From time to time readers comment on what they perceive as threads of fantasy woven into my Shan novels, citing the role of demons, sorcerers, astrologers, fanciful costumes, and medieval-style structures. I remind them that while these are works of fiction, they are not fantasies. Until it was overwhelmed in the 1950s, Tibet was a world unto itself, so unique in every facet of its material and spiritual culture—including its routine use of symbolic demons, exotic rituals, and ancient buildings—that to outside observers it did indeed often seem mystical. It was a society that did not view economic and technological advancement as the primary goal of civilization—for centuries Tibetans’ main use of the wheel, for example, was for mechanical praying devices—but instead focused on exploration of the human spirit. The characteristics that reflected such profound differences with our world may have an aspect of fantasy to some outsiders, but they were vital realities in traditional Tibetan life, and their vestiges can still be found today.
The main elements that appear in the backdrop of this novel are rooted in the Tibetan experience, past and present. Salt caravans that traveled over some of the most difficult terrain on the planet were a common feature of life in Tibet for centuries, as were the shrines that offered spiritual nourishment to those intrepid trekkers. For hundreds of years treasures, nearly always spiritual in nature, were deliberately hidden by lamas to surprise and benefit future generations, acts that for me have always reflected both the whimsy and the eternal hope that are ingrained in the Tibetan DNA. This same selfless, spiritual character meant that precious metals and gems were used primarily to honor deities, not as signs of wealth. Astrologers were esteemed members of many Tibetan communities, providing both death charts and horoscopes, and demon costumes were frequently utilized in Buddhist festivals.
Tibet was famed throughout central Asia and China for its doctors and medical colleges, which practiced diagnosis and treatment based on principles unknown in the West. Tibetan medical colleges developed the richest natural pharmacopeia ever known, made possible by expeditions of monks and doctors who harvested rare medicinal plants on high alpine slopes. Tibetan amchis considered both the empirical and the spiritual roots of illness in treating their patients, and they were diagnosing some diseases centuries before their European counterparts. The amchis’ sophisticated techniques for diagnosis by pulse reading—including even use of subtle pulses in the earlobe—have never been matched in the West, where medicine has always been a purely scientific pursuit.
The 1897 earthquake referred to in these pages wracked Tibet and the entire eastern Himalayan region. In an area of more than a hundred thousand square miles, nearly all masonry structures were destroyed. Temples collapsed, villages were wiped out, waterways shifted, and the earth’s crust rose more than fifty feet in some places. It is safe to assume that more than a few underground chapels, like the gonkang described herein, were never the same.
That natural devastation, however, pales in comparison to the seismic ruin caused when Mao Tse-tung unleashed his Red Guard revolutionaries. The dismantling of Tibetan institutions by the Chinese army during the previous decade was escalated on a massive scale by the Red Guard during the mid-1960s. Mayhem was inflicted not only on the million-plus Tibetans who were killed or maimed; it extended to the very foundations of their ancient culture. Ninety percent of Tibet’s temples and monasteries were annihilated. Tibetan medical colleges, including the world-renowned school at Chokpori, near Lhasa, were blasted to rubble, with no attempt to preserve their unique, centuries-old learnings about the mysteries of the human body.
While the destruction was particularly widespread in Tibet, it was not confined to that land. Those teenage cadres, equipped with military weapons, not only attacked fixtures of traditional life and those who embraced it, they actually devised ways to assault the past itself. In China, Mao’s zealots dug up the body of the seventy-sixth-generation direct descendant of Confucius and hanged it, then ripped apart an ancient Ming dynasty tomb and burned the bodies of the emperor and empress resting inside. The wounds inflicted by the Red Guard are still so raw that very few who endured the era will openly speak of those dark years.
The shadow that settled over Tibet decades ago sometimes makes writing novels set in that land feel like searching for jewels in a dim cave. It is tempting for Western observers to write off Tibet as an abject example of an entire culture that was wiped out as a result of global geopolitics. But Tibet is not destroyed. Rather, for me it has always been an example of how a people with deep spiritual and cultural foundations can endure sustained adversity. The shadow may exist, but dig a little deeper and brilliance can still shine through.