Jashideley!

The Tibetan greeting is “tashi delek”, which roughly translates as “may luck come!” However, in the dialect (or language) of Kham province, which once belonged to Eastern Tibet and now is part of the Chinese province of Sichuan, they pronounce it as “jashideley”, with the end slightly lengthened. And here, especially if it is said by a foreigner, from whom one would not expect it, it is no longer a greeting, but rather a magic spell that causes deep astonishment and increased euphoria. In fact, it calls to the surface, as if by magic, all the beauty, joy of life and kindness that characterize the people living here.

Faces in the town of Garzê responding to the spell of jashideley

Kham is one of the three provinces of historical Tibet, its western border region facing historical China. Its name also means “border” in Tibetan. The province, inhabited mainly by Tibetan nomads, was, together with the northern Amdo province, conquered by the Oirat (Khoshut) Mongols in 1642. The Manchu dynasty, which conqueured China at the same time, defeated its rival in 1720 after gathering strength for a century, and annexed the two provinces to China.

Location (above) and division (below) of the Tibetan Plateau roughly coinciding with historical Tibet

The third, most ancient Tibetan province, Ü-Tsang, was occupied by Communist China only in the 1940-50s, but then, Amdo and Kham were no longer reannexed to the Tibet Autonomous Region created from Ü-Tsang. The former is now the Chinese province of Qinghai, and the latter is the western part of Sichuan Province.

This unfortunate division of historical Tibet also has some minor advantages. One is that, unlike Ü-Tsang, the two eastern provinces have been accustomed to Chinese rule for centuries and do not rebel against it like the Tibetan core region does. Therefore, the pressure of the Chinese authorities, the destruction of monuments and the dilution of the population through resettlement is much smaller than in the Autonomous Region. This is why we actually find more authentic Tibetan culture and history here than there. The other is that while a foreigner can only enter the Autonomous Region on an organized Chinese tourist trip and under the supervision of a Chinese guide, he can roam freely in these two provinces – although he has to expect more police checks than in other parts of China, and certain “rebellious” monastic towns such as Larung Gar or Yarchen Gar, are still closed to him.

The map in the Sichuan Museum in Chengdu shows that Sichuan Province is sharply divided into two parts. Its eastern part is a lowland watered by great rivers. This part is home to Han Chinese or to ethnic groups merged with them since the beginning of the empire. The seat of the province, Chengdu was a border town and a major military base against Tibet until the 1700s. The montainous western part, the former Kham province, on the other hand, is already the Tibetan Plateau and is part of the historical Tibet. One third of the entire Tibetan population lives here, as well as several small ethnic groups (the Yi, Qiang, Miao, Tujia, Hui, etc.). The map is deceptive: the area of Kham is almost exactly 3 times the size of Germany (924 thousand km²).

This year I start my free roaming in the heart of Kham, in the town of Garzê (甘孜 Gānzī in Chinese), which was the seat of the conquering Mongols in the 17th and 18th century. The Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan province is still named after it, although its seat has already moved to Kangding, closer to Chengdu.

From Chengdu to Garzê it is a ten-hour drive. We will cover it in three days on our September tour. But now, on the preparatory trip, I want to gain time, so I fly, which is only an hour and a half.

I am the only European on the plane. The security guard at Garzê airport also spots this, and checks me out. Passport, what am I doing here, where is my hotel. This latter is extremely important, because it calms him down. But he does all this very kindly and politely. Although Kham is that part of Tibet where foreigners can enter freely, it does not hurt to keep an eye on them.

Two young Chinese brothers pass by and witness my checking. They are businessmen from Chengdu who came to the city for a meeting. They address me in English, and at the end of the checking, they offer to take me to my hotel with the business car that is waiting for them. Talking on the way, it turns out that their company is one of the main supporters of the Wekerle Business School in Budapest.

The airport, named after the legendary Tibetan king Gesar, is about fifty kilometers away from the city. It meanders through the deep valley of Yalong River. Mountain ranges five thousand meters high on both sides, colorful Tibetan villages along the river, small monasteries with golden roofs, red-robed lamas walking side by side, yaks grazing on the floodplain. I have arrived.

Kham and other western Chinese provinces may be touchingly archaic, but their hotels are absolutely modern. The explanation for this is that the hotels are primarily aimed at the wealthy and comfort-loving Chinese consumers of the big cities on the east coast, for whom this is the main scene of domestic vacations, the unspoiled rural idyll. Most of these hotels are not even listed on Booking.com, only on its Chinese equivalent, Trip.com, since they do not expect European travelers around here.

