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Where the vultures circle
In the badlands of the Khampa Tibetan herders, I encounter thuggish nomads and romantic backpackers.
In the centre of Gansu, a scruffy town on the high Tibetan plateau, it was dangerous for us – a foreign man and a Chinese girl – to wander unaccompanied after dark. Drunken men, easily given to violence, loitered in street corners. Other men were quacking and drinking in dinghy restaurants whose walls were smudged with sticky dirt. Luckily, we had four protectors: Tibetan students whom we had met on the bus to Gansu. The students were returning home after finishing high school, and they had to overnight in Gansu on their long journey home. I paid dinner for all of us – we owed the students for having squeezed on one seat on the bus so as to free up a seat for us – and afterwards they accompanied us as we shopped for supplies. They said it would be perilous for us to walk alone at night.
Gansu is a major town in the heart of Kham, a former Tibetan province that now partly falls in Sichuan province. The town has broken roads, worn buildings, and tricksters or wizards plying the pavements by day. Now we walked past eateries shrouded in steam emanating from huge woks, and I was surprised to see some monks drinking in some of the eateries. “The monks are the worse,” one of the boys said. “During the day they wear robes and go begging; at night some of them take off their robes and use the money to go drinking and womanizing.”
It was a revelation to hear a Tibetan speaking disparagingly of the lamas, as it chimed with my experience: I was finding the lamas, like other Khampas, rough and macho, and the thuggery was making our road journey along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway a stressful ordeal. This gave us haste; we wanted to see what there was to see and then hurry back home.
The next morning we found a driver to take us to Dzogchen village, a quaint village that was full of outlandish Tibetans on horses or on foot making circumambulations of the large monastery at the foot of a glacier, a monastery that was an eminent Buddhist study centre. The piety was stirring, and any passing tourist wouldn’t sense anything sinister. But our driver knew better, and he didn’t want to step out of the car. “Some of these men carry guns and daggers under their robes,” he hissed when I prodded him to get out of the car. “Fights are common, people get killed, and the murderers then flee to the mountains and become bandits that live beyond the reach of the law. You can’t be careful enough here.” Afterwards we drove to Yihun Lhatso, a spectacular lake fringed by glaciers. An old man trailed us, pestering us for money, and when I told him to shoo off, a younger man appeared from behind a boulder and angrily told us to get out of his sight.
The old man, even while he was gesturing for money rapaciously with his left hand, had continued fiddling prayer beads with his right hand, and humming the mantras: a pious Tibetan who was in fact a thug who scrounged money from tourists. Everywhere in Kham, part of the Tibetan orbit, I saw the same warped piousness that contrasted sharply with the wisdom in the West that holds Tibetans in reverence as a peaceable and incorruptible people.
But wait: I can’t generalize. Tibetans aren’t homogenous. The Tibetan diaspora is spread over a vast region stretching from India in the south to Xinjiang province in northwest China – a spread referred as the Tibetan Cultural Area. Throughout that area the inhabitants have different dialects, different lifestyles, and different levels of education, religiosity and development. Some live in villages, ekeing a living from farming; others have blended into town-life, and run businesses; the rest are nomads. The majority are nomads, yet not all nomads are the same either: some nomads are now more similar to cattle ranchers, raising yaks for the meat, while their more conservative brethren elsewhere still refrain from killing any animal for food.
I can talk about the Khampa nomads whose lives have changed little for hundreds of years. These are conservative, and legendary warriors, renowned for the quickness in using the dagger that they wear around their hip. These Khampa pastoralists – they are not true nomads as their movements are seasonal and circular – are socially divided into clans, and follow a seasonal rhythm dictated by yaks and weather. In winters they hunker down idly in stone houses in the valleys; by late spring they move their herds higher up the slopes, living in black tents made of yak hide; and in summer, when the ground thaws, they migrate again to the highest plains. They consider life in the pastures as the purest form, and they deride village-dwellers as no longer worthy of calling themselves Tibetan.
Westerners romanticize about the perceived innocence and natural lifestyle of the nomads. And from a distance it’s easy to be fanciful. The scenes are quaint and primeval – of cowboys on horses leading herds of yaks, prayer pennants fluttering at the summits, grasslands bursting with wild flowers, marmots scurrying from burrow to burrow, horses sprinting freely, sky larks trilling in mid-air, vultures gliding overhead, and women singing the mantras with passionate voices. The people themselves are equally exotic: long flowing hair, bombastic jewelry, ornate daggers, and colourful strings pleated into women’s hair. It’s indeed a tableaux that suggests innocence and harmony, and the social organization of clans of inter-related families (clans are identifiable by the colour-patterns of strings in women’s hair), and headed by a council of elders, reinforces the idea of consensual fellowship.
Those are scenes loaded with allusions of romantic tranquility, and that’s what most travellers see, looking out from a bus or from the side of the road. Get upclose, however, and things start to get ominous. We got close. There were three of us – my Chinese companion, our Tibetan interpreter, and I – and we rode six hours on horseback up the mountains to reach the summer camp at 4,000-plus metres high, a clan consisting of nine households called Tashka.
