by Kate Harris
For Ben’s sake, I was glad all those roadside mounds of gravel were finally being put to use, but I was also crushed not to return to the Aksai Chin. The nearest alternate route across the Tibetan Plateau was National Highway 109, starting from Golmud, an industrial city two thousand miles away in the Qinghai province. Without enough time on our Chinese visas to bike from Kashgar to Golmud, then continue more than a thousand miles across the plateau to Nepal, we loaded our bikes onto a train. Limited passenger ticket availability meant Mel and I took a different series of trains and buses than the bikes, which we planned to reunite with in Dunhuang, a historic Silk Road trading post. Then we would continue by bus to Golmud. Instead we arrived in Dunhuang to learn the bikes were missing.
A tall, angular Swiss cyclist named Philippe was in the same situation, though he received the bad news with remarkable poise, perhaps because he was a lay monk in the Zen Buddhist tradition. After meeting in Kashgar and hearing of our plans to bike across the Tibetan Plateau, he’d decided to join us, though he wasn’t yet sure how far he’d risk riding toward Lhasa. When Mel and I last snuck across Tibet, in 2006, it might as well have been Shangri-La compared to the North Korea it was now. In the spring of 2008, when Tibetans hoped the world would be scrutinizing China in the lead-up to the summer Olympics in Beijing, protests broke out across the TAR calling for greater independence for Tibet. Chinese security forces responded by firing on unarmed protestors, conducting mass arrests, brutalizing detainees, and torturing suspects—all in the name of preserving national unity. That very year, the government was initiating a grassroots surveillance program called “Benefit the Masses,” in which officials were deployed to villages and monasteries throughout the TAR to sniff out dissent among Tibetans and lead propaganda sessions on, among other subjects, “exposing the heinous reactionary crimes of the fourteenth Dalai clique.” The official slogan of this Orwellian surveillance initiative, which was originally slated to end three years later but continues still, is “All villages become fortresses, and everyone is a watchman.” Everyone but tourists, that is, because China doesn’t want outsiders to observe any of this. When we last biked into Tibet, independent travel by foreigners was forbidden on paper; this was now true in practice. Mel and I had no idea whether a stealth crossing of the plateau was even possible, but one thing was certain: we needed our bikes to find out.
As the train company searched for them, Philippe suggested we pass the time in Dunhuang by visiting the Mogao Caves, or the “Thousand Buddha Grottoes,” which featured Buddhist frescoes and shrines dating to the fourth century. The tall Swiss cyclist had to fold himself over to fit in the taxi we shared out of the city, but fortunately it was a short ride. The Chinese guide assigned to us at the grottoes was a pale, slender Chinese woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Chan. She wore sunglasses and carried an umbrella even inside the dark caves, the better to preserve her delicate, almost translucent skin through which veins swam blue. For some reason she was convinced that Mel and I couldn’t understand English, though she knew we were from Canada. “Do you know this term ‘flaking’?” she’d say, pointing at peeling paint on a mural. “It is very technical term, this ‘flaking.’” Her own English vocabulary was full of erratically rich words: she identified some chubby painted figures in a mural as “auspicious fairies with the robust bodies.” Confusing my suppressed grin for puzzlement, she said, “Do you know this word robust? R-o-b-u-s-t?”
Of the 1,000 original caves honeycombed into conglomerate rock, only 492 remain. The rest were ruined by earthquakes. Like buildings at MIT, each grotto is identified by a number, and the digits marked on the doors collectively give the caves the look of a trendy apartment complex for the spiritually inclined. Many had been raided by explorers like Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein, who in the early twentieth century pilfered priceless manuscripts, hacked off bits of murals, and stole (or cheaply bought) religious sculptures from the grottoes in the name of archaeological preservation. These men were knighted for their thievery, which relocated many of the caves’ more portable treasures to museums throughout Europe, a state of affairs that still has the Chinese justifiably apoplectic: the Dunhuang Research Academy’s otherwise neutral book on the grottoes calls Stein and his ilk “despicable treasure hunters.” Fortunately the sheer size of the contents of Cave 96 safeguarded it against plundering: the third-largest stone Buddha in the world sits inside, tall as a space shuttle. The sculpture gave off the stillness of a mountain as Chinese tourists elbowed closer to get a better look.
I thought about how the original Buddha (Sanskrit for “awakened one”) never wanted to be gawked at like this. In his lifetime Siddhartha Gautama protested against all forms of iconic representation, worried it would make him seem more divine than human. He wasn’t a god but a man, he insisted, and what he taught wasn’t a religion but a practical field guide to awakening. In the centuries after his death people respected the Buddha’s wishes and depicted him only obliquely, through an empty throne or a footprint on a road. Only starting in the first century C.E. did more anthropomorphic representations come into fashion, the kinds of elaborate frescoes and sculptures that populated these grottoes. “When you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha,” said Philippe as we looked at the statue, or tried to look at it through the jostling crowd. “As the Zen saying goes,” he quickly clarified, lest we ascribed to him any more literal destructive tendencies.
But where to begin? They were everywhere, whole battalions of them meditating on cave walls, proof that the Silk Road once trafficked in Buddhism as much as trade goods. At first glance, most of the grottoes looked sooty and bleak, yet the beam of Mrs. Chan’s flashlight unfailingly revealed them as full of zest and life and colour. I wondered if all darkness concealed a similar complexity, such as the look on Mrs. Chan’s face when she pointed her umbrella tip at some bodhisattvas whose faces were gouged out. “By the Muslims,” she pronounced soberly, for Islam had supplanted Buddhism along western China’s Silk Road by the eleventh century, meaning iconography was condemned—a somewhat perverse reversion to the Buddha’s original decree against divine portrayal. Some of the defaced paintings were of holy men, others of wealthy patrons who’d subsidized the shrines’ construction, and I found it oddly fitting that no distinctions were made in their destruction, that none were spared for their saintliness or wealth or nobility.
Even more of this troglodytic heritage would’ve been lost if some wise monks a thousand years ago hadn’t sealed up a chamber in one of the caves containing a library of tens of thousands of Buddhist manuscripts, which was only rediscovered in 1900. The grottoes also survived China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a brand of mass hysteria instigated in 1966 by Chairman Mao Zedong to eradicate the “Four Olds” in China: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. As many as two million people died across communist China in a decade of chaos and upheaval, during which gangs of students known as Red Guards ran the schools and forced teachers to labour in factories and fields. Education, science, and art were widely condemned as “intellectual” and “bourgeois.” Monasteries, temples, books, and works of art were systematically demolished across the country, although Zhou Enlai—the first premier of the People’s Republic of China and mastermind behind the road-building project that provoked the Aksai Chin dispute—personally interfered to protect the Mogao Caves from the Red Guards.
Mrs. Chan didn’t mention any of this, possibly because she was too young to have experienced the collective insanity that convulsed through her country under Mao, but also, no doubt, because China isn’t exactly forthright about acknowledging its past. The Communist Party of China, which still holds power in the country, admitted in a resolution in 1981 that the Cultural Revolution was a “comprehensive, long-drawn-out and grave blunder.” But this same resolution goes on to stress that “our achievements in the past thirty-two years are the main thing. It would be a no less serious error to overlook or deny our achievements.” Among them, of course, was the “peaceful
liberation” of Tibet.
Mrs. Chan snapped her umbrella closed, as though the storm she’d been waiting for had passed. The tour was over. We shuffled into the bright heat and Philippe folded himself into another taxi. As we drove back to Dunhuang I couldn’t stop thinking about the caves, which seemed seared on my inner eyelids, for I saw a thousand buddhas every time I blinked.
At the guest house a heartening message awaited: the train company had located our bikes in Lanzhou, in China’s far east, and they were being shipped directly to Golmud. Mel, Philippe, and I packed our gear and took an overnight bus to meet them there.
The bus lurched past what smelled like a chemical factory and looked like a mine, the earth seeping with bright liquid sores. Even after dusk the heat was vicious, and I envied the man a few bunks ahead of me for being able to take off his shirt. His back was as pale and smooth as a teenager’s, but when he turned around I was shocked to see a face decades older, a rough pumice of wrinkles and scars. To my right a portly Chinese man cuddled with a woman half his girth and age. “Ah, young love,” Mel whispered when I pointed them out. Blame the chemicals in the air, or sleep deprivation from a bus whose coffin-size bunks and rollicking motion seemed engineered to keep passengers awake, but in any case, when we got off in Golmud, I left Mel’s helmet on the bus and only realized it after the bus drove away.
Pedalling the high passes of Tibet without a helmet wasn’t an option, so our first task in Golmud was searching for a replacement. Unfortunately, the only options we found were for motorcycles—hulking, full-face carapaces that weighed at least ten pounds and came with chin guards and tinted visors. Mel gamely agreed to wear one of these on the road to Lhasa, declining my offer to let her wear my own sweaty, filthy bike helmet. “This one is very robust,” she remarked from inside a cavernous motorcycle helmet. “Do you know this word? R-o-b-u-s-t?”
A kind young Chinese man in the shop gleaned that our two-wheelers weren’t motorized and escorted us, after several detours and dead ends, to a bona fide bicycle shop. Mel tried on an aerodynamic royal blue helmet and I wandered around the shop, admiring the crisp newness of everything: inner tubes, spare wheels, at least seven different styles of bike shorts. Then I saw a bulletin board in the corner that was covered in photos, several of which depicted cyclists fist-punching the air in front of the Potala Palace. “It’s very popular,” the shop owner remarked when he noticed what I was looking at. “Many, many Chinese people bike the Qinghai-Tibet highway.” The bikes in the photos flew bright red Chinese flags, and the cyclists wore helmets, dark glasses, and polyester face-masks, presumably for sun or dust protection. I couldn’t tell at a glance whether any given cyclist was female or male, young or old, Canadian or Chinese . . .
“Do you sell face masks and flags like these?” I asked, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.
I could hardly breathe through the polyester as Mel, Philippe, and I biked out of Golmud that evening, but I looked so anonymously Asian I didn’t mind. The road was quiet, with only the occasional transport truck to send our Chinese flags flapping. Sedimentary mountains tilted up from otherwise flat terrain. The late afternoon light was so intense it seemed like a hard fact in the air, the sort of thing I could hold on to and steady myself by. I’d need that kind of support with the first checkpoint of dozens on the way to Tibet just ahead, though we didn’t really have to worry, given we weren’t in the TAR yet.
Sure enough, the police paid us no mind as we biked under the raised guardrail. As we accelerated away I switched to a higher gear and my chain jammed behind the chain ring. I stopped just beyond the checkpoint to fix it, with Mel and Philippe keeping watch, but no amount of yanking would release the wedged links. I finally had to break them, remove the rear wheel, and wrench off the gears to get the chain free. Then I fixed it with a replacement link. In the process I bent a spoke and threw my rear wheel out of alignment, though I didn’t notice until the next day, when I could barely keep up with Mel and Philippe. I couldn’t figure out why: Was it the steady gain in altitude? Biking almost fifty miles after weeks off? Only when we stopped to camp and I wheeled my bike off the road did I realize the brakes were rubbing on my wheel.
We pitched our tent beside a river, under a bridge that carried the high-speed train to Lhasa. Built over permafrost at high altitudes, this railway was as controversial as it was complicated to engineer. A Chinese pop song lauds the Qinghai-Tibet railway as “an amazing road to heaven, carrying us to paradise,” and it seems clear to whom the “us” is referring: ethnic Han Chinese workers, who took the railway to China’s “wild west” in droves following its completion in 2006, depriving Tibetans of jobs and opportunities and further consolidating Chinese control over the TAR. Staring up at the tracks, I saw someone standing on them, waving his arms. I waved back. Shortly after, a dozen men in military camouflage showed up.
The Chinese soldiers hovered around us, inspecting our tents and bikes, and asked us questions in Mandarin we conveniently couldn’t understand. When one of them made a call on a hand-held radio, it seemed obvious that trouble was on the way. Despite the sick feeling in my stomach I went on fixing my wheel. Half an hour later another military man in uniform showed up, and judging from his fancier camouflage and decorated lapels, he was some kind of officer or commander.
