Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid

by J. Maarten Troost

  “Eighteen hundred,” said the vendor when I stopped to consider a prayer wheel. “Look. Gold. Turquoise. Inside very old holy parchment.” She opened it and pulled out a roll of paper with Tibetan writing. It had been browned and burned at the edges. “Very old. Very holy. How much?”

  We bargained, until finally I had a change of heart, concluding that the prayer wheel was unlikely to be either very old or very holy.

  “Four hundred,” she said, and chased after me. I considered until a passing pilgrim shook his head no. Very helpful, these Tibetans.

  Inside the Jokhang Temple, I encountered a Chinese man hawking and unleashing a huge glob of phlegm. “You see these Chinese,” said the monk who took my ticket, laughing. “No respect for Tibetan culture.”

  And still he laughed. A Chinese invader had just unleashed a loogie inside the most revered sight in Tibet, and the monk chuckled. Imagine Santa Claus in a maroon robe. Abandon the paunch. Lose the beard. The hair too. Give him a tan. And you have this monk. Unflappable. Mirthful. Always looking at the bright side.

  I asked him generally how things were.

  “It’s been very hard with the Chinese, though a little better recently. There’s been lots of international attention.”

  The Jokhang Temple is more than 1,400 years old, filled with chapels and chambers and statues of Buddha. Nearly all the statues are new. After the invasion, Chinese soldiers ransacked the temple. And then, some years later, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution trashed it some more and placed a banner on its walls underneath a portrait of Chairman Mao—Completely destroy the old world! We shall be the master of the new world!

  Today, the monks have returned to the temple. The Dalai Lama, however, has not. Inside, I found the Dalai Lama’s big yellow cushion throne, disheveled and empty, and as I made my way up to the rooftop terrace overlooking old Lhasa, where I absorbed a vista of mountains, pilgrims, and palaces, I thought what a shame it truly is that the Dalai Lama and thousands of other Tibetans could not return to this wondrous city in the sky. Like them, I too hoped one day to return to Lhasa.

  “Where are you going from here?” Cat, Lachlan’s girlfriend, asked me. I’d met the Australians at a restaurant for lunch.

  “I thought I’d head for the Gamden Monastery in eastern Tibet. It was destroyed by the Chinese, but I read that they’re rebuilding it. What about you?”

  Cat took a deep drag from her cigarette. “We’re planning on biking to Everest Base Camp.”

  “Biking as on a bicycle.”

  She nodded. “Should be a bit of an adventure.”

  “Aren’t some of the passes above 17,000 feet?”

  They nodded absentmindedly. Yeah, I thought, that’s going to end well.

  When the proprietor came to take our order, Lachlan remarked with typical Australian bluntness, “I come here for the toilets, mate. You have the best toilets in Lhasa.”

  The owner beamed. “I clean them myself. And I do all the cooking. You must have the yak.”

  “What’s not to like about Lhasa?” Cat observed.

  Yak fatigue, for one thing. The Tibetans, I discovered, are not vegetarians. It is difficult to be a vegetarian at this altitude. There is a need for protein. And so the Tibetans eat yak. And it’s good. I liked the yak. I’d gorged myself on yak. I had yak momos, simple dumplings filled with yak; I had yak filet; I even had Yak Bourgogne at a French-Tibetan fusion restaurant. Such things exist in Lhasa. But I’d had my fill. I thought of the yak carcasses dumped onto the sidewalk. And I thought of the chef scrubbing his toilets until they became the pride of Lhasa. And then I thought of one thing that could mar my stay in this beautiful region.

  “I’ll have the vegetarian curry,” I said.

  Later, I ran into the Australians near the Barkhor Square. Lhasa, authentic Lhasa, is small and I often bumped into the same travelers again and again—many of whom I’d also met in Dali. Perhaps it was the promise of some kind of high that lured backpackers to both places.

  “Did you guys get permits?” I asked them.

  “No,” Cat said.

  “Neither did I.”

