Nomadic eastern Tibet

The Zangzu

No cycling today – hallelujah! Some of the people in Hezuo bus station could have walked straight out of prehistory. There were a few incredible-looking characters around - dark Genghis Khan lookalikes with long hair and moustache. They wore thick robes with dangling, straitjacket sleeves, and a headscarf. Often, a big ornate dagger hung from the long, brightly-coloured belt. These were Zangzu people - Tibetans from the eastern edge of the Land of Snows.

There were a few beggars around, proffering their suppurating stumps. One kid was accompanied by a wizened old woman who must have been about four foot two. The old lady smiled mutely, thrusting her upturned palm towards my face, jigging it up and down, withdrawing it, and then repeating the process. I stonewalled them. She was not to be denied, though; she and the boy knelt in front of me, pleading silently with outstretched arms. This was too much. I caved in.

The bus broke down twice, the second time for good. We were in a Zangzu village.

The women wore pink headscarves and thick, all-enveloping robes trimmed with brightly-embroidered geometric patterns. The village kids were fascinated by me, and I certainly didn’t disappoint. I sat by the roadside, waiting for the next bus on to Langmusi, and munched wearily on the same old travel food - bread, vacuum-packed pickled vegetables, and long-life chicken sausages. A stooped old lady padded along the dirt street, a huge woven basket strapped to her back. I marvelled at her toughness – the basket contained a humungous cargo of yak dung.

The Zangzu keep muscular, shaggy guard dogs. On the bus trip, I saw a group of them fighting each other, chomping into flesh and shaking their heads furiously. The stuff of postmen’s nightmares. We got into the beautiful village of Langmusi about 4 hours late, but I didn't care about beauty or punctuality. What mattered was that I wasn't cycling. My legs had ached all that morning and afternoon, but were starting to recover by evening.

I decided something was needed to ward off psycho mutts, so I bought a good heavy stick in Langmusi the next morning. The previous day’s aches and grim humour had vanished. I tied everything to my bike, and set off breezily.

A wide, flat strip of pastureland cut through low hills. Yak browsed on thin clumps of dark grass broken by tiny dirt hummocks. As the road zigzagged up towards a low pass, a couple of Zangzu guys passed on a motorbike. One suggested I grab his belt and they drag me up to the top, but I said no, I had to keep cycling.

A fierce wind thrashed the polychrome tatters. I’d descended about 200 metres beyond the pass when I heard an outlandish howling from behind me. I looked back up, and saw a figure on the pass, tossing multicoloured confetti into the air, hooting, shrieking and chanting. He kept throwing and throwing, and the paper was blown all over the mountainside. I managed to catch a few scraps as they tumbled and leapt along the ground. On each piece was a picture of a decorated horse springing through a flamboyant thicket of plants, birds, tigers and genie jars. Further down the mountain, I found scatterings of near-identical confetti. You can buy the confetti in shops here, and many temples and mountainsides are half-drowned in the stuff.

The people in this area are devotees of Bon, a religion that claims to be directly descended from the ancient pre-Buddhist shamanism of the Tibetan plateau. Academics, however, think it’s more likely that Bon is an idiosyncratic offshoot of Tibetan Buddhism, and that it emerged several centuries after the Indian mystic Padmasambhava brought Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century. Buddhist texts record that the local deities put up stiff resistance to Padmasambhava; not surprisingly, these rival entities are described as dangerous fiends. Padmasambhava eventually mastered these atavistic gods, taking the edge off their fierceness. After spreading the Dharma (Truth) in the Land of Snows, the sage departed for the southwestern universe of the magical cannibals.

Although Padmasambhava got the better of Tibet’s ancient gods, they’re still powerful. Even now, Buddhist monks perform complex rituals to stop malicious sprites from escaping their lairs. Matthew Kapstein of the University of Chicago describes a ritual for expelling a ‘gossip girl’, a spirit who invades small communities to plant curses and spread malicious rumours. An effigy is made from various household objects, and the exorcist invokes the words of Padmasambhava:

Daughter of malicious gossip! Listen up!
If you, malicious gossip, have no body in order to go,
Let this hollow straw be malicious gossip’s body.
Malicious gossip, associate yourself with this body and go away!
If malicious gossip’s body needs a head,
Let this red clay pot be malicious gossip’s head!
Malicious gossip, associate yourself with this head and go away!

