Burial in the sky

Traveling in Kham • Jashideley! • Burial in the sky • Kangding, the gateway of Tibet • The Love Song of Kangding • The monastery of Tagong • The Buddhas of Drakgo

I love cemeteries, those museums not mentioned in guidebooks, which often tell a different kind of history than the official one. Their stones have often been written with different letters, in a different language, with different terms, and sacralized with religious symbols different from those customary in the city today. Their style and motifs follow a standardized set of forms, which are nevertheless almost made private and intimate, and tell small stories that are not necessarily included in the greater history of the city. I visit them wherever I can.

I would have done so in the Kham-Tibetan Garzê, too, where I asked the monks in Kandze Monastery where their cemetery was. They looked at me shocked, then pointed upwards. “Do you bury in the sky?” “Yes.” I recalled my readings about the “sky burial” of Tibetan monks: that they hand over the corpses to the vultures beyond the monasteries, among the mountains, with the participation of only the monks and family members. As the Zoroastrians did until the Islamic regime of Iran forbade them to do so. Or their successors, the Indian Parsis, until the anti-inflammatory diclofenac, which had been given to cattle, wiped out the entire vulture population of India. This ritual is still followed in Tibet, but in recent years the Chinese government – in an act of good taste – banned tourists from taking part in it, filming it and then spreading the images on social media.

In the absence of my own recordings, here I include a report from forty years ago. One of the best contemporary Chinese authors, Ma Jian (1953-) lived a troubled and vagabond youth during the Chinese cultural revolution. In 1979, he became a photojournalist in Beijing, and it looked like he was settling down, but a divorce pushed him back onto the roads. He went to Tibet, where he spent three years in mountain villages, wandering between monasteries and camps of nomads. Of this period he wrote the small volume of short stories Stick out your tongue, in which he writes with unvarnished openness about the inhumane conditions prevailing in the Tibetan countryside. The book was banned in China immediately after its publication in 1987 as “doing harm to the fraternal solidarity between the country’s ethnic groups”.

The narratives, as if following a process of descent, gradually become darker and darker, bearing witness to increasingly cruel conditions. Although even the very first one, which talks about the “sky burial” of a young girl, is quite shocking.

The title page of the Italian translation of the book is a very accurate illustration of its content. A Tibetan boy holds the skull of a slaughtered yak in place of his own human head. Tie title of the translation – Stick out your tongue – could also be interpreted as a playful reference to the typical Tibetan way of greeting, but the original title is longer and more serious, testifying to the author’s determination to portray reality without idealism: 亮出你的舌苔或空空荡荡, liàngchū nǐde shétāi huò kōngkōng dàngdàng, “stick out your tongue [to diagnose your illness], or keep quiet”

The woman and the blue sky

Our bus ground to the top of the five-thousand-metre Kambala Pass. Behind us, a few army trucks were still struggling up the foothills. As the last clouds tore from the rocks and prayer stones on the summit and slipped down the gullies, Yamdrok Lake came into view. When the surface of the lake mirrored the blue sky and plunged the distant snow peaks head-first into the water, I was filled with a sudden longing to take someone in my arms. This was the mountain road to Central Tibet.

During the month that I’d stayed in Lhasa, I had visited many ancient monasteries and shrines, but it was to the Jokhang Temple that I’d returned most frequently. The Jokhang is Tibetan Buddhism’s most venerated site. Pilgrims from every corner of Tibet circle its walls in a continual stream, spinning prayer wheels, praying for an end to their suffering in this life and a prosperous rebirth in the next. Crowds prostrate themselves before the entrance, resembling professional athletes as they hurl themselves to the ground, stand up with hands clasped in prayer, then throw themselves down again. These displays of religious fervour appeal to foreign travellers, but sky burials arouse an even greater interest. While I was staying in Lhasa, I trekked to the burial site several times, camera in hand. But I never managed to see a burial: it would either be finished by the time I’d arrived, or relatives of the deceased would spot me from afar and tell me to stay away. Sometimes they even threw stones at me. I always ended up traipsing back to Lhasa in a bad mood.

