The road between Lhasa and the north is good for almost all of its length – except, travellers are always warned, for the hundred miles or so where it heaves itself up and over the Tanggula Range. There, even in midsummer, the weather is dreadful, the terrain wretched and the road usually stripped to its gravel foundations.
It was midsummer in the rest of the northern world, but on the day we broached the slope of the great range, wet snow began to fall, a wind whipped up, and soon we were grinding our way up the endless gradient in the teeth of a July blizzard. The car was misbehaving yet again – bad fuel, explained Miao, without conviction – and it took us several hours to make the summit, by which time it was pitch-dark and the wind was howling across the moors.
We had passed another chain gang, hundreds of men and women lashed together in small groups to repair a section of road at least twenty miles long. Even though there was little enough traffic, soldiers with flags were holding up all northbound trucks to make way for a string of southbound army convoys.
‘Trouble in one of the monasteries,’ speculated Tang, shaking his fist at the taillights of one of the army trucks. He had seen some of the rioting in Lhasa ten years before, when Chinese troops had beaten monks, and it had incensed him. He talked about it sparingly – he knew that Lily held very pro-Chinese views, and Miao's job with the Chengdu Propaganda Department hardly made him a likely sympathizer with the Tibetan cause. But when we were alone Tang spoke openly about his distaste for what the Chinese were doing.
‘It's more insidious these days, you know. They're advertising for people to come and live here – Chinese people, that is. Before long there will be as many Han as there are Tibetans – and because the Han people who come to live here are allowed to have as many children as they like, they may well outnumber the Tibetans. Then this will stop being Tibet. The people will just be another minority, like the Yi or the Nakhi. They'll lose everything.
‘I know the arguments – that before the Chinese came, the Tibetans were ruled by despots, by cruel old priests. That may be so. But at least it was their country. It was up to them to decide what to do about it. It's not up to us. It's none of our business. We come in, and give them good roads and water and hospitals, all the things they never had. But we think that gives us a right to tell them how to live their lives.
‘And if they don't do it the way we tell them, then' – he jerked his hand in the direction of yet another convoy, the fifth, another hundred trucks steaming southwards towards the capital. ‘Then we send in force and crush them.’
The people were reportedly up in arms just then about Beijing's decision not to acknowledge the youngster who had recently been chosen as the reincarnation of, or successor to, the Panchen Lama, the senior legal Tibetan lama. A group of wise men chosen by Beijing had settled on a candidate some weeks before, and the candidate – a boy of nine living in a remote part of western Tibet, near Shigatse – had been accepted by the Communist leadership. But then the wise men had made the error of telling the Dalai Lama, living in exile in Dharmsala in India – and he had agreed with the decision.
His agreement, which legitimized the boy's candidacy for the thousands of followers of the most revered (as opposed to the most legal) of Tibet's lamas, made Beijing promptly change its collective mind. The national leadership condemned the choice, criticized the child for all manner of sins and his parents – blameless people to their very core – for corruption and publicity seeking. A new child was chosen, and was due to be formally installed as the future Panchen Lama later in the year. The Dalai Lama was pointedly not consulted: he had already made his choice, said Beijing, and unhappily it was the wrong one.
This row would dominate the rest of the year, and almost certainly did result in some disturbances across Tibet, particularly in the western monasteries, where support for the Dalai Lama is at its most fervent. Now there seemed little doubt but that these soldiers – officially heading south for ‘routine resupply' – were going to help put down an incipient rebellion, yet again.
Which made it unlikely, I thought, that we would be given much by way of hospitality when, late that night and in the middle of a howling snowstorm, we hammered on the iron gate of the army base at Tanggula township and asked if we might possibly be allowed to bed down for the night.
On the face of it, the request seemed reasonable. Lily was sick again. The car was faltering again. We were tired and hungry. There was no other accommodation, and the weather was foul and getting worse. This – at 15,100 feet – was said to be the highest permanent human settlement on the face of the earth. We should at least be able to park in the courtyard and sleep in the car in some kind of shelter from the icy gales.
