The Peace Correspondent (18 page)

DUST devils swirl down a single potholed street lined with shabby one-story buildings. Along the roadside, rough-looking merchants trade hides and furs. The place has a vague feeling of the Wild West, of a one-horse town. But Gyantse, Tibet, is instead the Wild East, a one-yak town.

This dingy little burgh, this wind-blown village, played a major role in modern Tibetan history. The turn of the century was the era of the so-called “Great Game,” the furtive struggle between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia. By 1902, the Tsarist Empire was rapidly expanding eastward, and Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, feared Russian expansion into Tibet -- and perhaps further. In a letter to London in 1902, he vowed to “frustrate this little game while there is yet time.”

So, in 1904, the colonial government in India launched an expedition that has been called “one of the most contentious episodes in British imperial history.”

That year, Major Francis Younghusband led a force of more than a thousand British, Sikh and Gurkha troops from India, through Sikkim to The Roof of the World. The invading army marched over the Himalayas with 10,000 coolies, 7,000 mules, 4,000 yaks and six camels hauling two Maxim guns and four artillery pieces, as well as massive supplies. Correspondents from the Daily Mail and Reuters, and a gentleman from The Times (of London) accompanied the invasion force, as did a small signals unit that laid a telegraph line as the army advanced.

Although Younghusband's expedition eventually reached
Lhasa, the capital known for centuries as the Forbidden City, the original destination was Gyantse, one of Tibet's four main cities. Here in this town, with its massive hilltop jong (fort), the invaders defeated the Tibetans in a crucial battle that changed the medieval kingdom forever.

Historical events, and the airplanes, have opened Tibet to outsiders in the past decade or so. Most tourists visit only Lhasa, taking day trips to the surrounding sites. But the Chinese government has opened most of the Tibetan interior to individual travelers in recent years. So, in Lhasa I arrange a car with a guide, Tsering, and a driver, to travel to the spot where Tibet and the world clashed so dramatically. We travel in the opposite direction, from Younghusband's destination, the capital, towards Sikkim and India.

For the entire three-day journey, my dragoman sits in front of the Chinese jeep talking nonstop to the driver in Tibetan. Tsering's worth as a guide is questionable. Earlier in Lhasa, when I asked him to identify a tree in temple grounds, he informed me, “It is an ordinary tree.”

And in a temple's strange and spooky room of the protector gods, I wondered what the skulls painted on the rafter symbolized.

“They are painted skulls,” Tsering notified me solemnly.

But this early morning, with the sharp, high-altitude sun, ice blue skies, hard, clear light on the surrounding mountains and the gold roofs and wine dark walls of temples, I am content to merely observe the Tibetan countryside as Tsering drones on.

Leaving Lhasa, we follow the Tsang Po River, which runs into the great Brahmaputra. The swiftly flowing river, broad in places, narrow in others, will no doubt soon be discovered by whitewater rafters looking for a new thrill. For now, locals still cross in yak-skin boats, like huge leather baskets, to camp on sandy mid-stream islands.

Rustics in native dress lead donkeys and wives down the dusty roads, and peasants work the fields along valleys between
barren, dusty hills. Small herds of black yaks, which look and move like musk oxen, graze unattended. Some sport red decorations woven into their shaggy hair.

Tsering pauses long enough to point out an area high on a hilltop, where Tibetans practice sky burial, hacking up corpses and leaving them to the vultures.

These brown, dry mountains are deeply eroded, and the sun, so strong and direct in this thin air, leaves dark shadows like knife cuts in the valleys walls. We pass a truck which has gone off a bridge into the river, then another which went into the ditch, a grim comment on local driving skills.

Leaving the river, we pass a massive power development community (the “electric city” Tsering calls it) and begin the long, long, steep corkscrew climb up the mountain. Tsering points out a line crisscrossing up a mountain opposite us. It is the old trail that he rode along when going to school in Darjeeling, India, via Sikkim, in 1948. It was an arduous four-day mule ride to the Sikkim border then, but it was the only way to travel until the Chinese opened this road in 1951.

After the long climb, the top of the Khambala Pass (4,900 meters) comes very suddenly, revealing a breathtaking view of jagged, snow-topped mountains far in the distance, like the iced teeth of a crosscut saw. Far below, Yamdrok Yamtso, one of Tibet's largest and holiest lakes, spreads out, a hard, cobalt blue that appears artificial, as though someone had colored the lake with fountain pen ink.

Here at the peak, pilgrims stop on their journey to place rocks on a mound, burn incense and hang prayer flags. Old and faded pennants flutter from between two low mounds of rocks, and Tsering and I agree that it is too bad that we didn't prepare for our journey by bringing flags and incense.

On the mountain peak above, the white snowball-like dome of a Chinese radar facility sits like a giant, mislaid ping pong ball -- there to observe other countries' planes, Tsering says.

From here, the road descends gradually to the lake, a popular
site for day trip picnics from Lhasa. The Tibetan villages along the road are clusters of traditional low, mud-block buildings in good repair, prayer flags flapping from the flat roofs. On the far side of the lake, we stop by a lone tent set up in the middle of this bleak valley. It is Tibet's version of a truck stop cafe, where men are cooking soup and mo-mos, tasty Tibetan meat dumplings.

In this unlikely place, I encounter a band of a dozen elderly Americans from Hawaii, all dressed in the latest brightly colored outdoor gear, vivid reds, blues and oranges among the brown rocks. After trekking in Sikkim, they came overland from Nepal, en route to Lhasa. They are delighted to hear that the Holiday Inn hotel there has hot showers and a good restaurant and bar. We chat while Tsering eats both of our lunches -- I have no appetite at this altitude -- then go on our separate ways. The road now follows the lake and turns onto a dry, dusty valley floor past hillside forts destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, like so many in Tibet.

The jeep now climbs gradually to the Karo La Pass, just 75 kilometers from Gyantse, the last and highest on this route at 5,045 meters. Near the top, I get out to look at a glacier, which almost reaches down to the road. That must have been the same ice that Younghusband's soldiers scrambled across in 1904, as they fought the last battle before marching on Lhasa.

“The battle for the Karo Pass was to make military history,” as Peter Hopkirk notes in his excellent account of the event, Trespassers on the Roof of the World. “So far as is known, it was fought at a greater altitude than any other engagement before or since.”

The Sikhs and Gurkhas overran a six-foot stone wall built across the pass, and the way was open to Lhasa. Even now, in late fall, it is too chilly to stay out long, and I shudder at the misery the soldiers from the Indian plains must have experienced when they passed this way.

As we descend into the next valley, we encounter one of the strangest artifacts of that early 20th-century expedition. Telephone
poles made of mud, in places with wires still strung from the short crossbars, stretch off into the distance - a strange remnant of the Empire from Britain's brief period in Tibet.

The resourceful British signals unit accompanying the Younghusband expedition built this line as the army advanced, connecting the expedition to Darjeeling. One pole has 1910 daubed on it in red paint, obviously a memento of a later scrawler. More modern wooden poles now in use run parallel to the original line, going on and on across the windswept, dusty valley.

Tsering points out some mud walls he says are relics of British houses. We climb a hill to one, a kind of solid mud tower with no windows or doors. Tsering says it is a house.

“But it is solid,” I note.

“Yes, maybe it is a toilet.”

It is harvest time in Tibet; the fields are golden with wheat and farmers are threshing and singing as they hold the reins and whip the horses running round and round over the golden sheaves. This ancient scene, too, must be exactly as the Younghusband expedition saw it.

Travelers in the 1930s reported that this road was no more than a number of mule tracks about a foot wide twisting over the rocks and between the boulders. Now it is a paved highway.

