Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Over the previous two weeks I’d adjusted to the Chinese penchant for spitting and throwing sunflower seeds on the floor, but I couldn’t tolerate the smoking. One in every three cigarettes smoked in the world is smoked in China, with one person dying every thirty seconds from tobacco use. I was sure I’d be next. For that reason alone, travelling in hard-sleeper was now out of the question. The air was a cancerous blue, and men with gold teeth strolled around in singlets and flip-flops presenting with what appeared to be stage-four emphysema. Soft-sleeper was marginally better as smokers usually gathered in the vestibules, but, like our neighbour, a number of them hid in their berths with the door locked. I hadn’t given it much thought, but I now realised that in a country with one of the worst pollution levels in the world, it probably made no difference whether or not people smoked, given that the day was spent inhaling noxious levels of particulate matter. By contrast, a packet of Panda ciggies was quite the treat.

  With a surgeon’s mask in place, my asthmatic lungs and I found a seat in the corridor and looked out at this new earth – the rest of the world as I remembered it had fallen away. But for a few breaths of cloud, the sky sang arias of joy, lakes shimmered like molten metal and Tibetan antelope sprang in and out of sight. The higher we climbed, the more dreadlocked yaks lumbered into view, nibbling at tufts of grass or tethered by nomad tents strung with rainbow-coloured prayer flags. Higher and higher still, the yaks faded away and mountains sharpened by ice closed in around the train as it pushed into places no railway was ever meant to go. Opened in 2006, the Qinghai railway from Xining to Lhasa was considered a feat of engineering impossibility. Passing through earthquake zones, the highest railway in the world peaked at 5,072 metres above sea level at the Tanggula Pass, and contained more than 300 miles of elevated track built on permafrost that could melt at the slightest increase in temperature. In a region where temperatures ranged from -35°C in winter to 30°C in summer, engineers had circulated liquid nitrogen below the rail bed to keep it frozen throughout the year. Magic though this was in terms of pioneering technology, the new railway had posed an ecological threat to natural reserves and endangered species such as snow leopards. It was received with dismay by most Tibetans, who saw the railway as nothing more than a means by which Han Chinese – the largest ethnic group in mainland China – could pour in with renewed vigour, and continue to colonise their home, while others living close to the proposed stations were cheered by the business and employment prospects for their towns. At the time the Qinghai railway was announced the then president of China, Jiang Zemin, declared: ‘We must absolutely not allow separation of Tibet from the motherland and must absolutely not continue seeing Tibet remain backward.’

  For all the border controls and efforts to police the region, writers have always managed to worm their way into Lhasa and document everything from the colour of the skies and the sound of monks at prayer, to taking tea with the Dalai Lama. But in recent and turbulent times, the shifting of borders and people – and with them their stories – meant that from one day to the next, Tibet’s soil kept turning into fertile new territory for exploration. At this moment, the only thing I was interested in exploring was the underneath of my duvet. My temples had tightened, and mindful of Yuhan’s warning that if I fell asleep I might slip into a coma, I fell asleep, waking more than two hours later as we descended into the Lhasa Valley, having missed the best views of the journey. Soft suede mountains had moved into the foreground, and the clusters of tents had turned into stretches of grey concrete houses, each with a red Chinese flag in the front yard – a sinister omen. As the train approached the Tibetan capital, Marc stood at the window, his eyes widening as a Mitsubishi garage and a Buick showroom sailed past on a street lined with a parade of Chinese flags. A shadow cloaked our carriage as we drew into Lhasa station, and passengers began to gather their bags at the doorway. The wind whispered in our ears as we breathed in air as sharp as shards of glass, and looked around the station. Police with rifles wandered around as though a terrorist attack were imminent, and military guarded the exits, scanning bags and diverting passengers for searches. No one smiled and I already felt like I’d done something wrong. We were the only foreign tourists on the train and were ushered into a police station to have our permits stamped before being waved off to meet our Tibetan guide, who stood at the end of the path waiting with a sign saying ‘Welcome US guests’.

