Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [112]
And there was the sun. There is an awful lot of sun in Lhasa. You’re so much closer to it, for one thing. I slid on my sunglasses and headed toward the Potala Palace. If there is but one image people have of Lhasa, it is of the imposing Potala Palace, this mount in the sky with the thousand rooms and two hundred thousand statues. It towers over the city, but it is not merely a majestic, looming presence. There is something whimsical about it as well. Let’s paint this part white, I imagined the builders thinking. And over here, how about maroon? Maroon is good. And this part up here? Yellow. Yellow is perfect. The Dalai Lama adores yellow. And it’s such a nice contrast to this blue, blue, sky.
As I stood before it, admiring its rambling contours, the way it seemed to encapsulate a people born of the mountains, I was joined by Tibetan women with veiled faces: Ninja curio sellers.
“You are very nice,” one said, reaching for my face. “Like the yak.”
I had grown a beard. It is, of course, de rigueur for Western men traveling to Tibet to grow beards. I have no explanation for this. But Sir Edmund Hillary had a beard when he climbed Everest. Brad Pitt had a beard in Seven Years in Tibet. The two Australian men I’d traveled with on the flight to Lhasa had beards (their girlfriends didn’t, however). It is baffling; Tibetan men don’t typically have beards, so it’s not as if we all collectively went native. And it’s not merely Western men. I’d met two Japanese backpackers in my guesthouse. They both had beards too. All I can say is that if you are a foreign man considering a trip to Tibet, you will grow fur on your face. Resistance is futile.
Pleased though I was to have been favorably compared to a yak, I declined the women’s offerings and returned my gaze to the palace. Built in the seventeenth century, the Potala Palace was originally the winter home of the Dali Lama. I could see why the current Dalai Lama wanted to come back. It’s not a swanky palace. This was no Buckingham Palace, no Neuschwan-stein, the fairy-tale castle built by Mad King Ludwig. It did not exude luxury. It was not a place for formal balls. Instead, there was a hominess to the palace, a sense that this was somehow the collective home of the Tibetan people. It was a mountain palace, built by devout people with their heads in the sky. It was not a home for kings or tyrants. It was the home of a living god, the Dalai Lama. But he couldn’t go home, not now, not while the Communist Party was in charge. Indeed, to make the point that the Dalai Lama wasn’t welcome—or at least a Dalai Lama that didn’t kowtow to Beijing—the Party had razed the old town in front of the palace to put up an enormous Glory to the Communists monument.
They make things so awkward, these Communists. I was trying to lose myself in the moment—this Tibetan moment—and yet here, in the middle of Lhasa before the towering Potala Palace, I was obliged, simply by the mere presence of this monument, to acknowledge that I was standing in an occupied country. Tibet was an independent country when China invaded in 1950. And, as evidenced by the soldiers still present in Lhasa, the Chinese have no intention of leaving. Visiting the interior of the palace thus leads to very mixed emotions. On the one hand, you know you’re not really supposed to be there. It is someone’s house, after all, someone who’s been called away for urgent business