Day 198: Shigatse - Acres of parchment

A monk watches the sunset at Sakya monastery

By now it goes without saying that the day began with a visit to a monastery.  Shigatse's offering is a white and gold complex and, like each monastery we visited, it seemed even more beautiful than the last, as past wall hangings and thangkas, statues and turquoise gems blurred into memory.   The highlight, for me, was a series of shrines to past Panchen Lamas (the Dalai Lama's second-in-command, resident in Shigatse).  Gargantuan gold statues abounded, as in Lhasa's many shrines, but other features seemed both different and appealing: geometric designs on the ceilings in place of a swaddling of cloth, and simple but repeated icons on the walls, in place of larger-than-life painted figures.  But this was not only a question of taste; it was also a question of age.  Surely these shrines were new?

I looked at the dates and found that some were less than a decade old.  One celebrated the life of the last Panchen Lama, who died in 1989, so its recency was a matter of course.  But a second shrine celebrated the fifth to the ninth Panchen Lamas, the last of whom died in the 1930s, so why the newness?  It turned out that the original had been destroyed in the cultural revolution and recently rebuilt, obviously with the blessing (also the funding?) of the Chinese.  Signs in Mandarin all around the site, here and at other monasteries, read 'preserving cultural heritage is everyone's responsibility'.  The Chinese have obviously realised the value for tourism of preserving Tibet's heritage, but their outlook is still different from that of Tibetans.  Taking responsibility (finally) for preserving cultural heritage is different from experiencing that heritage as a lived part of each day.  Those Tibetans bowing before the lamas' tombs were not simply nodding to the beliefs and architectural accomplishments of the past; they were celebrating the holiness of today.

Shigatse

Our guide was not on hand to explain the history of the tombs as he had to obtain permits for our onward travel through Tibet, but another guide came over to see if he could help.  He started telling us about the Panchen Lama and we asked if he meant the Panchen Lama who was taken by the Chinese.  The guide immediately turned away.  "No politics," he said.  We have obviously been lucky in other people's openness, as we had previously been told all about the debate over the eleventh Panchen Lama.

"When the tenth Panchen Lama died, the Dalai Lama identified the eleventh," someone had said.  "But the Chinese chose their own Panchen Lama instead and they took the Dalai Lama's choice away."

"What happened to him?"

Young monk fetching water

The speaker shrugged.  "No one knows.  He was only six years old at the time and he hasn't been seen since.  The Chinese say he is living a normal life."  Again, the speaker gave us the wry smile that told us what he really thought without the danger of open comment.

"Some lamas would not visit the Chinese Panchen Lama at first," he continued, "as they didn't believe he was the real one."

"What happened to them?" we asked.

"They lost their salaries."

Nuns at Shigatse

Choosing a rival Panchen Lama sounded like a dubious strategy, but I could not also help wondering how the portraits of the Panchen Lama and Dalai Lama came to be so ever-present in the first place.  Did they always smile back from every wall, every shrine, or have they multiplied in the face of Chinese oppression?  In any other country where two men's faces stare so ubiquitously from the walls of a town, we would call this a cult of personality.  The Dalai Lama smiles from each gompa as regularly as the face of Assad smiled from the walls of Damascus and Aleppo, when I visited in 2000, or King Hussein's face in Amman (in the same year), or Mao's statue in Chinese cities.  But I have never heard the word 'cult of personality' spoken about Tibet.  Do we have dual standards for Tibet and other parts of the world when we consider a leader's omnipresent image malign or benevolent?

Pilgrims at Shigatse

But how dare I think this thought?  People like me believe in a free Tibet, a free Palestine, no war on Iraq and could we all join Amnesty International please?  Don't we believe that?  And don't people who visit Tibet in general come here with a pre-conceived interest in Tibetan Buddhism and a disdain of Chinese oppression (rather than a blank slate of opinion)?  Criticism of Tibet, that poor downtrodden nation under the fist of ruthless China, is something of a no no.  Yet the endlessly-produced image of the Dalai Lama still looks very much like a cult of personality to me.

We wandered out of the monastery and I asked a little more about what is and is not allowed in Tibet.  I have seen the colourful Tibetan flag flying in Dolpo, but it cannot be flown in Tibet itself; so 'dangerous' is its fringe of red, its neatly-stacked squares, its waft of green and yellow and crimson, that the authorities have banned it.  And what about the language?