  There are certain faces that are so imbued with goodness that it’s impossible to look away. Warmed by the kindness of their thoughts and lined by moments of mischief and laughter, those faces compel the beholder to come closer and to trust. Jhampa had such a face. Alert and amused, his eyes lay within soft folds and his smile carved dimples into his cheeks, revealing one overlapping tooth. Jhampa wore a hoodie and a baseball cap and carried three white khatas – ceremonial scarves – that he held on upturned palms before placing each around our necks in welcome. Thrusting bottles of water into our hands, he gestured to his car: ‘Come, let’s go to your hotel and make sure you keep yourselves hydrated.’

  Jem sat in front chattering away with Jhampa while Marc and I sat in the back, muted by the sight of Calvin Klein, Siemens, and fake Apple stores lining the streets. Posters of President Xi Jinping and Chairman Mao appeared on every other corner, and a billboard stretched over two lanes of traffic with a tacky tourist-board painting of the mountains that read: ‘Welcome to prosperous, harmonious, legal, civilized and beautiful socialist new Tibet.’

  We drove on in silence, not wanting to look at one another. At the traffic lights, boxed in by taxis, motor scooters, a brand new Audi A3 and a Porsche Cayenne with blacked-out windows, I looked from the ‘China Post Office’ to a ‘Bank of China’ ATM, next to which a young woman wearing New Balance trainers was buying a drink from a Coca-Cola vending machine, gripping a smartphone between ear and shoulder. Jem would have no problem replacing his trainers. A recurring roadside advert featured a whitewashed Chinese woman with one of her eyelids annotated. Two pairs of eyes showed the before and after images of an eye-lifting procedure to make the lids less hooded and slanting. Overhead, the road sign pointed to Central Beijing Road and East Beijing Road. As we approached the Gang Gyan Hotel, an old Tibetan lady shuffled along the pavement, her purple-ribboned hair divided into two plaits, and tied together at the bottom. She wore an ankle-length skirt and a multicoloured apron, her walnut cheeks a wind-burnt red. She looked completely out of place.

  The altitude sickness was proving hard to shake off. I’d woken in our hotel room in the middle of the night with my head clamped back in the vice and had to call for room service who had delivered a standard order of water and a canister of oxygen. In the morning, Jhampa arrived with an antidote to the sickness, producing a box of tiny vials containing a burgundy tincture called Rhodiola rosea. Sitting on the bed with the vials laid out, the three of us stared at what looked like a pile of blood samples and wondered who should go first. After a quick Google search, we learnt that the herb was used to improve cognitive function and fatigue, and having readily ingested far worse in the past, we poked in straws and sucked up the liquid, which tasted like rose-flavoured tea. Grabbing a handful of the vials for my pocket, we set off for a day of sightseeing, buoyed by the herbs, or at least a much-needed placebo.

  Our first visit was to the Potala Palace, the home of the exiled Dalai Lama. Sitting atop the Red Mountain and overlooking the Lhasa Valley, the palace was visible from all over the city – one of the few reminders of where we really were. Like rows of fallen dominoes, two sets of stairs zigzagged up a fortress of whitewashed walls and wooden windows. This section of the palace was government-owned, while the red and yellow complex rising from behind belonged to the monastery. The beating heart of Tibetan Buddhism, the palace was a place of pilgrimage for Tibetans, particularly nomads, who could be seen prostrating themselves on the pavement. Wearing what looked like old oven gloves, they raised their arms in the air before falling to their knees and stretching towards
the palace with a sweeping motion. Most pilgrims arrived wearing knee pads. Looking up at the palace, I relaxed. This was more like it. This was Tibet. With the exception of the Chinese flag that poked out of the top like a tiny middle finger.

