Forgotten Land, Defiant People - Tibet

Forgotten Land, Defiant People – Tibet

November 20, 2015 ·

Petri Kaipiainen

LuLa_Tibet-21 — New temple at Dzogchen Monastery, Kham

Forgotten Land, Defiant People – Tibet

Ancient Tibet was comprised of three provinces, U-Tsang, Amdo and Kham. The present day Tibetan Autonomous Region includes basically just U-Tsang. Amdo and Kham are included in Quinghai, Ganzu and Sichuan provinces, even though more than half of ethnic Tibetans live in these areas. Old Amdo and Kham are the core areas of both the nomad culture and Tibetan Buddhism, the two defining values of the Tibetan way of life.

LuLa_Tibet-1 — Monks starting a recess. Longwu monastery, Repkong, Amdo

The younger shaman is shaking uncontrollably. Breathing is laborious with short breaths. Exhaling makes his cheeks vibrate. Possessed by a mountain God, he is unable to talk, so he commands his two helpers with wild gestures and by pushing them around violently.

When he dances on the temple courtyard, he is given two bottles of fine booze, which he splatters around on the smooth stones, then a second and a third.

LuLa_Tibet-18 — Returning home at sunset. Yarchen Gar, Kham

Meanwhile, the older shaman dances around, throwing roasted barley to all the winds, while at the same time arranging the dancers for the next performance.

The whole population of the village seems to be dancing, not including adult females who form the crowd of spectators. There is a twirling spiral line of men, boys and girls under 20, youngest about 3 years old, all in their best festival finery, dancing. Older girls have heavy beads of coral attached to their hair, worth the price of a good car, with silver ornaments running down their backs; all this weight is carried by their strong black hair only.

LuLa_Tibet-6 — Shamans at work. Repkong, Amdo

“We are in a Buddhist temple because we are Buddhists, but there are no monks around, as this is not a Buddhist festival”, explains the village headman, in charge of the arrangements in this Sakchu village, a suburb of Repkong town in Amdo. “We make offerings to the mountain Gods, more ancient even than the Bön religion we had before Buddhism.”

Higher-order mountain gods seem to like clear alcohol, tsampa or roasted barley, milk and curd, and small statues made from yak butter. Smaller gods in more backward villages are more bloodthirsty, requiring blood sacrifices done by sticking steel skewers through the cheeks of young male volunteers.

LuLa_Tibet-16 — Curious shoppers at Yarchen Gar, Kham

“These proceedings have been cleaned up a bit because of tourists, I admit that much. In our village there has never been blood spilled, in smaller villages, yes, even now.”

‘Tourists’ does not mean foreigners (there are only a handful of Westerners present) but Chinese tour groups. Camera club groups stick out, especially the two photographers with the latest and biggest pro cameras with big lenses who get into the middle of the dancers. The older shaman throws barley hard at them and even smacks a few with a heavy stave to make room for the performers.

LuLa_Tibet-7 — Senior shaman about to float away… Repkong, Amdo

There are chain dances in which everybody participates, loud drum groups of older and younger men, acrobats on stilts, nimble masked boys doing gymnastics, and slow and graceful processions of girls. Between all the separate dances, sacrifices are made again and again.

On the second day there is a surprise theater performance, folk burlesque of a kind, six men of whom three are dressed as women.

LuLa_Tibet-8 — Young girls waiting for the signal. Repkong, Amdo

There is laughter all around, except in one corner of the courtyard. Nine athletic looking quiet men have appeared there, as if from nowhere. Five of them wear black tracksuits; four are in smart civilian clothing. The thought police, or the political department of the public security bureau has come to check the state of affairs of the festival. Classical religious dances do not possess a threat, but you never know about the comedians.

Repkong is not one of the quietest places regarding the political protests in the Tibetan areas. The wave of protests, which started in 2008, has caused eight self-immolations by monks in this provincial town of 70,000 inhabitants. The most recent six happened in November 2012. It is no small wonder that the area has not been closed to all foreigners since several areas still are.

LuLa_Tibet-15 — Yarchen Gar, home for 7000 nuns at 13400 ft. Kham

There have been a total of 121 self-immolations since February 2009, and all but seven were in Amdo and Kham.

