We had pitched our tent on the slopes of a Tibetan mountainside, above a bright green meadow that was crowded with very large yaks. Camping had not been in our plan; but our car had broken down, and now lay seemingly beyond repair. The diagnosis was plain: the two mild-steel bolts that were supposed to hold the radiator secure had both sheared simultaneously, buffeted by scores of miles of vicious bumping along what is laughably called National Highway 307. Once the bolts had snapped, the radiator had fallen backwards, directly onto the cooling fan. The whirling metal blades had promptly cut a series of concentric arcs into the copper tubing, causing all of the car's cooling water to pour out onto the dry and stony ground.
In London or New York such a mishap would be serious, but not mortally so. Even if there was no service station nearby, some man would be within hailing distance who could jury-rig the radiator, sealing its leaking tubes for long enough for us to limp onward for a permanent fix. But in Tibet, hundreds of miles from anywhere, an event like this turns into a disaster on an epic scale. So we broke out the tent and readied ourselves for a long and hungry stay in the midst of this unholy wilderness.
The tent was Chinese-made, overly well weathered and decayed by years of use. The zippers intended to hold together the flaps of the front entrance and its fly sheet had been ruined and refused to work. This in itself would be no major problem – provided the weather held. But Tibetan weather is notoriously fickle, and within seconds of my putting up the tent and clambering into it and showing Lily – who had never camped before in her life – where to stash her gear, the wind suddenly picked up and marble-sized spheres of hail began to tumble from the sky.
They sounded just like bullets – a fusillade that began slowly at first and then became as intense as a wild celebration of battle, with the chunks of ice, larger and larger and rougher and with ever sharper spurs and spikes, hurtling viciously down from the clouds.
I was keeping the unzippable doors closed with my hands, and the ice was beating against the exposed skin, bruising it and then cutting it until blood flowed freely and dripped onto the tent floor and onto the ice-carpeted grass outside. Lily was terror-struck, and she fled into a corner of the tent like a wounded animal – until a torrent of hail thundered down through the fly sheet and began to bruise and batter her, upon which she sensibly moved to the centre of the space, away from the wall. She sat whimpering, her crying drowned completely by the thunder of the hail, which went on and on, becoming ever louder, half burying the tent in a thick rime of frozen water. What with her wailing, and the thunder of the ice, and my bleeding hands, and the thought of the ruined car buried in white outside, the day was turning out to be rather trying.
We were on the road to the Yangtze's headwaters, and getting there – involving a lot of backtracking – was proving anything but easy. It had seemed very much otherwise some weeks before, when the cascade of coincidences that had begun with the taxi driver miles away eventually took us to two men who had access to cars – Mr Wu back in Panzhihua, and more recently Mr Xu Xiaoyang, who lived and worked in the Sichuan capital city of Chengdu. Xu was a devoted fan of the Upper Yangtze River, and he had stated flatly that if he could help anyone wanting to get there, he would: as he told his story in his office above a local department store, reaching the headwaters would be almost child's play.
We had been given his name and a letter of introduction by Wu of Panzhihua, and he – Xu – was waiting for us at the Chengdu railway station when we pulled in after our day-long ride from the south. It had been an astonishingly beautiful journey – a combination of scenic beauty and awesome engineering as, via tunnel after tunnel after tunnel, the line pierced the eastern flanks of the Daxue Mountains and raced high above the Anning River.
The railway had been built in the seventies by gangs of convicts and soldiers, and it must have been one of the most technically difficult pieces of permanent-way construction anywhere in the world. The reward for a traveller is one of perpetual astonishment, of being hurled from the bat blackness of a tunnel into the glare of a section high up on a cliff above the river, then dashing back into darkness again before once more – two hundred times, all told – being thrust into vivid sunshine higher up the mountain still, with the rice farmers working their paddies and the fishermen poling their sampans hundreds of feet below. We reached the plains of Chengdu quite tired out, exhausted by the huge emotional overload of seeing so much unforgettable scenery, and being so overawed for so many hours, without respite.
Xu Xiaoyang was in his early thirties, an owlish man in pebble-thick glasses; he was with a friend whom he introduced as Mr Tang, who had long hair draped over the top of his shoulders, and a vaguely Tibetan cast to his features. Tang had been to the headwaters ten years before, and would guide us; Xu would organize everything: it would be his pleasure, he said, and his privilege.
His organization, which was based in two large and spartanly furnished rooms above the department store, was called the Sichuan Corporation for International Cultural Development. How it raised funds, how it paid Xu and his pretty secretary and the rent and the office machines, remained a mystery during the initial days that we waited in Chengdu, getting my Alien's Travel Permit and our car – another Beijing Jeep, as it happened. But money it seemed to have in abundance: there were cellular telephones, air conditioners, expensive dinners offered to us each evening, visits from moguls from Shanghai and Hong Kong, and a good deal of talk about future cooperation, of ‘putting Sichuan on the map’, of making films about the Three Gorges Dam, and about the headwaters themselves.
