China - Buddhists & Muslims

I had my first good sleep in a while. Woke up to the dark desert. The Gobi is very big, gravelly, grey, mostly flat, and pretty depressing.

15th.

In the early hours, some women got off the bus, and unloaded their huge bags from the roof. Unlike in Ireland, the men didn't rush to help the feeble damsels. I did a bit of token bag-catching, but didn't bother anymore after a couple - I probably seemed more weird than chivalrous.

After 46 hours on the bus, got into the big city of Lanzhou. It sounds a painfully long trip, but I came out of it fairly refreshed - it was easy to sleep, and my legs were glad of the respite from cycling. Lanzhou is said to be the most polluted city in the world. In terms of garbage, that's not at all true; but the air is pretty thick and foul - factory belches get trapped in a long, narrow valley.

Quickly enough, I found a minibus on to Xining. Inside this vehicle was the worst starer in the world. This muslim teenager ogled me for about 45 minutes straight, and I got progressively twitchier. Eventually I couldn't take it any more. I eyeballed him from a distance of 2 inches, and sat back, relieved that I'd done the needful. But I hadn't - he kept looking. Maybe some people could have taken that in their stride; after all, he was just curious - and a couple of Islamic eyeballs aren't going to do me much harm. But relentless staring is something I can only be logical about in retrospect. At the time, I just got more and more nervous and angry. I finally blurted to him "wo bu shi dianshi" ("I'm not television"). This did the trick - but I still harboured murderous thoughts towards him for the rest of the (6 hour) trip. Which sounds strange (and probably is strange), but I'm not exaggerating.

I think I saw my first interethnic hostility on this bus ride - one of the muslims, a tough-looking guy who made me think of Bugsy Malone movies, told me not to let a Han (ethnic majority Chinese) couple sit next to me. When they eventually did, he stared daggers at them for a while. He was a bit of a thug; but resentment of the Han people is in some ways easy to understand. They've annexed Tibet, and have tried to impose their culture on many ethnic peoples in the western reaches of China.

Thoroughly sick of buses, I hopped off in Xining and went to find a hotel and a cup of tea. Not for the last time, the locals put up stiff resistance to my request for sugar in my cuppa. The tea there was grim - made from yak butter? One of my first tastes of Tibet's pretty skanky cuisine.

The next day, I cycled out to Ta'er Si, a major Tibetan monastery. A young Buddhist monk was giggling uncontrollably at the lanky foreigner - I told him (in English and therefore incomprehensibly) that I'd kick his ass, which was quite satisfying. A bunch of monks were watching Arnie (Conan the Barbarian) on TV. 'Great!', I thought - a fascinating culture clash for me to write about. Of course, the monks are into modern stuff just like anyone else - they race around on motorbikes when by rights they should be quaintly plodding around on foot. On another TV, a trio of foxy lasses performed in front of a strangely quiet, seated stadium.

This guy and his wife ran the toilet in the monastery. They looked after my bike, and gave me a free meal before I left

It was raining most of that day; that evening, I stopped for a bite to eat. It got dark a good hour sooner than I expected - I'd travelled almost a time zone eastwards from Urumqi. There weren't any hotels about, but the Han restaurant owner offered to put me up for the night. He and his wife didn't want to charge me anything, but I said I had to pay them at least something. The wife said 7 kuai (70p), but I said this was out of the question, and generously offered a pound. Later, I realised the true extent of my scabbiness, so I gave them two quid the next morning. Before going to bed, I watched a 1993 martial arts movie on the telly. The baddies were Japanese, and truly evil. Japan's mistreatment of Chinese people is past history, but it seems like there's still some bad blood. Halfway through the movie, there was an almighty bang from outside. A minivan had smashed into the back of a parked jeep; if there'd been someone in the van's passenger seat, their legs would have been pulped. The lucky driver staggered out unharmed; clearly sozzled, he lit up a smoke.


17th.