And so on. Malicious Gossip is urged to construct her body from items including cowrie shells, slices of radish and turnip, and a black pig-hair brush. The sorcerer exhorts Malicious Gossip to use a black-and-white rodent as her horse, and a gnarled yak-horn as her palace. He presents her with talismans to be attacked in place of human victims.

Both Tibetan Buddhism and Bon are profoundly intertwined with folk shamanism. For most of Tibet’s people, the world still teems with gods of well and creek and mountain ridge, with chimerical imps and the powerful, many-headed deities of Buddhism.

The road descended a little, reaching an incredibly flat, wide, lonely plateau. A sign announced this place as the Ruoergal Nature Reserve, and the altitude as 3,700 metres. Nothing much could grow up here. The dark green plain stretched to low hills in the distance, the dreary flatness broken only by scattered hummocks of dirt. My walkman radio couldn’t pick up anything here; I cycled on in silence.

While letting a herd of yak cross the road that evening, I handed the Zangzu shepherd a smoke. He invited me back to his tent for some food and kip.

I thanked him, but said I should be heading on. I cycled over some low hills. It seemed I’d left the nature reserve - the plain ahead was dotted with the dark, elephant-sized yakhair tents of nomads. Towards dusk, I parked my bike near one of these tents to ask whether I could put up my own tent nearby. Clutching my dog stick, I walked towards a couple of kids. They evidently thought I wanted to give them a thrashing, so they fled. Their two guard dogs came snarling after me. By waving my stick and growling, I kept them at bay fairly easily, and slowly walked my bike out of their territory.

Not knowing what the Zangzu people were like, I didn't want to camp without permission. As the dusk thickened, I found a man by the side of the road with his son and wizened mother. The guy was a taciturn sort, but he offered to put me up for the night in one of the two rooms they used in a long, ruined bungalow. It had probably been a hostel once. Most of the rooms were broken-down, with gaps in the roof, empty window frames and floors strewn with sheepturd. As per usual in rural western China, each inhabited room was a complete unit, with clothes, bedspread, and a blackened stove piping smoke through the roof. The man ordered granny to set me up. She laid down a mat and sheepskin blankets, and stuffed the stove with dried yak dung. They were all fascinated by my modern equipment - radio, small torch, walkman, sleeping bag. The little boy spent hours shining the torch on my postcards of Ireland.

The old woman disappeared into the twilight, soon returning with a flock of sheep. I watched from my doorway as she clucked, shushed and quacked at the nervous animals, cramming them into two derelict rooms beside me. Then a herd of yak emerged from the darkness, followed nonchalantly by the man of the house. The yak seemed to know the drill, ambling slowly into a roadside paddock. Last in were the horses, tied to doorposts in the courtyard by the sheep’s rooms. A tethered guard dog paid the animals no mind - it was only when the strange-looking human poked his head out the door that the leaping and raving started. I was just dropping off to sleep when my hosts came in and rustled me up 12 yakmeat dumplings - fairly tasty, and very generous for people as poor as they. It would have been a little precious to tell them that actually, I didn’t eat red meat; so I tucked into the salty fare.

At six in the morning, the old woman came into my room to light the stove. The morning was warm enough, so she’d folded her brown robes down to her waist, uncovering a western-style, sky-blue sweater. The two soot-blackened kettles came to the boil. I poured clean water from one of them onto my coffee granules; the other one bubbled with a disquieting oily fluid. Before leaving, I looked through all my stuff for something I could give them. I asked the woman if she was in any pain, and she said all over, all the time. I gave her a few paracetamol, with some bandages, thread, and Lipton's teabags. The previous night, I’d offered to pay my hosts, but they refused.

Breakfast awaited me in the next town. I set off. Near a cluster of yakhair tents in the next valley, two shaggy, rottweiler-sized guard dogs came barking after me. I grabbed my dog stick, and hopped off my bike. One of the dogs was pretty vicious, but I kept it at bay by shouting and banging the ground with the stick. Then three more dogs bounded into the fray; one of these took up barking position behind me. Surrounded as I was by five belligerent powerful dogs, I was getting scared, and looked quickly from dog to dog to see if any of them would start the attack. Waving my stick with my right hand, trying to balance and wheel my heavily-laden, topply bike with my left, I inched my way along, shouting, blood rushing. One by one, the dogs dropped off. At last, even the most vicious one called it a day. Up at the crest of the hill, I looked back into the valley. By the tents, people were moving. I thought 'how nice of them not to call off their dogs'. Perhaps they'd thought the dogs weren't likely to bite me, and had assumed I’d know that. Or maybe they were bloodthirsty knaves.

