The River at the Centre of the World (48 page)

‘I have heard from your friend Miss Pam,’ he said. ‘She has already told me you might be coming.’ I then handed over her letter, with the fifty yuan enclosed. ‘Another letter from her?’ He opened it, and exclaimed: ‘How good she is!’ He was a kind and helpful man, and he knew where I was hoping to go, and agreed readily to write a note of recommendation to his colleague across the border in Qamdo, the first true Tibetan town of any size on the far side of the river. This is what Pam Logan had hoped he might do. He sealed his letter with a huge red chop and signed his name for further authentication.

‘This will ensure you have no trouble,’ he said, though he looked a little doubtful, and added, ‘I hope.’

Officer Ma took us next morning to the one institution for which Dêgê remains well known – the Bakong Scripture Printing House, where, for the last 250 years, monks and their apprentices have been printing Tibetan bibles and prayers, for dissemination around Tibet, China and the lamaist world.

The building is wooden, constructed around a courtyard, and festooned with flags. On its flat roof are golden-plated sacred birds and a gold chorten, beneath which lie the relics of the founding lama. Inside, on old and sagging wooden floors that are connected by a maze of steep staircases, hidden trapdoors, secret passages and corridors, scores of young men were about the printing of thousands of sheets of biblical text, their energy astonishing, their hurry overwhelming.

They were screen printing from carved blocks of pepper wood, a peculiarly durable local wood that is stored for decades to be seasoned so that it never cracks. The process was perfectly mechanical, except that the mechanisms were young Tibetan lads. Two of them would sit facing each other, the one holding the block between his knees with the lower end resting on the floor. His partner would then swiftly roll an ink wheel down over the block – some pairs of boys were working in red ink, others in black – and then the first boy would with equal swiftness take from a pile on his right a sheet of fine mulberry paper, about thirty inches by five, and place it on top of the ink-glistening wood. The other boy would pass an uninked roller firmly over the paper, pressing paper to ink, transferring the Tibetan symbols – or the Hindi symbols, for Sanskrit versions of the bibles were exported to Sikkim and Nepal, as well as to the devout in India proper – from block to sheet.

The first boy then lifted the paper away and placed it, face up, on a pile to his right, as his colleague inked the block again and waited for the fresh sheet of paper to be set before him.

I counted: one pair of boys did a sheet every second. A Tibetan bible has 1800 pages. One hundred boys were working on the day we visited. The numbers seemed staggering.

‘It may look frantic,’ said the ancient lama who seemed to be in charge and who, with a lame left leg, limped gamely past his charges, to make sure they were working well. ‘But we have to make up for lost time. During the Cultural Revolution, we did nothing. We didn't print a thing. And there's a lot more than just bibles.’

He took me upstairs, puffing and wheezing his way up the attic flights. Older men were working under the eaves producing prayer flags, or slips of tissue paper imprinted with mantras that would flutter away in a breeze and produce a scriptural litter that the world would not mind.

One particularly ancient fellow, so thin that it seemed for a moment as if it was only a bagful of burgundy robes hunched over the wood block, was carving flat plates of
hujiao-mu
– pepper wood – which would be used to imprint prayers on water. The idea, he explained, in the croaky voice of an ancient more used to silence, was that a divine would squat beside a flowing stream and, once every couple of seconds, push briefly down with the prayer side of the block, impressing the inscribed prayer onto the surface of the water and letting the river carry the words of the deity to the river's mouth.

I told him that I was going to the Yangtze headwaters, and he became animated, his face creased with smiles. He looked around his shelves and found a small block, which he pressed into my hand. ‘Take it with you, my son,’ he said, ‘send prayers down the waters. You will become saintly if you do so. You will gain much merit. You will give me much pleasure. And you will please God.’

