tagong

i wake up before sunrise in kangding, home of a famous love song. for once the sky is not cloudy and i am happy to see some stars. the young man sleeping behind the reception desk seems to speak even less chinese than i do, but after knocking some doors i manage to check out. at the bus station i buy a computer printed ticket to tagong, 3 hours across the mountain pass. amazed how the chinese efficiency reaches places like this i try to figure out which bus is mine. asking around does not help, for some reason this town only seems to speak tibetan before sunrise. fortunately the bus is almost empty and i make myself comfortable, looking forward to the scenery that will unfold itself. but the windows freeze as soon as we get underway. after a while i have to open a window for some fresh air- for once it is not cigarette smoke; the exhaust seems to be leaking straight into the bus, but nobody complains. how ironic that in this magnificent pure mountains i can hardly get a breath of fresh air.

after a 4000m+ mountain pass the valley becomes dotted with tibetan stone houses. the sun is up and i am glad to see it after a gloomy week in chongqing-chengdu-kangding. a tibetan in a long sheep coat is playing a lonely game of pool in front of his house at 8 in the morning. i feel further and further away from han china, but it is the chinese who have built this sichuan-tibet highway and in the larger towns along it i spot the obligatory chinese buildings. this region is not that isolated, here i am in the middle of winter and the road is open, trucks go back and forth.

i was planning to just have a look in tagong and return the same day, but indeed the place is magic. and i needed some time to recover from 4 hours of bumpy road and a deafeningly rattling bus. i am dropped in front of the temple, where a friendly monk speaks to me in english. he knows about belgium and would like to talk a bit more, but says he is too busy with prayers today. he invites me to come back in the late afternoon.

on the top of a hill the giant shadow of a bird circling my head almost makes me dive. flashback of aggressive icelandic birds protecting their nests. this tibetan bird might know the taste of human flesh, one of the traditional tibetan ways to bury the dead is known as the sky burial, where the monks cut the body in peaces to be eaten by the birds.

having a rest in front of the temple enjoying the sun i notice that my mobile phone has full reception in tagong- those chinese are really serious about telecom. my friend calls me from beijing and the tibetans stare at me while i am talking my strange language. i must admit it is quite a surreal scene, there is a goat sleeping next to me, and the beggar lying on the door step has not moved since i arrived in this town. i feel my face getting sunburnt.

the monks invite me to follow them into the temple. they sing monotonous verses and from time to time beat the drum and blow a trumpet. in the dark entrance pilgrims are throwing themselves on the ground in their approach to the buddha statue. nothing around me reminds me of the 21st century. i try to disappear behind a pillar, i always feel a little awkward in such holy places, not knowing how to behave. i remember being scolded by a devout woman in a buddhist temple in siberia for walking around in the wrong direction i think..
my monk friend leads me to a brand new shining stupa behind the hill. it belongs to a different sect of tibetan buddhism and he says in fact its main purpose is to collect money from entrance tickets- karma business he calls it. at this time of the year there is nobody to sell tickets though. he tells me the fascinating story of this life, how he came to the tagong monastery as a young boy and studied the tibetan scriptures. in fact he does not speak any chinese. at the age of 20 he went to lhasa and then walked for one month crossing the border secretly into nepal, without a chinese passport. his group continued to india where tibetans enjoy a kind of refugee status, and he studied buddhist philosophy at a tibetan institute. the majority of important lamas seems to live in india. he also spent some time in nepal and bhutan, and finally bought a nepali passport to be able to fly back into china. he almost got into trouble because he forgot one of his study books had a picture of the dalai lama. now he is longing to continue his study abroad.

here in tagong it is obvious what the chinese have brought- improved roads, electricity, telecom, an elementary school etc. these are all good things, and the tibetans seem to agree; i am sure they know it would have been much harder to achieve this without support from beijing. my friend tells me the villagers are happy with the new road, even it they had to move houses, it is good for their business.

when we are eating noodles the tv plays karaoke vcds in tibetan and in chinese. that seems to be enough autonomy to satisfy the average tibetan that just comes into town to sell his yak butter and spends the rest of the year in the mountains.

december 2003