The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  Not all Han travel to Tibet because it feels like going on holiday in a foreign country. A small but increasing number visit as part of a gentle spiritual awakening. Tibet may be a less devout place than before, but everyday life remains a world apart from the relentless drive for riches which characterises day-to-day existence for most people in Han China. For a minority of Chinese, it is a place to search for a deeper meaning and understanding. Some seek out monks for guidance; most simply wander Lhasa hoping to absorb an intangible energy, reaching blindly to the gods from the roof of the world.

  Repressed during the first forty-odd years of CCP rule, the pent-up entrepreneurial instincts of the Chinese were unleashed in 1992 by Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong’s successor, with his much quoted, and likely apocryphal, statement that ‘to get rich is glorious’. Yet as more people achieve the status symbols desired by all – an apartment and a car, the cash to travel overseas – so a minority are beginning to wonder if there is more to life than what the Chinese press routinely describes as ‘money worship’.

  Many who don’t challenge the prevailing orthodoxy still acknowledge that it is flawed, an unnatural philosophy that is no guarantee of happiness. In Beijing, I liked to tease one particularly avaricious friend by asking her if westerners seemed more content than the Chinese, even though most of us drive cars, fly abroad every year and earn far higher salaries. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I still want what you have.’

  Growing prosperity is now being accompanied by a slow revival of interest in religion, both formal and informal. Accurate statistics are impossible to come by, but it is probable there are more Christians in China than there are members of the CCP. Another 20–25 million people follow Islam. It is Buddhism, though, that remains the most popular faith, with some 400 million Chinese claiming to subscribe to it.

  Their interpretation of prayer and meditation lacks the conviction which characterises Tibetan Buddhism, the unshakeable belief that inspires someone to set off on a year-long pilgrimage to Lhasa from a remote village, prostrating every inch of the way. Temples across China are increasingly busy, but the worshippers are nearly always praying for success: for better grades, for more money, or to find a partner.

  For the CCP, though, even that mild form of devotion is dubious, a deviation from the credo that the party is as much a faith as any religion. Mao himself was revered almost as a god, just as the Dalai Lama is in Tibet, and was portrayed in official propaganda as a messiah. In his hometown of Changsha in Hunan Province, there is a huge portrait of Mao depicting bolts of light emanating from his head, as if he was responsible for creation itself.

  In retrospect, the mere fact that the Dalai Lama is so venerated ensured that Mao would never have allowed him to remain in the Potala Palace, even if the Khampa hadn’t rebelled and given the Chinese an excuse to drive him into exile. He was too much competition for the Chairman, a reminder that Mao was just a proletarian version of the emperors who came before him.

  Now the Dalai Lama travels the world from his base in Dharamsala. Greeted with sympathy and respect wherever he goes, he is unable to find any government willing to stand up to Beijing and press for his return. He is certainly the last undisputed Dalai Lama. Should he nominate anyone from inside Tibet or the borderlands as his reincarnation, they will suffer the same fate as the six-year-old boy he picked to be the next Panchen Lama and disappear without trace.

  Beijing has already said it will be involved in the choice of the next Dalai Lama. That raises the distinctly surreal prospect of the CCP, an avowedly atheist organisation, deciding who will be the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama has hinted that his successor will come from the exile community in India, leaving Tibetans with a foreign-born leader who has never lived in the country he will be expected to guide.

  Inevitably, that will reduce the Dalai Lama’s standing and push Tibet further into the embrace of Han China. Lhasa is already a city drifting rudderless, caught between its past and present, the stark choice between the emptying monasteries and the enticing new apartment complexes rising towards the vast sky. With no definable border between the old town and the far bigger Chinese city that surrounds it, wandering Lhasa is a schizophrenic experience. Walk too far in any direction from Barkhor Square and you enter a high-plateau imitation of inland China, where karaoke clubs and Sichuan restaurants take the place of temples.

