Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [118]
As we drove on through the valley, we passed hardy farmers separating wheat from chaff and dozens of donkey carts; in turn, we were passed by a military convoy. And then, around a bend, we were flagged down by the police and told to line up with several other cars. Goba was not happy. He was told to get out of the car, and I followed. We were instructed to go to the police SUV, which was surrounded by a half-dozen other Tibetan drivers who had also been pulled over. We huddled around the window. Inside were four officious-looking policemen. Goba handed them 300 yuan.
“Why?” I asked back in the car.
“Say speeding. But no speeding.”
True, Goba had been speeding everywhere else in central Tibet, but he had not been speeding here. Indeed, as we had curved around the bend, we could not have been going more than thirty miles an hour.
Goba gestured. “Police. Money.” And he demonstrated how they put it into their pocket. “Chinese no good.”
We passed a People’s Liberation Army barracks on the outskirts of Shigatse, and as we entered the town itself, I was disheartened to find this home of the Panchen Lama and one of the great monasteries of Tibet had become just another unsightly urban sore in China. Shigatse is the second-largest town in Tibet after Lhasa and its traditional rival. And yet there was nothing here like the old town in Lhasa. It had been bulldozed in favor of a Han city of apartment blocks and electronics stores.
Goba dropped me off at a seedy hotel near the monastery. He would stay elsewhere for the evening, and I went to check in only to find that the hotel was run by the police. I dropped my backpack off in a vile room and walked through town, trying to find something to recommend it. But I couldn’t. My opinion would rise—slightly—the following day, after I viewed the eighty-foot statue of Buddha inside the splendid Tashilumpo Monastery, but for now I was dismayed to find myself here. I’m in Tibet, I thought, the very distant rooftop of the world, and I’ve was in a fly-ridden Chinese restaurant pecking at a gloppy chop suey. But, I consoled myself, the restaurant did have yak milk. I took cautious sips of the bitter, buttery brew. Something this bad, I thought, could only be good for you.
18
I curse you, Dan Brown!
This was my thought as I awoke, bleary-eyed, early on a frosty morning in Lhasa. I’d gone to the book exchange at the guesthouse the night before and rummaged through its quirky offerings. I left behind an exceptionally boring book about Shanghai—a real drudgery, makes-you-think-of-homework kind of book—and picked up Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, because when confronted by a forty-eight-hour train trip to Chengdu it’s good to have a fat, plot-intensive book. But it was just too tasty. Just one more chapter, I thought as the clock ticked past 2 A.M. It was only when the power failed at 3:30 in the morning and my room plunged into darkness that I finally set the book aside. But the damage had been done. I had little more than 100 pages left.
Curses!
“Do you need a taxi?” asked the Tibetan woman at the front desk.
“Yes.”
“I will help you.”
Very kind, these Tibetans, I thought.
“Forty yuan,” she informed me as I hopped into a taxi. And then the driver began a long, haranguing monologue.
“Forty-two yuan,” she updated me.
I agreed to the price, and soon I was barreling through the outskirts of Lhasa, crossing a bridge guarded by soldiers, speeding past a large military base where the People’s Liberation Army could be heard going through their morning drills as the Potala Palace shimmered in the near distance. Outside of China, it’s possible to believe that Tibet is simply a colorful province in a larger country. Inside Tibet, however, it can only be seen as a military occupation of a foreign land.
But not just a military occupation. The