The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  ‘You have a permit?’ he asked, in halting English.

  He was a civilian, or so I thought. In fact, he was a nark, and Qamdo was full of them. I ignored this one, but within minutes another, rather larger and more insistent, came up to me and asked the same question. Would I perhaps like to accompany them to the police station?

  Lily spoke fast and well. I was a distinguished geographer, she said, a foreigner with a lifelong fascination with the Yangtze. I was travelling this way only as a means of reaching the river's headwaters in Qinghai. I would not be stopping for any reason other than rest. It was a matter of common courtesy, she insisted, for the authorities to let me pass. The future of Anglo-Chinese geographical cooperation could be thrown in jeopardy if I were sent back…

  Sent back. The thought was chilling. To reach this town we had already driven over another vastly high pass across the Ningjing Range, which separates the Yangtze valley from the Mekong: it would be depressing beyond words to have to retrace our steps. Besides, the car was deteriorating rapidly, and there was likely to be a mechanic only in Lhasa, five days ahead – closer than Chengdu, now six days behind.

  The official was a small, ratlike man. He had brought his ten-year-old son to the interview, and the boy had taken my passport and was trying his best to read it, stumbling on the extravagant rubric in the front, which spoke about Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Requesting and Requiring Such Persons (as his father) to Let the Bearer of the Document Pass Without Let or Hindrance. He translated it, badly. His father ruminated. Then he took out a piece of paper and began writing furiously.

  ‘I will fine you a large amount – say, five thousand yuan – and give you a piece of paper guaranteeing safe passage to Lhasa. Will that do?’

  I was about to agree, when Lily shushed me. No, she said, it would not do at all. The sum he had in mind was outrageous. Five hundred yuan, maximum. He glared at her. She glared back. The child translated some more, trying to explain the difference between a Let and a Hindrance.

  Finally the man backed down.

  ‘OK – five hundred. And I will write this. It should be good for four hundred kilometres more. The rest of the police zone will present no problem.’

  But he was wrong. The very next day, at a dreadful high-altitude village called Leiwujie, we were detained once again. Lily was taken away alone this time, and I had to kick my heels in the street outside, listening to her screeching inside, as she raged hysterically against what she called the tyranny of the police. She was, I thought, an exceptionally brave young woman.

  She emerged after an hour, white-faced and in tears. But, as it turned out, triumphant. Shakily she explained what had happened inside.

  ‘I was on the telephone with the chief of police back in Qamdo. I argued with him. I shouted at him. I can't believe it – I told him to shut up! Many times. He was quite afraid. I argued and I argued. The policeman here said he has occasionally seen foreigners here before, begging, on their knees, trying to get permission to go on. He has always sent them back.

  ‘He had a man last year who fell over and over on the ground, rolling back and forth, weeping, offering money. But he said no. He said he has never once let any foreigner he has caught pass this point. He is proud of it. “If I see a foreigner, this is as far as he gets.” He told me that.

  ‘But for some reason, he decided to agree, in this one case. He listened to me, he understood my passion for this river. He was very impressed that we had come all the way here from the sea. He knew that if he said no the whole voyage would be in danger, and that you would write and hold him up to ridicule. So he said yes. We can go. No fine. No nothing. Just go. Immediately. Back to the Jeep!’

  Propitious or not, it was the Jeep that was the next to go. The wretched car sputtered to a halt two mornings later, when we were deep in the mountains and miles from the nearest habitation. I had to clamber down five hundred feet to a stream to get water: the wrecked radiator, cut to shreds by the spinning fan, spewed it out before we had gone a mile. Down to the river again, another bucket of water, another mile's progress – and so on for ten miles, by which time we reached a road menders' camp, and Lily and I pitched the tent.

  There were only Tibetan women in the camp; their menfolk would be back by dark, they said, and one of them had the equipment necessary for mending the radiator – a welding torch, I assumed. The women took us in out of the storm: they gave us soup and let us sit in the warm while a battery-powered prayer wheel by the door hummed its mantras into the howling gale. And then the storm quietened, and the men returned.

