The new rail line from Xining to Lhasa brings droves of Chinese tourists to gape at the ancient Tibetan city, where shrines and monasteries jostle with Western mores, writes Fintan O'Toole
On one side of Potala Square in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama's empty palace sits astride a jagged hill. On the other side a heroic monument shows the People's Liberation Army breaking the chains of feudalism that once bound the Tibetan people. Two elderly women wearing white floppy hats and plastic backpacks over traditional long woollen skirts and patterned aprons spin their prayer wheels and squint in the dazzling morning light, mumbling mantras under their breath.
They walk across the face of the monument, then stop, turn their backs to it and face the palace, looking up for a moment at the forbidding red, white and yellow walls and the golden roofs that gleam arrogantly over the city. Then they lie face down on the polished concrete, prostrating themselves in abject homage before the palace from which the Dalai Lama fled in 1959.
Between the pilgrims and the palace, groups of Chinese tourists are milling around the square, excitedly savouring their first daylight hours in this exotic destination. An enterprising local photographer approaches one group. She has a bag full of elaborately garish costumes, supposedly the traditional garb of the old Tibetan aristocracy that was smashed when the People's Liberation Army occupied the country in 1950. The tourists are to wear the clothes and, for a fee, she will take pictures of them pretending to be Tibetan lords and ladies.
There are plenty of takers. A round-faced young woman with glasses poses with her arms outstretched, hidden by the long white sleeves of the costume. On her head is a white fur hat, with long fake plaits that hang down to her waist over an ankle-length dress of vibrant pink, trimmed with more fur and finished off with an apron of green, yellow, white, red and purple stripes.
A LITTLE GIRL STANDS stiffly under an enormous hat of brown fur, her blue jeans peeking out from the bottom of the pink-and-gold gown the photographer has given her. A portly man plants his feet wide apart and stretches out his left arm to show off the yellow silk coat that fails to cover his patent leather shoes. The photographer demonstrates the right poses, and they follow her instructions before she frames them against the zig-zag walls of the Potala.
As these tableaux are being arranged, two young Tibetan women walk across the square towards the tourists. Their dark, weather-beaten faces and open curiosity suggest that they have come in from the countryside for the day.
One of them wears blue denim jeans and jacket and has a baby tied to her back with a blanket. The other is dressed in traditional clothes, with an orange-and-black band twisted in her hair, a black blouse and skirt and an apron woven in earth-coloured stripes. With her is a boy, perhaps eight years old, in a tracksuit and trainers. They walk right up to where the tourists are posing in their ethnic costumes and stand quietly, watching the scene. They seem neither contemptuous nor disgusted but merely inquisitive.
They stand there for ages, looking at the show like it is being staged solely for their benefit, for all the world as if they were the tourists and the Chinese people in the funny garb were the exotic natives.
I was one of those tourists who have been flocking to Tibet since the amazing rail line from Xining, capital of Qinghai Province, to Lhasa opened at the beginning of July. The railway has caused an outbreak of what the Chinese media is calling "Tibet fever", and by October, when a service from the southern city of Guangzhou is added to the existing services from Beijing and Chengdu, more than 5,000 tourists will be pouring into Lhasa every day.
The 40 of us in one tour party from Beijing had booked early and just managed to get seats for the two-day journey from the capital before demand massively outstripped supply. All except me were from Beijing. Most were middle-class: three women in their 20s who have been friends since middle school and who have made money in the children's clothing business; a very fat man who started out as a peasant and set up his own construction company; an aerospace engineer with his wife and son; a university teacher with his daughter; a businesswoman in her 60s with her two grandchildren, one of whom wore the same red England football shirt for the whole week.
We had arrived in Lhasa the night before, having ridden the rails for 48 hours, across the vast plateaux of sallow clay that are washed by the Yellow River, through the arid scrub lands of Gansu, and into the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau where the mountains rise from a base that is itself 4,000m (13,100ft) above sea level.. We had gasped at the sights of wild yaks, horses, donkeys and antelopes, then gasped again for air as the train powered its way through the Tangulla pass, at an altitude of more than 5,000m (16,400ft), before descending again along the headwaters of the Yangzi, over frozen tundra and waving grasslands, down into the green Lhasa valley, a mere 3,600m (11,800ft) high . We had used the railroad, a sleek symbol of modernity, to escape modernity, to find what tourists always seek: something different.
