LOSING FACE

I was woken from a dream-filled sleep on Monday morning by the sound of shouting and doors slamming down the corridor. The clamour was approaching my room.

‘Housekeeping!’ shrieked a voice from outside the door.

I leapt from my bed as I heard the scraping of a key in the lock and I arrived just in time to find a small Tibetan girl standing in the open doorway demanding my laundry. I asked if she could come back later.

‘May-oh,’ she replied, shaking her head and beaming a Tibetan smile at the same time. I packed up the clothes I had been wearing on the trip in through China and added the suit jacket that had been hit by the exploding shaving foam. The chambermaid kept smiling throughout, nodded and walked off down the corridor with my bundle, stopping in front of the next door to shout ‘Housekeeping!’ at the top of her voice.

It was still early but I could not get back to sleep. A dog from across the road had strayed onto the strip of wasteland between my window and the staff quarters. The inappropriate planting of dwarf conifers and stunted weeping willows along the edge of the land had done little to beautify the area but the bushes did provide excellent cover for the resident pack of dogs, who now lay in wait, watching the intruder. They considered the wasteland to be an integral part of their home territory and defended it fiercely (and extremely vociferously), against dogs from other packs. Approaching strays were either attacked or mounted or both. Anyone trying to separate the dogs was growled at menacingly, presumably being accused of interfering in their internal affairs.

The intruding dog made the mistake of wandering too far into the residents’ territory. The hotel pack gave chase with a war cry of barks and howls that was guaranteed to waken any hotel guest who had not already received a surprise wake-up call courtesy of the Housekeeping Department.

I set off for breakfast and found my reserved place at the management dining table in the coffee shop. I was greeted with silence. Mr Liu looked up at me and quickly back to the large Danish pastry filling his plate. There was a similar pastry at every place around the table except where Gunter, the Food and Beverage Manager, was sitting. The atmosphere was tense.

‘I didn’t want one anyway. I’m not hungry,’ Gunter said defiantly. He looked around the table and snarled at the other expatriates; ‘The Chef is an ignorant pig!’

The waitresses giggled. The General Manager reacted firmly, hissing an angry whisper in reply.

‘Not in front of Party A. Don’t make us lose face!’

He made a quiet but forceful smack on the table to show that he meant business. The public fight between Chef and the Food and Beverage Manager could go on no longer.

Wherever members of the animal kingdom live close together in confined areas there are always problems. Holiday Inn Lhasa proved to be no exception to the rule. For the expatriates living in the hotel, business life, social life and in fact all forms of life altogether revolved only around the concrete walls of the compound. The sense of loneliness and isolation is brought home by the reminder that outside the hotel there are only a dozen or so other foreigners resident in Tibet; an area two thirds the size of western Europe. While this creates an interdependent bond between the expatriates, it also leads to the smallest differences being exaggerated out of all proportion.

There are traditional quarrels between hotel departments that are found in every hotel in the world: Housekeeping fight with Front Office, Food and Beverage fight with the Kitchen, but with the extra strain of a hardship posting, the management team also tends to disintegrate along lines of seniority and experience. The new recruits resent the ‘old China hands’, who never listen to fresh ideas, only dampening their enthusiasm with wet blanket ‘that won’t work here’ replies to any new suggestions.

For their part the expatriates with years of experience in the field resent the naivety of the newcomers, who habitually come out with ridiculous ideas before they understand the constraints of working in unreal and illogical surroundings.

Mr Liu, the Controller from Hong Kong, had worked many years in mainland China and was particularly intolerant of naive new recruits. He had printed out a world map from his computer with a large arrow pointing to a speck in the blank area above the Indian sub-continent. The words ‘YOU ARE HERE’ were printed in heavy bold type across the top of the page. Whenever he was asked a question by a new expatriate he would produce an A4 copy of the map from his pocket, pass it to his new member of staff and chuckle. It was his idea of a joke. Nobody found it very funny, but as Mr Liu was the Controller, and therefore in charge of the payment of salaries and reimbursement of expense accounts, everyone laughed when he attempted a joke.

The responsibility for minimising the disputes between the departments and between the management staff is one of the least popular duties of the General Manager. But in Lhasa, even more important than actually keeping the foreign management team together, is keeping up the appearance that the team is together. Any dispute amongst the expatriates is considered to be a ‘loss of face’ for Party B.

‘Losing face’, and the contrary, ‘giving face’, were new expressions to me. Mr Liu rose from the breakfast table, leaving his Danish pastry untouched, and signalled that it was time to move on to the morning meeting.

Harry remained seated, finishing his pastry. ‘Without understanding face,’ he said to me, ‘you don’t have a chance here.’ I stayed to listen.

‘Losing face,’ he continued, ‘happens when you make a mistake, you screw up, you fight with one of your friends. You know, you just do the smallest thing wrong and they come along and make a big deal out it. That’s loss of face for you. It puts you in an inferior position. If you lose face, they get stronger and they can do what they want. If we lose face in front of Party A, Jig Me starts trying to run the hotel his way and then we can all go home.’

He gulped down the last dregs of his tea and stood up from the table.

‘Now, giving face, that’s the very opposite. You heap praise on someone for what they’ve done to make them think they’re the world’s best.’ He paused for thought.

‘It’s all a game,’ he continued, ‘but you have to understand how to play, if you get the rules wrong then you have to leave.’

‘Face’ explains why a tour guide wishing to please will never admit that he doesn’t understand what you are asking, or will never say that he doesn’t know the answer to your question. To avoid losing face, he will just give a reply that he thinks you will want to hear. This can be very difficult if you are asking a question that needs an accurate answer such as; ‘What time should we leave for the airport?’ If in any doubt he will just say ‘Yes’ to every question.

As we left the coffee shop, Harry brushed aside the waitress who came up to me demanding my meal voucher.

‘This is Mr Alec. No meal voucher. He works here. Yin Yi Bu Jingli.’

Apparently this was my title. ‘Yin Yi Bu Jingli.’ I quite liked it. ‘Mr Alec. Yin Yi Bu Jingli,’ I repeated to the waitress. We hurried down the corridor after Mr Liu and the other expats.

‘We mustn’t be late for the meeting or Party B lose face,’ explained Harry. ‘Jig Me has all his Party A staff there ten minutes before the meeting – if they are late he fines them!’

We ran up the set of stairs to the meeting room, puffing and panting in the rarefied air. Although I had only suffered from a headache on my first day, breathlessness over the slightest exertion was an effect of the altitude that never went away. Trying to give an impression of respectability upon entering the meeting room is difficult when you are shaking and openly gasping for breath, and I decided to get there earlier in future.

A morning meeting, officially called the ‘Operations Meeting’, takes place, in some form or other, in all the foreign-managed hotels in China. It is held every working day, from Monday to Saturday, and is the decision-making time that sets the mood of the day. The management team and department heads discuss the business results and problems of the previous day, the forecasted results and problems of the day ahead and any special activities that may be taking place.

Seating arrangements at the morning meeting in Lhasa were even stricter than around the management dining table. Party A and Party B sat together in a complicated pecking order that descended down the sides of the long table. The General Manager and Jig Me sat at the head of the table, with the General Manager’s secretary, Heather, perched uneasily on the corner, between the General Manager and Mr Liu. Thirty people crowded along the table edge; all of the expatriates, their deputies and other Party officials with dubious functions that none of us understood.

Heather had the delicate task of translating and taking the meeting minutes. English and Mandarin Chinese were the official languages used, although the full range of mother tongues around the table stretched from Tibetan to Cantonese, Hokien and other forms of Chinese, and a selection of European languages; German, Italian, French and Flemish.

Despite her very English name, Heather was decidedly Chinese. She had been given the name ‘Heather’ by her English teacher at school and had kept it for use with foreigners. An outwardly frail girl, she had an inner core of steel that could withstand the severe discipline of the General Manager. Her lank black hair fell flat down the sides of her face and over her thin shoulders. Shampoo and make-up would undoubtedly have been of great benefit to her, but instead of spending time on her personal appearance, she selflessly devoted herself to her work, putting in far longer hours than the majority of local staff. It was rare to find someone so good. Like the other Han Chinese, she yearned for her own country and like any 18-year-old girl in a strange place, a long way from her family, she was homesick and lonely. She lived only for the day when she could return to China.