Half a mile above the printing house, at the end of a valley road lined with almond trees, lay a small lamasery. Four elders were sitting in the sun outside, wearily watching the group of wild dogs that were pacing on the far side of the street. The men beamed with pleasure at the prospect of having a visitor, and they spent much of the rest of the morning shuffling ahead of me, showing me the altar rooms and the huge prayer drums and the portraits – all treasures of great antiquity, and all of which had mercifully escaped the rigours of the Cultural Revolution. Dozens of temples had been wrecked, thousands of icons smashed; sacred texts had been used as toilet paper by Chinese marauders, so say countless books on the tragedy of Tibet. But here in Dêgê at least, this one lamasery survives, more or less unscathed; and I suspect that there are very many more. The destruction of Tibetan culture may have been savage; but it was most assuredly not complete.

The following morning we crossed the Yangtze. The river was narrow up here – scarcely surprising, since Dêgê is 3100 miles up from the buoy in the East China Sea, and less than 900 miles from the source. It was so far from the river mouth and so different that it might have been in another world.

Down on the banks men were offering ferry rides to the far side in coracles made of yakskin. Some of the men had homemade kayak-style oars, which they used in the familiar style, dipping one end in, then the other on the other side. I had seen a film of them being taught this technique by an American, a visitor who came with the ill-fated Warren expedition of 1986: beforehand they had used single-ended oars, and paddled slowly and erratically. It seemed likely that they were now indeed using the American technique – or perhaps more accurately, the Inuit technique. If so, they were displaying one of the very rare advantages that have come to these corners of the world from contact with the supposedly more advanced outside.

A grumpy-looking Chinese policewoman was on picket duty on the Sichuan side of the narrow stone bridge, but she did not even glance up from her breakfast noodles as our Jeep stuttered across. On the far side – in what was now legally and properly Tibet, Xizang, there was a red-and-white pole barrier blocking the road, and I readied myself for interrogation and a smart return to China. But the ancient who manned the post turned out to be friendly and he raised the pole high. Before he could change his mind, Miao pressed his foot to the floor and the car, trailing more smoke than was healthy even for a Sherman tank, raced up the slope on the far side of the valley. For the time being we were leaving the Yangtze valley and would have to drive several hundred miles through forbidden land before seeing the Long River again.

The topography here reflects more than anywhere else the precise point of collision between this part of the world's two great tectonic plates. It is not an edgewise collision, the kind of collision that produces the chaotic kind of geology we had seen back in northern Yunnan. Here the plates had hit almost exactly head-on – so while the world here was rumpled, and violently for sure, it was rumpled in a somehow
orderly
way, with all the hills arranged in steep and equally tall ranges, and the rivers rushing through deep and equally narrow valleys, and all aligned precisely, as though with a compass.

The hills were arranged in an almost exactly north–south pattern – and the three huge rivers that drain this corner of Asia ran through the mountains parallel to one another, north–south also. Compounding the strangeness of the topography, they were also very, very close – making this one of the best-drained parts of the world, with rivers shearing away like railway lines from a city terminus.

First there was the Yangtze, heading south to Shigu and – but for the intervention of Cloud Mountain – the Gulf of Tonkin; then, a mere fifty miles to the west, was the upper part of the Mekong, which drained through Laos and Cambodia before entering the South China Sea near Saigon; and thirty miles farther west was the Salween, a lesser-known river that watered the Shan States of upper Burma, and flowed into the Andaman Sea by the town of Moulmein, a place made famous only in a poem by Kipling, the one about the Burma girl a-settin' by the old Moulmein pagoda.

We had our first spot of bother with the Chinese police when we arrived at Qamdo, a large town on the upper Mekong. We had found a ramshackle hotel, and were finishing an equally ramshackle dinner, when a young man sidled up beside me.

‘You have a permit?’ he asked, in halting English.

He was a civilian, or so I thought. In fact, he was a nark, and Qamdo was full of them. I ignored this one, but within minutes another, rather larger and more insistent, came up to me and asked the same question. Would I perhaps like to accompany them to the police station?