Then came a clue as to whence came the corporation's riches. A glossy brochure was delivered to our hotel one day showing the worldwide extent of its business. Most of the links appeared to be with countries in Africa – Tanzania, Kenya, Niger. There were photographs of banks and office blocks, grand houses that might have been presidential palaces, factories and hydroelectric schemes – all in gleaming white concrete, all being happily run by smiling Africans. They had all been built, it turned out, by Sichuanese – by men who had been sent out by Xu and his predecessors, to live and work in camps all over Africa, as part of what is generally known as bilateral cooperation.
I had seen such camps before – they were usually well-guarded barracks, with the inmates permitted neither to leave nor to welcome visitors. The workers' costs were met by the Sichuan provincial government, which in turn received a subvention from Beijing's foreign assistance ministry. The organization that made all the arrangements – Xu's in this case, though each province invariably had a similar foreign-assistance programme – took the provincial and national grant money, and maybe some subsidy from the foreign power to whom aid was an offer. It seemed to do very well – allowing in this case Xu, who was the manager, to drive a large Japanese car, to live alone in a comfortable house near the American Consulate (he was divorced, and his current girlfriend lived in Tokyo) and to dine famously every day.
It allowed him also to be unusually generous to friends and friends-of-friends who stopped by with what in other circumstances might seem outrageous requests. I had mentioned to Wu that Lily and I wanted to be able to see the far Upper Yangtze in a place where it was narrow enough to jump across – something that would ordinarily require months of planning and the granting of permissions. He had duly passed on this intelligence to Xu.
‘There will be no problem,’ Xu said excitedly, ‘I have the most excellent guanxi here. We will get all we need. You will get your wishes.’
By guanxi, he meant ‘connections' – the complex system of favour exchanging, of mutual back-scratching, of the calling-in of old debts which, overlying a byzantine network of family and business and school and military ties that acts as China's new-style class system, forms the essential lubricant that allows China to function, unfairly but quite efficiently. An impoverished peasant without any guanxi at all might not always get all of the rice he deserved or to which he was entitled; nor would a vexed citizen who lacked connections find true justice at the hands of the system. But I knew I would get a car and a driver to take me to the Yangtze headwaters because – and only because – I would be perceived as someone who might, one day, be able to repay a favour that would most assuredly one day be called in. This was guanxi in its most perfect essence: I would get all I needed because I could get them what they needed.
But what I nearly did not get was my Alien's Travel Permit. ‘I have serious suspicions about this man,’ complained the head of the Chengdu Public Security Bureau, when he was asked to give me permission to travel down Route 307, the old Lhasa brick tea road. He refused to say why he was suspicious: I had offered myself to him innocently as a teacher, bent on travelling to western Sichuan for reasons of scholarship and curiosity. But my passport was perhaps a little overfilled with stamps from previous visits to China, and he may have wondered why. Anyway, he turned me down.
So we went instead to another office, one that Xu knew had equal powers to issue permits, and eventually – and to a triumphal war whoop from Xu, who had been in danger of losing face because of the bureaucrat's obduracy – I was handed the grey folded insert for my passport, which allowed me to visit the towns of Kangding, Luding and Dêgê.
I would not be permitted to cross the Yangtze, however. The river here marks a firm frontier: on the far side, the western side, the right bank, was the province the Chinese now called Xizang, and which the rest of the world calls Tibet. The officials were adamant that I should not go that far, especially during what was said to be ‘troublesome times’. I was equally determined that I should: Lhasa may have been far from the Yangtze, but in the plan that Xu and I had conceived, it seemed an essential way station.
Back in Shigu, where the Yangtze makes its first big turn towards the north and east, I had taken a close look at the large-scale map. The road that headed north, up towards the old local capital town called Batang, was indifferent at best. It was a narrow dirt track used only by logging trucks and it led through hundreds of miles of difficult and frankly uninteresting wilderness. It would be far more interesting, I thought, to make a large zigzag of a journey, crossing the river and in doing so sampling a richer cross section of life and topography.
According to this plan, I would travel west from Chengdu along the southern branch of the tea road to the point where it crossed the Yangtze; then I would pass deep (and illicitly) into Tibet, I would cross the valleys of the rivers Salween and Mekong until I reached the only properly metalled road in the entire province, the great north–south highway that ran between Lhasa and Golmud, a dreary northern potash-mining town that lay in the gulag-land of central Qinghai province. If I took this road north from Lhasa I would then cross the Yangtze once again – and I would at this point be just a very few miles from one of the great river's supposed sources, the Tuotuo stream and its rising at the pool below the Gelandandong glacier. A brief trek into the moors near there, and I should perhaps find a Yangtze that was as narrow and as pristine as I wanted.
