High-Railing It To Tibet
Tibet, for good and bad, is in rapid transition. As the controversial new railway line connecting Beijing with Lhasa spirits him into its famed altitudes, John Brennan tracks the changes with a group of Tibetan artists.
As my taxi heads through the smoggy evening gloom towards Beijing West railway station to board a train that will take me to Lhasa across the world's highest railway, the driver asks my ultimate destination. "Tibet," I answer. "That's my dream!" he gushes. "Everyone wants to go there!"
That was then; this is now. What would my taxi driver say today? Would a trip to Tibet be the stuff of nightmares? That, after all, was a conversation conducted last year, before the Lhasa riots in March. In their wake lies a bitterness that reminds me of Chinese attitudes to Tibet when I first visited China 25 years ago. Back then the region was closed to foreigners, and ordinary Chinese despised it as an ungovernable backwater. But by 2005, when I returned to Beijing, where I now live, the swelling Chinese middle-class had taken to tourism in their millions, and jaded city-dwellers saw Tibet as a place of sublime mountain vistas and exotic photo opportunities.
To avoid the crowds I have always taken the roads less travelled: my first experience of Tibetan culture was not in Lhasa, but in the mountainous parts of western Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan, which all lie on the vast plateau that, in the hearts of Tibetans, is Tibet. The modern Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is just one part of the region of thin air and endless skies that Tibetans have called home for almost 2000 years. The places I saw were so beautiful that I became reluctant to visit Lhasa. Would it, I wondered, be all tour groups and tat shops?
Then, last year, I met Gonkar Gyatso. At that time, my wife was managing a gallery in Beijing's Dashanzi art district that was planning an exhibition of Tibetan contemporary art – the first ever to be held in China. I knew little of Tibetan art beyond the traditional thangka paintings I had seen in Sichuan monasteries. One cold February day, I dropped by the gallery and met Gonkar, a star of the forthcoming show. As we chatted he spoke in a murmur, but his eyes, serenely hooded like an image of the Buddha, never left mine. I looked through the exhibition portfolio, and realised something very interesting was happening in Lhasa.
All the artists in the exhibition were in their 30s, of the generation who had only known a Chinese Tibet, and much of their work grappled with the puzzles of modernisation. Religious imagery shared the canvas with symbols of consumerism, in an exploration of the contradictions of modern Tibet. Gonkar, who had lived in England since 1996, was the only expatriate. The rest of the artists were coming from Lhasa for the exhibition in late May, and returning on the epic, newly opened rail link. Then and there I decided I would go with them. My trip to Lhasa, so long deferred, was finally on.
At the exhibition opening, excited Tibetan students and Buddhist monks stand out in the usual art crowd. A knot of people cluster around one of Gonkar's works, an image of the Buddha almost a metre-and-a-half high, fashioned from thousands of souvenir stickers, drawings and cutouts. From a distance the effect is dazzling. Close up, the experience is full of moments both touching and shocking, none more so than a tiny created image of a Vietnamese napalm victim holding hands with Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse. On another wall is Gonkar's celebrated series of photographs of himself, My Identity, showing his evolution as an artist from traditional Tibetan to modern London-based painter. But only three of the four panels are there. The missing image, depicting his time as an acolyte of the Dalai Lama, is too sensitive to show in China, and is represented by a gap on the wall.
Close by hangs the work of Gade, a 36-year-old painter who lectures in art at Tibet University. His work plays with the traditions of thangka painting and Buddhist sutras, using the repetitive formalism of Tibetan religious art to contrast the spiritual and the material. On his canvas anything from a mobile phone to a safety pin can appear alongside an outline of the Buddha or Sanskrit text.
In Sichuan, I was charmed by the simplicity of Tibetan life. I wonder about the new reality awaiting me in Lhasa.
Inside the cavernous departure hall at Beijing West railway station, most of the travellers in the huge queue are Chinese. I scan the surging crowd for my new Tibetan friends without success. Aboard the train, I fill out a health declaration that warns that high-altitude travel is unsuitable for schizophrenics and "highly dangerous pregnant women". Wandering the corridors, I encounter chaos. A delegation of Mongolian dignitaries has bumped dozens of people to hard sleeper class. I retreat to my compartment.