Roads in this area are in awful condition; a100 km drive might take 5 hours with a heavy-duty 4X4. Police, meanwhile, seem to roll in money. Even in a small town it is not uncommon to see ten spanking new police cars, all of them the newest and biggest Land Cruisers from Japan.

Every car entering and leaving a town is photographed. At the market square or the main intersection of the town, a surveillance bus with large panoramic windows is prominently parked, a battery of video cameras aimed in every direction.

LuLa_Tibet-12 — Happy owner of a new shack. Larung Gar, Amdo

It is not enough to catch any demonstrators or self-immolators in the act; it is also necessary to record whoever happens to be present. If smartphone videos or photographs appear on the Internet, it is easy to find out who leaked it. In some cases problematic areas have been cut off the net for months after a small protest, just in case.

Camping is now so out

When Mao Zedong declared the “great leap forward” campaign in 1959, one of the aims was to simplify and boost farming by growing rice as the main crop everywhere in China. This included Tibet. This caused the first know famine in Tibetan history, killing at least 20,0000 Tibetans, even up to 1.2 million by some accounts.

LuLa_Tibet-14 — Sea of prayer flags near Serta, Amdo

The order might have been just a brainchild of a city bureaucrat totally out of touch with agriculture and not a deliberate attempt of genocide; the order was soon quietly reversed.

History is repeating itself, though. The new goal of the Chinese central government is to bring progress and prosperity to the Tibetan plains by forcibly relocating the nomad population to newly-built suburbs in small towns, or newly built villages in the middle of nowhere. By the end of this year 1.7 million people will be moved from tents to these model villages.

We are forced to ask again if this is a desk decision done without any thought about the economical and cultural impact it will cause, or a not so subtle way to marginalize Tibetans and turn them into welfare clients and cheap labor for the Chinese economy.

Traditionally, Tibetan nomads move with their animals for 8 months of the year, and stay 4 months at the winter pastures where they have a simple house built for the coldest months. Now the government is offering a modest amount of money for the old house, which must be demolished, and cheap loans and subsidies to purchase a modern house in a village. The cost to the family is still relatively high.

LuLa_Tibet-2 — Young boy waiting for his turn to dance. Repkong, Amdo

The price might not be a problem to a relatively wealthy nomad family, but what to do with the hundreds of animals they typically own? There is no place for those in a village. It is naturally totally voluntary to move, but the Tibetans have learned not to trust the officialdom in these matters. All decrees and even suggestions must be taken as orders; noncompliance indicates an anti-development attitude, which in turn means separatism and brings big problems for the whole family.

Pro-Tibet organizations working abroad (within Tibet there are naturally none) view the relocation programs along with the anti-religion campaigns as a clear scheme to marginalize the whole population into a jobless labor pool. Even in small country towns, an amazing number of 25-story high-rise apartment buildings are being constructed for Chinese immigrants. Tibetans are being pushed aside. In the cities they are already getting to be a minority trampled by the Han-Chinese influx. Unlike all other citizens of China, EasternTibetans from Amdo and Kham are not even allowed to travel to the Tibetan Autonomous Region without special permits; their own land is forbidden to them.

LuLa_Tibet-4 — Grandmother fixing a silver ornament. Repkong, Amdo

During my trip I saw dozens of these new nomad villages and suburbs. Only a few looked like a real living village. Most were either abandoned or never occupied at all.

“We are not moving; villages do not work”, says the master of a large black yak wool tent while kneading a tasty morsel for the guest out of stale yak butter, dried cheese and tsampa. The tent is standing, like hundreds of other similar dwellings, on the vast Zorge marsh plane at 3600m altitude. By cautious reckoning, at least half a million heads of yaks and sheep munch away on the lush pastures.

What about the government-set limits on the number of animals? “That is a good idea, brings some equality. In the old times some families had thousands of animals, hoarding the pastures. Twenty yaks and ninety sheep for each family member is enough for all”.