But Heather had made a mistake; being good at her job meant that she was likely to stay in Lhasa for a long time. This was a fundamental problem in motivating the staff. The Chinese actively held themselves back, so that they could be released as soon as possible and return to their homeland. The Tibetans, after forty years of Communism, were generally very laid back, without much of an interest in doing anything. Salaries were virtually the same for every level of employee and promotions were more dependent on Party status than on job performance.

The waitresses were typical of staff throughout the hotel. They tried their level best not to be promoted to Restaurant Supervisor. For practically no more pay, this new position would mean that suddenly the waitress would lose her friends, be responsible to the management and would inevitably lead to shouts, tears and the embarrassing demotion to dish-washer.

A colossal total of 560 staff were employed by the hotel. It was never very clear exactly what all these people did, and some of the names on the staff register appeared to be on permanent leave. Annual vacations were saved up and then claimed for months on end. The vacations would not include travelling time, which could amount to an extra month either side of the normal holiday. Maternity leave lasted twelve months (without travelling time) and any good staff falling pregnant, although a great cause for celebration, would seriously impair the running of the hotel.

Leave for abortions was also commonplace, as the Chinese government, desperate to avoid the catastrophe of overpopulation, effectively limits the number of children that Han Chinese may have to a single child by imposing financially crippling tax burdens on families with two or more children. Tibetans, as a minority race, are permitted to have two children, but Tibetan officials in Lhasa and practically all Tibetans in the countryside have no such controls imposed on them.

‘Take a seat, Alec,’ the General Manager said to me, pointing to the only vacant chair around the table. The rest of the expatriate managers sniggered. Gunter, who was sitting four places further down the table from the vacant seat, laughed out loud when he saw where I would be sitting. He gave me a thumbs-up sign, and even exchanged glances and a laugh with Chef who sat opposite him along the table.

I sat down cautiously, waiting for some practical joke to unfold. Or perhaps there would be an induction ritual for my first Morning Meeting. Were we all going to put on aprons and exchange funny handshakes?

Sitting on my right was a Tibetan lady, Mrs Qi Mei, whose title nobody really knew. She looked normal enough. Apparently she was something high in the Party but beyond that, none of the expats had been able to tell me what she did. Mrs Qi Mei smiled to me as I sat down. So far, so good.

On my left was a Chinaman, Mr Pong, the Deputy Controller. His nickname, I had been told before by Harry, was Alien III and now that I saw him for the first time, I had to admit that he did bear an uncanny resemblance to the futuristic being. He squinted through wire-framed spectacles at me and opened his mouth in a small spherical smile to reveal a mass of contorted teeth in various states of decay.

Then it hit me. The very aptly named Mr Pong had the kind of breath that could stun at over ten feet. I was transported to the depths of excrement alley at the Barkhor. This wasn’t just bad – there was something rotten down there. Something had crawled in and died. Gunter howled with laughter as he saw the look of horror on my face. It was the best entertainment he had seen since he had watched Chef chasing yaks through the kitchens.

The General Manager banged the table and started the meeting off with a welcome speech.

‘It has been over six months since we have had anyone in the Sales Department, so let’s welcome Mr Alec who we are sure can boost our sales and increase business.’

Heather translated into Chinese and everyone nodded.

Jig Me followed with a welcome on behalf of all Party A and wished that, ‘we will have a very good cooperation.’

He spoke in perfect English and Heather again translated everything. I could see that these meetings were going to take a long time.

Jig Me pointed out my deputy, a Miss Tsao, who had cleverly secured a seat down at the far end of the table well away from the breath monster next to me. Mr Liu read out the previous day’s financial results and Harry gave the forecast for the coming week – which was rather bleak. After the high occupancy and revenue of the summer months, business had now entered the gradual slide down towards the low winter season. We were still over 70 per cent occupancy which sounded quite respectable to me, but next week we would fall into the sixties.