In this plan, journeying into Tibet and all the way to Lhasa was essential. Yet now I was told – not that I had truly expected otherwise; everyone was saying that Tibet in 1995 was a tricky place to visit – that the greater part of the road I needed to travel was off-limits. The permit that allowed me to travel along it as far as Dêgê was firm in forbidding me to proceed any farther. Besides, cautioned my Australian guidebook, the roads leading to Lhasa from here (and there are actually two) ‘are some of the wildest, highest and most dangerous routes in the world. They are not open to foreigners. If you do travel along them do not forget the physical dangers – take food and warm clothing. Travel on these routes usually takes several weeks, hitch-hiking on trucks…’ The auguries were not so good.
Tang arrived on the morning of our departure in a bright red Beijing Jeep our second. They were common enough cars in China – made under licence in what was said to be a disastrously run joint-venture factory Chrysler had set up in the mid-eighties in the Chinese capital. He was sitting in the front passenger seat: the driver was a small and nervous-looking man named Mr Miao. Normally Miao was employed by the organization that owned the car – the Propaganda Department of the Chengdu City Government, with which the owlish Xu had such excellent guanxi. He knew perfectly well where we were wanting to go, and he thought there was a good chance we would get there. ‘You may have some trouble with the police,’ he said with a twitching grin, ‘but you probably also have many dollars, yes? Out there they are more interested in dollars than permits.’
Xu was up early to see us leave and he made a brief speech offering prayers, in guttural Sichuanese, for our good fortune. We then crunched into first gear, with a grinding noise that said little good about the mechanical quality of our conveyance. Miao patted his gear lever with an affectionate gesture that was to become his most obvious nervous habit (the more nerves, the more rapid the patting rate) and sputtered smokily out into the traffic and towards the distant mountains.
For several hours we motored southwestward, the hills looming rigidly on our right. This was still China, the far corner of the Red Basin of Sichuan, and the roads were good and fast; there were factories and airfields and a dismayingly large number of army bases, with heavily armed soldiers pacing back and forth on sentry duty outside the gates. Chengdu is a major staging post for troops bound for duty in the Tibetan highlands: whenever a rebellion is to be put down, or monks arrested, or borders closed, the soldiers who do the work are flown in from Chengdu, or sent by convoy down the metalled highway from Golmud. Of the two ways to get troops to Lhasa fast, the bases and the aerodromes around Chengdu are by far the more important.
Then we crossed a bridge and turned smartly right, to the west. The land began to rise. This was the beginning of the hills about which Li Bai had written his most famous couplet: ‘Oh how dangerous, how high! How hard is the road to Shu! It is as hard as the road to heaven.’ We were leaving China Proper and we were entering what once had been Tibet Proper, but which had for the last three centuries been a half-world, a place where the two so very different cultures came together and either merged or collided according to the mood of the moment. Between the edge of the mountains and the banks of the Yangtze – 250 miles as the crow flies, but five times that once the mountain passes were negotiated – lay a chaotic wilderness of craggy ranges and deep gorges that the Qing dynasty administrators had briefly called Sikang province, or in the words of today's Chinese historians, Xikang. The very existence of a state here had much to do with an engagingly eccentric Briton, Sir Francis Younghusband, who invaded Tibet on Britain's behalf in 1904.
This area between the river and the eastern edge of the mountains was always a wild and lawless place, peopled by volatile rapscallions who owed their allegiances to various local chieftains. The Moso, those who favoured lying upon and then wolfing down the Boneless Pig, were one such: there were others, petty states – more than thirty – with names like Chala (into which we had come when we made our sudden right turn over the bridge) and Lithang and Gyemorong. All were lumped together under the name of Kham, and the people were collectively known as Khampas. They were widely thought of as warlike, unruly and deeply holy, and were feared by Tibetans and Han Chinese alike – said with admiration by today's Tibetans to have been the region's best killers and the greatest saints.
Sir Francis Younghusband had come to Tibet – from India, and via Sikkim – in 1904 on what has often been described loosely as Britain's Last Imperial Adventure. The excuse provided by the Indian viceroy at the time for his doing so was laughably flimsy: Tibetans were said to be stealing Nepalese yaks, he said, and must be dealt with. The underlying purpose was very real: it was to keep Tibet out of the sphere of influence of the increasingly voracious Russians.
This action was the Great Game between innings, and when Younghusband's soldiers were firmly settled in place under the Potala in Lhasa – having been put there by superior force of arms and, as Hilaire Belloc summarized, because ‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not' – Britain forced the Tibetans to sign a convention that would keep the Russians firmly at bay. The side effect, unanticipated at the time, was that China would begin a long process that would culminate in her becoming the dominant influence on Tibet. ‘She climbed back into Lhasa,’ wrote one of Britain's critics, ‘on Francis Younghusband's shoulders.’
The first act of the Qing dynasts, the Manchus, was to annex the region of Kham, to create a buffer state between the Chinese Empire and what was then seen, supposedly, as an outpost of British imperial interest. So they sent west a ruthless killer named General Zhao Erfang, charging him with a mission to take Kham for the Chinese and wipe out any resistance in the towns through which we were due to pass in the coming days. The general became known as the Butcher of the Monks as he sacked lamaseries by the score, and executed Buddhist leaders from Yushu and Dêgê down to Batang and the Yunnan border. He crossed the Yangtze and made for Lhasa, looking for the Dalai Lama of the day: but the Lama had fled to India, just as his successor was to do when other Chinese came to get him, fifty years later on.
