Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [117]
Soon, we found ourselves back on a paved road, passing Tibetan farmers on donkey carts laden with wheat, one of the few things to grow in Tibet. But, apparently, they could grow watermelons here too. We paused to buy one from a boy on the side of the road.
“Is good?” Goba inquired after he’d cut out a slice with his pocketknife.
“Is good,” I replied. And also extremely small. I’d never beheld a watermelon the size of an orange. Considering the environment, however, it was a wonder that watermelons could be cultivated at all.
Finally, we pulled into the small town of Gyantse, where I was dropped off at the gate of the Pelkor Chode Monastery. Built in the fifteenth century, the complex is awash in whites and pinks, and is notable for housing monks from different sects within Tibetan Buddhism. I could only imagine what their debates must be like. Inside, monks in maroon robes were chanting. Others were at the gong. And one was both chanting and gonging. The incense smelled strangely like cannabis, and I watched pilgrims depositing their yak butter, which smelled like popcorn. Hey, I thought, cannabis and popcorn. Now, there was a combination worth traveling up to 15,000 feet for.
The monastery was renowned for its Kumbum stupa, a five-story octagonal pyramid with a golden dome containing 108 cavelike chapels with 10,000 painted images. It is the largest stupa in Tibet. I walked up and poked my head into the various chapels, which had all been decorated with Buddhist murals. From the top, there was an extraordinary view of the Dzong, a fourteenth-century fort that looms over the monastery, and the expansive, barren Nyang-chu Valley that stretched toward the mountains in the far distance. If you want to get away from it all, do a little meditating, Gyantse is a good place for it.
Back in the courtyard, there were dozens of listless dogs. Or perhaps they were just meditating. The flies, however, were quite active, and so, too, were the child beggars. In fact, I had never been besieged by so many child beggars, and I had been besieged by countless child beggars in China. Soon, I had run out of small money, and they followed me to the waiting car and surrounded it, whereupon Goba gave them his small money. But still, they persisted. I couldn’t close the doors. And then Goba ran out, and yelled and threatened and made all sorts of scramlike motions.
Sadly, I wouldn’t be staying in Gyantse. Despite the urchins, I found that in Gyantse it was possible to imagine the Tibet of yesteryear, its haunting austerity and those who regarded it as holy. On the road to Shigatse, Goba pointed to a mound of ruins on a hillside.
“Old monastery,” he said. “Chinese. Boom, boom.”
A few miles farther, there was another monastery that lay in ruins. “Boom, boom.”
I counted three more monasteries that had gone boom boom. That was the grim reality of Tibet. True, there are more monasteries and monks today than even twenty years ago. But the sad fact remains that the Chinese have all but obliterated one of the world’s most unique cultures. In the years following China’s invasion of Tibet and continuing on into the Cultural Revolution, more than 6,000 monasteries were shelled into oblivion. All religious activity was banned. Land was confiscated. And China swallowed Tibet. And while a few monasteries have reopened, they operate under the strict control of the Communist Party. It is still illegal