To the Ends of the Earth

The pilgrims hunker and prostrate themselves all over Lhasa, and they shuffle clockwise around every shrine. They flatten themselves on stair landings, outside the Jokhang, and all around the Potala. They do it on the road, the riverbank, the hillsides. Being Tibetan Buddhists they are good-humored, and because they are from all over Tibet, Lhasa is their meeting place—they enrich the life of the town and fill its markets. They come out of a devotion to the Dalai Lama, the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. They pray, they throw themselves to the ground, they strew tiny one-miao notes and barley grains at the shrines, and they empty blobs of yak butter into the lamps. The very pious ones blow horns made from human thigh bones—a femur like an oboe—or carry water in bowls made from the lopped-off top of a human skull. They venerate the various thrones and couches of the Dalai Lama in the Potala, and even his narrow Art Deco bed, his bathtub and toilet, his tape recorder (a gift from Nehru), and his radio. The Dalai Lama is worshipped as the Living God, but the pilgrims also pay homage to the images of Zong Kapa—founder of the Yellow Sect, and of the Lord Buddha, and other Dalai Lamas, notably the Fifth, whose great buildings dignify Lhasa. Pilgrims have made Lhasa a town of visitors who are not exactly strangers, and so even a real foreigner feels a sense of belonging there. Its chaos and dirt and its jangling bells make it seem hospitable.

Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave. I liked its smallness, its friendliness, the absence of traffic, the flat streets—and every street had a vista of tremendous Tibetan mountains. I liked the clear air and sunshine, the markets, the brisk trade in scarce antiques. It fascinated me to see a place for which the Chinese had no solution. They admitted that they had made grave mistakes in Tibet, but they also admitted that they did not know what to do next. They had not counted on the tenacious faith of the Tibetans, and perhaps they found it hard to believe that such dark, grinning people, who never washed, could be so passionate. The visiting party officials strolled around looking smug and hard to please. They were mostly on junkets. Tibet is a junketer’s paradise: a subject people, two fairly good hotels, plenty of ceremonial functions, and so far from Peking that anything goes. The Chinese reward each other with junkets and official trips—they often take the place of bonuses—and Tibet is the ultimate junket. But it is for sight-seeing. Tibet has made no economic gains at all. It is entirely dependent on Chinese financial aid. These Chinese nearly always look physically uncomfortable in Lhasa—it is the altitude, the strange food, and the climate, but it is also the boisterous Tibetans, who seem to the Chinese a bit savage and unpredictable—superstitious primitives if not outright subhuman.

The other aspect of Lhasa—and Tibet, too—is that like Yunnan it has become the refuge of hippies. They are not the dropouts I met years ago in Afghanistan and India, but mostly middle-class, well-heeled hippies whose parents gave them the air fare to China. Some of them come by bus from Nepal. They seemed harmless to me, and they were a great deal more desirable than the rich tourists for whom Lhasa was building expensive hotels and importing ridiculous delicacies—and providing brand-new Japanese buses so that groups of tourists could set out at dawn and photograph such rituals as the Sky Burial (Tibetans deal with their dead by placing them outside for vultures to eat). As Lynn Pan remarks in her analysis of recent Chinese history, The New Chinese Revolution, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tibetan culture, which has survived the worst that Maoism and force could do to stamp it out, has been left to be killed by tourism.” But I had my doubts. Tibet seemed too vast and inaccessible and strange for anyone to possess it. It looked wonderful to me, like the last place on earth; like a polar ice cap, but emptier.

Down the Yangtze

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