Lhasa Adventures

Although we still consider having our emotional and professional roots in South Louisiana as a creative team, we’ve shifted work emphasis to Asia recently. Then, pretty well settled after about a semester in Japan, we spent two months circumnavigating the globe. I can’t say it was the very best time to do it, but looking at the long range calendar there wasn’t going to be a more convenient time, any time, soon.

It would have been better to take six months or more to do this, because there is a lot to see on the old girl, spinning as she is on her cold, lonely orbit. And because just crossing the lines costs so much. But time’s winged chariot hurries near, and there’s nothing to be gained by waiting for a shinier penny to fall from heaven no matter how loudly we rock it with our bootless cries.

Google says the circumference of the earth is perhaps 24 or 25 thousand miles. And although we didn’t go round those humid, plump equatorial hips, we hardly cut a bee-line. We zig zagged from Hadano to Tokyo, to Beijing to Lhasha, back to China. Beijing to Moscow, down to London and around there, over the pond to Boston then here and there around bean town. I’ve no idea how far we went. In the end we criss-crossed the US between Dallas, New Orleans, Orlando, and Chicago on business and pleasure before heading west to arrive back in Tokyo.

Because we specialize in cultural analysis and hang with Scientists and Futurists and Artists and “ists” of all ilk, we could conceive of this whole journey—the business, such as delivering an academic paper at a conference in China, and the pleasure of touching base in Louisiana -- as so-called professional development. And thus justify our hemorrhage of cash and the delay in paying that bit of our still outstanding school loans. Still, this kind of thing does take a lot of what is euphemistically called “resources,” -- time and money. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

That said, it’s popular among the pinheads today to quote Danton, hero of the French Revolution, about the benefits of audacity. He had told Frenchmen "Il faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace" (You must dare, dare, and dare again). Yet, unlike the creeps too likely to appropriate that advice because the phrase sounds good, Danton really was a hero. He really did struggle to protect the moderate voice, and to shield the innocent. Perhaps that’s why on 5 April 1794, he and his peeps -- the people with courage enough to support him --were killed by the radical element in the Revolution.

Danton and his circle were the last defenders of humanity and moderation. After them, the Terror bloomed in full spate. In spite of calling for bold action, Danton wanted moderation and peace between the victors of the Revolution and the also rans. He wanted to set the stage for the future by a show of pity for those who had been “conquered;” a display of compassion by the winners for the losers. Audacity is, at times, just the right word. At other times it’s the lighting bug instead of the lightinin’.

The misappropriation of Danton’s word’s were on my mind as we began our travel, because we had been reading about the new train in China. I thought it was a fantastic, bold engineering feat. At the same time, much of my professional life has been spent working with “indigenous groups,” helping them understand principles of sustainable tourism growth. Or, writing for these groups. The new train from China was a potential engine for economic growth, but, at the same time, it could be thought of as a conduit of social change for Tibet. On the whole, would the change be good?

I’ve been reading, and maybe you could say, dreaming about, Tibet since Boy Scouts. Pouring over those books about the ancient East. Over the years I added to that youthful reading – of course Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet and David-Neel’s gripping stuff and history about the Younghusband violent entry – more academic texts. And I moved into the study of travel and tourism. You never really know what kind of post hoc ergo proctor hoc thing is going on. What sort of situation exists such that because you do one thing, the next thing follows. I got interested in Buddhism and quest or journey literature reading the Beats in high school. Those characters went to Japan, and now I have.

The American infatuation with Tibet probably festers from the publication of James Hamilton’s Lost Horizons, the apogee of escapist reading. Not only did it introduce readers to this fantasy world, it has the distinction of being the first contemporary paperback book. Published in the thick of the depression, a time when the rich, having ruined the world economy, fought to avoid aid programs to the unemployed in the US, and helped finance men like Adolph Hitler and Mussolini in Europe.

The disenfranchised were turning to community action in their repellence with capitalism, and the capitalists were, as a response, supporting leaders who promised strong central governments: putting the unruly poor in jail where they belonged. Today self-serving pols like Donald Rumsfeld lie to the great unwashed (because too often they know they can get away with it) American voter majority, referring to the “appeasement” of Hitler. But the lie is leaving out that Hitler was in power because the rich of the US and England financed his thuggery early on, hoping that he would be a foil against communism.