I started up the road to the pass ahead. I felt very weak and slow, and the kilometre markers made me feel even more leaden. It was snowing - much preferable to rain, because my clothes and bags don't get miserably saturated. Fog rose off the road; passing trucks swirled it like a hand swiping through cigarette smoke. The strange ululating song of a Tibetan shepherd drifted over from the mountainside. Snow lay on the ground higher up, and the flurries thickened; near the top, I could hardly see anything in the whiteout.

Over the top, and I raced downhill in relief; not far down, though, I had to turn left up a stony, grassy track. I cycled for 100m, but my legs weren't up to it; so I got off the bike and walked it up. I don't think the Coming of the Paleface happens too often on this road; the locals seemed pretty dumbstruck. They were Tibetans; swathed in plain, heavy robes with riotous lining, the women with pigtails and bright pink headscarves. I plodded up to the next pass. I stopped to put on more clothes for the chill ride downhill, and looked back along the valley I'd just climbed. Clouds flooded off the mountains behind, filling the valley with ominous speed. Down I rode.


18th (?).

Packed my tent, and rode up a rough, wheelchurned dirt track. It forked. I'd lost my map earlier, so I trusted my instincts and went downhill. Soon enough, I met a couple of truckers who told me I was going the wrong way. Over a couple of mountains, I stopped for lunch. I asked for sugar in my tea, but instead was given a small plastic packet containing sugar crystals, tealeaves, and lots of different kinds of nuts, roots and berries. The waitress chucked it all in my cup and poured water on it; I was suspicious that she was having a joke at the clueless foreigner's expense. I drank it anyway, and it was by far the tastiest tea I've had. I resolved to buy loads of it and drink it from then on.


19th (?).

Passed a man and a little girl herding a mixed flock of yak, sheep and donkeys. I heard loud bangs, and took a closer look. The shepherds were using slingshots to keep their unfortunate animals bunched. They'd swirl the slingshot round and round, and then release the stone with a great crack, hitting a long-suffering grassmuncher on the rump.

That evening, I stopped in a village for supplies (i.e. lots of sugary food). "Hello audience" I said genially to the gathering onlookers. 'Excellent', I thought, "I've finally come to terms with being gawped at". I cycled on. A group of kids stopped ahead of me, and gazed and giggled at the remarkable white entity. I wanted to plough my bike into them.

A couple of middle-aged women stopped me to wave a small tuber at me and babble questioningly. I didn't know what they were on about, so I started to leave. One of them got behind the bike and pushed me up the road for a few metres; 'come on, come on!' I shouted at her when she ran out of steam.

3 kids on road from Xining to Linxia

Camped for the third night in a row (becoming truly pungent at this stage).


20th (?).

Someone shouted into the tent at 6:45 in the morning. I was elated to have my sleep interrupted in this way; I groaned and kept quiet until the early turd left. That morning, got onto a downhill tarmacked road. Yippee - sped downhill for an hour, eating up the kilometres, ears popping. I reached what I later found out was the Yellow River, one of China's two great rivers. I cycled along the river for a while, until I discovered that my light-speed descent had been in the wrong direction; I'd have to head back uphill. This time, I was on a rocky dirt road. It took about five hours to reel in the lost kilometres; my legs were in bits and I was feeling mightily sorry for myself.

This was a very traditional Hui Muslim area, the men in white bowlshaped caps and the women with black cloth hanging down to their shoulders. I saw a blind man tapping his way along the road, and realised that in my time in China, I'd hardly seen a single disabled person. Soon after, I happened on a tiny village clinic staffed by a beautiful Muslim girl, and stopped to buy a soft drink off her. In my pathetic Chinese, I tried to ask her if all crippled people were put in institutions here - she answered yes to whatever she thought my question was.

Before the next pass, a motorcyclist fell off his bike near the top of a small hill. I helped him push it up to the crest. He was completely locked, and sat down on his bike, head bowed. Last time I looked back, he was still there, staring boozily at the ground.

That night, found a hotel; listening to the BBC World Service, heard that in preparation for the visit of the 2008 Olympic inspection committee, the Chinese had applied green paint to the brown grass in Beijing. I found that the jar of honey I'd bought a while back had leaked - the inside of my foodbag was sticky and gammy for days to come.