The Chinese turned the Kham they had thus conquered into the entire new province to which they gave the name Xikang – a process of Imperial administration that came to a screeching halt less than half a decade later, in 1911, when the Manchus were themselves driven from power by the republicans. But the idea of having a buffer state between China and Tibet (and at the same time of making a springboard by which the Chinese could ultimately make their leap to Lhasa itself) still carried weight. In 1928 it was revived, and there was more stern battling in the mountains as the Chinese fought to carve Xikang into an administrative reality.
It never truly happened. Governors came and went. Bureaucracies were set up and dismantled. The capital was shifted from Batang, beside the Yangtze, to a town that was then called Dardo and which is now known as Kangding. But even that capital never became much more than an exercise in wishful thinking; and in 1955, after years of halting starts, Xikang was formally abolished: the land was swallowed up by Sichuan, though its people were made semi-autonomous, and they were recognized as racially different from both the regions that marched beside it. (But in Taiwan today the province is regarded as still being in existence, and there is a representative, notionally from Xikang, who sits in the National Assembly in Taipei.)
The thought that Sir Francis Younghusband might have some responsibility for the unique existence of the country through which we were passing did not seem to press with undue weight on the local inhabitants. There were other diversions for them. In Ya'an, the frontier town where we spent the night, there was a very noisy market, and across from the inn some wily entrepreneur had set up a small zoo behind hastily hung mats, and he charged people one yuan to come and see his tired collection of exotica.
I was hoping to find one of the big blue-horned pheasants that are native to these parts, and which go by the magnificent name of Temminck's Tragopan; but instead there was just one flyblown porcupine and a ratty old snake or two. There were a number of pages torn from ancient copies of the National Geographic that showed teenage African girls with bare breasts: Lily was convinced that this was the true attraction on offer by the hustler who owned the zoo – it was not to show animals at all, but to offer sex-starved Chinese men a chance to feast their eyes on tits.
Next morning we started to climb hills in earnest, razor-sharp ridges so newly elevated that they were still crumbling and hurling down torrential landslips. I could well believe that the Indian tectonic plate was in continuing collision with its Asian cousin: the land seemed half alive here, and with the mist swirling through the rhododendron groves and the rivers coursing down every ravine, it was a place quite lacking in stillness, or in any sense of serenity or bucolic peace. It was one of these rare places
– New Zealand is another, I suppose – where the land seems far more charged with energy than do the people.
The roads were narrow and dangerous and clung to the side of huge black cliffs. Long diversions – one of them at least a hundred miles long – kept us away from the more serious landslips. One road across a high pass was only open westbound – the direction we needed – before two in the afternoon, and we arrived to find barrier poles up and police telling us to try the following day or take another long detour, which we did.
The route took us, fortuitously, along the frighteningly fast-flowing Dadu River and to the small town of Luding on its left bank. There, a black iron chain bridge that had been slung across the river in early Qing times, almost three centuries ago, was still standing: it had attained heroic status in late May 1935, when Mao's Long Marchers fought their way across it, under a withering fusillade of Nationalist machine-gun fire. Their action had been just as heroic as – but much more widely publicized than – their crossing of the Yangtze back at Jiaopingdu: brightly coloured pictures of the grim-faced soldiers battling through the fires, clinging to the great iron support chains, can be seen at most patriotically inclined shrines in today's China, as important an image for the collective mind as that of Mao standing before the microphones in Tiananmen Square, declaring the People's Republic born, or of him standing erect, his right arm pointing to some just attainable promise, a worthy goal for the distant Chinese future.
There was no artist to record the crossing of the Yangtze, though, and as a result today most Chinese seem to believe that the Luding Bridge actually spans the Yangtze, and not its lesser – but scarcely less impressive – tributary.
I strolled across the swaying planks, having paid one yuan for the privilege: Lily paid less (being Chinese) and came too, but she was frightened by the sight of the torrent swirling by below and demanded that I hold her hand as we crossed. On the other side she tried (in vain) to find a boat to take her back.
When finally we arrived at Kangding, which as well as being the capital of Xikang had been the seat of the King of Chala – we were all exhausted. As was the car: it was already showing acute signs of distress, not least because the bonnet had broken free of its cast-iron hasps after an encounter with a particularly deep pothole, and had fallen off, bouncing down onto the highway and into a ditch.
This town had at last the feel of Tibet about it. It was huddled in a fold among the mountains, and a small stream coursed under a string of bridges in its middle, sending up a constant roar that went echoing into the hills. I climbed up for a view: scores of red roofs glowing in the evening sun, the green of the forest-covered hills, the white of the little river rushing between the houses – this was a pretty place, and I felt a sense of relief that I realized, perhaps unkindly, came from winning some slight relief from China, and the Chinese.
Our hotel was beside a small lamasery, the Anjue Si, which was in the midst of being restored. Old women spun prayer wheels silently, young monks in burgundy robes strung flags from the scaffolding. This has long been a religious centre: up on the hill to the south of town is a small white stupa, known as a chorten in Tibet, the first of many such shrines. Until the first half of this century the French had kept a cleric here, the head of their Mission Étrangères, of which the plant-hunting Père David had been one of the best known. Kangding's bishop was once the redoubtable Abbé Huc, who made friends with the Tibetans and was thrown out by the Chinese for so doing: he wrote one of the best-ever travel accounts of the little-known China of the mid-nineteenth century, which became something of a worldwide best-seller.
Kangding is a crossroads town, once a terminus for the brick tea trade, now an important rest stop for anyone bound into or out of Tibet – it is the true beginning of ethnic Tibet or, for someone coming from the far side, the true beginning of the real China. The little cafés here serve Tibetan tea – a powerful decoction brewed from tea dust and twigs, with copious amounts of salt added to impart extra flavour and with large globules of rancid, hairy yak-butter floating on top. It is an acquired taste that I was not to acquire – finding it even less attractive a comestible than tsampa, the principal food of the Tibetan peasantry, which consists merely of flour worked with water and yak-butter, and which is eaten raw and has a taste like rotten dough.
The brick tea from which the brew is made was once the main reason for Kangding's existence as an entrepôt. Mule or yak trains took it from here deep into Tibet – the bricks wrapped in coloured paper, put into tubes of bamboo matting and then sealed in waterproof bags made of yakhide. The shapeless bundles that resulted, hard as iron and heavy as lead and containing perhaps scores of pounds of precious Chinese tea, were carried by pack animals or by human bearers over the worst and most dangerously exposed roads in the world – roads that took their traffic more than three miles high, across snowfields and beside seracs at the top of windy mountain passes. The road is little better today, even though trucks have replaced the mule trains, and even though the only people who travel on foot are the pilgrims, who go on their hands and knees and take many years to get to Lhasa.
The fact that Kangding is a crossroads came home vividly to me as I was sitting down to dinner at a small Chinese restaurant beside one of the river bridges. I was well into my steamed fish and spicy tofu when there was a commotion at the door and a young woman walked in – someone I knew very well. She was an archaeologist from California, a woman named Pam Logan who had borrowed my New York flat some six months before when she had been on her way to Paris. Neither of us could believe it – meeting at all was fairly improbable, but meeting in a small foothills town in eastern Tibet even more so. She knew the area well, and regained her composure rapidly.
‘Perhaps it's not so odd,’ she said finally. ‘This is Kangding, after all. When you come to think of it, it's probably more likely that we meet here than anywhere else. People have been meeting here for centuries. That's why the place exists.’
She was on her way back from Dêgê, where she had been working on a plan to restore a number of lamaseries that had been sacked during the Cultural Revolution. She was going to Chengdu, thence to Irkutsk and the once independent statelet of Tannu-Tuva, which lay in a series of valleys west of Mongolia. I knew Tuva fairly well, having been there to see a monument to the supposed geographical centre of Asia, which an Englishman had raised there, inaccurately, a century before. I gave her the number of some people to make contact with in Kyzyl, the capital; she in turn gave me a letter for the Dêgê police chief, a Mr Ma. She owed him fifty yuan, and tucked that into the envelope as well. Then we hugged and said our goodbyes – she would be in Tuva in a week, and I should be on the banks of the Yangtze, and at Dêgê, in another couple of days – if the car performed properly.
Next morning the road climbed high onto the basement of the Tibetan Plateau. There would be many more great ridges and plains before we reached the plateau itself, but these hills now had an organization about them, as though we had left the chaos of the collision zone behind us and were on the way to the high upthrusts of the Asian plate itself. There were villages of the strangely boxy stone houses of the settled Tibetans, and down in the meadows the large black tents of the nomads. It was all staggeringly beautiful – clean and glittering in the early sunlight, with dew-fresh grass, towering peaks, piercing blue skies and, dotting the scenery with ragged charm, hundreds upon hundreds of grazing yaks. Like sheep in Scotland, yaks always acted skittishly when we swept past: they would rear up and race away, their hooves sending sprays of earth behind them, and the ground rumbling under their speeding mass.
There were other animals, too – small creatures like groundhogs, and big waddling rodents, like stunted capybaras, that were said to be Tibetan marmots. Birds, too: owls by night, and small blue and red and orange perching birds by day. The dreariness of China was well behind us now: we had come up into a new altitude, and the world was new and excitingly different.
But the road was still terrible, and the car performed less and less well. Poor Miao, whose gear-lever patting rate was becoming almost manic, kept having to stop and cleanse this nozzle or rebraze that point or demand that local welders – who were becoming rare animals indeed in these parts – re-attach pieces that had fallen off. The Jeep was looking very sick indeed; and inside we were choked with dust, and all we owned was filthy and, in many cases, broken by the constant battering. Lily had rarely before been in a car for more than two hours: so far we were four days into a journey that might take at least two weeks. Her morale was not the best.