As I was contemplating the drop in hotel occupancy and what could be done to reverse the trend, a low gurgling noise started its rumble in the chair next to me.

‘Cccccrrrrrrrgggggggkkkhhhhpt.’

Mr Pong was clearing his throat in preparation to speak. This warning signal had already woken every expat around the table and sent them leaning as far back on their chairs as possible. Even Gunter, four chairs away, was not safe, and, panic stricken, he pushed his portly frame as far down the table as he could.

In painfully long statements of Mandarin, Mr Pong pointed out that there had been a problem in the kitchens with some confusion over the purchase of yaks. Heather translated for us. He said that he was sure that it would not happen again, if the expatriates would not argue and if there was a better cooperation. He suggested that perhaps so many expatriates were unnecessary.

It was exactly the kind of calculated attack that Party A tried when they saw disputes amongst the foreigners. The General Manager pointed out that there were only ten expatriates present, instead of the nineteen when the hotel opened and the twenty-seven allowed in the management contract and that any less would severely impair the efficient running of the hotel.

Much to everyone’s relief, Mr Pong did not reply, and the Deputy Food and Beverage Manager, a Mr Tu Dian, announced the good news that in the evening there would be a banquet held by the ‘Protocol and Friendship City Division of the Friendship with Foreign Countries Association’.

Mrs Qi Mei followed this with an announcement that I would have to go to the People’s Number One Hospital for a health check and the meeting was adjourned. As we walked down the stairs I told Mrs Qi Mei that it was very kind of her to arrange the health check, but it was completely unnecessary as I had already had extensive medicals at the request of Holiday Inn, both in Paris and Hong Kong. She smiled and said, ‘Yes.’

Miss Tsao, my deputy, was having a word with Jig Me after the meeting, about her papers. She had volunteered to come to Tibet twenty years ago and now wanted to return to her home province, but as her papers said that she was resident in Tibet, she was not permitted to move to any other part of China.

I carried on to my office, on the ground floor of the main block behind the gift shop. It was a small room with two desks, one filing cabinet, three chairs and one sofa. A large orange telephone sat on my desk, together with a flask of hot water. I was expected to provide my own jam jar. The floor was entirely covered with piles of paper. I was greeted enthusiastically by Tashi who I had not seen since he picked me up from the airport. ‘This is Mr Alec,’ he announced in English to the three other office staff. ‘He is a big potato.’

It transpired that the Chinese have a system of measuring someone’s importance in relation to the size of root vegetables. Thus I was the ‘big potato’ for the Sales and Marketing Department and my staff were introduced to me as ‘small potatoes’.

Tashi gave me the news that no matter what I had understood, I had to visit the hospital. He had been given orders to accompany me and to be my translator. I was not sure if this would be a good idea.

The hotel Landcruisers were in use, so we took a rickshaw down the tarmac cycle lane, past the cow-filled skips of refuse to the People’s Number One Hospital. Another feature of Chinese modernisation stood before us. Short railings around flower beds of grass and litter filled the grounds of an austere, cement-rendered building painted in a sickly shade of ‘garlic grass’. A group of lamentable beggars surrounded the main door, their filthy hands tugging at the clothing of anyone entering or leaving the building, until they received some small change. Two monks sat against the entrance chanting from a pile of woodblock printed prayers. A cardboard shoe box lay in front of them for donations. Whenever they saw a patient or a relative approaching they would speed up their chants and gesture towards the box.

Passing through the open glass door, it was some comfort to be hit by the smell of antiseptic, or disinfectant, or whatever that all-pervading hospital smell is. I wondered if a concentrated dose of it could be injected into Mr Pong’s stomach.

The inside walls were painted in a paler shade of sickly green up to the halfway line, and then whitewashed to the ceiling. The grey tiled floor was littered with surgical debris. Two doctors leant against a wall in the foyer, cigarettes in hand.

We were ushered along a dingy corridor to a dimly lit room which contained a table covered with a dirty sheet and shelves lined with glass jars. There were two chairs and a bicycle. We waited for a nurse to arrive.