This hotel in Garzê is also of absolutely high quality. Back in Europe, it would be considered a four-star. Entering my room, I am surprised to see that one of the wall pictures is a Catalan text, a fragment of Joan Brossa’s poem about a visit to an art gallery, accompanied by a drawing by Joan Miró which looks like a modern Chinese calligraphy. It is dizzying to think how such a little-known Catalan text ends up here, among the Tibetan mountains, on the roof of the world.

From the window of my hotel, I can see a large green square surrounded by willow trees, in the middle of which stand a few white and colorful Tibetan tents, and below and next to them many people sitting, snacking and dancing. I go down, approach the group, and shoot one or two photos from a distance. They invite me for tea with yam butter and meat dumplings. The dumplings are made with yak meat and look and taste exactly like Georgian khinkali. “What feast is today?” I ask, but it turns out that it is just a big family picnic. The head of the family, or at least the head of the picnic, is a 20-year-old boy studying Tibetan literature in Chengdu. He will perhaps become a teacher in Garzê after graduation. His younger sister already teaches mathematics here. His younger brother is studying to be a lama in the monastery town of Derge. All of them are thin, with face full of character, very intelligent, friendly figures. Their mother is beaming with pride at how far these three children have gone. They also have four older brothers, who are also here with their families. The several children continuously cling to this or that uncle or aunt. And now to me, the newcomer. They ask me what my job is, but from “art historian” they only understand “art”. The little girls immediately push a checkered notebook in front of me so that I draw them. I draw caricature-like portraits of them with quick strokes. They are very popular, they stand in line for them.

One of the uncles pushes out a large loudspeaker onto the square. The little girls immediately flock around him and start dancing to the beat-ified Tibetan folk music. Their dance is like the bowing of flowers, waving their raised hands, slowly circling. Only later do I see on a sculpted relief in the city’s dance square that this dance was traditionally performed by both men and women in very long sleeved shirts, and the essence was the waving and swirling of the sleeves hanging well beyond the hands. The older women slow join them. It is nice to see how they become more beautiful and rejuvenated in the dance. Then come the men, they also include me. The DJ uncle dances very well, he starts to teach me, too. To a general celebration, I quickly learn the relatively simple steps. From time to time I break away, enter the circle and video the dance from inside. I gave my camera to the little boys at the very beginning. They are quite happy to visit the tents and take pictures in places where I probably wouldn’t have been able to enter. That’s how I end up in one or another picture.

After the dance we eat again, this time cooked sausage, almost unseasoned, with almost unmixed yak meat and a lot of fat inside. “Do you know what this is?” asks one of the young lamas slyly. “Yak flesh stuffed into its own gut.” Perhaps he thinks that the Westerner will be disgusted from what he has unknowingly eaten, but I tell him that we also eat it at home, only from pork. “Right”, he nods, “we Tibetans also only eat pork and yak.” I ask him why they become monks. He replies that it was to reach perfection faster and to bring their families along with them. I ask them about Buddhism and they ask me about Christianity. We agree that compassion is a good common denominator. About the family, that it is the most important unifying force, that up to three hundred people gather on big holidays, and that they can count on each other for everything. You can almost physically feel this in this turmoil, in the multitude of people, big and small, talking to, interacting, playing with each other, paying attention to each other. I feel as if North American history took a different path, and now I am celebrating with a happy and cheerful Native tribe.

In Garzê, they dance not only at family picnics, but also in the main square. In fact, all over Tibet: last year I uploaded dancing videos from Kangding. From dusk until late at night, many people come together to dance in the large market square of the new town. Now it appears to be a centrally sponsored community event, but it probably had traditional antecedents. In Garzê’s large square, there is at least a statue of a Tibetan couple dancing with long sleeves, and locals are also dancing on “totem poles” and reliefs that illustrate local traditional culture. A sign in the square indicates that even the nomads who come down from the mountains for the big holidays and fairs can pitch their tents here and join in the dancing.

Unfortunately, by the time I get there after the whole day’s sightseeing, my phone is dead, so I can only take photos of the dances. Not for long, because the children in the crowd pounce on me, demanding close-up photos. Then they check how it turned and are happy. More and more children are lining up for this simple but effective trick.

On the fence of the nearby secondary school, the Tibetan motifs are replaced by Chinese ones, a message of the dominant culture. Classical Chinese pen drawings are accompanied by classical Chinese poems. Something from them will put down roots over the four years.

