The towers of the Himalayas (Traveling in Kham 5)

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 towers of the Himalayas

The peoples of the plains, above whom the sky arches at an unreachable height, build domes that imitate it: yurts, mosques, cathedrals. The mountain peoples build towers, as if only those twenty meters were needed, added to their thousand or two-thousand-meter high surface to reach the sky at arm’s length. After the towers of Assisi and San Gimignano, the valley of Theth in Albania, the Moroccan kasbahs and the towers of Svaneti, Tusheti and Ingushetia, the towers of Kham in eastern Tibet provide further evidence of this.

These towers stand all along the so-called “tribal corridor” between the Han-speaking area of Sichuan and the present-day Tibetan border, in the mountains of Kham and Amdo provinces, which, in addition to Tibetan nomads, are inhabited by many small ethnic groups who trickled down from the north and northwest, from today’s Mongolia, sometime from the first millennium BC onward. In the ancient Chinese chronicles, these peoples were uniformly called qiang, written with the character 羌, which, according to Shuowen Jiezi, the very first Chinese dictionary, is a combination of the characters for sheep 羊 and man 人, a reference to a shepherd people. But these peoples have been very diverse. In addition to patriarchal shepherd societies, they have also included matriarchal farming groups. The Chinese also classified the ancestors of the Tibetans as qiang, and a large part of them could indeed have arrived in their present territory with this wave, or rather flood. And the Yi, Qiang, Naxi, Moxuo, Bai and other small ethnic groups living in today’s West Sichuan and West Yunnan are also deposits of this flood.

Such small ethnic and linguistic groups inhabit the valley of the Dadu River in eastern Kham, where most of these towers are located. For the sake of simplicity, the Chinese state has put them in the “Tibetan” category among the 56 Chinese ethnic groups officially approved in 1956, and they themselves have accepted this classification. However, in reality almost every village speaks a different language, so much so that, as the locals tell us, if someone marries from across the river, they will speak Chinese at home, because that will be the only language both of them understand. But why would anyone marry from across the river, since those villages, they say with a shudder, are matriarchal, where the house, the land, and even the surname are inherited through the maternal line?

The valley of the Dadu River

The languages spoken here are usually grouped together as Qiangic. They belong to the larger Gyarong language group, which is a member of the populous Tibeto-Burman language family. However, their speakers are genetically very complex. A recent Chinese study pointed out that the inhabitants of the Dadu Valley are a mixture of farmers coming from the south and nomads from the north.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that in such a complicated ethnic-linguistic-social mosaic world, this large number of towers are built as a defense against the expected attack of the other.

The towers, which number in the hundreds in the Dadu River valley – and there were probably many more before frequent earthquakes decimated them – were not given much attention in Chinese architectural history until the 2000s. Built in a marginal region, fitting in the historical context and building culture of marginalized ethnic groups, they were impossible to place in the mainstream history of architecture. It was Frederique Darragon who noticed them in 1998, and spent seven years researching and documenting them, to the point of having samples of their wooden structures carbon-dated to determine their age. Her bilingual book 喜马拉骓的神秘古碉 – Secret towers of the Himalayas (2005) is the first, and to date the largest, monograph on these strange, mysterious and archaic structures. In it, she points out that the towers were mostly built between 1000 and 1500, in a period when the northern nomads were pushing southward with great intensity. Although they originally stood alone, with the residential buildings that now adjoin them being the additions of several centuries, the carpentry of these latter follows the same solutions as the interior woodwork of the towers, which means that they were built by the same population that still lives around them today. Darragon highlights a specific and common type: those towers with an octagonal star plan, which is not found in any other region. One can only speculate whether this was a trademark of a vanished architectural culture, or they simply wanted to provide the towers with greater stability in this earthquake-prone region.

The literature links these towers to the town of Danba, and calls them Danba towers. But this is misleading. The town of Danba did not exist when the towers were built. This modern town was established in the past century at the confluence of the Dadu River and its four tributaries down in the valley. The towers, on the other hand, are all located in the mountains, in small villages such as Zhonglu or Suopo, the two “most towered” towns. Danba is only the district headquarters to search for if you want to book accommodation in these villages, eventually in a tower house, as some of them have been converted into very comfortable, but still rustic and beautiful family accommodations during the domestic tourism boom of the last decade.

The tower districts of Zhonglu (to the north) and Suopo (to the south) in the Dadu canyon. Below: Our family accommodation in Zhonglu

The villages are made up of large white mansions, standing alone as farmhouses, surrounded by wide cornfields. This is a special microclimate, where corn grows in abundance at an altitude of 2,600 meters. It rarely snows in the valley, and there is never frost. The corn fields are covered with plastic sheets, through which the corn stalks grow through holes in a regular square grid. This saves the work of hoeing and keeps the soil moist.

The houses are also adapted to corn production. Their strong, wide, three-story residential tower is connected to a two-story house, the flat roof of which is basically used for drying corn. The top floor of the residential tower has a protruding wooden balcony with a porch, and somewhere hidden from view is an equally protruding small closed wooden toilet, from which waste fall into a digestion pit surrounded by a stone wall at the bottom of the tower. From there, the precious manure is taken out onto the fields.

On the gates or fences of the houses, according to the custom of the villages of nomadic Qiang origin, yak or cow skulls are placed to frighten away evil spirits with their imposing horns. Some large, worn stone inscriptions in the old Tibetan language are also inserted into one or another wall.

Religious woodcuts are pasted onto the gates, partly with Buddhist motifs, partly with the images of the protective spirits of local pre-Buddhist cults. And in small niches in the gateposts, as if materializing the supreme good, there is an ear of corn placed under Tibetan sutras.