Lily spoke fast and well. I was a distinguished geographer, she said, a foreigner with a lifelong fascination with the Yangtze. I was travelling this way only as a means of reaching the river's headwaters in Qinghai. I would not be stopping for any reason other than rest. It was a matter of common courtesy, she insisted, for the authorities to let me pass. The future of Anglo-Chinese geographical cooperation could be thrown in jeopardy if I were sent back…

Sent back. The thought was chilling. To reach this town we had already driven over another vastly high pass across the Ningjing Range, which separates the Yangtze valley from the Mekong: it would be depressing beyond words to have to retrace our steps. Besides, the car was deteriorating rapidly, and there was likely to be a mechanic only in Lhasa, five days ahead – closer than Chengdu, now six days behind.

The official was a small, ratlike man. He had brought his ten-year-old son to the interview, and the boy had taken my passport and was trying his best to read it, stumbling on the extravagant rubric in the front, which spoke about Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Requesting and Requiring Such Persons (as his father) to Let the Bearer of the Document Pass Without Let or Hindrance. He translated it, badly. His father ruminated. Then he took out a piece of paper and began writing furiously.

‘I will fine you a large amount – say, five thousand yuan – and give you a piece of paper guaranteeing safe passage to Lhasa. Will that do?’

I was about to agree, when Lily shushed me. No, she said, it would not do at all. The sum he had in mind was outrageous. Five hundred yuan, maximum. He glared at her. She glared back. The child translated some more, trying to explain the difference between a Let and a Hindrance.

Finally the man backed down.

‘OK – five hundred. And I will write this. It should be good for four hundred kilometres more. The rest of the police zone will present no problem.’

But he was wrong. The very next day, at a dreadful high-altitude village called Leiwujie, we were detained once again. Lily was taken away alone this time, and I had to kick my heels in the street outside, listening to her screeching inside, as she raged hysterically against what she called the tyranny of the police. She was, I thought, an exceptionally brave young woman.

She emerged after an hour, white-faced and in tears. But, as it turned out, triumphant. Shakily she explained what had happened inside.

‘I was on the telephone with the chief of police back in Qamdo. I argued with him. I shouted at him. I can't believe it – I told him to shut up! Many times. He was quite afraid. I argued and I argued. The policeman here said he has occasionally seen foreigners here before, begging, on their knees, trying to get permission to go on. He has always sent them back.

‘He had a man last year who fell over and over on the ground, rolling back and forth, weeping, offering money. But he said no. He said he has never once let any foreigner he has caught pass this point. He is proud of it. “If I see a foreigner, this is as far as he gets.” He told me that.

‘But for some reason, he decided to agree, in this one case. He listened to me, he understood my passion for this river. He was very impressed that we had come all the way here from the sea. He knew that if he said no the whole voyage would be in danger, and that you would write and hold him up to ridicule. So he said yes. We can go. No fine. No nothing. Just go. Immediately. Back to the Jeep!’

Propitious or not, it was the Jeep that was the next to go. The wretched car sputtered to a halt two mornings later, when we were deep in the mountains and miles from the nearest habitation. I had to clamber down five hundred feet to a stream to get water: the wrecked radiator, cut to shreds by the spinning fan, spewed it out before we had gone a mile. Down to the river again, another bucket of water, another mile's progress – and so on for ten miles, by which time we reached a road menders' camp, and Lily and I pitched the tent.

There were only Tibetan women in the camp; their menfolk would be back by dark, they said, and one of them had the equipment necessary for mending the radiator – a welding torch, I assumed. The women took us in out of the storm: they gave us soup and let us sit in the warm while a battery-powered prayer wheel by the door hummed its mantras into the howling gale. And then the storm quietened, and the men returned.

The ‘equipment' turned out to be a two-inch bar of solder, a jar of flux, and a sharp-edged hammer that could be used as a soldering iron. Miao fell upon these items with glee. As evening darkened and the Tibetan stars came up we watched this remarkable man as he performed, in that classical Chinese way, a miracle of improvisation. We watched him heating the hammer to red heat in the jet flame of a gasoline stove, and then melting silvery globules of solder onto each one of the eighty-three cuts and gouges we had counted in the radiator. It was painstaking work – every break had to be crimped closed, every closure welded shut with solder, every joint then tested under the high pressure that water attains in a car's cooling system.