Dartsedo / Kangding, the gateway of Tibet (Traveling in Kham 2)

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

Traditionally, five roads led from Tibet to the outside world. Two in the south to India, from where religion, culture and art flowed up to Tibet for a thousand years. One in the northeast, across the province of Amdo – today Qinghai –, which then joined the Silk Road of Uighuristan, and entering China together through the Yang Gate. The fourth and fifth went through Kham province to the east, to Sichuan in the east, and to Yunnan in the southeast, respectively. These two are traditionally called the tea-horse-road, after the two most important goods transported on them. Tea pressed into bricks was transported from the Chinese tea-growing regions to Tibet, and in return the excellent horses bred by the nomads there went back to the plains for the Chinese elite.

The map below, taken from the Historical atlas of Tibet (2015) shows how many weeks it took to reach neighboring regions from Lhasa, the center of Tibet, by traditional routes. The journey to Sichuan or Yunnan, for example, took twelve weeks, i.e. three months.

On the detail of the map below, I have highlighted in red the two branches of the tea and horse route to Sichuan and Yunnan. This shows that upon reaching Chamdo, the center of Eastern Tibet, the road split into two branches, and these led through the province of Kham. The northern branch reached Dartsedo, today’s Kangding, via Derge and Garzê, while the southern branch reached the same town via Batang and Litang. The northern one is today’s highway 317, the southern, highway 318. These two are the two main roads of today’s Western Sichuan or Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

The Yunnan route branched off from the southern branch to the southeast at Markam, passing through Lijiang, the capital of the Naxi kingdom, and Dali, the seat of the Nanzhao kingdom of the Bao nationality, to the tea fields of southern Yunnan.

This is the set of routes that we will follow again on our tour in September. First the Sichuan double route, then the Yunnan route. This is the tour I describe here in this “Traveling in Kham” series of posts.

Coming from Sichuan’s Chengdu – whic until the beginning of the 18th century was only a border town and a garrison facing Tibet –, the caravans entered Tibetan territory in Dartsedo, today’s Kangding city. This was traditionally considered the gateway of Tibet, as it is still today. The Chengdu bus, which covers the once three-week-long route in four hours through many tunnels, first stops at this bus station, and from here you can take local buses or taxis to go further into the interior of Kham-Tibet.

Until the 20th century, Dartsedo was the capital of the Chakla “kingdom” or tusi. Kham province was traditionally a patchwork of tribal territories centered around a monastery and its market town. They constantly tried to withdraw themselves from the authority and especially the taxation of the Tibetan government and declare themselves as independent kingdoms. To this end, they often allied themselves with the Chinese empire, which generously and selflessly supported their efforts at the expense of Tibet. The history of 17th to 19th century Kham was determined by the relations of these small tribal areas and their shuttlecock policy between Tibet and China. After the Chinese conquest of Kham at the beginning of the 18th century, the Qing dynasty recognized the local chieftains as provincial governors, tusis, who preserved their dynastic power passed down from father to son, over their own “kingdom”. China governed the western and southern border regions on the basis of such tusi system until in 1912 they were integrated in the unified national government. It was then that Dartsedo, the capital of Chakla, which became independent from Tibet in 1666, also received the Chinese name Kangding instead of the former Dajianlu, which was a simple transliteration of the Tibetan name.

The city is located in a deep and narrow valley, at the confluence of the Dar and Tse rivers, from which the Dartsedo river, which runs through the city, is born. The city itself was only a few streets parallel to the river. There was no room for more in the valley. On the right bank are the elegant streets with hotels and restaurants, on the left bank is the market. The main goods on sale are mountain mushrooms, yak meat raised on the Tibetan plateau, and fruit and vegetable brought from the Sichuan plain.

For lack of space, the city center is also on a bridge, through which the road leads from the left-side market to the right-side shopping streets. The bridge has benches to sit on, to mingle with the people already sitting there or keep a spectacular distance from them, and stare at the mountain that somehow ventured right up to the river bank opposite the bridge, but then the locals covered it with paintings of Tibetan idols. Even the villagers come here to see them. They stare reverently at the gods, and, as a modern form of prayer, they incessantly photograph them with their mobile phones.

On the right bank of the river, in the place of the former city gate, a small group of statues reminds us of the tea-horse-road. A number of people walk the way in and out of the gate, mainly tea caravans heading for Tibet. Unlike the southern, Yunnan branch of the tea-horse-road, where horses and mules could be used in the wide river valleys as well as yaks on the plateau to transport tea, here on the Sechuan branch only people were able to walk under the weight of eighty to one hundred kilograms of tea strapped to their backs in big racks. Sometimes even they were not able: the cold, the storms and slippery rocks claimed their victims. The Dafengwan Pass above Kangding is called “Pagoda of the White Bones” for a reason.

The inhabitants of Kangding were traditionally tea and horse traders, caravan drivers and mainly Lados, tough and extremely poor Tibetan peasants or nomads whose only source of livelihood was transporting tea. For travel of tree to four weeks (followed by almost the same time with a caravan bringing horses back from Tibet) they were paid roughly as much rice as the amount of tea they carried up to the plateau on their backs. Some of the old Lados who, as children, followed their fathers with a smaller load on the last journeys in the late 1940s, are still alive today. I saw the interviews and biographical publications with them in bookstores.

Lados from Dartsedo. Photos by David Crockett Graham, 1929

In addition to the Lados, we can also see the figures of the past who, according to the testimony of old photographs and stories, visited and brightened up the area around the city gate as a community space: traveling stuntmen with monkeys on their shoulders, the storyteller and his audience, the barber and his client, beggars and their helpers, tea and steam dumpling vendors, Buddhist lamas and the French Catholic priest who, accompanied by his porter, walks towards Tibet to create there the still existing Catholic islands I wrote about in a previous trip.

And the modern visitors of Kangding happily mingle in the reconstructed historical milieu and take photos with its figures.

A little further away they mark in the typical Chinese “façadist” manner, with only one remaining wall, and with a modern sculptural scene and a reconstructed gate, the place of the former central caravanserai and tea-smoking house, the Gas Tower.

It’s dusk. The lights come on on both banks of the river. And in a widening of the riverside main street, the music starts. In Kangdin, as in all cities in Tibet, people gather for evening dancing.

On the left bank of the river, they dance to this kind of heavily beat-ified Tibetan melodies, while on the opposite side, on the right bank, in a smaller square, to much more traditional tunes: