The River at the Centre of the World (47 page)

Next morning the road climbed high onto the basement of the Tibetan Plateau. There would be many more great ridges and plains before we reached the plateau itself, but these hills now had an organization about them, as though we had left the chaos of the collision zone behind us and were on the way to the high upthrusts of the Asian plate itself. There were villages of the strangely boxy stone houses of the settled Tibetans, and down in the meadows the large black tents of the nomads. It was all staggeringly beautiful – clean and glittering in the early sunlight, with dew-fresh grass, towering peaks, piercing blue skies and, dotting the scenery with ragged charm, hundreds upon hundreds of grazing yaks. Like sheep in Scotland, yaks always acted skittishly when we swept past: they would rear up and race away, their hooves sending sprays of earth behind them, and the ground rumbling under their speeding mass.

There were other animals, too – small creatures like groundhogs, and big waddling rodents, like stunted capybaras, that were said to be Tibetan marmots. Birds, too: owls by night, and small blue and red and orange perching birds by day. The dreariness of China was well behind us now: we had come up into a new altitude, and the world was new and excitingly different.

But the road was still terrible, and the car performed less and less well. Poor Miao, whose gear-lever patting rate was becoming almost manic, kept having to stop and cleanse this nozzle or rebraze that point or demand that local welders – who were becoming rare animals indeed in these parts – re-attach pieces that had fallen off. The Jeep was looking very sick indeed; and inside we were choked with dust, and all we owned was filthy and, in many cases, broken by the constant battering. Lily had rarely before been in a car for more than two hours: so far we were four days into a journey that might take at least two weeks. Her morale was not the best.

Gas stations were rare as well, and those who found them tended to stay in them for long periods, unwilling to plunge on into the wilderness once having discovered an oasis of relative civilization. At one, deep in the middle of nowhere, I came across a beautiful young woman who spoke flawless English. She was from Sikkim and had been working in the hills a hundred miles from here, helping to build a new lamasery, to replace one torn down by Red Guards in 1968.

She was called Changchup Dolma, and we arranged to have dinner together that night. Lily refused to come: Tibetans, and those who sympathized with Tibetans, were far from being her favourites.

The young woman was indeed young – only twenty-seven, and though her family was from Sikkim, she had been educated in the town of Vizakapatnam in southeast India, taking a BA in art history. Her uncle, under whose auspices the new lamasery was being built, was an exceptionally holy man – the incarnation, she said, of the great Dêgê Lama. He had been recognized as such when he was nine years old, he had come to Lhasa in the 1950s to study, as was decreed, and then gone on to Kangding, to a lamasery under the control of the Lama of Chala. During the Cultural Revolution he had been arrested, and spent twenty years in prison, for no greater crime than claiming himself to be (as did his followers) a reincarnate deity, a
trulku
.

The girl was almost weeping as she told me this. But she was not sad, she said – rather she was just tremendously happy to meet me, a foreigner who listened. She loathed the Chinese, and had made no efforts to learn their language. She spoke Sikkimese, Hindi, Tibetan, and this excellent English. ‘But Chinese is the tongue of our oppressors,’ she declared. ‘I would think of it as a betrayal to learn it.’ Since nearly 90 per cent of the local population – most of whom were nomads anyway – were Tibetan, she had little practical reason for learning the language.

She was tall and graceful, and when she begged me to stay for some months and try to learn something of the plight, as she put it, of the Tibetan people, I was more than a little tempted. During dinner she tried to teach me to write Tibetan, which I told her I had long thought one of the prettiest-looking of languages. But I could manage only
om mane padme hum
, which I already knew from having seen it so often carved on the thousands of roadside stones, set there by patient masons who wanted no more than for the mantra to be carried away by passing breezes. She was a patient teacher, though, and smiled beatifically through all my clumsy errors.

Later I had a letter from her, posted in a town called Luhou, the nearest to her lamasery: she said she had had to ride two days in a truck to post it.