  Even much of the old town feels ersatz, despite the numerous pilgrims. It is sanitised and pacified, Tibet transformed into a theme park. It didn’t take me long to realise I needed to escape the well-trodden tourist trail if I was to find a more authentic Lhasa, one not mummified like the Potala Palace, or slowly being enveloped by the same materialist vision that governs the rest of China.

  10

  A Night at the Nangma

  I started to haunt the teahouses down grubby alleys in the old town, lanes whose entrances were guarded at night by Wu Jing checking the identity cards of young Tibetan men. Away from Barkhor Square, the old town is a collection of small shops and houses which lack basic amenities. The alleys are strewn with the detritus of day-to-day life: discarded food from the markets, paper and plastic packaging, while the stench of the public toilets, despite the incense sticks planted in them to disguise their odour, hangs in the air.

  Exclusively Tibetan, the teahouses are all much the same. Customers sit on long benches covered in cushions compressed nearly flat from long use and drink yak-butter tea, Lhasa beer or chang, the cloudy, cider-like alcohol native to Tibet. Local pop videos play in the background, as well as Bollywood movies, in which singers in traditional clothes wander across the grasslands crooning wistful love songs.

  Singling out the teahouses was part of my ambitious, perhaps hopelessly optimistic, mission to rummage deeper into Lhasa life. The Tibet I was seeking – a place that is neither the Shangri-La touted by naive foreigners nor the backward region the Chinese stress it was until their arrival – remained elusive. So too did any specific sense of what ordinary Tibetans think about the way their country is changing.

  Dispelling a lingering anxiety that my compassion for China’s ethnic groups did not extend to the Tibetans was another motivation. Elsewhere in China, I felt a perhaps unjustified sense of solidarity with the minorities, something I put down to my mixed ancestry. As a Londoner with roots in the UK and central Europe, I like to assume that my first-hand knowledge of how ethnicity impinges on our views of nationality has resulted in an empathy with those who live at the edges of countries.

  When it came to individual Tibetans, though, I struggled to evoke the sympathy that seemed to come naturally with the other ethnic groups. It was an uncomfortable feeling, one that made me wonder if I had succumbed to the Han virus which differentiates between ‘good’ minorities and ‘bad’ ones, the modern-day version of the distinction between cooked and uncooked barbarians.

  My fear that I had hit an invisible minority ceiling stemmed back to 1988 and my first, unsatisfactory experiences with Tibetans in the Qinghai borderlands. I remember a mutual incomprehension in the villages I visited that went beyond the language barrier, one that gave way to active dislike as a man in a stinking chuba did his best to part me from my watch. I had been expecting to meet people lost in lofty contemplation of spiritual matters, not a black-toothed Amdo bandit.

  Subsequent encounters in Beijing and elsewhere were not fruitful either. It was only when I met Samphel in Litang that I found a Tibetan whom I could relax with. Yet even in western Sichuan the strutting nomads had brought back memories of the subdued hostility present in some of the villagers I met in 1988. In the borderlands especially, Tibetans can harbour an aggression that surprises those who believe they really are the Buddhist saints portrayed by pro-Tibet campaigners in the west. And while Tibetans are far more likely to pull knives on each other than on a foreigner, they will turn readily on the Han if they can get away with it.

  Separating Tibetans from the propaganda that smothers them, whether west
ern or Chinese, was one of my aspirations. But pushing aside the heavy, patterned blankets decorated with Buddhist symbols that shield the entrances to Lhasa’s teahouses did not admit me into a secret world where Tibetans spoke unguardedly. Instead, I was confronted with a passiveness completely at odds with the belligerence of the nomads of Kham and the people of Amdo. Resolving the contradiction between those two extremes was something I never managed to achieve during my time in Tibet.

  Conversation in the teahouses would come to an abrupt stop as every person inside turned to look at me. The teenage waitresses would giggle as I attempted to order in Tibetan and then everyone would smile at me. Unnerving as they were, those grins gave me unfulfilled hopes of meaningful contact. It was only later that Tenzin told me some Tibetans have a habit of smiling at random foreigners, and it doesn’t indicate a willingness to talk to them. After a few nights of drinking endless toasts of watery beer, I realised I was back where I started – still shut out from the Lhasa of the locals.