The next morning, at Xi'an, I feel Tibet edging closer. During the Tang Dynasty (AD618-907) Xi'an was the site of China's capital Chang An, a roadhead of the Silk Route. In AD636 the armies of Songtsen Gampo, the great Tibetan leader, surrounded Chang An: the Emperor Taizong sued for peace and offered his niece Princess Wencheng in marriage. In those days, Tibet dominated Central Asia, but by the 10th century it had lost its conquered territories, and for the next 1000 years remained withdrawn from the world. That isolation was pierced by the British invasion of 1904, and shattered by the Chinese takeover in 1951.
Today, the region is changing faster than at any time in its history. Critics of the new train between Beijing and Lhasa say it will speed up Chinese settlement and snuff out Tibetan culture. The Chinese Government says the train will be an economic bonanza for Tibet. Building the line, which cost $5 billion, meant pushing on from the existing Golmud station in Qinghai Province and laying 1140 kilometres of track across fragile tundra and permafrost. Special cooling pipes and sunshades keep the permafrost hard in summer, while complex windbreaks and stonework protect against sandstorms. The purpose-built carriages are fitted with oxygen outlets, special lightning conductors, UV-shielded windows and vacuum toilets of startling efficiency.
On the platform at Xi'an, I meet up with the artists, who, it eventuates, are travelling in a different carriage. Is the train good or bad for Tibet, I ask? It's a delicate question, and, while they are still juggling it, we have to reboard. One of them hangs back to tell me: "The effects will be good and bad. Anyone can see the train will carry a lot of things out of Tibet."
After we leave xi'an, I seek out Gade, and we make our way to the empty dining car. We talk about life in Lhasa, and the wave of Chinese tourists, with their romantic visions of pristine country and exotic customs. Will they be disappointed? Gade is shy, and frowns at the scenery before he speaks, but his responses are thoughtful. "There is a certain kind of tourist who comes to Tibet looking for a wonderland," he replies. "Like colonists, they want culture preserved for their enjoyment. When they find modern clothes and houses, they're disappointed. Contradictions don't interest them."
Turning to his art, I mention "Lhasa Train", a deceptively lighthearted image of the new railway winding through a stylised landscape in the shape of a reclining Buddha. A yak looks gravely down from a mountaintop, a welcoming party of monks hold balloons under a Coca-Cola sign, a distant factory belches smoke.
"Is that what the train is bringing to Tibet?" I ask.
"The train didn't bring all of it," he says at last, "but it's the Tibet of my generation." Who is the figure on the left of the image, I ask, standing on a rooftop wearing strap-on wings? Gade smiles for the first time. "That's me," he answers.
"In Lhasa I long for escape, but it's an illusion. I used to see Western tourists with their backpacks and I thought they were free, but now I know that when they get home they get on the subway and go back to work. You have to find a spiritual island to escape to. For me, that island is painting."
We swing north-west towards Lanzhou, the temperature rising into the mid-30s under the June sun. Then on to Xining, the Qinghai capital, 2275 metres above sea level. With an extra locomotive up front, we head towards the setting sun. We will climb 600 metres overnight, and at dawn cover the last stretch of the "old" line into Golmud. Tomorrow is the big day, when we climb to a world record 5072 metres on the run to Lhasa.
Restless, I doze off and wake in the cold dawn light when my ears pop. I peer through the curtain. It isn't dawn at all: a glittering full moon lights the plain, turning a meandering stream into a ribbon of silver. In the distance, a range of snowy peaks seems to float a finger's breadth above the horizon. It's 2.30am.