Shigatse Street

"The children learn Mandarin at school, not Tibetan," we were told.  "The alphabet is different so Tibetans will soon not be able to read their own language."

I looked around at the many inscriptions and brightly painted characters, then thought of the mani walls, the prayer flags, the drawers on drawers full of scrolls in the monasteries - all illegible.

But I had yet to see the king of Tibetan libraries.  We would do so that afternoon after a long drive made longer by speed restrictions which are set at 30km per hour not only in towns but on wide, empty rural roads as well.  We had to pull over and spend half an hour waiting in a hamlet before passing through a checkpoint, to ensure enough time had elapsed since the last speed check.  As we waited, carts drove by, dwarfed by their loads of hay, safeguarding the wheat from the approaching winter.  Then we were on our way again and turned into a side road weaving past villages that departed, for the first time, from Tibetan white.  The houses here were all grey.  "Mongolian villages," our guide told us.

Colourful Sakya

In the metropolis of the Mongolian valley, a small town with gompas on both sides of the river, we stopped for lunch and ordered banana pancakes.  A plain naan bread emerged.   Chris manfully chewed half uncomplainingly before real banana pancakes arrived for me and Guy and he realised he had been hard done by.  But even the real pancakes hardly gave us all the calories of awe needed for Sakya monastery.  We passed through two grey-walled courtyards and a passageway into the main chamber.  It seemed vast, and vastly more beautiful, than previous audience halls; in place of a labyrinth of small, cluttered shrines, stifled with wall cloths and groaning under the weight of gold, here was a large, almost airy room combining the key features of several chambers from other monasteries in one.  It had the long red benches of an audience hall, strewn with saffron robes; one corner of the room contained shelves with red, orange and gold cloth drawers holding the monastery's scrolls; along the opposite wall ranged dozens of tall gold statues of Buddhas and boddhisattvas.  In between lay space, air.  We have seen little of this simple compound amidst the sea of draperies and gems elsewhere in Tibet but it made the Buddhas look all the more beautiful.  Two other roomy but still dazzling chambers also led off the courtyard, but in the corridor behind the main audience hall lay the greatest wonder of all.

"I will ask if we can go and look at the scrolls," our guide told us.  "Sometimes it is possible."

The library at Sakya

We were in luck.  A monk led us into a corridor where we collectively gasped.  From floor to ceiling stood shelves of scrolls - dozens of them, fathoms of them, kilograms, tons, acres worth of parchment (if you spread it all out); every unit of measurement applies to this monks' library of all monks' libraries, so long as it is large.

Each compartment of the shelving had room for thirty-six 'books'; eight compartments stretched from floor to ceiling; forty-four ranged the length of the corridor.  I did the maths.  There was a minimum of 12,672 scrolls here.  The greatest of literary and theological luddites must gasp.  Remember that this was not the chief library of London or New York or Toyko but of a monastery in a small town in a valley of Mongolian farmers, nearly four thousand metres above sea level.  Even someone who could not read would surely have heard their jaw crash to the ground as they looked at it.

We paced the length of the corridor to where the 'oversize books' had a special shelf at the end, then walked back to our starting point, then paced along the corridor again.  It took a while before we were ready to return to the audience hall with its mere statues, mere thangkas, mere paddling pools' worth of gold.

Sakya almost has the feel of a fortress
rather than a monastery

Why so much gold, after all?  As we paid a final visit to the roof tops of the monastery, to look out over the grey walls of the Mongolian town, I felt almost drunk on the beauty of Sakya monastery, but when I came back down to earth the collective weight of the last week's gold intake pressed down on me.  Why, I asked again, so much gold?  The ranks of gilt statues striding across the hills of Tibet are not only beautiful but oppressive, weighty, absurd in their numbers and their majesty.  Was there really nothing better that could be done with so much wealth than to stuff the monasteries full of it?  Was there no portion of gold that could have improved a Tibetan peasant's life instead of turning it into another metallic god, shining with indifference?  Was the pre-Chinese Tibet really so perfect as we nostalgically make it, as we dream of rolling back the Chinese tanks and the ban on the Tibetan flag and the Mandarin script?  There is always oppression, but some types of it upset us more than others and perhaps cultural and religious oppression offend us more than economic oppression.  But does a monastic class hoarding tons of tons of gold while most Tibetans thresh wheat outside not count as a type of oppression too?  Or did the wheat threshers really feel that this gold was theirs as much as anyone's?