I had been told that when a Tibetan dies, the relatives keep the body at home for three days, then carry it to the burial site, making sure not to look behind them as they walk. When they reach the village gates or a crossroads, they smash an earthenware jar onto the ground to ensure that the dead person’s soul will never return. At the funeral site, the burial master lights a fire of fragrant juniper branches. Wealthy families employ a lama to recite from the scriptures and relate to the guardians of the Buddha Realm the merits and achievements of the deceased. Depending on the level of these achievements, the deceased will either return to the world of men, or remain in the Buddha Realm for eternity. The burial master hacks all the flesh from the corpse and slices it into small pieces. He grinds the bones into a fine powder and adds some water to form a paste. (If the bones are young and soft, he will thicken it with ground barley.) He then feeds this paste, together with the flesh, to the surrounding hawks and vultures. If the deceased was a Buddhist, a holy swastika will be carved on the corpse’s back. When everything has been eaten, the master presents the scalp to the relatives, and the burial is considered to be complete. After that, the only way the relatives can communicate with the deceased is to go to the temple and pray.

I was travelling to the remote countryside of Central Tibet. When the bus reached the foot of the mountain and hurtled along the shores of Yamdrok Lake, I began to feel dizzy. I opened the window. The lake was calm; there wasn’t a speck of dust in the breeze. The bus, however, was crammed to the brim, and the stench of dank sheepskin that wafted from the back made it hard for me to breathe. When I could take it no longer, I told the driver to stop, and jumped out.

It was August. The Tibetan Plateau’s golden month. The sky was so blue and transparent, it felt as though there was no air. I walked to the shore of the lake, put down my bag, took out a flannel and washed my face. In the distance, at the foot of a mountain, I could see the village of Nagartse. A hundred or so mud houses stood in rows along the foothills, prayer flags jutting from each roof. Above them, halfway up the mountain, was a small Buddhist temple, its walls painted in strips of red and white with a band of blue running below the eaves. Beside it were the ruins of a monastery, and a freshly whitewashed stupa, housing the ashes of a dead saint, gleaming in the sun.

It was a beautiful place. The shores of the lake were clean. The water was so clear, I could see every pebble. Beams of sunlight shone right down to the bed. The coloured prayer flags on the distant roofs moved in the wind, whispering the beauty of the Buddha Realm. Below the houses, near the shore of the lake, stood a cement hut with a red tiled roof. I assumed it was the village headquarters, and pulled out from my bag a forged introduction letter that was stamped with a red seal. As I approached, I discovered that it was not the village headquarters, it was just an ordinary brick hut. A soldier stepped out. From his accent I could tell that he was from Sichuan. He invited me to come inside and sit down, so I followed him through the door. The hut was an army repair station. The soldier had been posted here to maintain the smooth connection of the army telephone line. When the line was working, he would go fishing on the lake, and read a few kung-fu novels too, I assumed — seeing the pile of them lying on the floor. He was delighted when I asked to stay. He had lived here for four years, and could speak Tibetan quite well. He often went up to the village to have a drink with the locals. A rifle hung from a nail on the wall. The room was a mess — it looked like a scrap yard.

I asked if there was a burial site nearby, and he said that there was. Then I asked if there had been any burials lately. He froze for a second, and told me that a woman in the village had recently passed away. When I asked whether I might be allowed to watch the burial, the soldier muttered audibly then said that he needed to buy some beer. I handed him some money, but he pushed it away and walked out of the door. It occurred to me that this might be my last chance to see a sky burial: I was unlikely to come across one again in the next few days. I couldn’t let this opportunity slip by.