The landscape is generally sprinkled with a multitude of sacred signs, starting with pointed white stones the size of a human head, which might be considered primitive stupas, but local tradition connects them to the ancient religion of the region, and speaks of a war that the conquerors won with weapons painted white, inspired by a dream. Such stones also stand on the corners of the towers, or also alone along the roads.

But there are also real stupas painted white everywhere, either alone or in a row, as on the hillside of Zhonglu, under Mount Zibalon. Zibalon is one of the four sacred mountains around the Dadu Valley. As a deity, it ensures that people do not use more of nature – wood, water, earth, stone – than they actually need. This row of stupas is an important local pilgrimage site. Stone tablets carved with Tibetan sutras are tucked between the stupas, and holy images printed on colorful artificial silk as well as apples and other offerings are placed on them. A very small Buddhist shrine stands next to the stupas, just big enough to turn the large prayer wheel inside, and light candles in its small candle furnace. In front of it, in a small stone garden, you can see the astonishing love child of ancient spirituality and modern folk aesthetics: large plastic flowers that are also solar-powered loudspeakers humming Buddhist sutras day and night.

The Danba municipality working to promote tourism, has found a niche here, and they advertise a certain spot with a nice view of the valley with a sign reading “Best Photo Spot”.

Elsewhere, a colorful tent stands empty in the middle of the field, and from inside you can hear a continuous recording of Buddhist sutras and Tibetan folk songs.

The energies of nature are also used in other ways for the purpose of sustainable eternal worship. The small streams running down the mountainside are very practical for driving prayer wheels, or rather prayer mills.

Here and there among the farms are small Buddhist monasteries, which can only be distinguished from afar by their golden roofs. One of the most popular is Murdo Monastery, which, although is Buddhist, with four monks, but also serves the cult of Mount Murdo (4820 m) considered as a local deity. The roof of the temple is freshly gilded, it was restored in 2002. A sign from that year hangs above some of the statues, stating that they are 1800, 1850 or more years old (one of them even says 18,000, but seems like it must be a typo). Right now a large mound of debris stands in front of the temple, since one wing of the monastery has been demolished to allow place for a parking lot for pilgrims and tourists. Four monks there are washing the dust of the demolition from the objects saved from the building.

We set off from the river up the mountainside to Suopo on the winding road. The opposite mountainside is crowned by a multitude of towers. On the side of the retaining wall of one of the houses, as if they knew we would not get there, are rock drawings brought down to us from the Tibetan mountains.

We are heading to Moluo, the old village center of Suopo, the richest complex of towers and old houses.

This complex consists of a large old house with a stout corner tower, a porched courtyard, and two thousand-year-old towers with square and an octagonal floor plan. Next to it, other towers of a similar age. There is a phone number written in chalk on the gate, which you can use to call the owner, who lives in the house next door.

The furnishings are as if the last old owner had only recently left it, which is how it is. It is minimal, but authentic, it has not been converted into a residential museum. On the ground floor, there is an open tea stove in the middle of the room. Colorful Buddhist frescoes on the walls of the large room. Upstairs, there is a small chapel with a Buddha altar.

Not far from the house stands a strange modern stele with an inscription in Chinese and Tibetan: 东女人家 – The House of the Eastern Woman.

The stele obviously advertises a family guesthouse, but the inscription does not let me rest. Who could this Eastern Woman be? I search for it on the Chinese internet, and soon a magnificent story unfolds, which Jinba Tenzin, who was born here and studied anthropology in the USA, wrote in detail in his PhD thesis In the land of the eastern queendom. The politics of gender and ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan border (2014).

Chinese chronicles from the Tang era (618-907) mention “the Eastern Queendom” somewhere in eastern Tibet, over which women rule. Based on the vague references, this kingdom could have been in several places, and one possibility is the region of the Danba towers. The local tourism office discovered the quote and its marketing potential in the early 2000s, and they localized the former seat of the Eastern Queendom in Suopo. They even thought of finding the remains of the Queen’s palace. The local population also appreciated the idea. Not only because it is a great tourist attraction, but also because such an identity, to be the descendants of a former mystical female kingdom, would greatly increase the prestige of the region. Ever since China lumped them to the Tibetan nationality as a remainder, they have been doubly marginalized. The Chinese consider them Tibetans, but the Tibetans also consider them outsiders, since neither their language nor their culture is Tibetan. The queen story would finally give a name to their otherness. In Suopo, the Moluo Tourism Association was formed with the participation of local teachers and party cadres, and at its regular meetings they draft petitions to the authorities to certify Suopo as the former seat of the Eastern Queen.

We do not know whether Suopo will receive this title, and if so, whether the onslaught of tourists will begin. In my humble opinion, it is good for the village that it does not receive so much attention and that its authentic heritage is not turned into an open-air museum. In fact, the Danba show has already been stolen by Jiaju, built across the river. The tourist industry is booming in this small village. A huge bus parking lot has been built at the foot of the mountain, from where electric minibuses deliver the Chinese tourists, as if on a conveyor belt, to two viewpoints near  the village. From there, they can look out over the houses of the village and the towers of Dadu Valley, and then sit down in a restaurant. In my sad experience, every beautiful region in China needs such a “victim place”, which – in exchange for sufficient income – sacrifices itself to the onslaught of tourists so that the other places in the region can continue to live in peace.

We, however, sneak away form the lookout point and enter the village houses. In front of one of the beautiful traditional houses, an old woman says that we can go in for five yuan per person – about half a euro. On the other side of the river, Jiaju is said to have preserved its matriarchal social structure. After Tenzin’s book, I don’t know if this is really true or just a tourist exploitation of the myth of the Eastern Queen, but the fact is that the landlady does look like a very determined matron. The house is truly beautiful, but there are many like this in Suopo and Zhonglu, without all the tourist hype. Let’s hope they stay that way.