Gas stations were rare as well, and those who found them tended to stay in them for long periods, unwilling to plunge on into the wilderness once having discovered an oasis of relative civilization. At one, deep in the middle of nowhere, I came across a beautiful young woman who spoke flawless English. She was from Sikkim and had been working in the hills a hundred miles from here, helping to build a new lamasery, to replace one torn down by Red Guards in 1968.
She was called Changchup Dolma, and we arranged to have dinner together that night. Lily refused to come: Tibetans, and those who sympathized with Tibetans, were far from being her favourites.
The young woman was indeed young – only twenty-seven, and though her family was from Sikkim, she had been educated in the town of Vizakapatnam in southeast India, taking a BA in art history. Her uncle, under whose auspices the new lamasery was being built, was an exceptionally holy man – the incarnation, she said, of the great Dêgê Lama. He had been recognized as such when he was nine years old, he had come to Lhasa in the 1950s to study, as was decreed, and then gone on to Kangding, to a lamasery under the control of the Lama of Chala. During the Cultural Revolution he had been arrested, and spent twenty years in prison, for no greater crime than claiming himself to be (as did his followers) a reincarnate deity, a trulku.
The girl was almost weeping as she told me this. But she was not sad, she said – rather she was just tremendously happy to meet me, a foreigner who listened. She loathed the Chinese, and had made no efforts to learn their language. She spoke Sikkimese, Hindi, Tibetan, and this excellent English. ‘But Chinese is the tongue of our oppressors,’ she declared. ‘I would think of it as a betrayal to learn it.’ Since nearly 90 per cent of the local population – most of whom were nomads anyway – were Tibetan, she had little practical reason for learning the language.
She was tall and graceful, and when she begged me to stay for some months and try to learn something of the plight, as she put it, of the Tibetan people, I was more than a little tempted. During dinner she tried to teach me to write Tibetan, which I told her I had long thought one of the prettiest-looking of languages. But I could manage only om mane padme hum, which I already knew from having seen it so often carved on the thousands of roadside stones, set there by patient masons who wanted no more than for the mantra to be carried away by passing breezes. She was a patient teacher, though, and smiled beatifically through all my clumsy errors.
Later I had a letter from her, posted in a town called Luhou, the nearest to her lamasery: she said she had had to ride two days in a truck to post it.
I hope you remember me [she wrote, as if I could possibly forget]…
I am the girl you met in Luhou, Tibet. I am sure when you get home you will have many adventures to tell your friends… Being a poor talker I couldn't tell you much about Tibet. In China there is no freedom of speech, as you must know, and you can hardly talk about what you really feel. Living in Tibet for nearly three years now I really don't know what people feel in their minds and hearts. No one seems to believe any other person. They may be spies, or maybe they had been tortured badly during the Revolution. It still has an effect on them, this past – the older ones tell the younger generation to keep quiet and not to believe the third persons. Even the small children follow the rules.
I might be late in writing to you some more. I mean I might not be able to write to you very often. I hope you won't mind. You see, we don't have a post office here and going to town is difficult as there is no bus or cars. I have to go and look for a truck passing by, and they hardly ever give a lift. But I will do my best to write to you as often as I could.
That was the only letter that ever came. She enclosed a photograph of Domand Gunpa, the lamasery she was building for her uncle. It had room for forty student monks, she said, and there was to be a large chorten built near by. What had gone up so far was a grand and colourful two-storey structure of wood, and in the photograph there is a milling crowd of monks and abbots, and the local Tibetan girls in the foreground look happy enough.
On the surface, in many ways, it might seem as though the Chinese are allowing, if cautiously, some resurgence in Tibet's religious traditions. The fact that westerners are being invited to help rebuild lamaseries and that Sikkimese devotees like Changchup Dolma are being allowed to cross what was once a rigidly controlled international frontier speaks of a growing liberalization – at least to Lily, who consistently argued that China's policies towards Tibet had been universally beneficial and were now marked by an excess of tolerance. But this letter, which was waiting for me at home, postmarked in Chinese and Tibetan script, spoke of other, less pleasant attitudes – and knowing the Chinese, and their low regard for the barbarians who are their neighbours, I had to doubt that matters were improving in any significant way.
The road got steadily bleaker and more lonely, and the idea grew that we were journeying well beyond all law and beyond all organization – a notion that was in some way exhilarating, in another quite daunting. An example came a hundred or so miles outside Luhou, on a stretch of road near one of the many opencast gold mines that pepper this hazily administered part of Tibet-cum-Sichuan. It was when I watched two truck drivers – in the only trucks I had seen for dozens of miles – having a spirited argument. The one had climbed down from his truck and was standing on the running board of the other, gesticulating wildly at the man inside. As we passed by, this man suddenly pulled an automatic pistol from his jacket and, while the scene diminished steadily in our rearview mirror, had thrust it into the face of his antagonist. What happened next I can't say, but it had rather the look of violence to it. That the locals call this part of the world the Wild West seemed at the moment only too appropriate.