In the evening, we opened the beers and chatted about the latest news from China. I tried to worm myself into his favour. He liked to fish, so I said that I liked fishing too, and promised that when I returned to Beijing I would send him an imported, stainlesssteel fishing rod. I gave him my address and bragged that Premier Zhao Ziyang lived right next door to me. Needless to say, you could search Beijing for days and never find the address that I scribbled down for him.Then I talked about women. He listened avidly, sucking at his cigarette. I told him wild stories about today’s liberated women, and in a Sichuan dialect I assured him that when he came to Beijing, I would let him sleep with my girlfriend. ‘No problem’, I said. He brushed his hand over the table, then paused and told me that the woman was only seventeen. I couldn’t believe it. So young. ‘She died of a haemorrhage during childbirth, he said. ‘The foetus is still inside her womb.’

I crushed out my cigarette. We both fell silent. The floor of the room was damp. A single bed was pushed against the wall. The bed was wooden and painted yellow; on its headboard were a red star and an army regiment number. The walls of the room were pasted with pages torn from colour magazines. A pile of hooks and electric cables lay scattered beneath the washstand behind the door. There was just one window in the room.The lower pane was covered with a sheet of newspaper. Through the upper pane, I watched the sky turn from dark blue to black. It had been a long time since I’d heard a truck pass by outside.

The soldier stood up, leaned against the bed and said, ’You can go to the burial if you like. The people here won’t mind. Most of them have never seen a camera before. Myima’s two husbands certainly haven’t.

‘Whose two husbands?’ I asked.

‘The dead woman’s.’

‘How come she had two husbands?’

‘She married two brothers, that’s why,’ he answered quietly.

I paused, then asked why she had married two brothers. But as soon as the question left my mouth, I realised how disrespectful it sounded. The woman was dead. It was no business of mine why she had married two men.

He answered me, though. ‘Myima was not from these parts. She was born in Nathula. She was a weak child, the youngest of eleven. When she was six years old, her parents sold her to another family in exchange for nine sheep hides.’

‘Does that kind of thing still happen, then?’ I asked.

He ignored my question and continued, “She grew stronger after she moved here. She even attended school in Lungmatse. That was before her adoptive mother died, though.’

‘And what was her name?’ I asked, taking a pen from my bag. It sounded like an interesting story.

‘Her adoptive father is a drunk. When he drinks too much he breaks into song and starts grabbing women. Sometimes he grabbed Myima. After his wife died, his behaviour got worse. How could a young girl protect herself against such a brute?’ His voice was trembling. I could tell that he was about to swear. When he’d been showing off to me a few minutes earlier, he’d let out a torrent of abuse.

‘Bloody bastard! Just wait until I’m out of these army clothes!’ His face turned from red to purple, in that surly, stubborn way typical of Sichuan men. I kept quiet and waited for his anger to subside.

He went to the door and checked the direction of the wind. The telephone line was completely still. I finished my beer and circled the room. Although it was summer, the altitude was so high that there were no mosquitoes. The damp air from the lake poured into the room and chilled my bones.

‘Will you take me to see the brothers?’ I asked.

Without looking round, he grabbed a set of keys and a torch from the table and said, ʻLet’s go.’

We climbed to the village along dark, narrow passages of mud and brick. The path was rough and bumpy. The straw and dung on the ground flinched back silently as my torchlight fell on them. Behind every wall, I could hear the sound of dogs barking.

The soldier pushed through a gate and shouted a few words of Tibetan at a house with a light at the window. We walked inside.

The men seated around the fire turned and stared at me, mouths agape. The eldest one stood up and started speaking in Tibetan with the soldier, while the others continued to gawp at me. I took out my lighter and flicked it on, then passed my cigarettes around. In the dark, all I could see was the white of the men’s teeth. I flicked the lighter again and let the flame rise. Their jaws slackened. I handed the lighter to the man who was standing up. He took it from me and sat down. Everyone’s eyes focused on the lighter. They passed it between them, looking up at me from time to time to exchange a smile. At last I felt that I could sit down. The young man next to me took a chunk of dried mutton from his bag and cut me a piece. I had tasted raw mutton like that in Yangpachen, so I pulled the knife from my belt and took a slice. They seemed pleased, and handed me a bowl of barley wine. It was still green, and there were husks floating on the surface. My mind turned to the dead woman.