In any event, Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon, failed to gain much traction until it was boosted on radio by Alexander Woollcott. Intriguingly, according to this biography, “Woollcott was born in an eighty-five room house, a vast ramshackle building that had once been a commune. It was called The Phalanx, and was in Phalanx, New Jersey. There were many social experiments in the mid-1800's, some more successful than others. When the Phalanx fell apart, due to internecine squabbles, it was taken over by the Bucklin family, Woollcott's maternal grandparents. There, amid his extended family, Woollcott spent large portions of his childhood. His father was a ne'er-do-well, a supposed Cockney, who drifted through various jobs, sometimes spending long periods away from his wife and children. Poverty was always close at hand.” Did this life experience make the famous wag more or less empathetic to the plight of the victim?

Woollcott, a member of the famous “Charmed Circle” of wits, including Dorothy Parker, which met routinely at the Algonquin Hotel, lauded the novel, originally published in October 1933. The cover showed a contemporary aircraft crashed landed on a snowy landscape, text calling: “welcome to Shangri-La.” For a vast reading audience—no TV back then—and apparently left behind by the well-to-do and government, the promise of the better life beyond the far horizon was a tempting sell. There was already a kind of rough, indeterminate focus on the region due to the slow kindle of interest in peak bagging.

Climbing of Mount Everest was, of course, the news maker. When Andrew Irvine and George Mallory were killed on a climb in 1924, the Himalayas were welded into the popular culture fore brain. (Perhaps ironically, that expedition was organized by Francis Younghusband, by then head of the RGS) Tibet, essentially a closed country, was forever more in the spotlight. Now, it seems anybody with a kettle of cash and a cell phone can walk the roof of the world. But things were different back then.

On July 15, 2006 Richard Gere (who has been a practicing Buddhist for many years and is a long time supporter of the Dalai Lama) authored a long piece in the Op-ed section of the New York Times. For Gere, there are apparently no complexities in the situation existing in China with its relationship with Tibet. He seems pretty certain of “who” is right and wrong. Certain indeed that right and wrong exist.
As Gere put it, “The opening this month of the final segment of the world’s highest railway, from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet, is a staggering engineering achievement and a testimony to the developing greatness of China. But it is also the most serious threat by the Chinese yet to the survival of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity. In the words of a well-known Tibetan religious teacher who died after many years in a Chinese prison, the railway heralds ‘a time of emergency and darkness’ for Tibet.” The well known actor and activist for a particular Tibetan agenda then paints in, by broad strokes, the other hazards of modernized rail carriage: easier transport of the military, of the civilian population, of natural resources. Of course, if one views the military as protection, that’s good. If one views tourism as an economic engine, growing tourism is good.

There is no question that the Tibetans represent a small part of the colossal Chinese population. Even if you think of all the varied minorities as a block, they represent a trivial number compared to the monolith of China – if you are willing to imagine that China is a homogenous monolith. And Gere along with most of what might be called the Hollywood Tibetests does seem willing to make that kind of division.
Gere, chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, concludes his heartfelt opinion writing that, “Tibet’s precious culture and religion, with its principles of wisdom and compassion and its message of interdependence and nonviolence, are rooted in the Tibetan landscape and Tibetan hearts. The survival of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge in its own land is vital for the world, as well as the Tibetan people. China’s journey toward greatness must not include the further destruction of this heritage.”

The zeal with which Richard Gere writes is well explained in Orvell Schell’s Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, a rich, insightful book full of history and social narrative. For the Chinese claim a connection to Tibet from at least back when America was fighting its Revolutionary War (and Tibetans asked the Chinese authorities for “protection” from expansionist Nepal rumbling to the West.) The violence of the fifties might be a reaffirmation of that historical connection in the eyes of the Chinese. Dates are only numbers to history’s victims.

Still, Hollywood is a great one for re-writing the ending.

While the preferred narrative of American and many European fans of the Tibetans is peace and calm, only a few weeks before, the New York times carried a related story, “Arms and Armor From Tibet at the Metropolitan Museum” by Grace Glueck, May 13, 2006. Just as Orvelle Schell spends over 300 pages in his Virtual Tibet carefully explaining how much of the West’s “vision” of Tibet is a fatuous invention of longing and desire, Glueck is right on point putting the kibosh on the notion of peaceful Tibetans.

