Riding the Iron Rooster (68 page)

The Chinese were eager to snatch Tibet and turn it upside down. "A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater," Mao had said. That exhortation had gotten Chinese settlers into Qinghai. Now the armies began to march into eastern Tibet. What good were swords and pikes against modern Chinese armaments? And when the Tibetans were overwhelmed, and they appealed to the U.N., and tried to publicize their case against the Chinese, the world turned its back while a Tibetan delegation signed a treaty that had been dictated by the victorious Chinese. No one had gone to Tibet's aid; and a few years later in the maniacal Maoist spasm known as Religious Reform, ancient monasteries were dynamited, monks were sent to work in factories, and all Buddhist rituals were banned, including all prayers and insignia. The Chinese believed that the liberation of Tibet was complete, especially when the humiliated Tibetans fought back in various uprisings in 1956 and were flattened.

Antireligious feeling in Tibet was a perfect frenzy during the Cultural Revolution. The few monasteries that remained were either pulled down or else used for secular functions. Pigs were kept in the most sacred chapels of the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa, and the Jokhang Temple, the holiest of holies, was renamed Guest House Number Five. Soldiers bivouacked in its chapels and cloisters. The Buddha statues were beheaded. The gold filigree altar relics were melted down. The Red Guards yanked down the ancient medical college, Mendzekhang on Chakpori Hill in Lhasa, and a television antenna was erected in its place. Except for the Potala, Lhasa was destroyed.

"It was a mistake," a Chinese official told me. He was not belittling the damage. This after all was a man who had lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. Part of the Great Wall had been pulled down and plenty of temples and monuments had been wrecked. The whole of China had been vandalized. So what were a few dusty shrines and painted statues to that?

What happened in Tibet was an excess. It was not an outrage in Chinese eyes. Many Chinese I spoke to could not understand why anyone would prefer an old Buddhist medical college to a tall new TV antenna bolted to a ferroconcrete block.

And official Chinese vandalism is unlike any other vandalism on earth. You imagine gangs of crazy chanting youths smashing their way into a monastery and kicking the slats out of it. But it wasn't that way. It was Chinese wrecking. When the order went out,
Smash the feudalistic nests of monks!,
the soldiers, Red Guards and assorted vandals made chalk marks all over the monasteries—save these timbers, stack these beams, pile these bricks, and so forth. Brick by brick, timber by timber, the monasteries were taken down. The frugal, string-saving, clothes-patching, shoe-mending Chinese saved each reusable brick. In this way the monasteries were made into barns and barracks.

The Dalai Lama has stayed in exile, but some rebuilding has been carried out by Chinese who admit that wholesale destruction was a mistake. A little bit of old Tibet was given back. But schools were built, factories were put up, and army camps and gun emplacements sprang up everywhere in Tibet (in this way it greatly resembles Soviet-dominated Mongolia). And portraits of the Dalai Lama were banned. I was aware that in handing these pictures out I was breaking the law. But what the hell. They had nuisance value. They made the Tibetans happy. And they allowed me to feel like John the Baptist.

Nagqu has the only hotel worth the name, north of Lhasa, but even so I thought: Next time I'll bring a tent and a sleeping bag. Mr. Fu drove us out of Nagqu—perhaps a face-saving gesture, because a mile outside town he stopped the car and clutched his eyes.

"I cannot do it!"

And he slumped in the backseat.

I was happier than I had been since starting this trip on The Iron Rooster. I was driving, I was in charge, I was taking my time; and Tibet was empty. The weather was dramatic—snow on the hills, a high wind, and black clouds piled up on the mountains ahead. I also thought: I didn't die the other day.

Today, below the snowy and majestic Nyenchen Tanglha Range, nomads rode among their herds of yak, and the road was straight through the yellow plain. That tame road contributed to my feeling of well-being—it was wonderful to be in such a remote place and yet to feel so secure. Mr. Fu and Miss Sun were asleep in the backseat. There were no other cars on the road. I drove at a sensible speed towards Lhasa and watched the birds—hawks and plovers and crows. There were more gazelles, and once a pale yellow fox bounded across the road.

There was a sudden snowstorm. I went from a dry sunny valley, around a corner, into a black slushy one, the large cottony flakes whipping sideways. Mr. Fu, who was terrified of snow, mercifully did not wake. The snow eased; it became a dry flurry in a valley farther ahead, and then the sun came out again. Tibetans call their country "Land of Snows," but in fact it doesn't snow much and it never rains. The gales pass quickly. The Tibetans are not bothered by any of this. I saw children playing in this sudden storm.

I had wanted at the outset to reach Lhasa quickly. But now I didn't mind a delay. I would gladly have spent more nights on the road, providing it was not in a place like the dump at Amdo.

Damxung looked promising. It was at a bend in the road, there was an army camp nearby, and half a dozen one-room restaurants. We stopped and had four dishes, which included wood-ear fungus and yak meat, and Mr. Fu revived enough to accuse the serving girl of overcharging him—or rather me, since I paid the bill.

There were six soldiers in the kitchen, warming themselves, but they fluttered away when I tried to talk with them. Travelers in China had sometimes told me that they were harassed by soldiers or officials. This was never my experience. When I approached them they always backed away.

I found Mr. Fu spitting on the wheel to see whether it had overheated. He was kneeling, spitting, smearing, examining.

"I think we should stay here," I said.

We were watched by a small boy who had a playing-card-sized picture of the Dalai Lama tucked into the front of his fur hat. When I peered at him he ran away and returned without the picture.

"We cannot stay here. Miss Sun is sick. Lhasa is only one hundred and seventy kilometers."

"Do you feel well enough to drive?"

"I am fine!"

But he looked terrible. His face was gray. He had not eaten much. He had told me he had a pain in his heart. He also said that his eyes hurt.

"This wheel is not hot," he said. "That is good."

He gasped and gave up at a place called Baicang, saying he could not do it. I took over, and in a pretty place on a riverbank called Yangbajain, we entered a narrow rocky valley. It was the sort of valley I had been expecting ever since Golmud. I had not realized that this part of Tibet was open country, with flat, straight roads, and distant snowy peaks. But this valley was steep and cold, and half in darkness it was so deep. A river ran swiftly through it, with birds darting from one wet boulder to another. I saw from my bird book that they were thrushes, and the commonest was the White-winged Redstart.

When we emerged from this valley we were higher, and among steep mountainsides and bluer, snowier peaks. We traveled along this riverside in a burst of evening sunshine. Farther south, this little river became the mighty Brahmaputra. The valley opened wider, became sunnier and very dry; and beyond the beautiful bare hills of twinkling scree there were mountains covered with frothy snow.

Ahead was a small town. I took it to be another garrison town, but it was Lhasa, for sure. In the distance was a red and white building, with sloping sides—the Potala, so lovely, somewhat like a mountain and somewhat like a music box with a hammered gold lid.

I had never felt happier, rolling into a town. I decided to pay off Mr. Fu. I gave him my thermos bottle and the remainder of my provisions. He seemed embarrassed. He lingered a little. Then he reached out and put his fingers on my cheek, where there was the wound from the crash. It was scabby, the blood had dried, it looked awful; but it didn't hurt.

"I am sorry," Mr. Fu said. He laughed. It was an abject apology. His laughter said,
Forgive me!

***

It is immediately obvious that Lhasa is not a city. It is a small, friendly-looking town on a high plain surrounded by even higher mountains. There is very little traffic. There are no sidewalks. Everyone walks in the street. No one runs. These streets are at 12,000 feet. You can hear children yelling and dogs barking and bells being rung, and so it seems a quiet place. It is rather dirty and very sunny. Just a few years ago the Chinese bulldozed the Chorten, a stupa which formed the entrance to the city. It was their way of violating Lhasa, which had always been forbidden to foreigners. Even so, the city is not crowded. The Chinese badly damaged Lhasa and hoped to yank the whole thing down and build a city of fine ugly factories. But they did not succeed in destroying it. Much of it, and some of its finest shrines, were made out of mud bricks—easily broken but cheap to replace, like the Buddhist statues that were made anew every few years, or the yak-butter sculptures that were expected to go rancid or melt in order for new ones to be fashioned. The whole of Buddhism prepared the Tibetans for cycles of destruction and rebirth: it is a religion that brilliantly teaches continuity. You can easily see the violence of the Chinese intention in Lhasa; but it was a failure because the Tibetans are indestructible.

Lhasa is a holy place, so it is populated by pilgrims. They give it color, and because they are strangers themselves to Lhasa, they don't object to foreign travelers—in fact, they welcome them and try to sell them beads and trinkets. Chinese cities are notorious for their noise and crowds. Lhasa has a small population, and because it is flat it is full of cyclists. To me that was a complete surprise. I had expected a dark, craggy city of steepnesses and fortifications, overrun by Chinese and hung with slogans. I found a bright little war-torn town full of jolly monks and friendly pilgrims and dominated by the Potala, which is an ingenious and distracting shape.