The smell of burning dung was suffocating. I glanced around the room. It was as simply furnished as most Tibetan homes: prayer scarves draped over a wooden table, whitewashed walls. To the right of the front door was an opening into a dark chamber. I presumed that this was Myima’s room, or a larder, perhaps. Opposite the fireplace was a traditional Tibetan cabinet, and a scroll painting of Yama, Lord of Death, gripping the Wheel of Life in his hands and flashing his ferocious teeth. It was an old painting; its edges were pasted with scraps of coloured paper printed with words from the scriptures.

I guessed that the men were discussing my request to see the sky burial. A few of them were talking in Tibetan and nodding at me. The soldier stood up and gestured for me to follow him. He led me to the chamber and shone his torch on a large hemp sack that was tied at the top with cord and stood on a platform of mud bricks.

‘That’s her,’ he said.

I flashed my torch on the sack. She appeared to be sitting upright, facing the door, her head bowed low. I presumed that the men had had to push her head down before they could tie up the sack.

Back in the soldier’s hut, I lay on the bed, eyes wide open, imagining what the woman had looked like. She could sing, like the Tibetan women I’d heard in the forests or high on the mountain paths. At noon, she bound her sheepskin cloak to her waist, and bent down over the fields, her long braids of hair slipping over her ears. I gave her the face of a girl I’d seen on a bus: large red cheeks, small nose, dark-rimmed eyes, a steady gaze. Her neck was soft and pale. As I stood beside her, I could see the dark dip between her breasts tremble with each shake of the bus.

The soldier walked in from his nightly inspection of the telephone line and switched on the light. His face was blank. He lit a cigarette and lay down beside me. Neither of us was in a mood to sleep.

Eventually he spoke. ‘I might as well tell you. You’ll be gone in a few days. Besides, I can’t keep this to myself much longer. The pain is too much.’ I propped a pillow against the wall and sat up.

‘Myima and I were very close,’ he continued. ‘That’s why I’ve stayed here so long. Most people would have applied for a transfer years ago. I first met her up on the mountain. I’d climbed up to repair the telephone line two mountains behind. She had let her sheep out and was sitting on the grass. On my way back, I was carrying a large bundle of wire. It weighed a ton. I said hello and sat down beside her. Her dog glanced at me then went back to sleep. It was a hot afternoon. Her sheep had wandered off to graze on a breezy slope. She smiled, then looked at me straight in the eye, without any shame or embarrassment. I told her I worked in the repair station below. She didn’t understand me, so I traced my finger along the telephone line to my house at the bottom. She laughed and turned her face to the Kambala Pass. Two trucks were driving up the foothills over there, too far away for us to hear. Myima said that she’d seen me before, and asked why I’d stayed here so long. Her accent was different from the other Tibetans in the village. Before I left her that day, I cut off a long piece of wire and gave it to her as a present. I told her that she could use it to hang out her laundry or to tie things up with.

‘After that, I often went up the mountain to see her. She’d be sitting there, waiting for me, with home-made dried mutton and barley wine. Sometimes she made gin for me from dates and mountain pears. I would stay with her until sunset. She was cleaner than most Tibetan girls — I grew to like the smell of mutton and milk on her skin. One day, I stretched my hand out to unfasten the belt of her sheepskin cloak. She didn’t push me away, so I put my arm around her. She was the first woman I’d ever touched. After that, as soon as I got close to her, or my hand brushed against her cloak, I’d panic. I could tell that she wanted me to put my hand inside her cloak, but I was too afraid. She told me how her adoptive father kept grabbing her, and how she’d often run away and be too frightened to return home. Everyone in the village knew about it. All the young men in the village looked down on her.