I felt really weary that morning; it might have been the altitude, or a virus. That whole day, I covered a measly 50km on the bike. In the afternoon, a group of five Zangzu women waved me over to their hut. I accepted their offer of food, more out of curiosity than hunger. I was taken aback to see a flashy little solar power generator just outside the shack. Over the next couple of days, I’d occasionally see one of these outside a roadside hut or tent. Government issue I suppose. The women brought me into their home, a Stone Age hut of straw, wood and yak dung. It was pretty murky, with only a tiny hole in the wall to let out the thick smoke from the burning dung. A cluster of pink-cheeked, pigtailed teenage girls watched me, giggling. They scrutinised my postcards of Ireland. Their gaily-trimmed robes were folded down to their waists, exposing bright western-style blouses and chunky bead necklaces. Communication wasn’t easy, since their Chinese was even worse than mine. A stooped, cheerful granny fixed me a bowl of tsampa - a grim, watery barley porridge.

friendly old zangzu woman who fixed me some horrible tsampa porridge

I pretended to enjoy it, and guiltily declined a second helping, saying I must be getting on. I cycled off, waving to the growing throng by the hut.

Weird cobwebby structure in Buddhist temple complex

That evening, a Zangzu horseman cantered over to the road, and asked me whether I'd like to stay with his family for the night. I accompanied him over the fields and through his herd of yak, parking my bike by his yakhair tent. Yaks endure the savage cold of Tibetan winters; so not surprisingly, the tent was good and warm that night. It hadn’t been in the same spot for long; the grass ‘floor’ was still green. Strewn around the interior were pots and jars, a saddle, grubby blankets and a barrel of water. They used a hollow, sturdy chunk of metal as a stove.

My host’s mother had a permanently wry, pained expression. When greeting her, I tried to shake her hand. She was taken aback at this, but the son told her to go ahead and shake hands, so she offered a fingertip to the gauche foreigner. His young wife had an open, smiling face; she rustled up some pre-packed spicy noodles. I told my hosts they were delicious. ‘Surely not’, replied the man. Ordinarily, he would have been right; but days of tsampa, vacuum-packed vegetables and stale bread had lowered my sights. Some nice-looking girls hunkered down in the middle of the tent, watching me clamber into my sleeping bag. I considered taking up yakherding. As I was curling up, my host draped a couple of sheepskin blankets over my sleeping bag.

I have to say that the Zangzu are the most hospitable people I've met. Their hospitality is completely generous, but there’s no pomp and ceremony about it - they invite you into their home, give you blankets and chow, and clear a patch of floor for you to sleep on.

In the middle of the night, the yak were restless, their deep grunts escalating to a weird guttural crescendo. The man suddenly hooted, which seemed to do the trick. Or at least I fell asleep again.

Answering the call of nature in the morning wasn't too easy - some over-curious yak kept nuzzling me as I tried to pee. As I retreated, their taste in golden beverages proved to be somewhat awry.

When I was leaving, the wife smilingly refused to shake my hand. I realised there must be a touching taboo between the sexes. I thanked them as best I could, and set off into the drizzle, along a gradually rising, wildly rutted dirt road.

Stopping at a bridge for a smoke and some of my dire packed food, I met a cheerful, somewhat demented character. His friend, who spoke no Chinese, was of Xizang stock – a Tibetan from the central or western provinces of Tibet. He wasn’t as dark as the Zangzu, and lacked their fierce Mongol features. My demented buddy whined 'hello' at me, and sang fragmented ditties. I sang him a little Barry Manilow (at the Copa, Copacabana . . . ), and he picked it up, replying with a weird little Sichuanese version. I travelled on up the forlorn valley, the cold drizzle turning into a light sleet. In a solitary tent-shop by the road, they were selling that horse-god confetti, alongside a yellow soft drink with Ricky Martin on the label. Ricky must have been pretty cold up there in his shimmering satin top, but he looked as happy as ever.

Once over the desolate, blustery pass that evening,

tibetan prayer flags at the top of a pass

the road ahead wasn’t the easy downhill coast I’d expected. It was nearly dark, so I asked a young Zangzu lad if I could camp near his tent. He said he had a free bed, and invited the cunning freeloader in. I'm not sure if the bed was actually free, or if he felt bound to be generous - a couple of his friends came round later for a right royal booze-up, and ended up sleeping on the floor. I slept through the whole thing, only waking briefly to see shouting faces leering down at me.