I hope you remember me [she wrote, as if I could possibly forget]…

I am the girl you met in Luhou, Tibet. I am sure when you get home you will have many adventures to tell your friends… Being a poor talker I couldn't tell you much about Tibet. In China there is no freedom of speech, as you must know, and you can hardly talk about what you really feel. Living in Tibet for nearly three years now I really don't know what people feel in their minds and hearts. No one seems to believe any other person. They may be spies, or maybe they had been tortured badly during the Revolution. It still has an effect on them, this past – the older ones tell the younger generation to keep quiet and not to believe the third persons. Even the small children follow the rules.

I might be late in writing to you some more. I mean I might not be able to write to you very often. I hope you won't mind. You see, we don't have a post office here and going to town is difficult as there is no bus or cars. I have to go and look for a truck passing by, and they hardly ever give a lift. But I will do my best to write to you as often as I could.

That was the only letter that ever came. She enclosed a photograph of Domand Gunpa, the lamasery she was building for her uncle. It had room for forty student monks, she said, and there was to be a large chorten built near by. What had gone up so far was a grand and colourful two-storey structure of wood, and in the photograph there is a milling crowd of monks and abbots, and the local Tibetan girls in the foreground look happy enough.

On the surface, in many ways, it might seem as though the Chinese are allowing, if cautiously, some resurgence in Tibet's religious traditions. The fact that westerners are being invited to help rebuild lamaseries and that Sikkimese devotees like Changchup Dolma are being allowed to cross what was once a rigidly controlled international frontier speaks of a growing liberalization – at least to Lily, who consistently argued that China's policies towards Tibet had been universally beneficial and were now marked by an excess of tolerance. But this letter, which was waiting for me at home, postmarked in Chinese and Tibetan script, spoke of other, less pleasant attitudes – and knowing the Chinese, and their low regard for the barbarians who are their neighbours, I had to doubt that matters were improving in any significant way.

The road got steadily bleaker and more lonely, and the idea grew that we were journeying well beyond all law and beyond all organization – a notion that was in some way exhilarating, in another quite daunting. An example came a hundred or so miles outside Luhou, on a stretch of road near one of the many opencast gold mines that pepper this hazily administered part of Tibet-cum-Sichuan. It was when I watched two truck drivers – in the only trucks I had seen for dozens of miles – having a spirited argument. The one had climbed down from his truck and was standing on the running board of the other, gesticulating wildly at the man inside. As we passed by, this man suddenly pulled an automatic pistol from his jacket and, while the scene diminished steadily in our rearview mirror, had thrust it into the face of his antagonist. What happened next I can't say, but it had rather the look of violence to it. That the locals call this part of the world the Wild West seemed at the moment only too appropriate.

The gold mines are run by gangsters, too – claims are staked, locals are trucked in to work in near freezing conditions for a few cents a day, and the gold is divided up between a government official and the man who first found the lode. Officially, all gold belongs to the Chinese treasury: unofficially, a lot of local farmers are getting rich, and, more to the point, a lot of corrupt government officials – a phrase that in China has the ring of tautology to it these days – are getting even richer.

We were on the northern branch of the brick tea road, a longer route to Lhasa than for those who go by way of Batang, so there was very little traffic, no more than two or three trucks a day. Occasionally we would find broken-down vehicles, and once a bus that lay at the bottom of a canyon, wrecked almost beyond recognition, and still smouldering. The passengers, if any had survived, were nowhere to be seen.

And every day, every hour, we climbed higher and higher towards the great plateau. On our fifth day, after lunch at a hot, dry junction town that looked like a rest stop in eastern Montana, or Wyoming, we began to inch our way up the sides of a long couloir that the maps said led to the summit of Chola-shan, the final mountain chain before we reached the Yangtze.

The scene was unforgettably dramatic. In the background was the immense massif, scoured by three mighty glaciers that left razor-sharp peaks to slice through the racing clouds. In the foreground, beside a stream of cloudy ice-milk, was a sloping meadow, with pines and junipers where it joined the rocky slopes, untidy piles of tussock grass in the middle and then acres of sweet, lush, and damp grass closer to the road, where the land was flat. A dozen yaks grazed contentedly, and in front of her family's large black tent sat a young Tibetan woman, nursing her baby. In her right hand she held a prayer wheel, which she whirled like a top, sending blessings out on the wind. Her left arm supported her child, pressed tight to her breast.