‘Last year, at about this time of night, she burst in to my room and felt her way to my bed. She had never slept here before … We spent the whole night together. In the morning, she pushed me aside and said that she had to leave. I helped her get dressed, then I went back to bed. Before she left, she took off the turquoise necklace she’d worn since she was a child and slipped it under my pillow. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out that she’d agreed to marry the two brothers.’

He paused and looked up at me. ‘If this gets out, I’m finished. My leaders will kill me.’

I nodded solemnly, and gestured to him that I would keep my lips sealed. That is why, in this story, I refer to him only as ‘the soldier.’

He took out the necklace from the drawer. I held it under the lamp and studied it closely. It was a string of agate and red wooden beads, with a large lump of turquoise in the middle. The turquoise was smooth and dark, and still smelt of the woman’s milky skin. I thought of her now, sitting in the hemp sack on the platform of mud bricks.

‘Did she visit you again after that?’ I asked.

‘No. After she got married, she was busy with her chores and seldom left the house. The brothers liked her very much, apparently. Whenever they’d had a drink, the villagers would hear Myima yelling late into the night. The younger brother was even seen making love to Myima on his horse as he rode back from Wangdan Temple. Myima was already pregnant by then. The brothers were in their forties. They’d never been married before.

‘Why didn’t she visit you again?’

‘She did,’ the soldier replied. ‘I just don’t want to tell you everything.’

When I reached the sky burial site, the sun had already risen. This wasn’t a large flat boulder jutting from a cliff like the burial site in Lhasa, it was a gravel terrace halfway up the mountain between the foothills and the higher slopes. Dirty ropes hung from metal posts that were jammed into cracks in the ground. Beside them lay rusty knives, two hammers and an axe with a broken handle. The gravel was scattered with scraps of bone, clumps of hair, smashed rings, glass beads and bird droppings dotted with human fingernails. The mountain was silent. Hawks and vultures sat perched on the summit. In the valley below, ribbons of mist rose from Yamdrok and rolled into a single sheet that slowly covered the entire lake. The mist thickened and spread, rising and falling like the chest of a woman breathing, drifting higher and higher until it veiled the blood-red sun. The mist still clinging to the lake trembled slightly, then broke free and floated towards the foothills.

Slowly they emerged from the mist. The elder brother was lugging the hemp sack. I guessed that they couldn’t afford to hire a burial master, or that perhaps there were none in the area. The younger brother was carrying a felt bag, a thermos flask and a frying pan. A lama followed behind. I recognised him as the man who’d sat beside me the night before in Myima’s home. Clouds of mist billowed behind them.

They smiled at me. The sack was opened and Myima’s body was pulled out. She was lying in the foetus position, her limbs bound to her chest. The auspicious swastika that had been carved onto her back had dried and shrunk. When the rope was loosened she flopped to the ground. They tied her head to a metal post and pulled her body straight. She was flat on her back now, her eyes fixed on the sky and the scattering clouds of mist.

The younger brother lit a fire of juniper twigs and sprinkled roasted barley on the flames. The thick smoke rose into the mist. Then he moved to a second fire and dropped a lump of yak butter into a frying pan that was resting on a wooden frame. The elder brother fed dung pats to the two fires and glanced at the mountain summit. The lama sat cross-legged on a sheepskin rug counting rosary beads over an open prayer book. He was sitting close to the flames. I studied the corpse from a distance, then slowly approached. Her limbs were splayed out as though she were preparing to take flight. Her breasts were paler than the rest of her body and drooped softly to either side of her ribcage. Her belly was swollen, the unborn child still lying inside it. I wondered whether the soldier was the father of the child.

I set the aperture of my camera, adjusted the distance, then squatted down beside her and prepared to take a photograph. In the background were clouds of fog and snow peaks flushed by the rising sun. Through the lens, Myima looked like a little girl. I imagined her arriving at this mountain on horseback as a child of six, peeping out from under her sheepskin cloak to catch her first glimpse of the Kambala Pass. Years later, when she was up here tending her sheep, she would often gaze at the pass and think about her home in the south.