  The ‘equipment' turned out to be a two-inch bar of solder, a jar of flux, and a sharp-edged hammer that could be used as a soldering iron. Miao fell upon these items with glee. As evening darkened and the Tibetan stars came up we watched this remarkable man as he performed, in that classical Chinese way, a miracle of improvisation. We watched him heating the hammer to red heat in the jet flame of a gasoline stove, and then melting silvery globules of solder onto each one of the eighty-three cuts and gouges we had counted in the radiator. It was painstaking work – every break had to be crimped closed, every closure welded shut with solder, every joint then tested under the high pressure that water attains in a car's cooling system.

  But by dawn he was done. The final test worked – no appreciable amount of water spilled onto the roadway. The radiator was secured with two new bolts and wired on for good measure and additional safety. We had breakfast of barley-flour tsampa, and Miao and Tang gulped down some buttery tea. And then we started off once more – Lily and I dipping down in our seats every time we spotted the police, or truckloads of troops – and we continued climbing onto the plateau.

  Nine days out and we had reached it. The hills fell away, and ahead were endless plains, cold and windy. We camped out each night, now that I had managed to repair the zippers on the tent. The camping was quiet and lonely: there were no villages, no permanent habitations, and only very occasionally a gathering of nomad farmers on the horizon. Nor was there much by way of wildlife. This had been antelope countryside as little as a decade ago, with flocks of thousands; but their numbers had been savagely reduced by systematic poaching and the encroachments of the yak herders. Human influence in this part of Tibet is recent – the ever-rising population of China and the government-ordered movement of peoples being the two most obvious causes – and so far as the indigenous animal and plants are concerned, it is almost wholly malign.

  The few people we saw working on the roads were prisoners, guarded by soldiers. I asked that we speed past, for these were men from the laogai, the labour camps, and no foreigner should see them. Were I to be stopped by their guards there is little doubt that the expedition would be over: the Chinese authorities are sensitive about their political prisoners, and merely seeing these gangs of grey-skinned men, masked against the cold, shackled to one another, wielding picks and hammers with dispirited weariness – this was enough for my deportation.

  It was cold, and the air was thin. Lily was miserable – she had headaches and found it difficult to breathe, and in the tent at night she tossed and turned, worried by fearful dreams. I had read about the physical deterioration that precedes severe altitude sickness and listened to Lily to see if I could detect those problems: but no, she was in fact as strong as an ox – her symptoms, I felt sure, were brought about by the strange abnormality of her situation, of not knowing, of not being prepared for the bizarre side effects high altitude can bring.

  And then finally, eleven days out, in a slight depression in the plains ahead, there were the radio towers and tenements of a dreary junction town that I knew from my maps was called Nagqu. The town is of no interest – it is the administrative centre of one of Tibet's five regions, just as Qamdo five days behind had been – but little more. Except that it is the junction of the brick tea road, or the convoy road that goes between Chengdu to Lhasa, and the main highway that links Lhasa with the north. A road that, unlik
e the one we had suffered along for the last eleven days, was paved with asphalt, was fast, and, in places, had even the luxury of being a divided highway. We drew up at the traffic circle where the one road joined the other.

  I was faced with one small problem – which way to go. If we turned right we would be at the Yangtze headwaters in little more than a day. If we turned left we would be in Lhasa in about four hours.

  I looked at Lily, pale and exhausted. I looked at the ever stoical Tang, the man who knew the headwaters and who was smiling through it all – he had a stern look about him, and his eyes were nodding shut. I looked at Miao – he was chewing hard on something, his face was screwed up in a frown, and he was slapping the gear lever mightily, with the rhythm of deep anxiety.