Why, I wonder, does the oppression of Tibet by the Chinese upset the West so much?  They are not the only population around the world ruled by force against their will, yet few others can have as many support groups in other countries as Tibet.  How many British universities, for example, do not boast a Free Tibet group amongst their students?  This support may well be justified but it is not always as forthcoming for other national groups as for the Tibetans.  It is hard to help wondering whether a group whose monasteries were not so very beautiful would not attract quite so keen an interest.  Perhaps, after all, we do not care so very much whether the Tibetans can fly their flag or learn their language in school as how stunning are their architectural achievements?  (East Timor, where are your monasteries?!)  And I am as stunned as anyone.

More musings.  But no more monasteries.  For the rest of the afternoon we drove towards Tibet's main natural attraction: Everest.  Just before sunset, we saw it needling the dusk with Lhotse for company - two ghostly figures on the horizon.  We will drool over it from closer to hand tomorrow, but first we have to get through a night in rooms built around a hotel courtyard, rapidly shedding all their heat into the night air.  Incongruously, this is not a hotel for a cold climate.  It's time to zip our down jackets up to our noses.

Our first view of Everest and Lhotse

Solar "kettle" in the car park at the Shigatse monastery

Gate guard at Sakya

Sakya

That's a scarf around one of the scrolls in the library at Sakya

Gilded statues abound

Large open rooms give Sakya an imposing feel

Sakya

That "fortress" feel I mentioned before...

Day 197: Gyantse - Eating yak stroganoff and grandma

Gyantse monastery

I have travelled on many mountain roads, but none like the ones in Tibet.  In the Kali Gandaki Valley, in Nepal, collapsing bridges struggle to prop up overloaded vehicles and the road slumps under the onslaught of rockfall.  Around Manali, we drove in a bus without a windscreen, while a vertiginous drop waited to catch us if we skidded to one side.  There were no barriers, no paving, nothing approaching a smooth surface on any of these roads.  But in China things are done differently.

Every drop is protected by a solid barrier.  Every inch of road is metalled.  Where embankments, cuttings, any type of engineering at all, are needed, they are built.  The Friendship Highway means business.

The view of Yamdrok Yutso

We drove out of Lhasa towards the Gampa La pass, stopping at a viewpoint where a dog resembling a brown lion, mane and all, awaited our cameras.  This, presumably, is the Tibetan version of busking; you offer the world's woolliest dog for tourists to photograph in return for money.  One girl had only a goat (like busking with only a penny whistle?) but it looked feeble beside the dogs and nobody paid her any attention.

We climbed through thick fog to the pass but the views across the Yamdrok Yutso lake on the far side were clear and beautiful.  A Tibetan village huddled on the far bank.  None of the buildings stood more than two stories high and all were entirely white save for a black stripe under the flat roof.  The windows too hogged the top of the house with their brightly painted frames.  (I would like Tibetan windows in my London flat!)  We will see many more such villages over the next few days.

Grandma anyone?

Lunchtime brought us to our first restaurant without the luxuries of Indian food.  The menu was interesting to say the least, the most amusing option being 'grandma'.  (I wonder how she is served?)  Other delicacies included the lungs of various animals and several types of 'rotting' meat.  We settled on what we suspected would be the first vegetable noodle soup of many.

Afterwards, Gyantse monastery shook our notion that we were monasteried-out.  The walls of a fortress enclosed a small temple surrounded by empty space where buildings destroyed in the cultural revolution once stood.  Those that survived had been used as storerooms and so they were spared the flames.  We looked around rooms where the blur of red and gold merges with the scent of incense and the sound of chanting: 'Om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum'.  Buddhist monasteries bring a form of synaesthesia.  Will I ever see gold again, I wonder, without hearing that tune?  Will I ever smell incense without seeing a thangka hanging from a wall or watching the world turn saffron?

Gyantse

We climbed a blue and white monument, like a giant chorten, filled with shrines (more many-armed, many-headed monsters; more turbulent scenes) to a viewpoint across the walls of the fort and the mountains beyond.  Then we returned to the vehicle for the long drive to Shigatse.