The gold mines are run by gangsters, too – claims are staked, locals are trucked in to work in near freezing conditions for a few cents a day, and the gold is divided up between a government official and the man who first found the lode. Officially, all gold belongs to the Chinese treasury: unofficially, a lot of local farmers are getting rich, and, more to the point, a lot of corrupt government officials – a phrase that in China has the ring of tautology to it these days – are getting even richer.
We were on the northern branch of the brick tea road, a longer route to Lhasa than for those who go by way of Batang, so there was very little traffic, no more than two or three trucks a day. Occasionally we would find broken-down vehicles, and once a bus that lay at the bottom of a canyon, wrecked almost beyond recognition, and still smouldering. The passengers, if any had survived, were nowhere to be seen.
And every day, every hour, we climbed higher and higher towards the great plateau. On our fifth day, after lunch at a hot, dry junction town that looked like a rest stop in eastern Montana, or Wyoming, we began to inch our way up the sides of a long couloir that the maps said led to the summit of Chola-shan, the final mountain chain before we reached the Yangtze.
The scene was unforgettably dramatic. In the background was the immense massif, scoured by three mighty glaciers that left razor-sharp peaks to slice through the racing clouds. In the foreground, beside a stream of cloudy ice-milk, was a sloping meadow, with pines and junipers where it joined the rocky slopes, untidy piles of tussock grass in the middle and then acres of sweet, lush, and damp grass closer to the road, where the land was flat. A dozen yaks grazed contentedly, and in front of her family's large black tent sat a young Tibetan woman, nursing her baby. In her right hand she held a prayer wheel, which she whirled like a top, sending blessings out on the wind. Her left arm supported her child, pressed tight to her breast.
She had long pigtails, and her hair was decorated with amulets made of yellowed amber; on her arms she wore bracelets of braided silver. I thought then I had never seen anything quite so beautiful. There was distant birdsong. The icy water tinkled merrily between the grasses, and some of the yaks wore bells, which pealed slightly as they changed feet and moved on for another mouthful of meadow. Blue smoke wafted from a dying fire, and a black pot hissed on its embers. The young woman looked up at me and smiled warmly, quite unconcerned at my presence as she continued to turn her prayer wheel in silent, practised devotion.
Behind and above, the mists spun through the peaks like gossamer trails and tiny puffs of cloud lazed in the summer sunshine, their shadows briefly darkening the grassland. I wanted to stay here, my own Shangri-la among the hills, for always.
But we had to cross the Chola hills, and so I said my good-byes – blithely ignored by the young woman – and we continued, whipping the broken Jeep into some semblance of forward motion. The road was a switchback – ‘twenty-five bends to the summit!’ said Tang, who had been here before. Soon the meadow was just distant patchwork, and the sharp peaks were all around us, and melting snow was leaking onto the gravel. A half-wrecked snowplough lay in wait in a road menders' hut, and a cold wind rattled the corrugated iron of its driver's cabin.
There was a cairn at the summit – 4916 metres, 16,100 feet said the sign, not quite accurately – and lines of prayer flags fluttering wildly in the gale. It was bitterly cold, and the thin air was making Lily feel unsteady. In the distance I could see the black cleft where the Yangtze ran, on the far side of which was Tibet proper – and another roadmen's hut. We headed there for shelter, and a cup of tea.
It was entirely run by women, tough old brutes dressed to their chins in wool and padded green coats from the army. They volunteered for the work, they said, and were paid sixty yuan a month – nine dollars. The contract called for a five-year stint up at these altitudes – and there was a bonus paid to those who stuck it out and didn't go back to Dêgê or Luhou, pleading for easier duty.
‘But you know what bothers me?’ said one woman, thinking that I could perhaps improve her lot because, being a foreigner, I should have plenty of good guanxi. ‘The bosses say this pass is at 4916 metres – you saw the sign? Well, they put it up – but it's wrong. We're actually at 5500 metres [18,000 feet] – but they changed the sign just so they don't have to pay us the extra money that's supposed to be given to anyone who works over five thousand metres. They're cheating us. Cheapskates! Damn bastards!’ She kicked her boot furiously against a broken-down truck, and added: ‘You write about it. Then maybe they'll change it.’ I assured her I would do just that.
The fields on the weather side of the hills were covered near the summit with yellow tuliplike flowers and mats of blue heather, and lower down there were poppies and rapeseed fields – the hillside was a riot of primary colours. But as I was admiring the prettiness of it all, a huge black cloud roared in out of nowhere and it began to hail, the ice clanging angrily off the wrecked cars and trucks that had fetched up at the way station. We got back into the Jeep and raced downhill, until the hail turned to rain and then stopped altogether. A scattering of grubby little shacks showed that we were on the outskirts of Dêgê.