In the evening I go down to the hotel restaurant for a hot spicy soup. This is the meeting place for the elite of the area, prestigious lamas and businessmen walk in and out and negotiate at the tables. A kind looking Tibetan businessman sits at the opposite table. He glances at me from time to time, then gets up, comes over, and in a polite way asks me if he can take a photo of us together when I’m done eating. As in the well-known Russian joke: “You know, Sergey, there are so few black people among us.” When I'm done and pay, we both sit down at a table and he gives the waitress his cell phone. He pulls himself out, puts a thick book in front of us on the table so that the foreground of the picture is not empty. Then he eloquently says thanks for the luck he has been a part of. I also try to reciprocate his politeness as much as I can.

The old town of Garzê owes its existence to the Oirat Mongols who conquered Eastern Tibet in 1642. They turned the small market town at the intersection of important trade routes into a major military center. They built two castles here in the valley of Yalong River, and the monastery of Kandze on the hill above the town. The explanation for the latter is that in Tibet there was a bloody struggle between the laxist Karma monastic order and the new, fundamentalist reform order of the Gelug. The Karma was supported by the Tibetan king, while the head of the Gelug, the Dalai Lama, gained the patronage of the Oirat chief, Gushri Khan. The alliance proved to be fruitful. The Dalai Lama conquered Central Tibet with Mongol weapons and declared himself the ruler of Tibet, while his monks strengthened the power of Gushri Khan in the provinces of Amdo and Kham he had occupied. One of the nice fruits of this collaboration is the Gelug monastery in Garzê, founded by Gushri Khan.

The monastery developed rapidly. By the 19th century it had already 1,500 monks. It was the second largest monastery town in Kham province, after Chamdo, which remained in today’s autonomous Tibet. The old town of Garzê was formed around it. A series of temples were founded next to the main one, and they are surrounded by the monastery town clinging up the steep hillside, where each monk has his own small cottage. The pilgrim circle around the monastery (Tibetan pilgrims traditionally walk around the main temple and the whole monastery) used to be eight kilometers long. Its walls and gates have been preserved in several places. The monastery town is surrounded by a wide strip of traditional houses. These were once independent hamlets (their centers are still marked by street signs ending in 村, cūn, “village”), which gradually grew together into the old town of Garzê.

A steep staircase leads from the labyrinth of the old town to the gate of the monastery, and from there to the main temple on the hilltop. From the stairs, small alleys branch off to the right and left to the colorful houses of the monks. Looking back and forth, the panorama of the valley opens up more and more, with the large stupa dominating the entire town in the middle, and the 6,000-meter-high snowy mountain peaks lining the valley on the horizon. At the top of the hill, at the end of a wide square, stands the multi-storey main temple, around which a cloud of crows circles incessantly, so that the whole monastery town is filled with the ambient sound of continuous crowing. The spacious interior of the temple has a colorfully painted column-and-beam structure, surrounded by huge statues along the walls, the various appearances of the Buddha, the deities of Tibetan Buddhism, and the yellow-capped holy lamas of the Gelug order.

The large monastery temple is encircled by a number of smaller temples. Right next to it is one with four huge gods, the Lokapalas – the four Heavenly Kings, guardians of the four winds – on its façade. Its altar is dedicated to the arhats. The arhats are the enlightened sages who are already in the Buddhist Pure Land, as opposed to the bodhisattvas, who are also enlightened, but due to their mercy, they still stay in this world to help others to attain enlightenment. Arhats play a particularly important role in the Tibetan version of Buddhism. The large monasteries always have a small temple, where hundreds of their small statues are venerated.

Moving on, right at the gate of the monastery, there is another strange temple, or rather a temple complex. In addition to the three temples on the ground floor of the two-story building, there are a number of small ones on the first floor and around the upper courtyard, dedicated to various Buddhas, lamas and gods. They specially mark the temple of the Eighteen Arhats, the first companions of the Buddha, whose cult was particularly popular in Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism. This large selection of small temples and cult figures right here, next to the gate, to be first visited by those entering from the city, indicates that it serves for the daily prayer needs of the city’s worshipers. I also see pilgrims here for the first time, coming in from the countryside, dressed in yak-skins and with yak horns on their heads.

In the lower three temples I can still take pictures, but when I come out, a monk is waiting for me around the corner, who invites me up the stairs to the temple of the Eighteen Arhats. He shows me around this and the other small shrines around the courtyard, but does not allow me to take pictures. A small apple tree stands in the yard with small green apples the size of scoops. Just looking at them makes my stomach turn sour. “Are the apples edible?” I ask, rather just out of politeness. “And how!” he replies with obvious pleasure. Above four thousand meters, people are not picky. Finally he leads me into a room that first looks like a church, but then it turns out to be a religious gift shop, which also strengthens the character of the place as a pilgrimage templme. This is where I first see the banned but widely respected portrait of the Dalai Lama on the wall. The prices are quite high, probably because of the sanctity of the place. After I don’t buy anything, he asks for a tour guide fee, which is in line with the prices of the shop.