She looked as though she were asleep. I panned my camera down her body. Soft arms, palms upturned to the sky, a red mole under her breast, smooth thighs. I thought of the soldier’s creaking wooden bed and of the two brothers who were now gulping the barley wine. I focused on her feet. The soles were white, the toes tightly clenched. The smallest toes were so short there was no room for nails to grow. I stepped back for a wider view and hit the shutter, but nothing happened. I checked the camera, pressed the button again. It was stuck. My legs gave way. I sat down on the ground, wound back the film and changed the battery. I focused on Myima’s face this time and pressed the shutter, but the button seemed to be frozen in place. Then, as I looked up, I noticed the corner of Myima’s mouth twitch. It was neither a smile nor a sneer, but her mouth definitely moved.

I stood up. A shriek echoed through my head then vanished with a gust of wind. A bald eagle plummeted through the sky, circled the corpse’s head, settled on a rock and ruffled its wings.

I tramped back to the fire. The younger brother reached into his felt bag, scooped out a piece of dung and flung it onto the flames.Then he produced a lump of roast barley and broke me off a piece. I chewed it greedily. There were raisins inside. He brought out some dried mutton and filled the lid of the thermos flask with barley wine. I grabbed it and downed it in one. I wondered whether Myima had prepared the mutton. I looked up at her. Her legs were spread open; a piece of string hung from the wounded flesh between her thighs. I presumed that someone had attached it during her troubled labour in an attempt to wrench the baby out. I dragged my knife through the dried mutton. The brothers smiled at me. I smiled too, perhaps, but my face was turned to the distant snowcaps that were reddening in the sun. The fog had vanished, and in the distance Yamdrok looked as calm as it had done the day before, and as blue as Myima’s turquoise.

The elder brother got up, threw some more dung onto the fires, then walked to the lama and poured him some wine. The lama pushed the bowl away and announced that Myima’s soul had risen to the sky. The younger brother stood up and took a sharp knife from his pocket. I followed the two brothers to the body. Immediately the sky darkened with vultures that screeched and swirled through the air. The brothers turned Myima’s body over, stuck the knife into her buttock and pulled it down, opening up her leg all the way to the sole of her foot. The younger brother hacked off a chunk of thigh and sliced it into pieces. Her right leg was soon reduced to bone. With her belly squashed to the ground, sticky fluid began to trickle from between her thighs. I picked up my camera, set the distance, and this time the shutter closed with a snap.

The vultures surrounded us and fought over the scraps of flesh. A pack of crows landed behind them. Perhaps they considered themselves an inferior species, because not one of them dared move forward. They kept their distance, sniffing the air, waiting for their turn.

The morning sun flooded the burial site with light. The younger brother shooed away the approaching vultures with pieces of Myima’s body. I picked up the axe, grabbed a severed hand, ran the blade down the palm and threw a thumb to the vultures. The younger brother smiled, took the hand from me and placed it on a rock, then pounded the remaining four fingers flat and threw them to the birds.

When the elder brother dug his knife into Myima’s chin and drew it up her face, I suddenly forgot what she had looked like. While the brothers continued to carve, her eyes remained fixed on the sky above, until every piece of her head vanished from the site.

The elder brother snatched a bunch of Myima’s braids that were still tied with red thread, swirled it around the circling vultures and staggered back to the fire. The crows had now joined the vultures at the metal posts, and were picking at the roast barley that had been mashed up with scraps of brain.

I checked my watch. I had been up here for two hours already. It was time to go down. I knew that the soldier was waiting for me in his room. He’d promised that he would borrow a boat in the afternoon and take me fishing on the lake.”

Jashideley! (Traveling in Kham 1)

Traveling in Kham • Jashideley! • Burial in the sky • Kangding, the gateway of Tibet • The Love Song of Kangding • The monastery of Tagong • The Buddhas of Drakgo

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.