  During the military-grade scan to enter the palace, I noticed a bucket of confiscated cigarette lighters, which was no doubt to prevent Chinese tour groups from smoking around the palace, though the cynic in me wondered if it was to avoid spontaneous acts of self-immolation. In 2012, two Tibetans had set themselves on fire outside the Jokhang Temple in the centre of town, where monks had previously taken part in anti-Chinese riots, and the Chinese government had ramped up security to ensure it didn’t happen again, turning Lhasa into an Orwellian nightmare of CCTV, road blockades and pop-up police stations. Even inside the palace courtyard, Chinese guards wearing orange, flame-retardant jumpsuits and heavy boots shoved their way through crowds, snapping at anyone pausing for too long at the shrines. As we took the stairs at a geriatric pace, elderly Tibetans speeding past with grandchildren on their backs, I asked Jhampa why the flame-proof guards were around.

  ‘Too many candles,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Candles?’ Marc replied, roaring with laughter. ‘These monks have been lighting candles for hundreds of years and never needed Fireman Chan on standby.’

  Travelling with Jhampa as our guide was a treat, but it presented similar problems to those we’d faced in North Korea. The difference here was that Jhampa knew what we wanted to ask, and we knew what he couldn’t tell. He needed to keep his job and we didn’t want to get him into trouble, but we still had four days to extract what we could.

  Climbing the stairs was proving a task for Jem, whose altitude sickness was manifesting itself by paralysing him from the waist down, whereas mine focused on the neck up. Yogic Marc, on the other hand, was bounding ahead and looking back at the pair of us with the patience of a dog off its leash. Citing ‘years of rugby’ that had given him ‘too much muscle’ in his thighs, Jem was picking each leg up the steps and struggling to breathe. Fishing out my inhaler, I handed it to him and suggested he have a puff to ease his breathing. He looked at the Ventolin with suspicion, as the three of us crowded around, as though watching him drop his first E.

  ‘Go on man, try it,’ Marc urged.

  Jem frowned. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Honestly, it will be fine,’ I promised, ‘it can’t make you feel much worse.’

  That’s where I was wrong. After taking two puffs, he spent the next hour not only unable to walk, but riddled with palpitations and panic.

  Once inside the palace, Jhampa took us directly to the main room, which housed the Dalai Lama’s throne. Propped up by red pillars carved with peacocks, trees and roses, the room was packed with loud Chinese tourists in anoraks jostling to see the throne, and throwing white khatas in its direction. The throne itself was almost invisible under the scarves, which had collected like piles of old laundry. Threads of smoke curled off crumbling sticks of incense and I stood back against the wall, breathing in their calm and waiting for the crowd to move along. Two crinkled monks in robes were sitting to the side and watching a video on a gold iPhone, giggling like schoolboys, before one of them saw me staring and began asking Jhampa about me. He gestured for me to come over to the monk who clasped my hands and began talking in rapid Tibetan. Jhampa translated: ‘He has been guarding the Dalai Lama’s room since 1991 and is delighted to see you here because you are Indian. Tibetans are grateful to India for keeping his Holiness safe.’ The monk continued to smile and natter in a way that made me want to both hug him and weep on him, when Marc and Jem came over to see what was going on.

  ‘I’m half Indian,’ Marc said. ‘That must count.’

  ‘And I could be Indian,’ Jem added.

  Seeing that there were more of us, the monk handed his iPhone to his friend and signalled for us to wait. We watched as he waded through the scarves and climbed up to the Dalai Lama’s throne, retrieving three golden silk scarves from the seat. He came back and knotted one around each of our necks. His eyes moistened and I stared at the cloudiness of his cataracts as he talked at us, then squeezed our hands again. Jhampa said: ‘He is very touched that you have come so far to see Tibet. And he would like you to take these scarves back to your home as a blessing and to remember his Holiness.’

  I stroked the scarf and thanked the monk before striding off to sniffle in peace. For the next two hours, we wandered around the palace, peeking into tea rooms, the Dalai Lama’s bedroom, and marvelling at the tombs where the previous seven Dalai Lamas were all mummified. Jhampa explained that the current (14th) Dalai Lama would have to decide with the support of UNESCO and the exiled government if he could also be laid to rest here, though it was unlikely that China would allow the creation of such a site of pilgrimage. Copying the other visitors, I had been taking care not to step on the threshold every time we entered a new room, until Jhampa whispered that it was a Chinese superstition, not a Tibetan one, and I immediately stopped. Even the smallest gesture of defiance felt worthwhile.