The old town of Garzê lies around the monastery walls, descending down the slope of the hill. It has preserved its traditional architecture in a manner typical of Kham, and even the whole of Southwest China. This, on the one hand, means real preservation, that of the old buildings and construction techniques. And on the other hand, a kind of façadeism, when new urban buildings are constructed with modern technologies, reinforced concrete frames etc., but their façade motifs imitate those of the old houses. There is probably some central will and construction regulation promoting this, so that this region, designated as the most important destination for domestic tourism, has a sufficiently archaic effect on tourists visiting here from the big cities of the East to find their roots. But if there is, it is applied with sufficient laxity so that the old towns do not become open-air museums. Here and there you might have this feeling, especially in the tourist trap streets, but this much is not bad. The lower level of the houses is stone, brick, or, increasingly, Ytong, covered with clay, with small, porthole-like openings. The upper level is built of wood, painted in vivid colors, with large windows and a balcony, with lots of flowers on it. The gates are also carved and colorful, with printed sutras, sacred images and amulets. There are some exaggereated details as well, like the exotically designed street lamps, and a lot of tinkering, but that’s a sign of life.

You can almost read the history of the really old houses. And not even almost. The street numbers assigned during successive renumberings of the street can be read side by side on the gables of the old houses. (How useful this would have been for us in Lemberg, when searching for Captain Truszkowski's house!) This house had a long history: its six numbers are lined up on its lintel like medals on the chest of a Soviet general. Two are illegible, they are probably the hero city and hero mother medal. As to which one is valid, it can be deduced through stylistic criticism.

The gates have a lot of apotropaic metal fittings. The newer the gate, the more kinds of them. Dragons, Buddha lions, the Wheel of the Doctrine, stupas. And on this hardware they run soft accessories: printed holy images, saints and sutras, braids made of colored textiles, garlic garlands, amulets. On the right wing (viewed from inside) of this gate there are “I say it politely”-grade textile prints, while on the left wing there are knives on a string against the really hardcore evil spirits.

At the gate of the old town, at the beginning of the street coming over from the modern town, stands the Sweet Mango Pub, where the traveler can draw strength before getting lost in the labyrinth of the old streets. I say jashideley to the owner at the door, and he invites me in, seats me at the family’s table, and offers me yak meat and yak butter tea. At the other table, they are drinking rice brandy. We raise our glasses back and forth, and finally their moderator, Kanba joins us for a few words. He is a photographer here in Garzê, and his colleagues are also local alternative intellectuals. It turns out that we were born in the same year and month. We drink to this.

The rustic decoration of the pub includes high stacks of dried cow dung along the stairs leading up from the street. For us, who heat with peaceful Russian gas, this might be surprising, but they also need something to heat with. In summer, they collect and dry it on the sunny walls of the houses. A magnificent decoration, which beautifies even the recently popular Ytong bricks. And besides money, cow pies are the one thing that does not smell.

In Tibetan cities and villages, small chapels play an important role next to large monasteries. In fact, in many places they are the only holy building. They are small, local, popular sources of holiness, like Catholic chapels. People make pilgrimages to the monastery for important matters, but they come to the neighborhood chapel even on their way to work to turn the wheel of the Doctrine two or three times. Because the essence of these chapels is a huge prayer wheel in the center of the small square interior. You can walk around it and turn it, just as devout Italians say an Ave in front of the holy image of the Virgin Mary on the street corner.

And they also have another function: the accumulation of holiness. The decoration of these chapels is not ordered by some church authority, abbot, local lama etc., but brought together by the neighborhood. Anything that carries some minimum of holiness, a holy image, a photo of a lama, a Buddha statue, an image of a god, an artificial flower, are all brought here, so the small ones add up into a great common holiness which fills the space of the chapel for the benefit of everyone. These are impressive museums of popular religiosity, splendid raw materials for an ethnographer. Like here, at the beginning of the main street in the old town of Garzê, next to the Sweet Mango Pub.

Each of the small villages that make up the old town of Garzê has its own folk shrine. Its essence is the large prayer wheel or row of prayer wheels, for whose turning the locals come down, make a detour, and drive the cattle by, which waits patiently while the owner walks around the shrine, turns the wheels, recites the prayers and then chats with the others.