We had used a project intended to show that Tibet is an integral part of China to try to find a place whose attraction is that it is not the same as China. We had come, as tourists usually do, hoping to see a distinctive culture before it is ruined by tourism.
BUT WHILE WE posed and gaped, another kind of traveller moved through and around us, turning prayer wheels, performing ritual prostrations, repeating mantras. These real pilgrims, some of them nomadic herders who have walked hundreds of miles from the grasslands, seem to exist in two worlds at the same time. They seem hardly to be aware of one of these worlds, the provincial Chinese city of Lhasa, with its uniform streets of three- or four-storey system-built shops, each with a façade of scuffed off-white tiles topped by a brash cardboard or plastic sign advertising its wares in lurid colours.
They don't glance at the neon signs in the big red-light district opposite the government offices. They don't acknowledge the Playboy store or the dolled-up girls in the massage parlours, or the burger joint called Georgia, which has pictures of Santa Claus in the window, wishing its customers a merry Christmas in July. They pay no heed to the American faces and scantily-clad bodies on the huge Coors Light poster outside the Babila Night Club, where DJ Jelly, all the way from Hong Kong, is currently in residence.
They are following invisible lines, walking the Lingkhor, a long-erased ritual path around the city that pilgrims once had to measure with the length of their prostrate bodies before they could enter Lhasa.
And we tourists hardly see the real Lhasa either, for the provincial Chinese city is not what they have come to see. We, too, follow an invisible path that links site to site, monastery to monastery, seeking our own kind of spiritual satisfaction to capture inside our cameras and take back east to Beijing. Yet what we find is not a simple, innocent and exotic past, but something more complicated, something at least as worldly as it is other-worldly.
In the Potala, we poke around the Dalai Lama's private rooms, chapels and public audience chambers, and our chatter destroys their air of quiet sanctity. But then we come to the vault of the fifth Dalai Lama, founder of the Yellow Hat sect that established itself as Tibet's ruling theocratic dynasty, and find that it is not just us who are shallow materialists. The vault is stupendously opulent and far more grandiose than that of any medieval pope, decorated with four tons of gold and diamonds, corals and pearls as numerous as pebbles on a beach. Looking at it, or at the memorial to the fourth Panchen Lama in the Tashi-Lunpho monastery 350km away in Xigaze, (85kg of gold, 15 tons of silver, innumerable precious stones) we remember that the spiritual rulers of Tibet had no horror of filthy lucre.
THE MONKS WHO haunt the restaurants and bars, begging for alms, don't refuse money because it is Chinese and has a picture of Mao on one side. The holiest temple in all of Tibet, the Jokhang, in the old Barkhor district of Lhasa, houses the precious Jobo Buddha, brought in the seventh century as part of the dowry of a Chinese princess. On the roof, a shaven-headed monk in puce-coloured robes sells T-shirts embroidered with five yaks and the slogan "Yak, Yak, Yak, Yak, Yak: Tibet".
As I was looking out over the golden turrets and pondering the exotic beauty of Lhasa's medieval buildings, I heard a soft chant coming from a room in a corner of the Jokhang's top floor. The voices were female and the chant sounded like a work song. I followed it and peered into the room. Seven women were sitting in a semi-circle, cross-legged on thin cushions. In front of them was a ragged pile of paper money, clearly the offerings left by pilgrims and tourists in the holy shrines below. Their chant was the noise of methodical counting.
The woman nearest to me, wearing an earth-coloured dress and a shiny pink silk blouse, was wrapping the already-counted bundles of notes with rubber bands and arranging them in neat bundles for collection.
The double-vision of the pilgrims, who follow a sacred path through the grubby, commercial city seems to be rooted in a religion that long combined temporal power and spiritual authority. That night, I joined in the communal walk along the other ritual path, a rough circle around the Jokhang and the Barkhor. It is an easy walk and thousands of Tibetans join in the constantly revolving wheel through the narrow streets. And it is medieval in the real sense, not some kind of pious, po-faced demonstration of sanctity, but a raucous procession, part hallowed journey, part evening promenade.