Sixty thousand people live in this ugly little settlement, wedged into the valley of a noisily rushing Yangtze tributary. None of the buildings seemed to be complete – they were either being built, or falling down. Our hotel was as grubby a place as I expected, without water of any sort – I had to wash in public under a hose that builders were using to help make cement. I drew quite a crowd of nut-brown watchers, especially at the more intimate ablutionary moments.
Dêgê is an overwhelmingly Tibetan town (it used to have a king, like Muli and Chala) but with a large number of Han Chinese immigrants. ‘Solidarity between the Han and the Zang* people will make China strong!’ said a poster above the police station. Inside, the police chief, Ma Lu – who was Tibetan, but not a believer in the primacy of the Dalai Lama and thus trustworthy, in Chinese eyes – beamed with pleasure at our arrival.
‘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.
But by dawn he was done. The final test worked – no appreciable amount of water spilled onto the roadway. The radiator was secured with two new bolts and wired on for good measure and additional safety. We had breakfast of barley-flour tsampa, and Miao and Tang gulped down some buttery tea. And then we started off once more – Lily and I dipping down in our seats every time we spotted the police, or truckloads of troops – and we continued climbing onto the plateau.
Nine days out and we had reached it. The hills fell away, and ahead were endless plains, cold and windy. We camped out each night, now that I had managed to repair the zippers on the tent. The camping was quiet and lonely: there were no villages, no permanent habitations, and only very occasionally a gathering of nomad farmers on the horizon. Nor was there much by way of wildlife. This had been antelope countryside as little as a decade ago, with flocks of thousands; but their numbers had been savagely reduced by systematic poaching and the encroachments of the yak herders. Human influence in this part of Tibet is recent – the ever-rising population of China and the government-ordered movement of peoples being the two most obvious causes – and so far as the indigenous animal and plants are concerned, it is almost wholly malign.
The few people we saw working on the roads were prisoners, guarded by soldiers. I asked that we speed past, for these were men from the laogai, the labour camps, and no foreigner should see them. Were I to be stopped by their guards there is little doubt that the expedition would be over: the Chinese authorities are sensitive about their political prisoners, and merely seeing these gangs of grey-skinned men, masked against the cold, shackled to one another, wielding picks and hammers with dispirited weariness – this was enough for my deportation.
It was cold, and the air was thin. Lily was miserable – she had headaches and found it difficult to breathe, and in the tent at night she tossed and turned, worried by fearful dreams. I had read about the physical deterioration that precedes severe altitude sickness and listened to Lily to see if I could detect those problems: but no, she was in fact as strong as an ox – her symptoms, I felt sure, were brought about by the strange abnormality of her situation, of not knowing, of not being prepared for the bizarre side effects high altitude can bring.
And then finally, eleven days out, in a slight depression in the plains ahead, there were the radio towers and tenements of a dreary junction town that I knew from my maps was called Nagqu. The town is of no interest – it is the administrative centre of one of Tibet's five regions, just as Qamdo five days behind had been – but little more. Except that it is the junction of the brick tea road, or the convoy road that goes between Chengdu to Lhasa, and the main highway that links Lhasa with the north. A road that, unlike the one we had suffered along for the last eleven days, was paved with asphalt, was fast, and, in places, had even the luxury of being a divided highway. We drew up at the traffic circle where the one road joined the other.
I was faced with one small problem – which way to go. If we turned right we would be at the Yangtze headwaters in little more than a day. If we turned left we would be in Lhasa in about four hours.
I looked at Lily, pale and exhausted. I looked at the ever stoical Tang, the man who knew the headwaters and who was smiling through it all – he had a stern look about him, and his eyes were nodding shut. I looked at Miao – he was chewing hard on something, his face was screwed up in a frown, and he was slapping the gear lever mightily, with the rhythm of deep anxiety.
I asked him to turn left. Later that evening, and to our general delight and relief, we were at the Lhasa Holiday Inn, sleeping between clean sheets and eating yak burgers. The manager turned out to be a Frenchman I knew, and he gave us three rooms for no charge. We stayed for three memorably pleasant days. I spent hours in the ancient shrine of the Jokhang and at the Potala, the former seat of the Tibetan government and the Dalai Lama's gigantic winter palace. I strolled around his summer house, the Norbulingka. I took a car to the Drepung Monastery, once so huge and proud, but now savagely reduced by the Chinese. And I rested. I was happy to be here, and to be so close to the India where I had lived some years before, and which I loved. I met a man from San Francisco, who gave me pills for Lily's sickness. We found a mechanic who repaired the car.
After the days of rest and restoration, and with the car washed and with its tyres pumped up and Lily high on her new medicine and Miao slapping his gear lever only once an hour or so, we set off back up the asphalt highway. Five hours later and we were passing Nagqu once again, and the junction with the cordially loathed (but later, fondly remembered) brick tea road. Then the land began to rise. We were coming up onto the southern flanks of the Tanggula Range of mountains, to the hills where the Yangtze has its beginnings.