Half the population of Lhasa is Chinese, but those who are not soldiers tend to stay indoors, and even the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army keep a low profile. They know that Tibet is essentially a gigantic army camp—the roads, the airports and all the communications were a military effort—and they know that the Tibetans resent it. The Chinese feel insecure in Tibet, and so they retreat into a sort of officiousness; they look like commissars and imperialists but their swagger is mostly bravado. They know they are in a foreign country. They don't speak the language and they have not managed to teach Chinese to the Tibetans. For over thirty years they maintained the fiction that the official language of Tibet was Chinese, but then in 1987 they caved in and changed it to Tibetan.

The Chinese imply that they have a moral right to run the Tibetans' lives, but since the late seventies, when they began to despair of political solutions to Chinese problems, they have felt more uneasy about being in Tibet. They have no right to be there at all. The Tibetans themselves would probably have found a way to tax the rich families, get rid of exploiters and raise up the Ragyaba—the scavenging class and corpse handlers—and free the slaves (slavery persisted into the 1950s). But the bossy ideology of the Chinese compelled them to invade and so thoroughly meddle with the country that they alienated the majority of the population. They did not stop there. They annexed Tibet and made it part of China, and however much the Chinese talk about liberalizing their policies it is clear that they have no intention of ever allowing Tibet to become a sovereign state again.

"It feels like a foreign country," Chinese friends of mine confided to me. They were bewildered by the old-fashioned habits and clothes, and by the incomprehensible rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, celebrating the sexual mysticism of the tantric rites, and the hugging and fornicating statues illustrating the mother-father principle
oiyabyum,
and the big, toothy, goggling demons that Tibetans see as protectors. Even with the Chinese watching closely and issuing decrees and building schools and initiating public works, Lhasa is a medieval-seeming place, just like Europe in the Middle Ages, complete with grinning monks and grubby peasants and open-air festivals and jugglers and tumblers. Lhasa is holy, but it is also a market town, with pushcarts and stacked-up vegetables and dirty, air-dried cuts of yak which will keep for a year (grain keeps for fifty years in the dry Tibetan climate). The most medieval touch of all is that Tibet has almost no plumbing.

The pilgrims hunker and prostrate themselves all over Lhasa, and they shuffle clockwise around every shrine. They flatten themselves on stair landings, outside the Jokhang and all around the Potala. They do it on the road, the riverbank, the hillsides. Being Tibetan Buddhists they are good-humored, and because they are from all over Tibet, Lhasa is their meeting place—they enrich the life of the town and fill its markets. They come out of a devotion to the Dalai Lama, the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. They pray, they throw themselves to the ground and they strew tiny one miao notes and barley grains at the shrines, and dump blobs of yak butter into the lamps. The very pious ones blow horns made from human thigh bones—a femur like an oboe—or carry water in bowls made from the lopped-off top of a human skull. They venerate the various thrones and couches of the Dalai Lama in the Potala, and even his narrow art-deco bed, his bathtub and toilet, his tape recorder (a gift from Nehru) and his radio. The Dalai Lama is worshipped as the Living God, but the pilgrims also pay homage to the images of Zong Kapa—founder of the Yellow Sect—and of the Lord Buddha, and of other Dalai Lamas, notably the 5th, whose great buildings dignify Lhasa. Pilgrims have made Lhasa a town of visitors who are not exactly strangers, and so even a real foreigner feels a sense of belonging there. Its chaos and dirt and its jangling bells make it seem hospitable.

Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave. I liked its smallness, its friendliness, the absence of traffic, the flat streets—and every street had a vista of tremendous Tibetan mountains. I liked the clear air and sunshine, the markets, the brisk trade in scarce antiques. It fascinated me to see a place for which the Chinese had no solution. They admitted that they had made grave mistakes in Tibet; but they also admitted that they did not know what to do next. They had not counted on the tenacious faith of the Tibetans, and perhaps they found it hard to believe that such dark, grinning people, who never washed, could be so passionate. Tibet has made no economic gains at all. It is entirely dependent on Chinese financial aid. The visiting Party officials stroll around looking smug and hard-to-please. They are mostly on junkets. Tibet is a junketer's paradise: a subject people, two fairly good hotels, plenty of ceremonial functions, and so far from Peking that anything goes. The Chinese reward each other with junkets and official trips—they often take the place of bonuses—and Tibet is the ultimate junket. But it is really for sight-seeing, not business. These Chinese officials nearly always look physically uncomfortable in Lhasa—it is the altitude, the strange food, and the climate, but it is also the boisterous Tibetans, who seem to the Chinese a bit savage and unpredictable—superstitious primitives if not outright subhuman.