When we pull into Golmud in the early morning, we are at 2827 metres. The Mongolians rush the platform vendors, returning with armloads of giant cucumbers, said to be good for altitude sickness. Beyond Golmud, we are on the new line, plugging at a steady 90 kmh through a jagged brown hillscape. After two hours, I have a dull headache. My ears pop again. Suddenly, with a hiss, a cool stream of oxygen pours from outlets in the walls. By 8.40am, we are at 4300 metres, travelling through dry, treeless tundra. I head for the dining car, passing the soft sleeper cabins, where it's cucumber city. The Mongolians are slicing cucumbers, dicing them, munching them whole. One woman lies on her seat, her husband anxiously feeding her cucumber in long green slivers.
At breakfast, Clare Harris, an Oxford academic travelling with the artists, arrives in a cloud of fragrance and some embarrassment: her deodorant, in a startling display of high-altitude physics, had ejected its roller-ball and sprayed her with a plume of scent.
By 9.30am, we are at 4700 metres. As I stare out at the craggy hills now appearing on the horizon, we pass a convoy of Chinese military trucks heading into Tibet. I stop counting at 60. At that moment, the public address system comes on to reassure us about the health of the workers who built the line. "During the construction," the announcer tells us, "not one person died of plateau disease or the spread of plague, which could be regarded as another great wonder of the whole project."
We pass a herd of endangered Tibetan antelope, graceful creatures with slender, backswept horns. They wheel away in a patter of dust. It's 11.30am, and the mossy tundra sweeps away to distant snowy hills. We must be nearing the Tanggula Pass, the highest point on our journey. I go to ask our location, and chat to two Tibetans smoking between the carriages, apparently unfazed by the pyrotechnic potential of lighting up in a mobile oxygen tent. They are students in Xi'an travelling hard seat to see their families in Lhasa. They love the train, they say: it saves them days on the road.
I find out that we have already topped the pass and crossed into the TAR. To the west lies the Kekexili, a plain so high and desolate that only two other places in the world are lonelier. At 1.45pm, we reach the shores of Cuona Lake. Between the jade water and the lapis lazuli sky hangs a line of red hills, their reflection as perfect as sculpted glass. Beyond the lake, we pass two motorcyclists in stetsons who have stopped to chat. They wave to us, and I trace their track, a pale tendril winding away to nowhere in the hills.
We're crossing the Qiangtang Plain now, a vast sweep of high-country pasture. The snowcapped mountains almost seem within walking distance – a classic high-altitude illusion. We pass a group of low black nomads' tents, then a tiny village: adobe houses topped by prayer flags. Two hours later, the mountains are closer. A high sawtooth range rises into cloud under shafts of late-afternoon sun. Glaciers loom from the ridgelines while grey coils of fresh melt-water tumble past the track. At 6.45pm, we enter a long series of tunnels piercing the northern mountains surrounding Lhasa.
One hour later, in a crash of celebratory music, we arrive in the huge new Lhasa station, an architectural echo of the Potala Palace. Minutes later, when I see it in reality, through the ugly scramble of concrete that is the new western part of town, my heart sinks: the Potala seems lost and defeated.
The next day, I head to my "appointment" at the Potala. To control numbers, visits must be pre-booked. As we approach, the new town melts away, and the Potala reclaims its place against the mountain ramparts of Lhasa. The palace and the mountain seem to be one, the sloping walls sweeping down into living rock, the golden summit soaring 250 metres above our heads.
Inside, our guide keeps us moving. Under new rules, tourists have an hour to get through the palace. Army guards hover, holsters gleaming, walkie-talkies hissing. Chinese tour groups cluster everywhere. It's lunchtime: older monks sit with bowls of rice, while a younger one strides by with a hamburger. We pass through corridors bathed in golden light, bright blue roof beams meeting crimson columns as thick as tree trunks. In each chapel, banks of niches disappear into the gloom, each housing an ancient text bundled in yellow cloth. We reach the resting place of the "Great Fifth" Dalai Lama, a vast bejewelled stupa decorated with brocade hangings. Then we are on the street again and it is over: 14 centuries of history in 60 minutes.