LuLa_Tibet-5 — Learning the traditions. Repkong, Amdo

Older brother, who lives as a monk in Baima monastery, turns off the satellite TV and nods in agreement. For a family of six the rule allows enough livestock to be comparatively wealthy, given the rising demand for meat in economically advancing China.

The guests start to leave, but first some offerings have to be made for the benefit of all. On a smoldering pile of dry yak dung, some ten kilograms of tsampa is poured first, then a few kilos of butter. Several ladles of still warm milk are splashed to all four winds. Apparently, famine is not threatening any time soon, but does the sacrifice also protect against the government orders and bureaucrats, who have the power to send anybody to a labor camp for four years of “re-education”, without a court order? There is still room for more inmates, even though the old province of Amdo (now Quinghai) already has a 10% prison population, collected from all over China.

LuLa_Tibet-9 — The leader of the Maiden’s dance group. Repkong, Amdo

In the next small village of Tange, there is a gleaming white new suburb of 120 houses with a neatly tiled central square. Nice houses that combine modernity and traditional Tibetan details are carefully placed along concrete roadways with street signs. A welcoming arch gate at the main entrance, small and classically proportionate Buddhist Stupa is still under scaffolding. There is no living soul in sight. It is raining quietly.

The biggest in the world, nonexistent

The Camps are not marked on any maps; they are not mentioned in any guidebooks. Larung Gar (Camp for becoming a monk) and Yarchen Gar (Camp at Yarchen pasture) are the biggest and the second biggest conglomeration of monks and nuns in the world, or the other way around, but they both have about 10,000 residents, and growing. Some sources claim Larung Gar to have up to 40,000 students, which might be true during festivities.

LuLa_Tibet-20 — Pilgrims on their way to Lhasa, yet a thousand miles and a year to go. Manigango, Kham

If one approaches Larung Gar along the new construction road from behind, he must be careful not to fall on his knees alongside the prostrating pilgrims at the first sight of the valley, not from deep belief, but rather, from sheer disbelief. Thousands of small cabins, like an anthill in reverse, or a repetitive growth of fungi, cover the whole valley.

Larung Gar, or the Serta Buddhist Institute, was established by Jingme Phuntsok, a hugely popular teacher of Nyingma sect, in 1980. His name and fame drew so many students to this remote side valley that in ten years it has grown into a community of 10,000 people. Surprisingly, there were some 3000 Han-Chinese monks and nuns among them. This was not to the government’s liking, and some 2000 huts were unceremoniously demolished in 2001. Permanent maximum perimeter lines were bulldozed to the sides of the valley.

There is not much building space left, but 30 professional construction teams build some 1000 new huts annually on the narrow strip still vacant at the far corner of the site, and in the narrow places between existing cabins. Added to this are a number of huts built by the monks and nuns themselves, often helped by their families and relatives.

LuLa_Tibet-19 — Printing religious texts at Derge printing house, Kham

A new ten square meter cabin costs about $4,000.,while old huts go for only $500., as they must be resold at the original purchase price. The monastery, to prevent profiteering, tightly controls prices. The dweller turnover rate is typically 8-15 years. Larung Gar is not, strictly speaking, a monastery, but a religious college, where students stay until they get a degree in divinity. After graduating they either return to their original monastery or seek placement as religious teacher. The institute has no official recognition, so in a way it does not exist and students have no official resident status there.

During the summer the conditions are quite nice. New lavatories have been built around the periphery and electricity is available. In the wintertime things are different. At a 4000 meter altitude the temperatures drop to -30C/-20F and electricity stops; the streams feeding the small local power stations dry up and freeze. Thin walled huts made of split logs have no insulation. Thick pile of quilts and small stoves stocked with yak dung are the student’s best friends during the 10 month meditation period, when even visiting a neighbor is forbidden.

A Nun in a Slum

If Larung Gar can be a somewhat aesthetically nice example of self-reliance and determination, then Yarchen Gar is a slum. Larung Gar is after all only some 20 km away from the nearest sizable town of Serta. Yarchen Gar, by contrast, is at least 5 grueling hours on a four-wheel drive from anywhere, in the middle of nowhere, at over 4000 meters above sea level.