Next day, cycled through spectacular scenery - kind of like Death Valley in California, but split by a river and lush green terraces. I'd twice been told that the road was in terrible condition, and that I shouldn't cycle it; but I ignored the warnings. The whole road was under construction, so the shouts of 'hello!' came thick and fast, along with the occasional anomalous "hi" or "ok". Wended my way through the rocks and corrugations; further down, the road was smothered in dust. I passed a sort of primitive elongated tractor. It was being driven by a couple of kids - one of about six was working the pedals, and the four-year-old was doing the steering.

After lunch down at the river, I continued up the dustiest road on God's Earth. The chain on my bike was clogged and crunching against the gears; the screwcap on my waterbottle was jammed by the particles. There wasn't any space to camp - as in many places in China, any remotely horizontal land was used for either houses or crops. I'd been warned that there were some dodgy types around; so I was lucky to find a little hotel around nightfall. They helpfully gave me a horsetail duster to whip the dust off with. Watched by a horde of kids,

Some of the kids watching me and shouting 'Hello!'

I applied a hearty flogging to my bags, my bike and my self, pausing to give the wee ones a thrashing. Eating my supper later on, the whippersnappers kept knocking at the window outside, jumping up and down and shouting 'hello! hello!'. The owner's kid had been assigned to give me some peace, so when the nippers peered round the curtain, he'd spit at their faces, cackling gleefully when he hit the mark. I appreciated his efforts. On the telly was an ad for pills to make your bones stronger and your brain bigger; it featured Albert Einstein and a kid in graduation gear.

I didn't sleep too well that night - the early morning blaring of trucks saw to that. Chinese towns and cities generally aren't too noisy, but you need earplugs to live in the villages - truck drivers are concerned to protect people's lives, but not their eardrums. I was quite worn out cycling up to the next pass that day - almost cried with relief when I reached the top. I was resting just over the crest when a bus driver beeped his horn and shouted (guess what?) "hello!". "Give me a break!" I snapped. He found this highly amusing, and guffawed as he drove on.

The road dipped and snaked and plunged, passing the goats and the dark low shrubs of the plateau. I coasted down, past herds of yak and through cold, rockstrewn valleys. In the afternoon, I reached a gentle, terraced valley, bright yellow streaks of rapeseed punctuating the green fields. The air was warmer here, and insects flicked against my skin as I raced downhill. There was a small, grubby town further down the valley. A young Han guy chased after my bike, shouting at me to stop. He wanted to practise his English in exchange for showing me around, which suited me fine. He was friendly and inquisitive, although his movements betrayed tension of some kind. There was a Buddhist temple perched atop a buttress of a hill above the town, and we trod up the steps leading up from the valley. A Buddhist himself, he interspersed tour-guide duties with incense-burning and kow-towing to the gods. The temple was peopled by leering, garish, multiheaded idols. The mural covering most of the left wall depicted a heaven and hell very similar to our own. Buddhist hell was populated by red demons with fire rising from their ears; these individuals pronged the buttocks of screaming misbehavers. The clean-living folk had a better deal – mounted on fine steeds, they galloped joyfully into the clouds.

My guide’s accent was a mixture of Chinese and fruity BBC World Service. He asked me "have you made love with a woman?". Apparently, the people around there didn't have sex before marriage - this would harm their chances of securing a desirable spouse. He was 23 and unmarried. We bumped into a friend of his, a university student with excellent English, and we strolled back to my hotel room for. They both spoke highly of the Communist Party. At the moment, they said, it's definitely heading in the right direction with its policies. They admitted that the Party had made some mistakes in the past. Foremost among the Party’s errors was instigation of the Cultural Revolution, a deadly mix of ideology, despotism and mass hysteria. As Flower Power blossomed in the West, Chinese authorities and intellectuals were humiliated and brutalised by delirious mobs. Gangs of students beat up their teachers, and students manned traffic lights, ordering drivers to start their cars when the lights turned red. This was ideologically laudable, since red is the colour of the Communist Revolution and therefore couldn't mean anything negative like 'stop your car'.