We found inhospitable weather, the day swinging between biting squalls and searing sun. And we found no respite inside the tent either: the smoke from the fire-pit, swirling from the smoulding dried yak-dung and heather, stung my eyes, and the food was woeful (mostly tsampa – ground barley kneaded with butter and milk – as well as dumplings stuffed with dried yak cheese, or noodles made of flour and cooked in milk). Then, on our first evening, we encountered the man intent on stealing our things – he was the cousin of our host Sherub, and before nightfall he even had the temerity to snoop inside the tent to familiarize himself with where he would grope in the dark that night. “Be careful,” Sherub warned us after dinner. “I told him to back off, but he won’t listen to me. He told me, ‘When they’re sleeping they can’t see anything, so what’s the problem?’”
Tashedekyid, our interpreter who hailed from a herders’ family, could imagine what the cousin had in mind, and she started to sob. Me, I went to see one of the clan leaders and warned him that I would fight the intruder. The leader assured me that he would tell off the man, but I didn’t want to take any chances – the Khampas are notoriously unruly. I told Sherub that we were his responsibility as he was hosting us. So Sherub slept behind the flap of the tent with a sword on one side and a gun on another, and in the nights that followed I woke up at the slightest sound – a yak grunting outside, the patter of rain on the tent, a yak peeping through the open flaps of our tent…
Tashedekyid, disturbed by the experience, recounted her family’s brush with violence. “We were very close to each other as families,” she said. That was before their friend and neighbour stole their yak, and Tashedekyid’s uncle killed the thief. Traditional justice holds the eye-for-an-eye principle, although the lamas now intervene to broker a non-violent settlement. “We had to sell everything we owned and give the money to the neighbour, and we also had to move away.”
The trouble usually starts when someone steals a yak; a fight would ensue, someone gets killed, and it evolves into a family feud. Fights over grazing rights are also common; herders from different clans often encroach into the territory of other clans. Dangers lurked everywhere: Sherub warned us repeatedly to avoid wandering among the tents as we could be attacked by the savage guard dogs, and to be wary of neighbours and never leave our things unattended. The dogs are designed to ward off thieves, and to hinder the raids of the brutal bandits who roam the mountains.
Some people did invite us to their tent, and they gave us tea and food. This included Wangchen, one of the senior leaders at Tashka, who cooked us a great meal of semi-dried strips of yak fried in garlic and butter. “Theft and violence is decreasing now,” told me Wangchen when I brought up the subject, “because the lamas are always reproaching the people about these things.”
I was also worried that Tashedekyid, the interpreter, could be cornered into sex. Promiscuity is rampant; visiting male relatives are by custom expected to sleep with the host’s wife, and men habitually corner single women and have sex with them – when I queried about this, I was told that the girls “enjoy it.” But Tashedekyid wouldn’t enjoy it; she was a prude, she said a virgin. Then we caught some chatter that the men at Tashka were seeking Tashedekyid for sex. She became consternated, and I felt responsible for her protection. I was also mindful that if something happened to her, then her family would want retribution. (This is how traditional justice works; for example, a Chinese friend of mine had traveled to the region in his car, and a man rode around the corner on a motorbike driving on the wrong side, crashing into my friend’s car and breaking his leg; then a mob formed around my friend and demanded that he has to have his leg similarly broken, and my friend only managed to get away by giving them everything he had on him, including all his money.)
These anxieties left me sleepless, I became sick, and after three days I was ready to see Tashka behind me. Back in Tagong town, troubled by my experience, I went to see Cherku Shiremena, a senior lama and traditional doctor, to make further enquiries. “It’s the bad people who are thieves,” he said. “And it’s better now – now only ten percent or less are thieves.”
I also wanted to discuss issues related to the environment, development, and the killing of yaks for meat, something that’s a controversy. In recent years, as religious constraints gradually weaken and materialism sets in, some pastoralists have started raising yaks for meat-production. In other areas of Kham, the raising of yaks for meat is already established, but in the more conservative area near Tagong the monks are making a fuss about it (the local Khampas believe that the doubling in the price of yak-meat last year was a form of higher punishment provoked by the anger of the lamas). “These are also bad people,” Cherku told me of the herders who kill yaks. “And we are working to put an end to this.”
I asked if selling the herds for meat might be a catapult out of poverty.
“They can sell things like butter, cheese, and the furs of yaks that die naturally,” Cherku countered.
They have been doing that for hundreds of years, and the money raised amounts to a pittance – about €350 annually per household (now they are also making more money from collecting caterpillar fungus). Besides, from an environmental viewpoint, having herds of yaks that yield just a meagre amount of milk is a waste of resources. The yaks are denuding the grasslands, and pushing wild animals like brown bears, wild yaks, and Tibetan antelopes to the brink of extinction.
Cherku told me that the lamas indeed wanted to see the nomads become educated and move to towns where they can find work in tourism (a lama, for example, had partly financed Tashedekyid’s studies, and now she had bright prospects working with NGOs active in development and education in the region).
After talking to Cherku I went back to the guesthouse where we were staying. I sat in the living room and listening to backpackers talking. They were lamenting that development and tourism were destroying the nomads’ way of life. They talked admiringly about the herder’s way of life, which they assessed to be full of harmony. Travel, I thought, hadn’t taught the backpackers anything; travel had only reinforced their romantic predilections. They had travelled far, but they hadn’t gotten close enough. Few people do. Travel is useless, like going to the circus.
© Victor Paul Borg 
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