  It was the bane of traveling in Tibet. There is the Lhasa permit. Then there is the permit for the Tibet beyond Lhasa. And then there are the permits needed to travel on certain roads. And the rules were always changing. Sometimes permits could be had, sometimes not. The Chinese government is very particular about what foreigners are allowed to see in Tibet, and for inexplicable reasons, I hadn’t been able to get a permit for the regions far beyond Lhasa. Perhaps something was happening elsewhere in Tibet. Of course, here we’d be the last to know; not since Hong Kong had I encountered a news source that hadn’t been filtered by a government censor.

  “We’ve decided to go anyway,” Lachlan said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Well, you’ll soon find out, I thought. The odds of four smokers biking up to 17,000 feet on a heavily policed road in a region where, technically, their very presence was a violation of national security laws were, I guessed, not particularly high. I wished them the best of luck.

  I, however, had changed my plans. Deprived of a permit for eastern Tibet, I would turn southward toward the monasteries in Gyantse and Shigatse. I had hired a driver, a friendly young man named Goba, who had an English vocabulary of about forty words, which he used to express less than enthusiastic opinions about the Chinese.

  “Lhasa no good,” he said as we sped past a billboard. The Developing Zone Is Very Promising. “In Lhasa, four Chinese. One Tibetan. No good.”

  To finish the thought, he took his hands off the steering wheel and made a grabbing gesture. “Chinese take. Take!”

  We made our way through the blighted sprawl of outer Lhasa, underneath the twinkling gaze of an enormous portrait of Deng Xiaoping. Soon, we were passed by an SUV ferrying police.

  “Chinese police. No good. Chinese no good. Shigatse. Two Chinese. One Tibetan. No good. Gyantse. Four Tibetan. One Chinese. Is okay.”

  We drove along a paved highway together with a few other trucks and SUVs. Soon, we had passed the last wispy trees and nearly all the traffic, and the landscape had become even more dry and ethereal, which I had not thought was possible. The mountains that surrounded us were more rugged and the highest among them had blinding snowpacks. The road itself was largely deserted except for the occasional solitary monk on pilgrimage. Up, hands to head. Pray. Hands to knees. Lie down. Up. Hands above head. Pray. Step forward. Repeat. It wasn’t the fastest mode of transport, but I suspected that was probably the point. I had never been anyplace more devout than Tibet. I sensed that people here lived in a different universe from the one I inhabited; it would never occur to me that my spiritual well-being might be enhanced by prostrating myself on a highway in the middle of nowhere. The only other people I’d encountered with a propensity for lying down on roads were Pacific Islanders on payday Fridays. Of course, they were drunk, having found bliss through the bottle. But the Tibetans were sober, and yet still they lay down on roadways.

  We followed the Yellow River, which flowed to our right in a blue, icy stream. Soon, Goba began to drive very fast, and I was beginning to regret stirring him up with the China talk. Then I considered. Hey, I’m paying for this. If we run over a monk doing his devotions, it’s going to seriously mess up my karma. So I asked him to ease up.

  He slowed to possibly twenty miles an hour. “Is okay?”

  Leadfoot, of course, couldn’t keep that up for long, and we flew along the highway until we stopped at a dusty road-stand, where Goba bought me a drink. It was a can of Red Bull, fuel of choice for drivers everywhere. We idled with some local truck drivers.

  One pointed at my drink. “Yak piss. Ha ha ha.”

  I nodded. “I hear it’s good for the heart.”

  Back in the car, Goba inserted a cassette into the tape deck. “Nepali-Tibetan. Okay?”

  It was a groovy trance beat overlaid with what appeared to be Tibetan chanting. Together with the Red B
ull, all that was missing were the Ecstasy tablets.

  “Have you been to Nepal?” I asked him. After all, it was just across the border, albeit a very high border, and if the Tibetans have an affinity for anyone, I figured, it would be the Nepalese. They are both mountain people and Buddhists. Indeed, in the seventh century, before the peace and love of Tibetan Buddhism had set in, the Tibetans had occupied Nepal.

  “No passport,” Goba said. “No Lhasa Tibetan with passport.”

  In the near distance was a snowcapped mountain that towered above 20,000 feet, and on its lower slopes rested a village with stony, terraced fields and fluttering prayer flags. They are everywhere in Tibet, long strings with colorful flags draped over mountainsides or hanging from masts like ships’ pendants.

  “Tibetan,” Goba said, pointing to the village. “Very beautiful.”

