He returned the holy water to a shelf holding the bowl cut from a human
skull. "Dalai Lama," explained the robed monk, using the only
words we had in common. From my seat on a worn goatskin, I replied "Dalai
Lama," nodded, smiled, and took another sip from my bowl of tea. The
Tibetan pilgrims, anointed with liquid blessed by their spiritual leader,
left us to continue up the mountain.
I was in a one-room monastery. It was a simple home: wooden walls and ceiling
over a dirt floor. Two adult monks sat cross-legged on a raised platform.
The two boys in their scarlet robes dashed about, refilling my tea, bringing
bread from a curtained storage area, pointing at my big feet, and patting
my big belly. An ancient monk and a young woman chanted muted prayers beneath
photos of the Dalai Lama. Our conversation was minimal-- I spoke no Tibetan,
they spoke no English, and their Chinese was no better than mine-- but
we seemed to communicate well enough.
I had thought the lamasery was abandoned. I'd seen a stone wall high above
the valley and climbed up to investigate. As I approached the crumbling
two storey walls, I saw a spinning prayer wheel on a small deck beneath
the ruins of the main buildings. Someone was living there. I hesitated,
wanting to respect their privacy. Then the two young monks-- perhaps 9
and 12 years old-- raced out and enthusiastically waved me up.
It turned out to be my favorite place in China, although perhaps the least
Chinese. This was past the Western edge of traditional China, in what had
been Tibet in ancient times. (Of course, the political boundaries of modern
China extend a thousand miles further.) Xiahe, the village at the end of
the bus line (Gansu Province), was a mix of Tibetans and Chinese Muslims.
The area beyond was pure Tibetan. Yaks grazed near walled villages. Prayer
flags fluttered from lines strung across the valley. The villagers dressed
in heavy overcoats with bright collars and cuffs. The women wore their
hair in long braids decorated with yarn and beads. The men wore daggers
in their sashes. The monks were brilliantly colorful in their reds and
crimsons.
After an hour with the monks, I followed the family of pilgrims up the
mountain. I caught up with them at a sacred spring. Prayer flags flew from
every branch. Tufts of goat hair served as prayer flags on small bushes.
One of the women motioned me forward. She dipped water from the small pool
and poured it into my hands. I touched it to my face and forehead in a
crude approximation of the motions I'd seen in the monastery. Her husband
lit a smudge fire of twigs, cedar, and ash-grey powder. Once it was burning,
they bowed to the spring, collected some water and continued uphill. I
headed up the other slope.
It was quite a climb to the top of the mountain. False summit followed
false summit. A huge vulture soared overhead. A striking black and white
magpie looked over the valleys from a rocky knob. It was one of the only
places in China where no people were in view, and the only place I saw
animals in the wild. Marmots scrambled over the rocks. Ravens and crows
flew beneath me. A brace of grouse ran uphill before me. A softball-sized
furry critter nibbled moss above the spring (an Asiatic Pika). The other
wildlife I saw in China was in market baskets and restaurant tanks. Soft-shelled
turtles, rabbits, frogs, quail, bamboo rats (a giant muskrat), cobras,
vipers (and other snakes), box turtles, Chinese raccoons, kittens, owls,
tortoises, hawks, eels, carp, and hedgehogs were all available live for
take-out. Dried offerings included shark fin, tiger paw, pangolin (an armadillo-like
scaly anteater), lizards, and centipedes.
This empty range wasn't wilderness. Nimble domestic goats had climbed everywhere.
Prayer notes littered the peaks. Charred rock testified to countless smudge
fires. It was hard to tell if Tibetans worshipped in the mountains or actually
worshipped the mountains. The true summit was marked by a tall pole draped
with yellow, white, red, and blue prayer flags. From there, the topography
seemed to gently roll from peak to peak, an invitation to walk ever onwards.
Unfortunately I was not as hardy as the pilgrims-- from grandmother to
little boy-- who slept on the bare ground under the cold wet sky, wrapped
in their coats. I had an hour's scramble down the mountain, followed by
several dark hours to a warm wool blanket in Xiahe.