A sentry opened the iron door a fraction, his face wrinkling with distaste at the blowing snow outside. I asked him to get an officer, and a few moments later a young man appeared, his shoulder showing the rank of captain. I explained the problem, and asked if we might stay.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Certainly not.’
I put on as innocent an expression as I knew how.
‘Pray – why not?’ I asked.
He thought for a moment.
‘Three reasons,’ he then replied. ‘First – you are a lao wai, and we don't let lao wei stay in Chinese army bases. I'm sure your army wouldn't welcome a visiting Chinese traveller, right?
‘Second – you are all civilians, and we don't let civilians stay in army bases. And third' – here he seemed to be casting around for a third reason when suddenly he remembered something – ‘and third, last night, for some so far unexplained reason, thirty-seven of our men died here of some mysterious ailment.’
He looked at the four of us, gazing at our faces as we registered our shocked surprise. Suddenly his expression was triumphant, as if he had blocked us at all our exits. I thought hard for a second.
Not so fast, I realized. I raised my hand.
‘But in that case, surely that means you'll have thirty-seven empty beds. Doesn't it?’ The question of available space was a red herring, but it was the only herring I had. And I wasn't too worried about how the men had died* – we would quite probably freeze to death if we stayed out here.
The captain's face cracked into a smile. He swore, using some imprecation that I couldn't catch but was obviously racist in its implications, and then he opened the door. Yes, he said, he supposed we could have four rooms, and would we perhaps like some dinner? Army rations were not so good up here in Tibet, he said, but they could probably rustle up rice and meat of some kind.
I now had doubts about my theory that the convoys of troops were off to beat up local monks: here the soldiers were totally relaxed, performing the dreary routines of garrison duty as though nothing had happened in this part of Tibet for years, and nothing was likely for the rest of their tour. So we spent a warm and peaceful night; and it was only when we awoke at five for the final push that the spell was broken. The dawn broke grey and it was snowing still, and it was bitterly cold once more.
From the base the road sloped downwards a little for the next twenty miles, then passed a lonely menders' camp and a small settlement called Yanshiping. Through the driving snow I could occasionally see the outlines of nomads' black tents, their walls plastered thickly with ice. The yaks had gone to ground, presumably huddled down in depressions on the moors, waiting out the blizzard.
We drove on, and on, mile after wretched mile, stopping from time to time to scrape the accumulated ice from the windscreen. Finally, late in the morning, we came to a wretched little settlement sprawled across both sides of the road that was called Tuotuoheyan. We were at 14,500 feet. There was a meteorological station here, and a hydrometric station that measured the flow of the river, and there were barrack blocks with mud walls, where the long-distance truck drivers took their ease, a break more or less halfway between Lhasa and Golmud along this terrifyingly bleak highway.
Here the Yangtze was really narrow, and so it was where the first of the river's many bridges had been built. In this foul weather it was also quite probably as far as we were going to go. We all got out to investigate.
The bridge was concrete, standing on a dozen buttresses, and it was about three hundred yards long. The river itself, murky and greyish, made an unappealing sucking noise as it passed under our feet. It was divided into a number of channels, each separated from the others by bars of brown gravel – on high-water days they would be submerged, but here, on this midsummer's day, the river was quite low. All told, it was perhaps a hundred yards wide, and it wallowed along quite placidly, compared with the wilder sections just a few score miles downstream.
There was a furious blast of snow, and the others skittered back to the car. But I was determined that this should not be quite the end. Not yet. So I fastened the zip on my polar jacket and put on my gloves, and I jumped down onto the grass on the left-hand side of the bridge, at its far end.
I began walking. My compass showed that I was going due west. I was on the river's left bank, and if I kept on walking for perhaps another week, and if I climbed up another three thousand feet, then I might reach the source – the spiritually appropriate, wholly photogenic, mountain-ice-fed but nevertheless not-exactly-correct source – at the Gelandandong Glacier. But then again – and here was the rub – I could walk in quite the opposite direction, keep going for about two weeks and climb up a little less far, and I might reach the other correct but unappealingly ugly ooze-of-a-source on the puddle-sized lake at the head of the Dam Qu stream. And whichever source I reached would, in someone's eyes, be quite the wrong one.
