, and luxuriating in the sunshine and looking down on the lake was an easy way to pass a few hours. In the harsh light of the midday sun, it appeared almost anaemic. By the late afternoon, though, the lake turned a rich blue again that made me long to jump in it for a swim, although I knew I wouldn’t last long in its icy waters.
Killing animals, except for food, is prohibited in Buddhism. Nor do Tibetans eat fish; at least, I never met one who did. Manasarovar, like all Tibet’s lakes, teems with life, its clear waters making the fish easily visible. When I waded in to see just how cold the water was, I was soon surrounded by fish of different sizes and colours, brushing and nibbling my legs and pulling at the hairs on them. It was an unusual but not unpleasant sensation.
Buddhism’s strictures on the taking of life mean also that stray dogs far outnumber humans at Manasarovar, like everywhere outside Lhasa. But not even their random howling could disturb the supreme serenity of the lake. It is especially magical at night. Chiu is far smaller than Darchen or Saga and not on the electricity grid. The only lights at Tashi’s place ran off car batteries and, once the sky had turned a black so inky and dense that it redefined the colour, we might have been invisible. I would step outside and listen to the water lapping against the lakeshore, while gazing up at more stars than I had imagined it was possible to see.
Elsewhere in Tibet, clouds had cloaked the constellations, or I had been in places lit up enough to dilute the effect of a star-filled sky. At Manasarovar, the nights were clear and the view was a canopy of stars that stretched for ever. I gaped at what appeared to be the entire Milky Way, thousands of little white dots so close together they seemed to merge into one colossal star glowing intensely bright. Just as I never got bored of looking at Tibet’s never-ending sky during the day, I ended every night at Manasarovar staring upwards.
Climbing back into the land cruiser and departing from the lake felt like the end of my Tibet adventure; with the Kailash Kora completed, the only remaining task was to leave without being rumbled as a fake tourist by the authorities. But there was still time for more excitement. Soon after departing from Manasarovar, Tenzin, Lopa and I were standing by the car on a forsaken stretch of 219, peering at the engine and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working any more. Lopa diagnosed a problem with the distributor. He called a friend in Darchen and asked him to come out with the part to rectify it.
Waiting for hours by the roadside didn’t appeal. Having expected to spend the day inside the car, and lacking even vaguely clean socks, I was in bare feet and flip-flops, not the most suitable footwear when you are exposed to the wind at 4,800 metres. I decided to hitch a ride to Saga, leaving Tenzin with Lopa, counting on my Mandarin to explain why I was without my guide when I reached the Wu Jing checkpoint I would have to pass through before Paryang.
Hitching on a mostly traffic-free Tibetan highway is easy: the moment a vehicle approaches you rush out into the middle of the road and make it stop. That was my tactic anyway and it worked. A land cruiser full of rare Han tourists returning from Kailash, probably intrigued by the bare-footed foreigner, kindly offered me a cramped space alongside their luggage in the boot.
Their Tibetan driver fuelled himself with cans of energy drinks, lurching around corners so fast I thought we would turn over. But seven uncomfortable hours later I was back in Saga, the Wu Jing having given my passport and permit only the most cursory glance. Squelching through the familiar mud of the main street in my flip-flops, trainers in hand, I found a shop selling socks, which I put on straight away to the amusement of its owner.
One final stretch on 219 awaited us after a night in Saga, before Lopa’s revitalised land cruiser turned south on an unsealed road leading to Nepal. It ran through a lonely valley of grassland, interspersed with exquisite, turquoise-coloured lakes, heading towards a long, unbroken line of splendid peaks: the spine of the Himalayas. I glimpsed Shishapangma, towering over the mountains around it, before we entered the western end of the Everest National Park.
We were still over 4,500 metres, and rose for one last time above 5,000 metres to cross the Tong La Pass. Everest was to the left, disappointingly obscured by clouds. But I jumped out of the car for a final look at the mountains that could be seen. The wind howled across the pass, busy with tourists in land cruisers coming from Nepal. This was their first proper stop on the high plateau, and they snapped pictures eagerly while talking excitedly about the altitude.
Going down was far quicker than driving up. In less than an hour, we were below 4,000 metres and the barley and mustard fields we had driven through in U-Tsang reappeared. We stopped for lunch in Nyalam, where Indians on their way to Kailash perused shops run by Nepali migrants selling the widest range of merchandise I’d seen since Shigatse. It was a shock to find places that didn’t just offer instant noodles, water, beer and cigarettes. Nyalam is far cleaner than the towns of the far west, and I became conscious of how dirty and dishevelled I was in comparison to the people just arriving in Tibet.
It was thirty-two kilometres on to Zhangmu, the border town, zigzagging down a dizzying road which followed the contours of the deep gorge leading to Nepal and the Kathmandu Valley. In the time it took to get there, we dropped to 2,350 metres, the lowest altitude I had been at for a month. The air was suddenly heavier and stickier, the sides of the gorge covered in pine trees and lush green vegetation, among which purple and yellow flowers stood out – a delight after the high-altitude desert of western Tibet.