It's hard to condense China into a few paragraphs. It's a country of great
contrasts. Walk down a street & you'll see beautiful women in sequined
dresses & high heels passing wrinkled peasants in dirty work clothes
with sacks of watermelon seeds. Or take a bike ride, avoid the sewerage
running in the street, and look at your fellow cyclists: businessmen wearing
ties, army officers in uniform, women in miniskirts & heels (skirts
too short to cover the entire bike seat), deliverymen piled high with cabbages,
or couches, or coal, or Coca-Cola. The bicycle pick-up trucks haul anything
and everything: people, refrigerators, motorcycles, street-food kitchens,
steel reinforcing bars, cabinets. A regular bike-rack on a rear fender
typically carries a passenger, or a bundle of brush, or a couple small
pigs, or a basket of hot peppers, or a few dozen chickens.
This is just the everyday scene. Crossing the country by train you glimpse
more exotic views. Camels plowing wheat fields in Inner Mongolia. Two yoked
farmers pulling a plow driven by a third man. Water Buffalo, knee-deep
in mud, plowing rice patties. Red brick villages, adobe houses with windowless
walls facing the cold North winds, cave homes dug into hillsides, the peaked
canvas tents of Tibetan sheepherders, block upon block of ugly grey high-rise
apartment buildings provide shelter. Old-time steam locomotives share the
right-of-way with very modern electric trains. Little pagodas mark graves.
Old pill-box bunkers, once part of Shanghai's defense against Japan, squat
in fields of mulberry.
Of course we were part of the scene once the train stopped. Three of us
bought breakfast from a street cart in Hohhot (Inner Mongolia) and sat
on a step to eat it. We gathered a circle of school-kids (I counted 35
in the front row) who were quite happy to spend their entire recess watching
us.
It's an amazing place. There's far too much to describe. I'll limit myself
to another story, one from South of the Yangtze River.
After breakfast at Lisa's (a hybrid Chinese-Western cafe in Yangshuo),
Bill Moss and I rented bikes and took off on the main road to Guilin. The
scenery was fantastic-- rounded columns of limestone, rising out of the
rice patties, all the way to the horizon-- but the traffic was heavy: lots
of empty tour busses, farm wagons propelled by rototillers, slow bikes,
and big trucks. A few miles out of town we turned onto a dirt path leading
back into the villages and the hills. It was just gorgeous. We followed
a narrow path through the stone-walled hamlets and surrounding farmlands.
Some of the rice plants were in bloom, with tiny flowers along the seedstalks.
Much of the path had been paved with large irregular rocks, giving an incredibly
rough ride. A dubious improvement, but somewhat better than impassable
mud (I guess). We had a good climb up to a notch and then a fast drop into
a scenic valley. These were the best bikes we had in China: they had gears,
the brakes worked pretty well, and they weighed less than 50 pounds. (Of
course they weren't quality bikes by American standards, I'd broken off
a pedal the day before.)
We stopped for a soda at a little shop by a fishpond. Not bad, perhaps
strawberry-- it was red anyway-- and less of an aftertaste than most of
the Chinese brands. A tiny straw hut perched on stilts in the pond-- a
mosquito net its only amenity. (Hopefully, not a full-time residence.)
We passed through villages that were essentially timeless: limestone walls,
dirt paths, a young woman carrying wooden buckets of "nightsoil"
to fertilize her vegetables. An occasional electric line was the only sign
of the 20th century. We crossed a river on a diversion dam and continued
onward. The path deteriorated as we rode between rice patties and fish
ponds. Eventually it became a narrow rocky strip separating the plots.
"Bill," I called, "do you think we're still on the main
path or are we just riding on somebody's wall?"
I looked up for his answer, when I dropped head first off the wall. The
water was murky, and deep. I grabbed my glasses as I fell, figuring everything
else was replaceable. I was totally submerged, and upside down, when I
hit the bottom of the pond-- thick gooey mud. My momentum completed the
360° roll and I surfaced belly-deep in the gray-brown water. Big fish
were jumping over my head and flopping off the steep bank. Bill had turned
in time to watch the entire fall. Once his laughter was under control,
he acted quickly: swinging his camera up to record the event. Another Kodak
moment.
I was still straddling my bike, although a good 10 feet below the path.
I lifted the bike up as high as I could and Bill stretched down to grab
the front wheel. He hauled the bike out while I scrambled up the wall.
I spent several minutes wringing out my socks and pouring water from my
shoes. A man with a minnow trap passed, chuckling. Women working a nearby
rice patty were laughing. It was a wet ride back to Yangshuo, where I dropped
off my second load of laundry of that day.
Chuck
June 1994