Clouds of dust rolled along the corridor, followed by a Tibetan lady who was attempting to sweep the hallway filth into a tin can which had been cut in half and nailed onto the end of a stick. It appeared that she was a nurse of some kind, as when she saw us, she came into the room, wiped her hands on her dusty coat and looked around the jars of surgical appliances to find the one containing needles.

I asked Tashi to inform the lady that I had already had all my tests both in Paris and in Hong Kong so that there was really no need for any more. Tashi said ‘Yes’ to me and spoke to the nurse in Tibetan. She nodded. Smiling, she approached me with a large needle she had found in one of the jars. She made a poking gesture, smiled and nodded again to me. I told Tashi that it wasn’t anything to do with a lack of confidence in their health system – it was just that I had already had all the tests I needed. Tashi again said something in Tibetan to the nurse. She laughed and wiped the needle on her sleeve to demonstrate that it was clean.

I was saved momentarily by the interruption of a dog running into the room. It had picked up something out of the dustpan and was looking for a quiet corner where it could stay undisturbed and chew its find. Our nurse chased it from the room, brandishing my needle at it and shouting at the two cigarette-smoking doctors as the dog ran past, tail between its legs and prize between its teeth.

Foolishly I consented to the blood test, but only when the nurse had found another needle in a sealed packet. For all future examinations I took a supply of my own needles bought in the West.

After a drop of blood was collected from my ear lobe, Tashi and I were taken to the X-ray room. Heavy doors marked ‘Danger – Radiation’ stood wide open, and to my surprise I found the room filled with patients queuing up in front of the X-ray machine. Flashes of X-rays went off around the room as pregnant women, nomads and small children lined up expectantly in front of this modern technology. It seems that someone had lost the operating handbook – where it clearly states that you should stand behind the lead shield. After a single chest X-ray I was taken to a further examination room.

An elderly nomad from northern Tibet was seated by a low table, with a contraption for testing eyesight on his head. He wore a long sheepskin chuba, with the fur innermost and the rough cut skin on the outside to face the elements. The trailing edge of the chuba was finished with an inch-wide hem of brightly coloured braid. He looked up at us as we entered the room and smiled a toothless grin as a greeting. I tried out a tashi delai and he beamed with delight, sticking his tongue out in reply.

The nurse shouted at him, removed the machine from his matted hair and put it straight on my forehead. At the same time a doctor stirred in the corner of the room. He had being enjoying his morning snooze on the examination couch and had been woken by the disturbance. He stood up, rubbed his eyes and stretched into a lengthy yawn. The nomad watched with keen interest as the doctor took a filthy probe out of his pocket and stuck it into my ears. The doctor said something to Tashi in Tibetan.

‘Sorry, Mr Alec, I don’t know the words in English.’

Tashi continued to apologise to me, shrugging his shoulders as he excused himself for not being able to translate. He then started an elaborate mime that the nomad enjoyed tremendously. From Tashi’s actions, I was concerned that the doctor had found a large lump of something very, very bad in one of my ears, but it turned out after further miming that he was saying I had to give a stool test. Our nomad friend loved every minute of it.

The nurse rushed back into the room brandishing her empty dustpan, hot on the heels of the mangy dog that had crept back into the hospital in search of further treasures. It ran past the nomad and caught the side of a brimming spittoon pan, knocking it clean over. The slippery contents trickled across the tiled floor and over the doorstep into the corridor. Strangely, this did not seem to bother anyone except for myself.

I asked Tashi to tell the doctor that I had already had a stool test, and for once, the doctor seemed satisfied with this answer. I suppose that he was looking forward to making the examination even less than I was to producing the sample in those conditions.

I gave the eyesight contraption back to our nomad friend and, treading around the pool on the floor, Tashi and I were able to leave the hospital with no further questions or prods. I made a note never to return if I became ill. Nothing could be less likely to lead to recovery than spending any time in there.

