Asia > Tibet > Lhasa > Lhasa > Articles > Lhasa Portrait

I first visited Lhasa in 1987. Tibet was like some once fabulous but now dusty jewel whose owners wanted to show off preferably to high-yield group tours. The jewel, though, was flawed. Its heritage, not to say citizens, had been battered and emasculated. The Motherland had admitted to mistakes but repentance was not on offer. More prosaically, hotels were mostly basic, their toilets often unspeakable and restaurants little more than grimy sculleries that reeked of old meat and stale eggs. Yet few of us were bothered – we were on top of the world in fabled Lhasa, utterly immune to passing discomforts and indifferent food.

So to return for a third visit after eleven years is to find a maturing city rather than a fumbling town. Its mutation mirrors the changes across all of China. Vast boulevards funnel traffic efficiently past car showrooms. Its public spaces are neat and clean. The markets are full and bustling; shoppers throng its department stores. Hotels boast marble foyers and glitzy lobbies, little bars of soap and hairnets. There are regular bars and girlie bars. It probably has the world’s highest Beijing Duck restaurants and has recently been connected – no mean engineering feat – with the world’s highest railway.

But the Chinese in Tibet haven’t quite scaled the moral high ground. That inconvenience, or outrage depending on how you view their presence, seems to be increasingly overlooked as the West embraces the next superpower. Weighed by all this ethical baggage, the first-time visitor might initially be disappointed. Lhasa no longer looks how you imagine it should. It has largely become a Chinese city: you see more Chinese faces, Chinese script is almost always more prominent on signs and posters, and modernisation has generally been unsympathetic to Tibetan architecture. I arrived with a heavy heart and soaring nostalgia.

Tourism, of course, is complicit in all these changes; hotels are more comfortable, the food better. There is (a little) more to do after dark and rather more to buy by day. But the basic ground rules remain the same: don’t talk politics (at least not too loudly) and don’t even flash a picture of the great “splittist” – the current Dalai Lama – though that’s not to say the odd local will never ask for one furtively.

At heart, though, an essential ‘Tibetan-ness’ endures as best it can. With an eye firmly on the tourist dollar it is even carefully encouraged. The capital remains home to Tibet’s holiest shrine, the Jokhang Temple, and the Chinese have long stopped trying to pretend otherwise.

Every Lhasa visit begins at the square fronting the Jokhang. Inside, amidst theatrical gloom, pungent butter lamps and robotic chants of prayer, stands a hyper-sacred statue of the Buddha aged twelve. Known as Jowo Sakyamuni, it was cast in India and came here from China as a dowry from the Buddhist Princess Wencheng. Solemn pilgrims still queue to revere the statue, replenish its candles with flasks of ghee, and deposit ten-miao notes in a multitude of chapels that honeycomb the complex.

There’s a charming tale surrounding King Songtsen Gampo’s quest for the Jowo. In competition with other powers for Wencheng’s hand and the coveted statue, the Tibetans faced a series of tests devised by the Chinese emperor. When required to thread a piece of worm-holed turquoise, they ingeniously used an ant to tease it through. When faced with a cut wooden pillar and asked which had originally been its top and bottom, the wily Tibetans threw it in a river knowing a treetop always faced downstream. Before having to select the princess from a long line, the cunning Tibetans traced her nanny who provided clues. Then, rather than pick her blind and possibly arouse suspicion, they first narrowed the selection down to five. Wencheng came to Lhasa and, for the Chinese at least, helped inaugurate the special relationship by which Tibet became an integral part of China. But what, you may wonder, happened to that Tibetan guile?

Nowhere in this city reveals the marrying of old and new Tibet quite like the Barkhor. This kilometre-long circuit orbits the Jokhang through the very core of what is left of the old quarter. A constant stream of cheerful locals, rosary-thumbing country folk, earnest monks and camera-toting tourists stroll by identical stalls of trinkets, “yak-yak-yak” T-shirts, turquoise and amber jewellery. There are shops with bizarre names like ‘Best of Hip Hop Station’ and ‘God Eagle Shop’. Past them crawl a few raw pilgrims with leather aprons and wooden hand boards who laboriously prostrate their way around the holy of holies – with such arcane hardship comes much merit.