The route is lined, as it always has been, with the stalls of hawkers. They sell prayer-wheels and DVDs, Buddhist images and trainers, cloth for monks' robes and frilly knickers, incense and kitchen knives, T-shirts with Buddhas on them for the tourists and with Elvis and David Beckham on them for the locals.
A monk in front of me had his arm around a guy in a cowboy hat who looked like his brother. An old woman who was repeating her mantra over and over and seemed to be in a devotional trance was being held gently by the elbow by a young girl in tight lime-green jeans and a pink spangled top. As the circle wheeled around again to the front of the temple, about a dozen people, mostly women, were performing a strenuously fervid exercise in front of one of the windows. They had pads on their hands and they would drop to their knees on to carefully-placed cushions, then slide the pads along until their faces were flush to the ground, before jerking back on to their feet and repeating the movement over and over. In the window before which they were abasing themselves, a middle-aged monk was watering his window-box from a plastic spray-can, supremely oblivious.
AS WE TRAVELLED around in the following days, it was this ability to occupy two worlds simultaneously, to be deeply religious without being at all holy, that struck me as the key to the survival of Tibetan traditions in the face of both official persecution and of tourism's subtler invasions. Underlying Tibetan Buddhism is the native animist religion, Bon, which it displaced and to some extent assimilated. (Practices such as the use of prayer-flags and sky burials, where bodies are left on mountains to be eaten by eagles, are Bon, not Buddhist.) And the places that tourists see as landscape are often, in the Bon beliefs that still thrive among the yak herders of the grasslands, holy mountains and holy lakes. Yet rather than seeing us tourists as defilers of all this holiness, the nomadic herders seemed quite happy to regard us as bounties brought to them by the generous gods.
As we swarmed from our bus to join the hundreds of other Chinese trippers on the summit of the holy mountain of Kangbala, we could see the prayer flags, sheets of paper printed with sacred texts and yak skulls mounted on piles of stones that marked recent rituals. But a group of nomads had built a makeshift toilet from stones and mud on the holy mountain and were charging the tourists a few yuan for necessary relief. At Namtso, the highest saltwater lake in the world, three miles up and fed by the run-off from the even higher mountains that surround it, there are sacred temples in the rocks, an unending flutter of prayer-flags in the breeze, and pilgrims drawn by the belief that its five islands are reincarnations of the five avatars of the Buddha. But the herders run a thriving business leading tourists down to the water's edge on tamed yaks and some have turned their tents into makeshift shops and tea-rooms. The sign on one of them offers, in Chinese and English, a unique list of goods for sale: "Yak Milk, Battery, Film, Oxygen".
I UNDERSTOOD THIS apparent lack of concern with the mixing of the sacred with the profane better when, one evening, my translator and I broke away from our tour group and, desperate to talk privately with some Tibetans, brazenly invited ourselves to dinner with the first family we met.
They lived in two rooms on the top floor of a medieval block in the Barkhor. The gas cooker was outside on a narrow balcony. There was a communal pump in the courtyard and a communal toilet beside it. Traces of grandeur remained: the cornice around the balcony was an elaborate wrought iron design, and the ceiling in the front room was hand-painted in complex, abstract patterns. The big television set was broken but the stereo was working. In the back room, the walls were decorated with Buddhist scriptures and photographs of monks and nuns.
The flat was rented by Deyi, who is 28 and works in a hotel, and her husband who was away driving a tourist bus. Deyi's 26 year-old sister Qu, who works in a department store, was still in her blue shop uniform and Deyi's five year-old son Yixi was playing on the balcony. We sat drinking a strong, oily tea made with yak butter and chewing on hard sweets made with yak milk. After a while a third sister, Luo, arrived. Her head was shaved and she was dressed in the rust-coloured robes of a trainee nun. She is 24 and has been studying for three years. When she finishes her training, she said, she will retire to a monastery in the countryside. Soon, another novice arrived and a friend of Qu's, and I talked to the five women while Deyi prepared a stew of yak meat and potatoes for dinner.
