Tibet

Getting to Tibet is no longer difficult; you can fly from China’s eastern cities or take an overnight train. Domestic tourists arrive by the busful. Foreigners need permits, though they’re easier to get than ever: make a reservation through a Chinese travel agency and go.

The capital, Lhasa, has fresh air. Security cameras watch over its street corners. Sellers hawk prayer flags and wheels, incense, silks (I had skirts made to size), silver trinkets, and leather boots — all made in China. That Lhasa’s “local handicrafts” aren’t local can seem like Chinese imperialism, but then again, I don’t feel badly about “Italian” rosaries made in China.

There are cities beside Lhasa, of course, but no one visits Tibet to see them. Spend your time in the countryside.

I have never been poor, but I have seen places that are, close up, and I think that changes how you see rural Tibet. It is gorgeous — unforgiving blue sky, hard dry land — and cruel to most Tibetans, who are subsistence farmers. In 2008, the last year for which I could find statistics, annual rural income was $460. In 2014, GDP per capita nationwide was less than $5,000. A dollar goes further in Tibet than in the West, but these are bleak averages.

40% of rural income comes from six weeks of hunting yartsa gunbu, a caterpillar-killing fungus that Chinese medicine calls an aphrodisiac. Some primary schools schedule yartsa holidays since students skip class anyway. Yartsa-hunting villages own more cars, per capita, than other Tibetan villages.

Have you heard of the “Comfortable Housing” program? China spent a decade coercing Tibetan farmers from mud-hut homes to garish prefab apartments. The pitch: move for the indoor plumbing, electricity, and satellite television. It’s working. The Dali Lama has called Han migration the biggest threat to Tibetan culture, but the promise of CCTV may be more damning.

Tibet’s acquisition of Chinese characteristics shows no sign of slowing, and woe to the parent who wants their child raised “in the Tibetan way.” One well-off parent I met planned to smuggle his son to Dharmsala on what he assumed would be a one-way trip; though he’d like his son to return eventually, he didn’t think they could explain gaps in the government’s digital records. This parent found his own border sneaking, thirty years earlier, easier when records were paper.

China has yet to convince Tibetans they should be capitalists, not Buddhists, though they’re trying: “urban development” paved over Lhasa’s pilgrimage circuits; new shopping malls are excellent temple facsimiles, down to their jewelry-counter alters; and young, would-be monks are often re-routed from monasteries to trade schools. It’s Field of Dreams development: build it and they will come.

Tibetan Buddhism is concerned with what happens to the spirit, not the body; China’s concerned with what happens to two particular Tibetan Buddhist bodies: the Dalai Lama’s and the Panchen Lama’s. Did you know China’s accused of capturing and hiding a 6 year-old boy in 1995? Tibetans want their ageless second-in-command back; the CCP claims he’s now a happy 20-something who wants privacy. Spiritual succession has dominated the national consciousness for two decades already, and the Dalai Lama is 81 years old. His body will not last forever.

I toured many monasteries, and my guide repeated the same story in each — Songstän Gampo establishing Buddhism in Tibet, stabilizing the empire with two marriages to Chinese and Nepalese princesses, and bringing out a cultural consciousness. It took three temples before this sleepy American realized everything was about Songstän. Oral storytelling only allows for so many plot twists, I suppose.

Tibetan tourism has a monastery circuit. The Jokhang is the most celebrated temple, 1400 years old and now sandwiched between shopping malls. Sera is where monks debate, mostly for tourists. The Government shut Drepung in 2008, after monks rioted; it re-opened in 2013 under close supervision. Ganden was destroyed in the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, and rebuilt in the 1980s without its relics. (A satellite was established in India in 1966.) Ani Tsankhung nunnery runs a popular tourist cafe. Rongbuk is the highest monastery, perched at the base of Mount Everest. Pelkor Chode is a mashup before its time, Tibetan x Nepali x Han architecture. Six decades of China-Tibet conflict has not been kind to these places.

A few monks shuffle around Potala Palace during the daytime for tourists’ benefit — giving it a distinctly Disney feel — and each is tailed by a Chinese solider. I happened to visit Potala at midday, where I saw monks and minders sharing lunch in secluded pairs. Someone with better language skills than I should write about the relationships between these odd couples.

Signs, in Chinese and English, inside monasteries directed tourists toward fire extinguishers in case a candle tipped or caught a monk’s robe. Face saving at its most grim.

Do not visit Tibet for its food, but try its yak butter tea (oily, weak, black) at least once. Tsampa, dehydrated barley flour mixed with butter tea, is the farmer’s staple, appropriately grim-tasting. It is hard to imagine tsampa surviving grocery store supply chains once they reach rural Tibet. Momos (dumplings) are standard fare. Holy momos, made by nuns or monks at monasteries, cost more than momos made at restaurants. The tastiest indulgence in all of China?

I enjoyed Sichuan food in Tibet much more, which made me feel guilty. There was a spicy cucumber dish in particular I haven’t been able to find again. (If you see it on a menu in Sichuan or Tibet — order it.)

Over the past 80 years, Tibet has gone from buffer state to nationalist cause to charity case. The worry is that next it’ll become a place for economic extraction. China reports it has spent $45bn developing Tibet over the past decade; wouldn’t you want something to show for all that?

In Tibet, you can feel the absurdity of Beijing time, sun rises at 830a and sets at 10p — though at 12,000 feet above sea level, most everything feels absurd.

April 2013