Back at the hotel I had a surprise when I entered my room. There was a joke in the hotel to the effect of: ‘What is small, grey and wrinkled?’ I thought this would be a run of the mill joke about elderly elephants, but the answer is; ‘Your returned laundry.’

On my bed lay a plastic bag of small shirts, flattened beyond recognition and tinged with a colour that was not there before they were sent for cleaning. Buttons also suffered under the Lhasa laundry technique and every week one or two would be reduced to a fine powder. Sometimes they would look deceptively good until you touched them, whereupon they would disintegrate in your fingers. My suit jacket had also undergone considerable changes. The wool was pressed razor thin and now shone like the high gloss finish of a used-car salesman’s favourite jacket. I complained to Charlie that he had told me we had the finest laundry equipment west of Beijing.

‘Yes, but I did not tell you we have local washing powder and local labour,’ was his rather inadequate reply.

I was not impressed by the Peoples’ powder that washed greyer than grey, but why should I have been? We were in Tibet. I thought of the nomad’s sheep skin chuba. It had not had a clean since it had been taken off the sheep. Everything has to be taken in perspective, and doubtless, his life on the plateau involved more significant concerns than the whiteness of his wash.

Gunter, the Food and Beverage Manager, was also having more important issues to come to terms with than his washing. Despite his immaculate preparation, the banquet for the Protocol and Friendship City Division of the Friendship with Foreign Countries Association, had not been a success. The tables were set with the hotel’s finest glass and silverware, the waitresses and waiters were all at their stations on time and Chef had prepared a fine display of Western cuisine. It was difficult to eat a whole steak with a pair of chopsticks but this was not a problem for the guests.

They had been invited to honour the retirement of the Association chief and Western food had been ordered especially to highlight the importance of the banquet. Western dishes added prestige and the Chinese were suitably impressed with the alien and inedible food. Bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label were disappearing in rapid bouts of drinking – all the signs showed that the dinner had started well.

During the course of the evening, Gunter had found a scruffy little man at the buffet table using a pair of chopsticks to dismantle the pièce montée. He had piled his plate up with steaks, potatoes, cold meats, cakes and yogurt in one heap, and he was now trying to take the apple from the suckling pig’s mouth. Gunter was furious, and presuming this man to be a driver who had found his way in to the banquet room from the group buffet, marched him out of the restaurant. No amount of protests would stop Gunter. It was his restaurant, this was an important banquet, and no filthy truck driver could mess it up for him.

It was Jig Me who broke the news to the General Manager. Gunter had thrown out the new head of the Friendship with Foreign Countries Association. Jig Me was seething. It was a serious loss of face all round. There was no other option. Gunter had to go. He handed in his resignation, due to ‘personal reasons’, the following morning and spent the day in his room. Holiday Inn would try to find him a suitable position elsewhere in Asia – but nothing could be guaranteed.

The only good thing to arise from Gunter’s dismissal was that there was now an extra space free around the table at the Morning Meeting. Mrs Qi Mei and the three people to my right had all moved down a place, so I could now follow their direction and sit two seats away from the breath monster.

Morale was low. Mr Liu read out the news that thirty-one television sets were missing from the hotel – Party B was on the attack. We had suffered greatly from the embarrassing dismissal of Gunter and we needed a victory to put us back in control. The Security Department, which was run entirely by local staff, was blamed for a total lack of professionalism. The Security Chief pointed out that in the missing property report of two years previously, there had been forty-eight television sets recorded as missing, so if there were now only thirty-one sets missing now, his department had done a very good job. The idea of burglars tiptoeing through the corridors late at night to return stolen television sets was an intriguing one and rather put a stop to our attack.

To change the mood of the meeting, I announced my ideas to increase winter business, which at least cheered up the General Manager. I had found a telephone book with 1,400 addresses of foreign companies in China. I planned to send a letter to each of them, to entice their high earning expatriate managers to visit Lhasa during the winter months. Known officially as ‘doing a mail out’, this is only the most basic sales activity, and similar sales efforts take place in every marketing-orientated hotel in the world.

A few days of organising lay ahead: the copy writing, printing the brochures and printing labels for the envelopes, and under normal circumstances, the ‘mail out’ should be finished by the end of the week.