Zhangmu has by far the most spectacular setting of any border town in China I have visited. Spread out along the sides of a narrow road sloping sharply downhill towards Nepal and running along the left-hand side of the giant gorge, with the houses and shops rising up the hillside behind it, it was crowded with Chinese and Nepalese trucks waiting to cross the frontier. The spices of the subcontinent floated in the air, and Han and Nepali traders outnumbered Tibetans.
Being so low was invigorating. I charged up Zhangmu’s steep street like an athlete who has been training at high altitude before descending to race at sea level. Sadly, the effect wore off after a couple of days. And for the first time in weeks, I was in a genuine hotel room with both a shower and a sit-down toilet. Lying on a bed with clean sheets and a real mattress felt as good as staying at the Ritz.
Demob happy at the prospect of leaving, I was taken aback the next morning when the Wu Jing soldier inspecting my passport at the frontier handed it to an officer who then disappeared. I had never seriously considered that, after the deceptions involved in reaching Tibet, I might have a problem getting out. I tried to convince myself that this was just a routine extra check, while doing my best to appear relaxed yet also a little annoyed at being held up – the natural reaction of any traveller anxious to move through a busy border as quickly as possible.
Ten nervous minutes later, my passport was returned with an exit stamp and I walked across the bridge that leads to the other side of the gorge and Nepal. I found a shared taxi and for five hours wound lower and lower through the Kathmandu Valley, with the temperature and humidity rising all the time, until we reached the frantic streets of Nepal’s capital, where cars, bikes and pedestrians jostled for space. Tibet was already a memory, the mountains far behind me.
Part III
The term savages, used by so many authors to denote all hill tribes of Indo-China, is very inaccurate and misleading, as many of these tribes are more civilised and humane than the tax-ridden inhabitants of the plain country and indeed merely the remains of once mighty empires.
Archibald Ross Colquhoun,
Amongst the Shans
(1895)
15
Early evening in Jinghong and the tour buses arrive in clusters at the town’s theatre. They disgorge group after group of Han visitors, who are shepherded inside by their guides for the daily performance. To the accompaniment of music with only a tenuous link to the old songs of the region, young and attractive ethnic-minority women sashay across the stage in body-hugging dresses, performing fake versions of their traditional folk dances.
The dance show is the single most popular part of any trip by Chinese tourists to Jinghong, the capital of the Xishuangbanna region, deep in the south of Yunnan Province. With Laos and Myanmar a few hours’ drive away, this is where China meets South-east Asia. People from across the country are drawn here by a combination of the tropical climate and the perceived exoticism of the local minorities.
An unspoken but intrinsic aspect of Xishuangbanna’s appeal for the Chinese is the reputation those ethnic groups have for being free and easy in their attitudes to sexuality, a vivid contrast with Han China where even talking publicly about sex remains something of a taboo. Alongside pictures of palm trees and elephants, the advertising used by the tour companies invariably includes tantalising photos of scantily clad, long-haired women bathing in the local rivers, or dancing gracefully in idyllic outdoor settings.
At one of Jinghong’s most popular restaurants, visitors can listen to a band while teenage girls in traditional costume showing off their bare midriffs go from table to table singing. Then they sit on the laps of the male customers and make them drink a glass of beer over their shoulder. It is a ritual from the wedding ceremony of the Akha people, appropriated now by the tourist trade to cater to Han fantasies of licentious minorities living in paradise.
Those dreams are rooted in what the CCP regards as fact. Until the communists seized power in 1949, the Han knew little about the borderlands of Yunnan except that they were home to numerous peoples whom they regarded as barbarians. When the CCP started to classify them in 1953, no fewer than 260 different groups came forward asking to be registered as ethnic minorities. That was far too many for the Beijing bureaucrats, who swiftly lumped many of them together into larger, more manageable units.
Even so, almost half of China’s fifty-five official minorities come from Yunnan, making it the most ethnically diverse region of China. It is also the most varied part of the country geographically. Taking up a large chunk of the south-west, Yunnan sprawls from the mountainous border with Tibet in the north, via temperate plains dotted with the remains of ancient kingdoms, south to the jungles of Xishuangbanna and the frontiers with Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar, which also borders Yunnan in the west.
Chinese anthropologists spent much of the 1950s investigating the minorities of Yunnan. Their approach was coloured by an inevitable assumption of Han superiority and their conclusions reveal an almost wilful misunderstanding of the local cultures and traditions. They pander both to every cliché about tribal peoples imaginable and to the demands of the CCP’s propaganda department.
Thus the age-old animist beliefs of the minorities were categorised as ‘primitive spirit worship’, while the local landlords were slave-owners operating a ‘feudal’ system. The propensity of the minorities for singing and dancing was noted, as was their practice of what the Beijing academics described as ‘free love’, even though no evidence was offered to support that. As nonsensical as those reports are, they have been quoted in countless Chinese books since. That leads many Han to associate Xishuangbanna with carefree savages who spend their time sleeping around and celebrating endless festivals.
Like the Han tourists, I was in search of tropical China when I first visited Xishuangbanna, which the locals abbreviate simply to ‘Banna’. It was just after Christmas in 2008 and I was escaping the glacial embrace of Beijing’s winter. As I travelled around, though, I was intrigued not by dance shows but by how different ethnicities and cultures exist in a space which mirrors other similarly diverse regions across the nearby borders.