The sisters grew up, they said, in a herding family that keeps 45 yaks, 40 cows and four horses. The family live on the grassland in a good house. Their parents still spend the warm months out with the herds and come into Lhasa for the winter. Deyi got no education at all, but has learned some Chinese from working in the hotel. An aunt who has a government job arranged for them to move to Lhasa so that Qu could go to school when she was 13 and learn her fluent Chinese. Luo, the trainee nun, speaks only Tibetan.
Without being able to speak and write Chinese, they said, it is hard to get a steady job. Tourists were welcome, they stressed, because they brought employment and helped to sustain the monasteries, though there were often too many at the holy sites and they were not always respectful. They worked and lived quite happily, they said, with the Han Chinese incomers who make up much of Lhasa's population, though when I asked Qu whether Tibetans often married Han people, she replied immediately that they do not and that she herself wouldn't go out with a Han man. They were ambivalent about their own situation, hankering after the old pastoral life, but toughly realistic about the fact that women could expect to find employment only in the urban, Chinese world of the city. But they were worried about the railway, thinking that it will bring more Han people in search of work and make it harder for Tibetans to get jobs.
What was clear, though, was that for all the changes in their lives, Buddhism is still woven through them. They thought it completely normal that Luo had chosen to become a nun since most families, they said, have at least one member in holy orders. When I asked them about the future, they said they thought things will be okay "since the Dalai Lama will protect us". But there was nothing really supernatural about this faith. Luo sleeps in the back room and lies on the sofa learning her Buddhist texts off by heart. She and her fellow postulant washed the potatoes at the pump and tucked in to the stew, yak and all.
When I asked whether young Tibetans still know the old songs, the other sisters took this as an invitation to sing a hearty traditional song of welcome. The two nuns then decided that they should sing, too. A plastic bottle of rice wine, brought from the family home in the countryside, had by now been produced. The nuns had a long, animated conversation in Tibetan about whether it would be right for them to sing a particular song or not. They decided to give it a blast anyway and belted out a ballad that pays homage to the wonders of rice wine, pausing now and then to giggle in devilment.
Afterwards, they explained that though they were not permitted to drink alcohol, they had decided that it must surely be okay to sing about it. Such an impious, gleefully impure faith is also one that is robust enough not to collapse when the world that creates it is destroyed. It might even be all the stronger now that it is removed from power and grandeur and pushed even further down into the intimacies of daily life.
It may even be robust enough to mesmerise its conquerors.
AS THE TOUR went on, there was a gradual but profound change in the atmosphere among our group. At first, as we filed through the monastery chapels, there was busy chatter, frantic photography and a detached, almost anthropological curiosity. Over a few days, the tourists became quieter, more affected. In the richly beautiful Tashi-Lhunpo monastery complex, the seat of the Panchen Lamas that overlooks and seems to mock the banal modern town of Xigaze, some of the tourists began to mutter the mantra "Om Ma Ni Pa Me Hum" as they turned the giant prayer wheels. They did not prostrate themselves in front of the deities in the chapels but more and more of them bowed and joined their hands before their chests in homage. Before an image of Buddha's all-seeing eye, which is rumoured to cure defects of sight, I noticed one man in our group surreptitiously take off his glasses to see if he was cured. In a chapel where the walls and doors are sticky with soft resin so that pilgrims can affix paper money as an offering, I noticed that of about 500 notes stuck up by the tourists, only three had the side with Mao's image facing outwards, a proportion too emphatic to be a random event.
When we arrived at Lhasa station, we had each been greeted by a local guide, and had white silk scarves hung around our necks as a "traditional" gesture of greeting, an old Tibetan custom turned into a piece of entertainment for tourists. But as I walked around the huge 25m high golden statue of Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, in a dim, red-walled chapel in Tashi-Lhunpo, I turned a corner and saw the three middle-school friends from Beijing reach into their handbags, take out their white scarves and hang them at the Buddha's feet. They bowed and turned quietly away, no longer tourists for a moment, but pilgrims.
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