Although one of Tibet's leading towns, Gyantse is a bleak place in a scenic setting. It has a forlorn, empty, end-of-the-world feeling. The fort looms in the background like a Tibetan haunted castle.

We first check in at the police station, an unfinished building with a small generator to supply the communications radio and a big pile of yak dung patties to fuel the little tin stove in the middle of the room. The woman officer in civilian clothes scratches out something in crude letters on a sheet of paper -- our permit to visit this area -- and Tsering hands over some ragged bills.

English traveler Robert Byron, who referred to Tibet as Asia Magna, was perhaps the first writer, and the first real “tourist,” to travel to Tibet after the Younghusband expedition (although numerous
military and political officials preceded him). The adventurous Byron, who wrote of the trip in First Russia, Then Tibet, came in the early 1930s, when it took him eight days to fly from London to India on Imperial Airways' new Air Mail service. His mother's only request was that he not bring back a Buddha.

But in those days, he could only travel from India, through Sikkim, and was only allowed as far as Gyantse, where a British commercial agent was posted after the 1904 invasion. Lhasa was still the Forbidden City. Today, we can only travel from the other direction, from Lhasa, and can proceed no further south.

Just south of Gyantse, the road branches south to forbidden Sikkim, down the valley from where Younghusband (and later Byron) came. I talk a reluctant Tsering and the driver into going on a short way down the valley.

Just south, a fort set high on a hill to the right guards the valley. From here, the Tibetans with their ineffectual matchlocks could only look down helplessly on the invaders. After about 10 kilometers, we stop at a small monastery. It is eerie, as squatting monks chant in the dark, cold chamber, and are served their meal of tsampa (roast barley flour) and yak butter tea. As so often in Tibet, there is a sense of timelessness.

A short distance down the valley, near a village called Guru, was site of the first fatal meeting of Tibet's medieval army and a modern one., on March 31, 1904. The Tibetans were armed only with swords, matchlocks and a talisman -- a piece of paper with the Dalai Lama's personal seal -- which the lamas promised would make them bulletproof. But magic was no match for modern arms, and in four minutes the invaders destroyed the Tibetan army. As Hopkirk notes, the medieval army disintegrated before 20th-century firepower. Daily Mail reporter Edmund Candler, who was injured in the battle, later recalled the devastated Tibetans leaving the scene.

“They were bewildered. The impossible had happened. Prayers and charms and mantras, and the holiest of their holy men, had failed them… They walked with bowed heads, as if
they had been disillusioned by the gods.”

I'd like to go further toward the border, toward the scene of the later battle of Red Idol Gorge just 20 miles from Gyantse, but my nervous companions refuse, returning to the town for the night. Our hotel, the Gyantse, is a new, large and typical Chinese hostelry with a cold, barren feel, and the smell of wet concrete.

Dinner, tour-group style like in China years ago, consists of a challenging mush of overcooked, soggy noodles in a soup (the Chinese don't appreciate al dente), spicy cucumbers which are edible, a heavy bun, and two plates of greasy indeterminate meat -- probably yak. When Byron was here, socializing with the Tibetan gentry, he noted Tibetan food is preferable to any that is found in Greece (where he had traveled extensively). Today, this is barely believable.

The bedroom is large, and grubby, with an ancient thermos holding some hot water, roughly painted walls and thick, heavy, dirty quilts. At this altitude, sleep is difficult, and accompanied by disturbing dreams of strange Tibetan gods.

Eager to leave the hotel, I wake on a very cold dawn as the sun rises and slowly washes down the hilltop fort, casting a fresh, clean light on the mountains.

The Palkhor Cholde monastery, like a purple shawl against the mountain, is the town's main attraction. More interested in history than religion, I go to see the citadel, squatting on a rocky hill which sticks up several hundred feet like the end of a French loaf in the middle of the town. Tsering and I walk up, both puffing and panting, as this is higher than Lhasa. The fort is not normally open to visitors. A large rock blocks a big red door at the entrance, but some workmen remove it to open it for us.