  Of course, my teahouse jaunts made me no better than the tourists I scorned for arriving in Lhasa with a preconceived picture of holy lamas and unworldly villagers. There is, though, something about Tibet which induces a delirious imagining in visitors; the unfamiliar sensation of living at altitude is perhaps to blame. Certainly, many people subscribe to visions of Tibet which bear little resemblance to the reality.

  Those hallucinations take bizarre forms, whether it is movie stars embracing the Dalai Lama as a role model, or the western women who date only Tibetan men. One British woman I knew in Beijing fantasised about sleeping with Tibetan monks, claiming they had both physical and spiritual qualities no other men could match. I used to think of her babbling about something she had never experienced, or was ever likely to, while I was prowling the alleys of Lhasa. It was reassuring; it made my search for the Tibet I thought was out there less fanciful.

  Romanticising the Tibetans is an understandable reaction to the colonisation of their country. The empty Potala Palace and the reduction of once great monasteries to simple tourist attractions, along with the Wu Jing presence in the old town, are just the most obvious signs of Han domination. The real pressure put on the Tibetans is mental: the constant efforts to separate them from their past; the constant reminders of their lack of freedom; the constant striving to impose alien values on a people who have nothing but their ancient beliefs.

  It is the monks, the people whose immersion in Buddhism is supposed to have instilled a benign acceptance of fate, who remain the most willing to protest against what is happening in Tibet. From March 2011, lamas, as well as a few nuns and lay people, began setting themselves on fire in public. This desperate expression of dissent started as a rebellion by monks incensed at being confined to their monasteries like prisoners, and by their enforced participation in the ‘patriotic re-education’ programmes which are aimed at getting them to renounce their allegiance to the Dalai Lama.

  Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these self-immolations take place in Kham – in eastern Tibet and the western Sichuan borderlands – the traditional centres of Tibetan resistance. Unable to demonstrate their discontent publicly and increasingly isolated in a society they once dominated, some monks convey both their anger and sheer lack of hope by turning that rage on themselves – dousing their robes in petrol, clicking a lighter and waiting for the flames to consume them.

  Beijing reacted to the fiery suicides in predictable fashion, branding them criminal acts and accusing the Dalai Lama of inciting them. In 1954, he had walked side by side with Mao in Beijing and was treated with, if not deference, then respect. Now, according to CCP propaganda, whose language remains rooted in the Cultural Revolution era when it comes to Tibet, he is a ‘jackal in Buddhist monk robes’ and responsible for inspiring all opposition to Han rule in Tibet and the autonomous prefectures.

  In turn, the Dalai Lama responded by pointing to the repression of the monks. He talked of how virtual martial law in Tibet and the borderlands was pushing some Tibetans to increasingly extreme behaviour. Certainly, the self-immolations pulled me up sharply. If Tibetans are so muted by what is happening in their country that suicide is the only way to make a statement, then it was self-delusion on a grand scale for me to believe I could give them a voice.

  All China’s minorities lack outlets of expression. Even in the multi-cultural UK, the views of the ethnic British are heard less frequently than everyone else’s. In China, it is far worse. The minorities are absent from TV shows, movies, literature, popular discourse and are mostly excluded from politics. Now what little dialogue that takes place in Tibet between the locals and the Han is being replaced by death. And despite my ambivalence towards Tibetans, that left me both depressed and unsure of what I was really doing here.

  Yet, not knowing what else to do, I continued my nocturnal rambling through the old town. One evening, I came across a bar called 798, the name of Beijing’s hip art district. It was owned by a Tibetan and his girlfriend, a folk singer from Liaoning Province in the north-east. She was quick to tell me she was Manchu, although she didn’t look it and I didn’t believe her. It was possible she was trying to make life easier for her boyfriend by claiming to be a minority, because mixed Tibetan and Chinese couples are a very rare sight in Lhasa and can provoke a violent reaction from the locals.