My conversation with them was interesting, but rather frustrating. These guys seemed totally unaware of how far the Chinese government has strayed from the ideals of Karl Marx. The administration is brutal in its repression of dissent, and allows some of the world's worst sweatshops to operate on its soil.

Next morning, I was woken at 6 by a knock at my door. It was Mr. BBC China. He said he'd been worrying during the night - perhaps the police were aware that we'd been talking late. I felt like applying the police beating myself, and managed to eject him fairly quickly. Back he came at 8:00. He said it was time to get up - I had to leave soon if I was to get to the next town by nightfall. He started asking me questions about sex - had I made love with many women? Had I made love with a Chinese woman? What was sex like? I said I needed to sleep. He said 'first, I want you to teach me a few words of English'. I said 'no, sorry, I must sleep, I need at least another hour'. His mouth beamed and his eyes darted uneasily. He backed out the door. After he left, I thought argh, maybe he'll be back after 60 minutes on the dot. I couldn't sleep, and punched the wall. He didn't come back until 9:45. I packed my bags, grumpily answered the flood of questions about sex, and left as quickly as I could.

even i thought this was cute

same pic further away

the chinese are insane gamblers

That evening, I made it to Xiahe, home of the major Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Labuleng. Xiahe was a friendly, potholey town with English-speaking tourists, hotel showers and menus in English. I spoke lots of English, cleaned myself up and ate well.

Next morning.

In the courtyard of the lavish main temple, about seventy monks were sitting on the steps in their worn red robes. They wore strange ochre hats, crescent-shaped and topped with yellow, punk-style manes. They sang deep, repetitive, multilayered chants, swaying back and forth to the weird harmonies. A lone monk stood on the golden roof; every so often, he'd sound a large gong. Tears welled under my eyelids; I was watching a very old, strange, different culture at work. The monks stood up, and moved into the inner temple. A group of Western tourists trooped in after them; I hesitated, then guiltily followed suit. We stood by a wall covered with thousands and thousands of near-identical paintings of the Buddha sitting in the lotus position. The dusky inner temple, about 250 feet deep by 300 feet wide, was choked with visual riches. The monks sat amongst painted pillars and rich, tasselled hangings featuring plants, vivid geometric shapes, and fearsome dragon gods. At least some of the monks were using the bizarre ‘throat singing’ common to the plateaux of Tibet and Mongolia – individual monks could simultaneously chant in a deep rumble and a high-pitched, almost electronic buzz. Not a ceremony I'll forget.

Outside, a group of shaven-headed young monks beckoned me over.

tibetan monks in typical pose

Decorations at the Lamas' living quarters

Mostly, the questions were the usual ones - 'where are you from?' 'How old are you?'. But as at the small monastery two days before, the first question was "Do you know the Dalai Lama?". For Tibetans, the Dalai Lama is an awesome figure. Perhaps their feelings resemble those of ancient Egyptians towards their pharaoh. They call him Yeshe Norbu (The Wish-Fulfilling Gem), or Kundun (The Presence). The title ‘Dalai’ was not applied to Kundun until the third incarnation, Sonam Gyatso. In 1576, Gyatso was invited to the court of Altan Khan, ruler of Mongolia. The two dignitaries exchanged compliments. The Tibetan praised Khan as "King of the Turning Wheel (of life) and Wisdom", and the Mongolian lauded his guest as the "All-Knowing Sceptre-Holder, the Dalai Lama". ‘Dalai’ is the Mongolian word for ‘ocean’, and ‘lama’ is Tibetan for ‘guru’: hence ‘Dalai Lama’ – Ocean of Wisdom. The Tibetan’s eloquence and magical powers dazzled the Khan (it can’t just have been the flattery that impressed him – he was no doubt used to that). He became a zealous convert to Lamaism. And where the Khan went, Mongolia followed: shamanism went into decline. Mongolians gave up slaughtering animals to appease the gods, and no longer sacrificed widows to their departed husbands.