  I asked him to turn left. Later that evening, and to our general delight and relief, we were at the Lhasa Holiday Inn, sleeping between clean sheets and eating yak burgers. The manager turned out to be a Frenchman I knew, and he gave us three rooms for no charge. We stayed for three memorably pleasant days. I spent hours in the ancient shrine of the Jokhang and at the Potala, the former seat of the Tibetan government and the Dalai Lama's gigantic winter palace. I strolled around his summer house, the Norbulingka. I took a car to the Drepung Monastery, once so huge and proud, but now savagely reduced by the Chinese. And I rested. I was happy to be here, and to be so close to the India where I had lived some years before, and which I loved. I met a man from San Francisco, who gave me pills for Lily's sickness. We found a mechanic who repaired the car.

  After the days of rest and restoration, and with the car washed and with its tyres pumped up and Lily high on her new medicine and Miao slapping his gear lever only once an hour or so, we set off back up the asphalt highway. Five hours later and we were passing Nagqu once again, and the junction with the cordially loathed (but later, fondly remembered) brick tea road. Then the land began to rise. We were coming up onto the southern flanks of the Tanggula Range of mountains, to the hills where the Yangtze has its beginnings.

  15

  Headwaters

  The road between Lhasa and the north is good for almost all of its length – except, travellers are always warned, for the hundred miles or so where it heaves itself up and over the Tanggula Range. There, even in midsummer, the weather is dreadful, the terrain wretched and the road usually stripped to its gravel foundations.

  It was midsummer in the rest of the northern world, but on the day we broached the slope of the great range, wet snow began to fall, a wind whipped up, and soon we were grinding our way up the endless gradient in the teeth of a July blizzard. The car was misbehaving yet again – bad fuel, explained Miao, without conviction – and it took us several hours to make the summit, by which time it was pitch-dark and the wind was howling across the moors.

  We had passed another chain gang, hundreds of men and women lashed together in small groups to repair a section of road at least twenty miles long. Even though there was little enough traffic, soldiers with flags were holding up all northbound trucks to make way for a string of southbound army convoys.

  ‘Trouble in one of the monasteries,’ speculated Tang, shaking his fist at the taillights of one of the army trucks. He had seen some of the rioting in Lhasa ten years before, when Chinese troops had beaten monks, and it had incensed him. He talked about it sparingly – he knew that Lily held very pro-Chinese views, and Miao's job with the Chengdu Propaganda Department hardly made him a likely sympathizer with the Tibetan cause. But when we were alone Tang spoke openly about his distaste for what the Chinese were doing.

  ‘It's more insidious these days, you know. They're advertising for people to come and live here – Chinese people, that is. Before long there will be as many Han as there are Tibetans – and because the Han people who come to live here are allowed to have as many children as they like, they may well outnumber the Tibetans. Then this will stop being Tibet. The people will just be another minority, like the Yi or the Nakhi. They'll lose everything.

  ‘I know the arguments – that before the Chinese came, the Tibetans were ruled by despots, by cruel old priests. That may be so. But at least it was their country. It was up to them to decide what to do about it. It's not up to us. It's none of our business. We come in, and give them good roads and water and hospitals, all the things they never had. But we think that gives us a right to tell them how to live their lives.

  ‘And if they don't do it the way we tell them, then' – he jerked his hand in the direction of yet another convoy, the fifth, another hundred trucks steaming southwards towards the capital. ‘Then we send in force and crush them.’

  The people were reportedly up in arms just then about Beijing's decision not to acknowledge the youngster who had recently been chosen as the reincarnation of, or successor to, the Panchen Lama, the senior legal Tibetan lama. A group of wise men chosen by Beijing had settled on a candidate some weeks before, and the candidate – a boy of nine living in a remote part of western Tibet, near Shigatse – had been accepted by the Communist leadership. But then the wise men had made the error of telling the Dalai Lama, living in exile in Dharmsala in India – and he had agreed with the decision.