She had long pigtails, and her hair was decorated with amulets made of yellowed amber; on her arms she wore bracelets of braided silver. I thought then I had never seen anything quite so beautiful. There was distant birdsong. The icy water tinkled merrily between the grasses, and some of the yaks wore bells, which pealed slightly as they changed feet and moved on for another mouthful of meadow. Blue smoke wafted from a dying fire, and a black pot hissed on its embers. The young woman looked up at me and smiled warmly, quite unconcerned at my presence as she continued to turn her prayer wheel in silent, practised devotion.

Behind and above, the mists spun through the peaks like gossamer trails and tiny puffs of cloud lazed in the summer sunshine, their shadows briefly darkening the grassland. I wanted to stay here, my own Shangri-la among the hills, for always.

But we had to cross the Chola hills, and so I said my good-byes – blithely ignored by the young woman – and we continued, whipping the broken Jeep into some semblance of forward motion. The road was a switchback – ‘twenty-five bends to the summit!’ said Tang, who had been here before. Soon the meadow was just distant patchwork, and the sharp peaks were all around us, and melting snow was leaking onto the gravel. A half-wrecked snowplough lay in wait in a road menders' hut, and a cold wind rattled the corrugated iron of its driver's cabin.

There was a cairn at the summit – 4916 metres, 16,100 feet said the sign, not quite accurately – and lines of prayer flags fluttering wildly in the gale. It was bitterly cold, and the thin air was making Lily feel unsteady. In the distance I could see the black cleft where the Yangtze ran, on the far side of which was Tibet proper – and another roadmen's hut. We headed there for shelter, and a cup of tea.

It was entirely run by women, tough old brutes dressed to their chins in wool and padded green coats from the army. They volunteered for the work, they said, and were paid sixty yuan a month – nine dollars. The contract called for a five-year stint up at these altitudes – and there was a bonus paid to those who stuck it out and didn't go back to Dêgê or Luhou, pleading for easier duty.

‘But you know what bothers me?’ said one woman, thinking that I could perhaps improve her lot because, being a foreigner, I should have plenty of good
guanxi
. ‘The bosses say this pass is at 4916 metres – you saw the sign? Well, they put it up – but it's wrong. We're actually at 5500 metres [18,000 feet] – but they changed the sign just so they don't have to pay us the extra money that's supposed to be given to anyone who works over five thousand metres. They're cheating us. Cheapskates! Damn bastards!’ She kicked her boot furiously against a broken-down truck, and added: ‘You write about it. Then maybe they'll change it.’ I assured her I would do just that.

The fields on the weather side of the hills were covered near the summit with yellow tuliplike flowers and mats of blue heather, and lower down there were poppies and rapeseed fields – the hillside was a riot of primary colours. But as I was admiring the prettiness of it all, a huge black cloud roared in out of nowhere and it began to hail, the ice clanging angrily off the wrecked cars and trucks that had fetched up at the way station. We got back into the Jeep and raced downhill, until the hail turned to rain and then stopped altogether. A scattering of grubby little shacks showed that we were on the outskirts of Dêgê.

Sixty thousand people live in this ugly little settlement, wedged into the valley of a noisily rushing Yangtze tributary. None of the buildings seemed to be complete – they were either being built, or falling down. Our hotel was as grubby a place as I expected, without water of any sort – I had to wash in public under a hose that builders were using to help make cement. I drew quite a crowd of nut-brown watchers, especially at the more intimate ablutionary moments.

Dêgê is an overwhelmingly Tibetan town (it used to have a king, like Muli and Chala) but with a large number of Han Chinese immigrants. ‘Solidarity between the Han and the Zang
*
people will make China strong!’ said a poster above the police station. Inside, the police chief, Ma Lu – who was Tibetan, but not a believer in the primacy of the Dalai Lama and thus trustworthy, in Chinese eyes – beamed with pleasure at our arrival.