LuLa_Tibet-10 — Time to shear the sheep. Zoige, Amdo

Yarchen Gar was established five years after Larung Gar, and it is particularly popular with nuns. When Larung Gar was partly destroyed in 2001, many nuns found a new home in Yarchen Gar. Here the standard of living is lower. The camp is on a flat flood plain in a bend of a river; there are 7000 shacks constructed of boards, plastic sheets, linoleum flooring and aluminum sheeting. The village looks like a slum and smells like one, the few lavatories are built on the shoreline, for the benefit of fish and numerous stray dogs.

Twelve years ago a new monastery temple was built on the East side of the river for the monks, numbering about 3000. Since then they have been forbidden to cross the river to the west shore, so the traffic and the mind is now in better control. If a lone stranger, after a bold visit to the nunnery, happens to leaf through the pictures in the camera in the vicinity of monks, a tight wall of spectators quickly forms behind, and the atmosphere is full of excitement.

LuLa_Tibet-17 — A happy nun at the medical clinic. Yarchen Gar, Kham

Yarchen Gar grew around the late teacher named Achuk Rinpoche, and it keeps growing. The nun’s slum is packed to the gills; there is still some room behind the monk’s quarters. Even though a random visitor will not notice it, there is some invisible government control. At least that is what two elderly monks told me, while sitting down for a cup of tea laced with yak butter.

The two brothers I met did not suspect me to be a spy for the Chinese, like some monks I met in Larung Gar did, even though they wanted to touch my stubble and stroke the hair on my forearms (Tibetans and Chinese are quite hairless). They actually are willing to ask about the impression the self-immolations are giving to the foreigners, or what will happen after the venerable Dalai Lama dies, in what might be the not too distant future.

“When the Dalai Lama, in his speech in 2006, asked Tibetans to stop wearing the skins of endangered species like the snow leopard, and all such festive garments were destroyed in a few day’s time, I finally realized what a tremendous authority he has over the Tibetans”, says a monk who has lived in Yarchen Gar for over 20 years. “Now in some monasteries there are demands that monks have to denounce his holiness in writing and disclaim the “Dalai clique”. I do not know anybody who has done this, even though the threats are both mental and physical.”

LuLa_Tibet-3 — Mother and child, girls waiting for their turn. Repkong, Amdo

There has been speculation that the fourteenth Dalai Lama would announce that he will not be reborn. This would be unheard of, but the case of the eleventh Panchen Lama sets a precedent: the new incarnation found by the religious government in exile simply disappeared after three days along with his family 20 years ago, and nothing has been heard about them since. The Chinese government soon found a better candidate, who happened to be a son of two accomplished party members, and they started to turn him into Panchen Lama of sorts.

Pictures of the tenth Panchen Lama can be seen everywhere, and of the eleventh, nowhere. When the eleventh Panchen Lama comes to visit monasteries, the government has to force or pay Tibetans to attend, to avoid an embarrassing situation. If the real Panchen Lama or Dalai Lama would come, no amount of money could keep the people away.

LuLa_Tibet-13 — Larung Gar encampment near Serta, Amdo

Possession of a picture of the Dalai Lama is forbidden in the entire country. In the big “touristy” monasteries within easy access, the likeness of His Holiness is displayed in some side chapels, but in smaller or more distant temples his picture is in the middle of the main altar, surrounded with honorary khata scarves and offerings. “When the government inspectors come, the picture is hidden. When they leave, it reappears. In the Tibetan Autonomous Region the people are meeker and the discipline tighter, but it is better not to handle us Khampas too hard. We know it, and what is best, the government also knows it”.

Photographer/writer Petri Kaipiainen visited Amdo and Kham in July-August of 2013, and was able to photograph freely at both Larung Gar and Yarchen Gar Buddhist Institutes, which both are often closed to foreigners.

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Petri Kaipiainen

See all articles by Petri Kaipiainen

Petri Kaipiainen is a press/newsmagazine photographer from Espoo, Finland, with 38 year experience in documentary, political and portrait photography. He has visited Tibet 5 times since 1985 and has done considerable amount of trekking on the south side of the Himalaya in Nepal.

Forgotten Land, Defiant People – Tibet

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