So I had made more modest plans. I strode along through the muddy grass for an hour or so, following the lazy twists and turns of the riverbank. The gusts of wind slowed and then suddenly, and just as I had hoped, the snow stopped altogether. The clouds swirled away, and I found myself standing quite alone in the middle of a vast white plain, crisp with frost, under the perfect blue sky and a low late-morning sun.
Behind me I could see the smoky smudge of the grey-brown buildings of Tuotuoheyan. To my right was a small encampment of nomads, and a man was riding slowly towards me on a pony. I waved at him, and he waved back and yelled something unintelligible, but clearly friendly.
I looked ahead of me, to the far west, and then just a little south. There, rising starkly from the high plateau of the Tanggula Range, stood the ring of high and snowy peaks called Gelandandong. Through my field glasses I could see arêtes and bergschrunds and couloirs and all the other features of Alpine geography. In the midst of this magnificent scrum of young mountainhood was the glacier and the small circular pool from which, said most – and from which, said Wang Hui, in the painting at which I had looked so carefully all those thousands of miles away in New Hampshire – this great river started its long journey.
The great river was not great here, not at all. It was beside me now, shallow and quite clear, running fast through a gravel-bottomed channel that was ten feet wide. There must have been a dozen such channels, each glinting blindingly in the sun. This was a braided stream, meandering its way through the boggy flatlands of the plateau, not quite knowing which was the path of least resistance along which gravity should most effectively direct it. I didn't care to know: all I was interested in was this single narrow rivulet beside me, a rill of ice-cold and pure water: the Yangtze heading eastward to the sea.
I reached into my pocket for the tiny prayer block that the monk had given me back in Dêgê – I had hoped, I think, that I might imprint a few good thoughts on the waters and send them scurrying down to sea level. But it was not there: I had left it behind carelessly. It was back in the army base. In any case, I told myself, for me to do such a thing was more than a little out of character: I was no Buddhist, I had no real idea what sentiments had been inscribed on the wood, and would feel plagued that I had performed some disingenuous act, just for the symbolic sake of it.
So instead I got out a cigar. A friend had given it to me in Hong Kong. The Mandarin Hotel had imported a Cuban maestro from Cohiba in Havana, and had set him to work hand-rolling cigars in a corner of the hotel lobby. My friend had bought two for me, for some exorbitant sum. One, he said, was to be smoked at the start of the Yangtze journey, and the second was to be savoured in mood victorious if, and only if, I reached the headwaters. This battered and somewhat stale object that I pulled from my jacket pocket was the very one.
I straightened it as best I could and listened to it: there was a slightest crackle of a few stale leaves, but not too much – it seemed to have kept most of its supple softness, and it might not be too bad. So I tilted my head out of the breeze and lit it slowly and carefully, then blew a cloud of pure blue smoke out into the chilly air.
Once, a few weeks back, this had been a grand cigar; now, old and tired from its journey, it had just a hint of its glory: in any restaurant it would have been sent right back. Out here, though, it was the best smoke I could ever, ever imagine. And so I sat there in a state of utter contentment, listening to the gurgling of the stream, listening to the lone Tibetan behind me marshalling the yaks from a herd that had been scattered in the storm, and listening to the soughing winds. They began to pick up again, and they started to scatter the grass and to riffle the calm surface of the river waters once more.
The furious caprices of the great Tibetan Plateau: four seasons in an hour, they like to say. It had just been high summer for ten minutes, and now wintertime was blowing back. It started to get cold once more – and so I stood up and turned back, and – walked to the waiting friends in their car beside the Tuotuoheyan bridge. It struck me that for the first time in nearly four thousand miles, I was travelling in the same direction as the waters of the river. It was heading seaward, and I was too.
All the cars and trains and boats and planes that I had booked for the coming days would take me in the same direction, too, carrying me until I ended up in Shanghai once again. Then, just like the river water here, I would push out across and over the Woosung Bar and its red canister buoy, and I would pass the winking lighthouses and the huge navigation buoy just off what they had once called Cape Nelson, and I would soon be out onto the ocean once more, and back on my way to the rest of the world.
Back on my way to what they call the outside world. Back from having been at its very centre, and along the river that runs right through it.