In the seventeenth century, when the fifth Dalai Lama was having trouble with rival Tibetan sects and secular armies, he asked Gushi Khan, a Mongol prince, to sort things out. Khan invaded Tibet, conquered all the Dalai Lama’s enemies, and promptly handed the entire country over to the Dalai Lama’s control. I mean come on Gushi, that is so not In The National Interest. The same Dalai Lama, Ngawang Gyatso, also declared himself the reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, a mighty god of compassion who is a crucial figure in Tibetan Buddhism. According to legend, twelfth-century monks dug up a gter ma, a book of wisdom which Buddhist masters had buried centuries before. The gter ma revealed that the first Tibetans were born when Avalokitesvara took the form of a monkey and mated with an ogress. It was Ngawang Gyatso who ordered the construction of a magnificent palace in Lhasa, and named it ‘Potala’, after Avalokitesvara’s heavenly abode.

P. Stobdan, senior fellow at New Delhi’s Institute of Defence Studies, calls reincarnation ‘the most ingenious form of religious and political control ever devised.’ Authority passes from Dalai Lama to Dalai Lama just as it passes from king to king; but the Dalai Lama is far more commanding than any temporal ruler. What’s more, his upbringing is completely controlled by Tibet’s lamas. This system has brought enormous power to the Gelugpa (Yellow-Hat) sect of Tibetan Buddhism, who used the authority of reincarnated leaders to wrest power from Tibet’s secular nobility.

The present Dalai Lama fled his kingdom after the Chinese crushed the 1959 Tibetan uprising. I told the monks what little I knew about him – about the strange portents, visions and rituals that led to the discovery of the most recent incarnation. These days, of course, the Chinese authorities are using all means at their disposal to dominate Tibet. Stobdan remarks glumly that:

… irrespective of what the present Dalai Lama may decide to do with his future, the Chinese are going to find the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama according to their choice and method, … in connivance with the Buddhist clerical elite inside Tibet. The post-Mao leadership in China has … realised the importance of traditional Tibetan institutions for their control over Tibet.


The evening before, I'd been talking to a British woman who'd been working with the Red Cross around Central Asia. She remarked that the monks were like big kids, which struck me as true - the young ones seem to be always messing and wrestling. They're very physical with each other, constantly hugging and draping their arms around each other's shoulders. Heinrich Harrer, who in 1943 escaped a British POW camp and fled into Tibet, writes that many Tibetan monks "live in strict celibacy and are forbidden to have anything to do with women. Unfortunately homosexuality is very common. It is even condoned as giving proof that women play no part in the life of those monks who indulge in it". Harrer became tutor to the Dalai Lama. His best-seller ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ gives a unique insight into the last days of that remarkable theocratic nation. In many respects, Harrer was an exceptional man. But he was also a homophobic former SS squadron leader, whose racially pure marriage had been given the blessing of Heinrich Himmler.

At about noon, I set off down the poplar-lined road, through wooded valleys of maroon and green. Bundles of sticks stood atop some of the flanking hills, lashed together in irregular, vaguely ominous shapes. The road was paved and smooth, but I was absolutely wrecked, and could only make about 10 kilometres an hour. I stopped for lunch at a roadside café, and ended up faced by an enormous pile of spicy chicken, the flesh aged and dark. A drunk leaned slantwise in his chair, head against the wall, mouthing curses. He subsided into a fetid, ungainly slumber. Then, yet another crash. A crammed minibus was kerwacked by a chugging blue three-wheeler (a vehicle beyond my ken – a sort of miniature taxi-van). The three-wheeler careered along the gutter, narrowly missing my parked bike. The driver regained control of his vehicle and fled the scene, leaving the ailing minibus pouring fuel onto the road.

That afternoon’s cycle was tough; my worn-out body complained at every turn of the pedals. I limped into the town of Hezuo, and decided that I'd have to take the next day off. My hostel room was clean, and came with a television and two Buddhist monks. I slept. They rose at dawn. I didn’t.