  How, I wondered, did these people manage to live here? True, there was a haunting, austere beauty to the land. There was something elemental in Tibet that I had not experienced before. The sky disappeared into an endless blue-black void; the mountains were venerable, and the land hard. Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen, but in Tibet I felt near to something profound and powerful. It did not leave me with soft and fuzzy feelings. Instead, I felt something very like awe, a deep, primordial awe.

  But few places could possibly be more inhospitable to human habitation than Tibet. There is, of course, the extreme altitude. But Tibetans have solved that problem by simply having stronger lungs than lowlanders. They’ve adapted and evolved, and now the average Tibetan has a far greater lung capacity than just about any other person on Earth. While I gasped at my first exposure to the altitude in Lhasa, my pedicab driver could merrily pedal and smoke without breaking a sweat. But still, there remained in Tibet a vast and challenging landscape that was ill-suited to human habitation. Little grows in such conditions. Tibet is essentially the final frontier of human civilization.

  We had come to a fork in the road. We could continue following the paved road that would eventually wind up on the doorstep of Mount Everest. Or we could follow a dirt track that, from what I could see, led into a valley of desolation. We took the dirt trail.

  Goba drove as if this was the Paris-Dakar road rally. But for once I didn’t mind; there’s something about off-road driving that brings out the inner twelve-year-old in every man. We passed through a small village of mud-brick houses and waving children, and then, over a small rise, we crossed the pass and entered a widening desert of stones. It was the strangest landscape, extraterrestrial. I’d been to a few remote corners of the world, but here, high up on the Tibetan Plateau, I felt like I’d taken leave of the planet. I was above 15,000 feet, higher than I’d ever been, but if there was one place on earth that I could compare it to, it would be one of the very lowest: Death Valley.

  Soon, we found ourselves back on a paved road, passing Tibetan farmers on donkey carts laden with wheat, one of the few things to grow in Tibet. But, apparently, they could grow watermelons here too. We paused to buy one from a boy on the side of the road.

  “Is good?” Goba inquired after he’d cut out a slice with his pocketknife.

  “Is good,” I replied. And also extremely small. I’d never beheld a watermelon the size of an orange. Considering the environment, however, it was a wonder that watermelons could be cultivated at all.

  Finally, we pulled into the small town of Gyantse, where I was dropped off at the gate of the Pelkor Chode Monastery. Built in the fifteenth century, the complex is awash in whites and pinks, and is notable for housing monks from different sects within Tibetan Buddhism. I could only imagine what their debates must be like. Inside, monks in maroon robes were chanting. Others were at the gong. And one was both chanting and gonging. The incense smelled strangely like cannabis, and I watched pilgrims depositing their yak butter, which smelled like popcorn. Hey, I thought, cannabis and popcorn. Now, there was a combination worth traveling up to 15,000 feet for.

  The monastery was renowned for its Kumbum stupa, a five-story octagonal pyramid with a golden dome containing 108 cavelike chapels with 10,000 painted images. It is the largest stupa in Tibet. I walked up and poked my head into the various chapels, which had all been decorated with Buddhist murals. From the top, there was an extraordinary view of the Dzong, a fourteenth-century fort that looms over the monastery, and the expansive, barren Nyang-chu Valley that stretched toward the mountains in the far distance. If you want to get away from it all, do a little meditating, Gyantse is a good place for it.

  Back in the courtyard, there were dozens of listless dogs. Or perhaps they were just meditating. The flies, however, were quite active, and so, too, were the child beggars. In fact, I had never been besieged by so many child beggars, and I had been besieged by countless child beggars in China. Soon, I had run out of small money, and they followed me to the waiting car and surrounded it, whereupon Goba gave them his small money. But still, they persisted. I couldn’t close the doors. And then Goba ran out, and yelled and threatened and made all sorts of scramlike motions.

  Sadly, I wouldn’t be staying in Gyantse. Despite the urchins, I found that in Gyantse it was possible to imagine the Tibet of yesteryear, its haunting austerity and those who regarded it as holy. On the road to Shigatse, Goba pointed to a mound of ruins on a hillside.

  “Old monastery,” he said. “Chinese. Boom, boom.”