Once we had crossed the next high mountain pass, the remains of the afternoon dispelled my idea of Tibet as a bleak mountain kingdom.  It may lie close to the chilly sky but its valleys are wide and its hills rolling.  It is a world of gradual if continuous ascents, not rugged crags or sheer escarpments.  We watched Tibetans harvest fields of grain in the flat valley bottoms as we drove to our destination.  They used machinery where the Tibetans of Dolpo threshed by hand.  Maybe Dolpo resembles an older, pre-mechanised Tibet.  In Tibet itself, the world of work looks more benign, less arduous, and the valleys appear golden - a prosperous place.

Our resting place was certainly prosperous - a swish Chinese hotel in Shigatse, the second largest city of Tibet.  Alas, the food was also Chinese so we campaigned successfully for a visit to one of the only Nepali / Indian restaurants in town.  As everywhere, there was no shortage of yak-based options on the menu, alongside the curries and biryanis.  In most eateries you can obtain a yak steak, yak momos, or a yak burger; such options go without saying.  But I had not adequately considered the prospect of yak stroganoff before reaching Tibet.  Nor had I realised that yak pizza was an Italian speciality (why else would it be listed in the 'Italian specials' section of the menu?).  I would love to walk into a restaurant in Naples and demand a yak pizza, then ask the chef why his selection is so poor that he cannot even cook Italy's chief culinary specialities!

Susan and Chris at the pass

A brief snow flurry at the lake

It wasn't uncommon to find a Lhasa taxi turned into a tourist car for the day

Mountain views from our second pass of the day

Prayer wheels at Gyantse

More yak butter candles

Multi-armed buddha

More books

The library at Gyantse

Colourful books

Mega thanka wall

Shrine at Gyantse

Future buddha at a Gyantse shrine

Gyantse

Water mill grinding roasted barley into tsampa

Day 196: Lhasa - A shrinking monastic family

Sera Monastery

Sera monastery sprouts from a hillside outside Lhasa.  The complex looks like it could hold a village full of monks.  "There were two thousand here," we were told.  "Now there are three hundred."

"Are there any monks in your family?" we asked.

The man who had spoken shook his head.  "It's very hard to become a monk now.  The Chinese restrict entry to the monasteries.  If you want to be a monk, you have to go to a Chinese school first."

Red figures still weave their way around the monastery but many rooms are empty.  We were shown the kitchen with its huge vats for rice and vegetables.

"They don't use those pots anymore," we were told.  "They are too big for the remaining monks.  Here are some smaller ones."

Sera

But the number of visitors does not seem to have diminished, however the monastic population may have dropped.  The labyrinth of rooms felt crowded with gold buddhas, yellow hats, statues of lamas, and flesh-and-blood devotees - I do not know which were the most plentiful.  It must be hard to be a worshipper here.  You do not have the Catholic luxury of bowing to the Virgin Mary and praying at the altar, then departing the church, for there are many many lamas, many buddhas, so many golden statues requiring devotion.  You may walk through the monastery leaving a trail of one yuan notes behind you, one at each shrine, until even the thickest of pocket books lies empty.  There is no shirking; each icon awaits devotion.  Wide pots replete with the wicks of burning candles stand in front of each golden form and visiting women feed the flames with yak butter until the monastery overflows with it.

What happens to the spare butter?

"What happens to all the spare butter?" we asked.

"It goes to rural monasteries that do not receive so many visitors."

So there are arteries of yak butter pulsing from Lhasa all around the country.

The heart of the monastery was the audience room - a wide space with row on row of cushioned benches in red and gold.  To one side, a door led to a shrine with statues of the seven spiritual sons of Buddha, several times the height of any human son.  More gold.  More turquoise.  More red.  I liked the way the Buddha had adapted to the Tibetan climate.  In Sri Lanka, the Buddha sits with his manly chest bare and a cloth wrapped around his waist; in Tibet, layers of material enfold his upper body to keep him warm against the Himalayan winter.  But this is not the only difference.  Tibetan Buddhism looks like a turbulent religion, full of demons wielding skulls.  They take offerings of beer and chang; I counted one hundred and sixty-eight cans of beer in front of one icon - surely sufficient to stave off (or invoke?!) any number of evil spirits.  The paintings on the walls show turbulent scenes as often as peaceful ones.  Something dark stalks the layers of gold.

There were even touches of humour but these were not intentional.  We could not help chuckling at the words written over the entrance to one anteroom: "please do not come in woman in this temple".  Even as a devout atheist, I thought this went without saying in a religious place.

Sera Monastery

We could not take many photographs (with a charge of 20 yuan or £2 per room, photographers must be selective) but once we were in the open air again we photographed the prayer flags fluttering on the hillside with monks in the foreground, clad in crimson and chatting incongruously on their mobile phones.