  ‘Do you reckon they give these scarves out to loads of tourists?’ Marc asked, as we left the throne room, but over the next two hours, not once did we see anyone wearing a golden scarf.

  Owing to its position and its rich, natural resources, Tibet’s history is pitted with battle scars, but in 1950 events took a turn for the worst when China led a full-scale military assault on the region, coercing its leaders into signing a treaty that resulted in military occupation. In 1959, a major uprising against the Chinese led to thousands of Tibetan deaths – an incident that China’s government denies – and forced Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, to flee the Potala Palace and seek sanctuary in Dharamsala in India, with more than 80,000 Tibetans following at his heels. China’s Cultural Revolution unfolded in the mid-1960s, driving the desecration of almost all of Tibet’s monasteries, destroying libraries and paintings. Han Chinese swarmed into Tibet under the guise of developing the region, moving swiftly to mine its wealth of copper, gold and silver, with no concern for the pollution and devastation wrought across the land. Anti-government protests and self-immolations by monks, nuns and local Tibetans led to the Chinese pushing a ‘patriotic education’ programme, which forced all Tibetans to publicly denounce the Dalai Lama. Today, images of the Dalai Lama are banned and Tibetans undergo regular searches of their homes, where the discovery of any sign of His Holiness can lead to brutal punishment.

  The Chinese, however, see things rather differently. They argue that Tibet has never been an independent state and that the West has laboured under a misapprehension, romanticising the Buddhist culture and deliberately ignoring the fact that, until 1959, Tibet was operating under a feudal system with more than 95 per cent of the population living at the mercy of an elite 5 per cent, which comprised corrupt lamas and rich landowners who brutalised their subjects – though there is little evidence to support this claim. According to the Chinese government, the events of 1959 brought about the peaceful liberation of Tibet from its cruel overlords, and China has since set about modernising a backward society, pouring billions of dollars into the region, developing its infrastructure, building housing, pushing education, creating tourism, boosting GDP, and dramatically raising the standard of living for local Tibetans.

  After a quick stop for noodles, Jhampa took us to the Drepung monastery. Built into a rocky hillside and dating back to 1416, it is one of the last strongholds of Tibetan Buddhism, where monks continue to live a traditional lifestyle, praying, cleaning the monastery, schooling young monks and generally keeping to themselves. It had once housed more than 10,000 monks but now there were fewer than 500 in residence. The monks were preparing for the annual festival of Lhabab Duchen, celebrating Buddha’s descent from the heavens back to earth. It is a time when everything is given a new coat of paint, and they were slapping the walls, pathways, trees, and their own hair and robes with a mixture of paint and milk, causing the sun to ricochet off the white su
rfaces. A young monk, no more than ten years old, stomped past, the laces of his Nike trainers coming undone. I smiled at him and he scowled in return, glaring at the phone in my hand.

  ‘No!’ he barked, making a beeline for Jhampa. After a short exchange, the monk threw me a fierce look and disappeared through a wooden door.

  ‘He wanted to know how to say: “Don’t take pictures of me” in English,’ Jhampa said. ‘Reincarnation is important in Buddhism and some Tibetans believe that when you take a photograph it captures a little piece of their soul and traps it on earth after they die.’

  I didn’t blame the monk for being annoyed. Photography wasn’t allowed inside the Potala Palace but here the Chinese were out in force with their long-lens cameras and selfie sticks. It was impossible to turn a corner without finding some narcissist brandishing what looked like a broken-off wing mirror and grinning with the belief that an image of an ancient monastery was somehow enhanced by their face in the foreground. I didn’t understand the obsession with selfies. Were they taken as proof that you were really there? Was it for those suffering from amnesia, to remind them where they had been during the day? I rarely took photographs while travelling, other than to use as memory aids when writing, which normally included road signs, information on monuments or snippets from local papers and menus. These made for a dull set of holiday snaps, but I preferred to enjoy the moment for what it was. The last thing I wanted to look at when I returned home was my own face wincing in the wind, with a runny nose and a few angry monks in the background.