“Hello! Welcome to China!” he said in flawless English. He proceeded to explain, very apologetically, that we were camped on military grounds that were somehow related, from what I could gather, to the train tracks. “I’m afraid we must request that you move at least a half a mile up the road.”
Not a problem, we reassured him, feeling intensely relieved.
“I wish you all a good journey,” he continued warmly. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
I considered asking for Alien Travel Permits but decided that would be unwise. For all he knew, we planned to turn off the Qinghai-Tibet highway long before the TAR. So far, our ride was perfectly legal.
After the soldiers left, we biked farther up the road and pitched our tents at a Buddhist temple with the permission of the caretaker, an elfin Chinese man no taller than my shoulders. His smile matched the upswing curves of the pagoda when Philippe got out his monk’s rakusu, a vest-like garment indicating his lay ordination in the Zen Buddhist tradition. Across the valley a giant yellow bulldozer energetically stripped away the slopes of a mountain, work that I assumed would stop by dusk, but as darkness fell the spotlights came on. When I peeked out of the tent that night I saw freshly scraped mountain slopes glowing white as teeth, and the sputtering and drilling of heavy machinery continued through dawn. I woke up with a headache and blamed the altitude.
In truth we weren’t very high yet. Only a couple days later did we crest the first of a dozen passes across the Tibetan Plateau, the road rising through mountains whose dirty glaciers looked like ice sifted with cinnamon. I spent most of the climb fantasizing about freshly baked cinnamon buns. At the top of the pass Mel dug through her panniers and pulled out a box of stale chocolate-filled buns instead. But when we bit into them, there was no chocolate, just a hole where the chocolate should’ve been. It was almost like a homecoming.
“The number one ingredient in packaged food in China?” said Mel. “LIES.”
“The number two?” I said between bites of unbearable sweetness. “SUGAR.”
Given that the Chinese energy bar we ate next listed “loosening” and “meat flavouring” on the label, we sure hoped lies and sugar were the primary ingredients, though the latter would mean I’d finish this Silk Road with nine cavities for souvenirs. We offered some snacks to Philippe, who politely declined, preferring instead to preserve his smile. By now he’d decided not to risk the ride to Lhasa. Instead, he would head toward Yushu, a part of the plateau that was ethnically Tibetan but beyond the TAR, meaning he didn’t need a permit and guide or stealth tactics to travel there.
Mel and I were sorry to see the Swiss lay monk go, especially when the quiet gravel side
road he turned down looked far more appealing than the paved highway we faced, edged by enormous powerlines that made the sound of knuckles cracking. To reach Nepal before our Chinese tourist visas expired, Mel and I needed to cover fifty miles a day on this road, across relentlessly high altitudes, into fierce headwinds, wearing face masks, dodging the law, for twenty-one more days. No time off, no room for error, and no resupplies—not because grocery stores and restaurants weren’t widely available in eastern Tibet, but because we didn’t dare stop for fear of getting caught. For the same reason we concealed our camp each night, which wasn’t easy in a land of huge horizons.
At least biking in stealth mode became less suffocating once we cut breathing holes into our face masks. Whether we smiled or rode along with our mouths open, breathing hard, the mask gave us each a leering rictus, which seemed an appropriate greeting for Chinese police cruisers. At first I panicked at the sight of those gleaming white SUVs with red lights on the roofs, but none slowed to stare as they passed: we blended in with the sundry Chinese cyclists on this road, though to my eyes our distinctions were obvious. For one, their bikes usually had only two panniers, compared to our four, because they were able to eat at restaurants and sleep at guest houses along the way. They also tended to pedal in an extremely high gear at a hard grind, compared to our speedy twirling in a lower gear. And despite this being a paved highway, the Chinese cyclists all rode mountain bikes with at least front, if not dual, suspension. The sole exception we saw was a forty-something mother from Beijing, who rode a folding bike with a few piddly gears. Somehow she managed to keep pace with her teenage son, who rode a mountain bike, at least for the hour or so Mel and I rode alongside them at their invitation. They’d wanted to practise their English, which they knew we spoke from the moment we said “Ni hao!” to them with an obvious accent. But if these Chinese cyclists were aware that we shouldn’t have been on that road without a guide, they kindly didn’t say so.