When we finally left Sera monastery, our day's quota of golden buddhas was not yet complete; the Jokhang temple remained to be visited.  This is the centre of pilgrimage to Lhasa - the holy temple around which so many worshippers prostrate themselves.  As we entered, we gazed at the bright fabrics hanging from the ceiling and the wooden pillars, the wall paintings and row on row of gold statues.  Every so often I came across one that I thought depicted a woman, only to find that it was a statue of a man after all.  Buddha, it seems, looks somewhat effeminate, but his soft facial features are the closest thing to a woman we encountered.  Amongst hundreds of golden statues, I had seen only men, a fact that grated ever more severely.  Increasingly, the Buddhist temples and monasteries began to impress on me the idea that Tibetan Buddhism's central teaching is that you must be male to be wise.  Women may only be followers.  If that is not the case, the iconography does nothing to help counter the impression.

What were gender roles like in Lhasa before the Chinese invasion, I wondered?  What are they like now?  I thought back to Chengdu with its many women in public life and wondered if there were women with IQs of two hundred who were slowly going mad in their homes in the 'free Tibet' before 1959, or female children who were brighter than their brothers but given less intellectual roles in adult life.  Perhaps.  But perhaps few Tibetan women would harbour that thought.

Lhasa from the temple roof (the Potala Palace in the background)

We stepped up onto the temple roof to look out over the city - to the square lined with its beautiful white houses, its shops of turquoise jewellery, its inhabitants spinning prayer wheels and women wearing the striped apron which shows they are married, hanging over a long dark skirt.  Then we looked further outwards to the high-rise city beyond.  It has encroached a little on the temple square: the brash facade of the Chinese chain restaurant 'Dicos' eyeballs the white houses and the words 'WC' ooze red neon light.

I wonder how Tibet would have developed since 1959 if the Chinese had not invaded?  Surely it would not have continued to consist only of peasant villages and the white central streets of Lhasa?  A modernising world, even under the Dalai Lama's rule, would not have remained entirely outside the gates, would it?  When we look at Lhasa, do we look to find an exact replica of 1959, like a museum piece, sculpted in unbreakable stone?  If there was ever a place for 'then' and 'now' photos, it is this one, but even without an invasion, 'then' and 'now' presumably would not look quite the same.

Facemasks are almost obligatory

As are hair-extensions!

'What ifs', I suppose, are useless.  There is a Chinese majority in Lhasa these days so even a free and fair vote presumably would not help the cause of a free Tibet.  China is here to stay.  (You could say it has been here for a long time; China has owned Tibet for hundreds of years, albeit with greater local autonomy before 1959, and the right to secession is not a given.)  Is it permitted to say that Chinese imports must include useful elements of modernity as well as destructive ones - perhaps some freedom from the oppression of a patriarchal society mingling with the onset of cultural and political oppression?  I wonder how today's health care, sanitation, or transport compare to those before the invasion?  (I have no idea, as yet, of the answers.  I am speculating - like many first visitors to Lhasa no doubt - from a point of utter ignorance.)  But then, modernity does not have to arrive on a tank; it can arrive by other means.  There are more benign ways of bringing rail transport and modern economics to a country than by invasion.  Passing through the police checkpoints once again, the guns remain accusatory, the x-ray machines invasive.

Enjoying tea, Lhasa style!

I went for a final walk through the white streets then into the modern city, with its well-kept riverside path that I would be happy to find in central London, and its immense market where live fish swim around water tanks until they receive the knock-out blow on their heads, which I would absolutely prefer not to see in London!  In another half an hour, I was back among the white streets for the last time.  Tomorrow we head into rural Tibet.  Lhasa farewell.

Books at Sera Monastery

Autumn comes to Sera

Multiple Buddhas

It's auspicious to walk underneath this giant Thanka, back-bent!

The audience room at Sera

Stand 2 metres away from the wall, close your eyes, put a finger out and walk forwards.
It's considered lucky if your finger finds this hole in the wall!

Ancient and modern prostrating at Jokhang. Is there an app for that?

Courtyard at Jokhang

Susan and Chris taking tea

Prostration is everywhere

Even the Chinese military find Lhasa photogenic

More ancient and modern contrasts in Lhasa

Beautiful jewellery and head-ware

Prayers in Lhasa

Lhasa by night