What are the two magic words to attract visitors to Kham? One is the Tibetan culture, which, as we have seen, has its own statue in the form of dancers in the main square of Garzê. And the other is that branch of the Chinese Silk Road network that has experienced a renaissance in the last decade: the Tea-Horse-Route. Along this route they transported tea from Yunnan in the south and Sichuan in the east up to Tibet, and in return magnificent Tibetan horses back for the Chinese elite. These are the two routes we will cover in this September with two groups, first the Sichuan branch going across Kham, and then the other through Yunnan. And the small towns along the way boast everywhere with various monuments dedicated to the tea and the horse. The mostly hyper-realistic groups of sculptures were modeled on archival photographs, since the trade of tea and horse flourished even in the 1940s, until the Communist takeover.

In Garzê, the horses and the foot porter with the large, 100-kilo-load of tea on the back meet the visitor on the main street of the old town, with the large 茶马古道 Chamagudao (The old road of tea and horse) inscription and explanatory panels. The choice of the location is excellent, as from here you can see the hillside leading up to Kandze Monastery with the many small colorful houses. The only problem is that the figures come loaded with tea from the direction of Tibet, to where they are supposed to carry the tea. The creators obviously did not want the tourists, who enter at the lower end of the main street, to encounter the horses’ asses at this festive point. After all, who remembers directions here?

There is also a small shop next to the monument. After the whole days’ walking around the old town, I buy a beer for my horse here, then I sit down on the circular bench between the statues and let him drink it. This is how it turns out that this bench is a magnet that also attracts other visitors of the tea-horse-road. First, an old monk sits down next to me, who tries to explain the tea-horse-road to me in Tibetan. Then an old Tibetan man comes with his two teenage granddaughters, and he introduces himself as a local Belgian. He shows his Belgian passport, and from then on he is only willing to speak Flemish instead of Chinese. He left twenty ears ago, and since then he has not seen his children. Only this year’s liberalization of Chinese visa – in merit of which a number of European countries, including Belgium, were granted visa-free entry for 15 days – brought the opportunity for him to visit home. Later I hear a similar story from another Tibetan Belgian in the town of Derge, right on the Tibetan border. He emigrated from official Tibet through India and lost his Chinese citizenship, but not the traces of his emigration. So he did not even think about applying for a visa. Even now, he was only able to get to the Tibetan border, because as a foreign citizen he can no longer go home to Tibet. His family is coming over from there to meet him in Derge. Their story seems to be typical.

The modern also slipped into Garzê, but it did so to its ruin. Its bleaching bones fill an entire block of land near the dancing square, at the intersection of two major roads. It is an unknown Mecca of urbex enthusiasts, beginning with the 永佳百货 Yongjia Baihuo, that is, Forever Excellent Department Store, whose neon sign also boasts the translation “winbest departuent store” for eventual English-speakers going there. From the spacious empty parking lot, which is now used by the cars of the local fire department, it seems that they excpected a lot of traffic. The building is in structurally complete condition. It probably never got further than that. The development got stuck somewhere, and the iron teeth of time took over the foremanship.

The windows of the departuent store open to further torsos that take on the pseudo-Tibetan style even more strongly. Their indended functions can only be inferred from the sporadically preserved – or rather too early installed – inscriptions: beauty parlor, fashion salon. A large entertainment industry complex began to sprout hesitantly here, under the Himalaya, for the local cosmopolitan elite. But the icy wings blowing down from the snowy ridges suffocated its green buds. The iron sway of Tibet was victorious again.

Only one large block of buildings could defy the Tibetan fate, spectacularly planted in the intersection: a multiplex bar, labeled on one side Superyak, on the other Empty Bottle Pub, on the third ORVS CLUB, and on the fourth “D Dr party-k”. As you can see, not only the European-American culture knows how to use Chinese characters in idiotic ways, but the Chinese can also do the same with this handful of illogical gibberish letters. Perhaps, actually, the goal was to create this block as a ruin pub, only for that the ruin had to be created. I already learned yesterday at the Tibetan family picnic that the local cosmopolitan elite – or, as they put it, the city’s bulls (superyaks) – come here. There is, therefore, something that neither time nor the retrograde power of conservative Tibetan culture can overcome: the transnational demand for swanky macho representation.

In Garzê (and all of Southwest China) there are clubs in every streets. But in contrast to London, they do not require formal introduction. It is enough to stand next to the table. For a strategically placed jashideley, you even get a beer. And if you later meet a club member on another street, he will remember you and cheerfully confirm your club membership.

In such a place, all you have to do is sit down somewhere, say on the steps of a shrine, and things will happen. Cows are coming. Cows are going. The shopkeeper aunt is reading. Motorcyclists come and say hello loudly. Women come and say hello to the shopkeeper aunt. A client comes, and the three of them give her three different types of information. Calves are coming. Club members are coming and say hello to you. It is getting dark. You go home.