That night, at a disco less than a kilometre from the Potala, a stick-thin Chinese girl dances on a light box in thigh-length boots and a miniskirt. The barman pours lighter fluid on the counter and raises cheers with a blue wall of flame while Tibetan and Chinese couples dance to Australian electro-pop.
I ask Gonkar: has Tibet lost its spiritual heart? "Of course, in modernisation, something valuable is lost," he says. "That's the nature of the economic development game: you lose something, you gain something. In Tibet, we've had some big gains. Young people are prouder than they were of being Tibetan; they're smarter, more open and more tolerant. It will be a political loss when the Dalai Lama dies, but the culture will carry on through the religion. We will modernise it and make it more relevant to young people." Then another artist offers his own advice. "Go to the Jokhang Temple at sunrise. You'll see that the spirit lives on."
Sunrise at Jokhang Temple, the most sacred building in Tibetan Buddhism. Prostrating worshippers cluster at the entrance, while an immense queue of pilgrims winds patiently into the dark interior. I skirt the queue and enter the central hall. The inner temple, dating from the 7th century, forms one of the world's oldest wooden structures. (With the dodgy wiring and the flickering butter lamps, it's a miracle of survival.) On a wall bowed and golden with age is a mural depicting the foundation of the temple, which by legend stands on the site of an ancient lake. The stone floor is slick with yak butter. I gaze up at the florid ceiling carvings half-visible in the gloom.
The line of pilgrims leads through tiny chapels around the temple. Finally I reach the holy of holies, a chapel in the rear wall containing an object so sacred that it is hard to think of a Christian parallel. This is the Jowo Sakyamuni, Princess Wencheng's dowry gift to Songtsen Gampo almost 14 centuries ago: a golden statue of the Buddha said to be one of the few blessed by the Enlightened One himself. Around me, pilgrims wait for space to prostrate themselves before entering the chapel. In the past, worshippers would walk for weeks, or months, across the plateau to reach this spot, this moment. Today, the pilgrimage is easier, but many still walk, some even prostrating themselves every step of the way.
Outside, I join the stream of pilgrims making the clockwise circuit of the temple. Old women in patterned tunics, kids in Nikes, an old man leaning on his daughter's arm, praying as his prayer wheel spins. I fall in with two tall Khampa men from the east, their long hair coiled at the brow and fastened with rings of amber and bone.
On my final circuit I pause at a tall incense stove where a woman is unwrapping a bundle of juniper branches. She fusses with the knotted stems, then tosses one on the fire, staring at the flame. Then she is ready. She slips the bundle into the flames. Her lips moving soundlessly, she steps back and watches the smoke carry her prayers towards the distant hills.
In march, Tibet and the Tibetan regions of China were convulsed by anti-Chinese riots that caused an unknown number of deaths. A propaganda war erupted between the Chinese government and supporters of the exiled Dalai Lama. Foreign travel to Tibet was suspended and only allowed to resume in late June.
From my home in Beijing, I watched events with a heavy heart. While I would not have predicted the events, they did not surprise me. Time and again in my travels through Sichuan in 2005, ordinary Tibetans drew me aside to proclaim their allegiance to the Dalai Lama. I can only think these encounters sprang from feelings deeply held.
Tibet is going through painful transitions. To find peaceful prosperity, those in the Tibetan political movement will have to follow the lead of the Dalai Lama and accept what virtually every government in the world accepts – Chinese political sovereignty over the region. At the same time, China needs to make its own transition – to real religious freedom for the people of Tibet.
Guide To Tibet
GETTING THERE
Qantas operates three direct flights and Air New Zealand two direct flights a week to Beijing, from where daily train and flights connect to Lhasa. To enter Tibet, foreigners must obtain permits through an authorised agent.
THE TRAINS
Beijing-Lhasa train fares are $59 hard seat; $124 hard sleeper; $193 soft sleeper.