Printing the brochures is usually the longest part of a mail out, so Tashi and I started with a visit to the Lhasa printers. It was a fraction cleaner than the hospital, but exuded the same air of efficiency – and, curiously, the same smell. We were taken to meet the director in his office but before we could discuss any business, tea had to be served and cigarettes offered to everyone. A minion rinsed out two large blue-and-white tea cups while the director showed us to our seats between piles of printed booklets. A spoonful of green tea leaves was dropped in each cup and boiling water added from the office thermos flask.

Chinese tea is not an easy drink to handle. The leaves float to the surface, and drinking it requires the skill to take a noisy slurp while simultaneously blowing the leaves away from your mouth. It is a complicated procedure which I was never able to master. If you are not careful you end up with mouthfuls of tea leaves which you can either swallow or spit out into the office spittoon.

He looked at us with some surprise when we asked him if he could print us a simple black-and-white brochure by the end of the week. It transpired that he was not at all interested in doing any print work for the hotel, as he had not been paid for the last work that he had done. He went to the cupboard and pulled out a stack of laundry lists. There were no straight lines of print but instead the letters followed roller coaster rides across the page. Capital letters were used freely in the middle of words and there was no letter ‘s’.

He explained that they could not find an ‘s’ when they printed the list, so instead had used an ‘=’ sign. Thus ‘socks’ on the laundry list had become ‘=ock=’. He thought it looked perfectly good and could not see why Holiday Inn should have been so fussy. To anyone with a sense of humour they would have been ideal, but for a professional company they were certainly lacking.

Tashi remembered the case of the printed laundry lists from the Morning Meetings. He told me it had taken nine months to produce the laundry list and when it finally appeared in such a state, it was returned.

Before leaving we were taken on a tour of the print works. Chinese and Tibetan characters were cut out of metal and stored in row upon row of wooden boxes. It looked very primitive. Along the back wall stood a line of machinery covered in dusty sheets. The director proudly pointed to them.

‘From Germany,’ Tashi translated. ‘Very good. Gift of the Australian government.’

State-of-the-art printing machinery lay covered in sheets while only slightly more modern versions of the Caxton printing press were being used alongside.

‘Can we use them?’ I asked hopefully.

‘May-oh.’

‘Why are they here then?’

‘Putchidao.’

Nobody knew what they were there for, or how to operate them – but they had a high prestige value. The director could proudly tell his friends that he had foreign equipment in his factory. It wasn’t going to help me with the mail out, so I concentrated on the resources in the hotel.

‘Mr Alec wants to make propaganda for the hotel,’ Tashi told the other office staff. I was shown the highly prized electronic typewriter that was in the possession of the Sales Office. Replacement ribbons could only be purchased in Hong Kong and in any case the letter ‘a’ had somehow been chipped off the daisy wheel. I seriously considered typing a letter by avoiding the use of the letter ‘a’ but decided that I would have to use such peculiar phrases that no one would understand what I was asking them to do. ‘As’ could always be painted on by hand if I could just photocopy the letter 1,400 times.

Of the three Canon photocopier machines in the hotel, only one was still partially functioning. A piece of tyre rubber had been glued onto the top where the cover had been broken. Light grey paper coated with dark grey toner chugged through the contraption, usually becoming chewed into concertina shapes by the machine’s intestines. There was no way this was going to produce 1,400 copies of an attractive letter to be sent out to prospective hotel guests.

Harry lifted up my hopes by telling me that there was an unused offset printer in the hotel that had sat in its packaging for two years. One thousand dollars’ worth of brand new machinery sat in the Engineering Department, eagerly awaiting its first use. It was complete and perfectly functional. There was just one small flaw; an essential can of oil was missing and it was such a specific oil that it could only be obtained from a certain manufacturer in Hong Kong, known only to the supplier of the printer. There were no records to say where the printer had been supplied from and none of the local staff could remember anything about it, except that it needed a special oil which had been ordered at the time of the purchase two years previously. As the oil had not arrived since its order in 1986, it seemed unlikely that it would arrive by the end of the week.