“It's unusual to think of the Tibetans as warriors,” the art critic explains. She notes that, “this mostly Buddhist people, now ruled by China, is better known today as a deeply spiritual culture devoted to peace. But they were once fierce and, like others with turf to defend, held a vital stake in battles and weapons. Tibetan history includes long periods of heavy military activity, beginning in the seventh century. Tibet's early protector gods were worshiped as warriors, equipped with battle gear.” When we finally did travel to Tibet, not by the train after all, and we did get to examine the great monasteries, these fearful “protector gods” stuck out. Dervish like and repellent, the big statues were hardly the kind of thing to fill one with calm and feelings of peaceful quietude.

According to Glueck, the superb battle skills of traditional Tibetans were made “abundantly evident” in the then mounted exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet." In what the writer describes as “a dazzling display of Tibetan war equipment from the 13th to 20th century” the show was filled with edged weapons, tack, firearms, and armor for horse and rider.

According to Donald LaRocca, curator of the Met's department of arms and armor, who organized this show and catalog, “many objects here were still being produced and used into the 20th century.” Moreover, weapons, if not in current use, are fully integrated into the culture in spite of the pop-cult image cultivated by Hollywood. Today, the center section of Lhasha is set aside for ethnic minority Tibetan dealers (you could say, in trash and not be far wrong) in tourist souvenirs. Perhaps the most common object being sold is the ubiquitous handled prayer wheel. But very, very common are cheap copies of the weird, evil looking Tibetan edged weapons.

The Met’s show explained that “older examples were kept for ceremonial use, particularly in the Great Prayer Festival held in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, at the start of each year. Votive weapons were also placed in monasteries and temples, housed in special chapels dedicated to Buddhism's guardian deities.” We might prefer to think of Tibetans as curiously “peaceful” or “childlike,” but, perhaps unfortunately, they seem to be “normal.” Realistically, if we imagine that the Tibetans are “coerced” by the Chinese army; need they be inherently peaceful to expect to lose? On the other hand, is it necessarily the case that the investment of that kind of cash – and engineering skill—to bring into being a modern rain system is done in malice?

Anyway, the new train seemed a fantastic idea. Imagine curling up, up, up over the passes that that wacky plane in Lost Horizons crossed! Instead of seeing only the tops of cottony clouds passengers could actually see the landscape.
According to coverage on web BBC “the line boasts high-tech engineering to stabilize tracks over permafrost and oxygen pumped into cabins to help passengers cope with the high altitude.” The Chinese authorities claim that the 1,140km (710-mile) line will create major opportunities to a traditionally underdeveloped region. The BBC coverage quoted “critics [who] fear it will be used by China to assert its control over a contested border region.” In addition, they say the “railway line threatens not only the delicate Himalayan environment, but also the ancient Tibetan culture.” The fantastic train climbed to 5,072m (16,000 feet), before beginning the descent to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Although passengers were in special pressurized carriages, some reported being sick with altitude. Toothpaste squirted from tubes, stuff exploded.

The BBC coverage said that “the train carriages have windows with ultra-violet filters to keep out the sun's glare, as well as carefully regulated oxygen levels with spare supplies to combat the thin air.” It also quoted exiled Tibetan Lhadon Tethong who said that the railway was "engineered to destroy the very fabric of Tibetan identity." I was not sure if the train could destroy a social fabric more quickly than a plane (and Lhasa has and has had a very active airport for decades). Indeed, many Tibetans left Tibet for fully industrialized regions with better or other forms of education, economic opportunity, and medical care. I did not want to jump to conclusions. But. It did seem that a shift of people into the region, perhaps by train, would have a cultural effect. Then again, the shift of people out of the region, motivated by a similar desire to improve their own circumstances, might also have some effect on local area dynamics. I suppose we are not to notice if Tibetans move from Lhasa to India or London. But we are supposed to be alarmed if Chinese move to Lhasa.

For us, however, to begin to do actual field work it was necessary to make a number of visits first to Tokyo, to begin the process of applying for entry visas for China and the Autonomous Region of Tibet.