From April next year, Beijing and Lhasa will be connected by a luxury train service, offering carriages with panoramic views and architect-designed five-star suites. Onboard hospitality, managed by Kempinski Hotels, will include a 24-hour bilingual butler service, ensuite bathroom with shower, flatscreen television and entertainment system. Fares start from $3469 for the four day/three night journey from Lhasa to Beijing (Nov-Jan) and from $4626 for the five-day/four-night journey from Beijing to Lhasa (Nov-Jan). The operators, Tangula Luxury Trains, will also offer a southern route from Beijing to the city of Lijiang in Yunnan Province.
www.tangulaluxurytrains.com
WHEN TO GO
The best time to visit Tibet is between May and November. However, the main public train operates year-round, and travel to Lhasa is rewarding in any season. Winter temperatures can reach 10 or 15 degrees in the day, falling to minus 10 at night. Excursions from Lhasa to remote parts of Tibet are severely restricted in winter.
USEFUL ADVICE
Altitude
Lhasa is 3650m above sea level, so altitude will affect most people. Avoid strenuous activity on your first day. The Beijing-Lhasa railway reaches 5072m, and while the air in the train is oxygen-enriched, carriages are not pressurised. A small number of passengers become distressed: this usually subsides as the train descends. At high altitudes it's best to seal pens and liquid containers in plastic bags to prevent messy leaks. In Lhasa, take extra precautions against the sun as the thin air lets through many more UV rays.
Dangers
While no foreigners were targeted or injured in the Lhasa riots in March 2008, it would be advisable to check on local circumstances before travelling. Under normal conditions, crime of any kind is rare in Lhasa, and Tibetans are generally friendly and hospitable.
Etiquette
When handed a sacred object (an image of the Buddha or a revered person), Tibetans will enclose it in their hands prayer-fashion and touch it to the forehead as a sign of reverence. You should do the same. If given a gift of this kind, put it away with care – never in the back pocket. Visitors often receive a khata – the white scarf of welcome. Wear it with respect and store it with care. In monasteries and temples, men and women should dress modestly, behave quietly and respect photography restrictions. Tibetans are often happy to be photographed, but always ask permission.
If you walk around the exterior of a sacred building, always go in a clockwise direction.
TIBETAN ART
Gedun Choephel Artists' Guild Gallery
Run by a Tibetan contemporary artists' co-operative. A good place to meet artists and arrange gallery visits. Closed in winter.
3 Northeast Corner, Barkhor, Lhasa; www.asianart.com/gendun
Sun City Art Gallery
Contemporary art by local Tibetan and Chinese artists.
19 Norbulinka Road, Lhasa; +86 891 665 6140.
Websites
www.peacefulwind.com
www.sweetteahouse.co.uk
TIBETAN CRAFTS
Most "Tibetan" goods sold in Lhasa are made in India, Nepal or eastern China.
There are several places where authentic Tibetan handicrafts are available.
Dropenling Handicraft Development Center
A community co-operative selling genuine Tibetan woven goods, textiles, thangka paintings.
See www.tibetcraft.com for map and directions; +86 891 633 0898
Khawachen Carpet Factory
Superb hand-knotted traditional carpets made from the legendary handspun wool of the chang tang (high plateau).
103 Jinzhu Xilu; +86 891 686 3257.
WHERE TO STAY
Brahmaputra
Grand Hotel
Tibetan-themed decor tends towards kitsch in this modern comfortable hotel, but its old photographs, artifacts and weapons are fascinating. Doubles from $150. Tower B, Yangcheng Plaza, Gongbutang Road; +86 891 630 9999.
Yak Hotel
With its location in the old quarter, this Lhasa favourite offers everything from clean dorms to comfortable double rooms with ensuite. Book ahead.
Doubles from $84. 100 Beijing East Road; +86 891 632 3496.
WHERE TO EAT
Makye Ame
Marvellous location, and great authentic Tibetan cuisine.
Second floor, south-east corner of the Barkhor; +86 891 632 8608.
Snowlands Restaurant
Large bustling eatery in the Barkhor area. Tibetan, Chinese, Indian and Western cuisine, all surprisingly good.
4 Mentsikhang Road; (no phone available).
Click here to see a special T+L Gallery on the artists' train journey from Beijing to Lhasa.
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