Mr Liu, the Controller, was the only hope. He alone had a laptop computer in his office and a small printer.

After much negotiation I was permitted to use the computer and printer overnight between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. for a limited period of one week only, as after that he had to do the ‘month-end closing’ and would not be letting the precious computer out of sight.

It took four sleepless nights to print out the letter on the tiny printer without an automatic paper feed. Meanwhile I had to devise a way to get the letters to their intended readers. Mr Liu had made it categorically clear that I was not to use the computer to input the addresses, as the memory was nearly full. He ran the entire hotel accounts from this computer with a peanut memory and did not wish to risk overloading it.

The only solution was to use the photocopier. Derek had taken the three machines apart and reassembled them to make one that gave its best performance in years. The dark grey toner stood out just a bit darker than usual and the background greyness smudged across the paper a little less than before.

Pages from the address book were photocopied and my staff spent an entire day cutting out each address with the office pair of scissors. Tashi had been shopping for large pots of glue and the rest of the week was spent pasting the addresses on to the envelopes. When it was finished, Tashi pointed out that the addresses were written in English but the postman at the Lhasa sorting office would only be able to read Chinese. We then sorted the letters according to which province in China they were going, and my Chinese staff wrote out the province name in Chinese characters on the envelopes.

Inserting the letters in the envelopes took another day and then we hit another delay. There was no self-adhesive strip or gum of any kind on the back of the envelopes and we had to paste each one individually. All that was left was to take them to the post office to be franked.

We bundled the letters into farm sacks and took a lift down to the main post office with Dorje, the hotel driver. Cows and cyclists jumped out of our way as we sped down the cycle track in the Landcruiser. Nobody at the post office knew what a franking machine was. Tashi didn’t know either, so it was difficult for him to translate. They looked in horror at the sack-loads of mail that we had brought, and reluctantly sold us stamps. The required amount for each stamp was 35 fen, but of course they only had stamps of ten, three and two fen. Each envelope would require five stamps.

Tashi called in for more glue on the way back to the hotel. I should have taken this as a sign of what was to come, but at the time I didn’t realise the significance. He explained when we returned to the office. Chinese stamps do not have glue on the reverse side – every one of them had to be glued on by hand. This took three more days of sticking. Finally, we set off for the post office with our sacks full of totally glued envelopes.

‘May-oh.’

No, the postman would not take so many at one time. He said it was not possible to carry so much and that we could only send out 200 per day – some of these were returned because one of my staff had been sticking the stamps on the back of the envelopes, instead of the front.

I was in the office early the next morning, trying to steam stamps off envelopes, when the two Canadian mountaineers burst in with a bottle of Chinese brandy. Greg and Dave were at last ready to leave. I left the envelopes soaking in water and followed Greg and Dave out to the forecourt where a convoy of Landcruisers and trucks stood ready. A team of Tibetan drivers, eager to start the race, revved the engines to fever pitch, causing gusts of exhaust fumes to blow through the main entrance into the hotel lobby.

I waved as Greg and Dave climbed into their Landcruiser and the convoy pulled out onto the Everest road. Statistically, they only had slightly more chance of making it to the top of Everest as of not coming back at all. It was a sombre thought as I went off to the Morning Meeting.

Jig Me announced that Chinese National Day was approaching and there would be celebrations throughout the land. The Vice Governor would host the traditional 1 October banquet at the Holiday Inn and all foreign staff and other expatriates in Lhasa would be invited. It was truly a day of celebration, commemorating Chairman Mao’s glorious founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949.

Just one small point. Would Mr Alec inform the hotel guests that they would not be allowed to the Barkhor due to security reasons. Guests who had paid thousands of dollars for the trip of a lifetime would have to avoid the spiritual centre of Tibet and the famous bazaar. The ban would only be for five days, I was told, then we wouldn’t have to celebrate any more.

Anything could happen on National Day, which by no small coincidence was the anniversary of the 1987 Tibetan riots and the date of the customary burning down of the police station. Chinese military filled the streets and the People’s Armed Police were placed on full alert.