  A few miles farther, there was another monastery that lay in ruins. “Boom, boom.”

  I counted three more monasteries that had gone boom boom. That was the grim reality of Tibet. True, there are more monasteries and monks today than even twenty years ago. But the sad fact remains that the Chinese have all but obliterated one of the world’s most unique cultures. In the years following China’s invasion of Tibet and continuing on into the Cultural Revolution, more than 6,000 monasteries were shelled into oblivion. All religious activity was banned. Land was confiscated. And China swallowed Tibet. And while a few monasteries have reopened, they operate under the strict control of the Communist Party. It is still illegal to carry even a photo of the Dalai Lama in Tibet. It is no wonder that, months later, Tibet would erupt as thousands of Tibetans took to the streets to protest Chinese rule, an act of defiance that, unsurprisingly, was crushed by Chinese troops.

  As we drove on through the valley, we passed hardy farmers separating wheat from chaff and dozens of donkey carts; in turn, we were passed by a military convoy. And then, around a bend, we were flagged down by the police and told to line up with several other cars. Goba was not happy. He was told to get out of the car, and I followed. We were instructed to go to the police SUV, which was surrounded by a half-dozen other Tibetan drivers who had also been pulled over. We huddled around the window. Inside were four officious-looking policemen. Goba handed them 300 yuan.

  “Why?” I asked back in the car.

  “Say speeding. But no speeding.”

  True, Goba had been speeding everywhere else in central Tibet, but he had not been speeding here. Indeed, as we had curved around the bend, we could not have been going more than thirty miles an hour.

  Goba gestured. “Police. Money.” And he demonstrated how they put it into their pocket. “Chinese no good.”

  We passed a People’s Liberation Army barracks on the outskirts of Shigatse, and as we entered the town itself, I was disheartened to find this home of the Panchen Lama and one of the great monasteries of Tibet had become just another unsightly urban sore in China. Shigatse is the second-largest town in Tibet after Lhasa and its traditional rival. And yet there was nothing here like the old town in Lhasa. It had been bulldozed in favor of a Han city of apartment blocks and electronics stores.

  Goba dropped me off at a seedy hotel near the monastery. He would stay elsewhere for the evening, and I went to check in only to find that the hotel was run by the police. I dropped my backpack off in a vile room and walked through town, trying to find something to recommend it. But I couldn’t. My opinion would rise—slightly—the follow
ing day, after I viewed the eighty-foot statue of Buddha inside the splendid Tashilumpo Monastery, but for now I was dismayed to find myself here. I’m in Tibet, I thought, the very distant rooftop of the world, and I’ve was in a fly-ridden Chinese restaurant pecking at a gloppy chop suey. But, I consoled myself, the restaurant did have yak milk. I took cautious sips of the bitter, buttery brew. Something this bad, I thought, could only be good for you.

  18

  I curse you, Dan Brown!

  This was my thought as I awoke, bleary-eyed, early on a frosty morning in Lhasa. I’d gone to the book exchange at the guesthouse the night before and rummaged through its quirky offerings. I left behind an exceptionally boring book about Shanghai—a real drudgery, makes-you-think-of-homework kind of book—and picked up Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, because when confronted by a forty-eight-hour train trip to Chengdu it’s good to have a fat, plot-intensive book. But it was just too tasty. Just one more chapter, I thought as the clock ticked past 2 A.M. It was only when the power failed at 3:30 in the morning and my room plunged into darkness that I finally set the book aside. But the damage had been done. I had little more than 100 pages left.

  Curses!

  “Do you need a taxi?” asked the Tibetan woman at the front desk.

  “Yes.”

  “I will help you.”

  Very kind, these Tibetans, I thought.

  “Forty yuan,” she informed me as I hopped into a taxi. And then the driver began a long, haranguing monologue.

  “Forty-two yuan,” she updated me.

  I agreed to the price, and soon I was barreling through the outskirts of Lhasa, crossing a bridge guarded by soldiers, speeding past a large military base where the People’s Liberation Army could be heard going through their morning drills as the Potala Palace shimmered in the near distance. Outside of China, it’s possible to believe that Tibet is simply a colorful province in a larger country. Inside Tibet, however, it can only be seen as a military occupation of a foreign land.