  Later, I came to think that she was just trying to distinguish herself from the other young, middle-class Han who move to Tibet as supplicants in search of something they struggle to articulate themselves. Known as zang piao, literally ‘Tibet drifter’, they are a vanguard – people who have taken the decision to step off the path that leads from school to university and then on to a high-paying job, the dream all Chinese parents have for their children.

  Zang piao can be found running cafés in the old town, buying jewellery to sell in the cities they come from or working as singers and artists; creative Chinese have been travelling to Tibet in search of inspiration since the early 1980s. They are very different from the hundreds of millions of young Han who leave their homes in the countryside for jobs in factories and on building sites, or to work as security guards, waitresses and cleaners. If they come to Tibet, it is to open a tiny restaurant or shop because there is less competition there than in their home provinces.

  Their more fortunate counterparts are drawn to Tibet not by economic prospects but by its reputation as an unsullied paradise, one where people don’t follow the same tenets as those of the Han, or anyone else. In many ways, the zang piao are similar to the westerners who idealise Tibet. Like them, they believe that Tibetans hold the key to a door that is locked for everyone else.

  The customers at 798 were much more talkative than the people in the teahouses. ‘We don’t see many foreigners in here any more,’ one said to me. ‘There used to be more foreign tourists than Chinese in Lhasa, but in the last few years it’s been the other way around.’ His name was Pemba, and he was a teacher who had grown up in the old town. Now his parents rented out their house there and the family lived in a modern apartment in the west of Lhasa, a move increasingly made by Tibetans who can afford it.

  ‘Rent for shops and bars in the old town is very high now, because there are so many Han tourists. It’s a good thing to own a house here now,’ noted Pemba. But although he lived elsewhere, he still socialised in the old town. ‘I have to, because all the other parts of Lhasa are like a Chinese city. This is the only place where you’ll find Tibetan culture. We say Lhasa is divided into the old town and new town, like two different countries really.’

  But 798 could have been a bar in any Chinese city, save for the Tibetan clientele and the prayer flags adorning the walls. And Pemba and his friends were graduates, who had travelled and studied in eastern China. They spoke fluent Mandarin and, for all their talk of the way Lhasa is changing, none appeared particularly upset by the Han influx into their country. Perhaps when they spoke among themselves they got angry, but their fatalism in public reminded me of the passive pat
rons of the teahouses.

  I asked them where ordinary Tibetans went for a night out, apart from backstreet teahouses. ‘Well, there’s always the nangma,’ one said with an expression that was half grin and half grimace. They told me nangma are nightclubs, named after a classical Tibetan dance. Pemba looked down on them as unworthy. ‘I hardly ever go. I feel sad when I do, seeing young Tibetans getting so drunk. You know nangma were originally performances for high lamas? They used to be much more traditional. Now it’s just about drinking, dancing and sometimes fighting.’

  His perception of the nangma is typical among educated Tibetans. When I told Tenzin I had visited one, he was shocked and immediately asked me if there had been any trouble. It is as if they have become a codeword for the way Tibetan society is being disconnected from its roots. They sounded less alarming to me, more like an outlet for the general unruliness of country Tibetans.

  Pemba wouldn’t go with me to a nangma, but he did tell me where to find a popular one. It was outside the old town, up a long, steep flight of stairs at the top of which two bouncers in black jackets waited. As a foreigner, I was deemed safe and so not frisked for a knife. Inside, it looked like a scruffier version of a provincial Chinese nightclub, except that there was no dance floor. In its place was a stage lit by coloured neon lights opposite which were tables and behind them more comfortable booths.

  A waitress showed me to a table towards the back. I was the oldest person present by some distance and the only one who wasn’t Tibetan. Like in any Chinese club, alcohol was ordered in bulk: beers came in groups of six or you could get a bottle of whisky or wine. I was allowed to get away with asking for a single beer. Bottles covered most of the tables and a few people were already slumped head down in their chairs, or sprawled out in a booth. But not everyone was drinking alcohol; cartons of orange juice seemed to be a popular choice as well.