  His agreement, which legitimized the boy's candidacy for the thousands of followers of the most revered (as opposed to the most legal) of Tibet's lamas, made Beijing promptly change its collective mind. The national leadership condemned the choice, criticized the child for all manner of sins and his parents – blameless people to their very core – for corruption and publicity seeking. A new child was chosen, and was due to be formally installed as the future Panchen Lama later in the year. The Dalai Lama was pointedly not consulted: he had already made his choice, said Beijing, and unhappily it was the wrong one.

  This row would dominate the rest of the year, and almost certainly did result in some disturbances across Tibet, particularly in the western monasteries, where support for the Dalai Lama is at its most fervent. Now there seemed little doubt but that these soldiers – officially heading south for ‘routine resupply' – were going to help put down an incipient rebellion, yet again.

  Which made it unlikely, I thought, that we would be given much by way of hospitality when, late that night and in the middle of a howling snowstorm, we hammered on the iron gate of the army base at Tanggula township and asked if we might possibly be allowed to bed down for the night.

  On the face of it, the request seemed reasonable. Lily was sick again. The car was faltering again. We were tired and hungry. There was no other accommodation, and the weather was foul and getting worse. This – at 15,100 feet – was said to be the highest permanent human settlement on the face of the earth. We should at least be able to park in the courtyard and sleep in the car in some kind of shelter from the icy gales.

  A sentry opened the iron door a fraction, his face wrinkling with distaste at the blowing snow outside. I asked him to get an officer, and a few moments later a young man appeared, his shoulder showing the rank of captain. I explained the problem, and asked if we might stay.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Certainly not.’

  I put on as innocent an expression as I knew how.

  ‘Pray – why not?’ I asked.

  He thought for a moment.

  ‘Three reasons,’ he then replied. ‘First – you are a lao wai, and we don't let lao wei stay in Chinese army bases. I'm sure your army wouldn't welcome a visiting Chinese traveller, right?

  ‘Second – you are all civilians, and we don't let civilians stay in army bases. And third' – here he seemed to be casting around for a third reason when suddenly he remembered something – ‘and third, last night, for some so far unexplained reason, thirty-seven of our men died here of some mysterious ailment.’

  He looked at the four of us, gazing at our faces as we registered our shocked surprise. Suddenly his expression was triumphant, as if he had blocked us at all our exits. I thought hard for a second.

  Not so fast, I realized. I raised my hand.

  ‘But in th
at case, surely that means you'll have thirty-seven empty beds. Doesn't it?’ The question of available space was a red herring, but it was the only herring I had. And I wasn't too worried about how the men had died* – we would quite probably freeze to death if we stayed out here.

  The captain's face cracked into a smile. He swore, using some imprecation that I couldn't catch but was obviously racist in its implications, and then he opened the door. Yes, he said, he supposed we could have four rooms, and would we perhaps like some dinner? Army rations were not so good up here in Tibet, he said, but they could probably rustle up rice and meat of some kind.

  I now had doubts about my theory that the convoys of troops were off to beat up local monks: here the soldiers were totally relaxed, performing the dreary routines of garrison duty as though nothing had happened in this part of Tibet for years, and nothing was likely for the rest of their tour. So we spent a warm and peaceful night; and it was only when we awoke at five for the final push that the spell was broken. The dawn broke grey and it was snowing still, and it was bitterly cold once more.

  From the base the road sloped downwards a little for the next twenty miles, then passed a lonely menders' camp and a small settlement called Yanshiping. Through the driving snow I could occasionally see the outlines of nomads' black tents, their walls plastered thickly with ice. The yaks had gone to ground, presumably huddled down in depressions on the moors, waiting out the blizzard.

  We drove on, and on, mile after wretched mile, stopping from time to time to scrape the accumulated ice from the windscreen. Finally, late in the morning, we came to a wretched little settlement sprawled across both sides of the road that was called Tuotuoheyan. We were at 14,500 feet. There was a meteorological station here, and a hydrometric station that measured the flow of the river, and there were barrack blocks with mud walls, where the long-distance truck drivers took their ease, a break more or less halfway between Lhasa and Golmud along this terrifyingly bleak highway.