Old Tibet is alive (though not necessarily well) among the earthier back streets that are still satisfying to wander. Tibetans fondly turn an enormous prayer wheel at the Mani Lhakhang, and further down a little lane just off the Barkhor stands the Meru Nyingba Temple. Barely a century old, few places in Lhasa exude such an intense medieval aura. Docile walnut-faced women cram its cloistered courtyard spinning hand-held prayer wheels and mumbling mantras. Smouldering juniper billows fragrant smoke from plump burners.

Lhasa’s ultimate landmark, the Potala Palace, remains an architectural marvel but has inevitably become a tourist scrum. Built on ancient fortifications and said to comprise one thousand rooms with two hundred thousand images, its completion in 1697 seems only to have been secured by the Fifth Dalai Lama’s regent keeping his death a secret for twelve years. So pivotal is it to the fabric of Lhasa and identity of Tibet that a Tiananmen-like square was cleared before it in the mid-1990s (and I can never forget the Westerner I saw back then, kneeling on the fresh concrete and weeping in despair at that potent no-nonsense symbolism).

These days a visit seems a touch more obligatory than inspiring. Large sections are closed, allegedly for renovation, and invariably timid guides reel off the strictly official version of history. Yet, at least in the abbreviated English captions and notices, there is little overt propaganda and the Potala still has its moments. The extraordinary Dalai Lamas’ tombs comprise huge reliquary stupas gilded with kilos of gold and inlaid with turquoise, agate and pearls, which even officialdom no longer finds decadent. There’s a little light relief in a frankly surreal offering of Ferrero Rocher in a display case of intricate 3-D mandalas. And most poignantly of all, down on the main road directly below its Red Palace there is a section of kerb smudged brown from the grimy palms and foreheads of kneeling pilgrims whose loyalty to Tibet’s historic leaders seems unbreakable.

The city’s great Buddhist nodes lie on its outskirts and, superficially at least, they have survived difficult times rather well. To the west, Drepung Monastery was once among the world’s largest: in the 1640s it boasted around ten thousand affiliated monks with a fifth residing on site. Dozens of imposing prayer halls with gilded roofs, whitewashed chapels, cloisters and monks’ quarters cluster at the foot of bare, lofty hills. Its wonderful kora, or orbital path, affords some of the best views of this labyrinthine and enthralling complex.

A few kilometres north of the centre, the equally impressive Sera Monastery seems to receive more visitors. Its monks regularly conduct open-air debates whose stylised choreography and hand clapping drive home the arguments though there’s a touch of artifice about these displays. Tibetans come mainly for the vital Tamdrin Chapel whose fierce-looking yet practical deity calms a deceased’s journey to the next life, and blesses sickly children and pregnant women.

I headed on to nearby Pabonka, a small and bewitching monastery and had it almost to myself. One of the oldest Buddhist sites in the Lhasa Valley, its cosy main hall stands atop a huge boulder. I hiked away up the stark hillside past cairn-like mani stones crowned with goat horns to an ancient part-ruined hermitage with panoramic views over the city. A kindly monk showed me round, then gave me butter tea and biscuits while I looked over a few old and curling pictures of past lamas and happier days. Explaining I’d first come to Lhasa in 1987, his wistful expression seemed to hover somewhere between a heavy heart and deep nostalgia.

Lhasa – The Long and Winding Road
For a time until the early 1900s, reaching Lhasa was virtually a holy grail for a cast of explorers and spies. British India was their usual starting point and they met with varying degrees of success. Today one can fly in from Kathmandu, Beijing and several other Chinese cities, and most visitors do this at least one way. But the rugged land routes remain exciting and underline just how remote and isolated Tibet once was.

The latest land option is the new railway from Golmud in Qinghai Province through which direct trains run from Beijing. Yet apart from some rugged scenery at either end of the new line, much of this route largely follows the Golmud-Lhasa road crossing the barren and somewhat dreary Tibetan Plateau.

Other roads lend more exhilarating trips. Passing close to Mt Everest, the Friendship Highway to/from Nepal is a deservedly popular and practical one. The tortuous road to/from Kashgar (Xinjiang Province) is officially closed to foreigners but a handful of adventurers seem to trickle through. From India, the ancient routes via Ladakh (Jammu & Kashmir) and Spiti/Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh) are firmly shut. The Hindu pilgrim trail from Uttarakhand is open only to Indian citizens by special arrangement. The newly reopened Sikkim route seems restricted to trade. However, some of the most spectacular journeys – from China’s Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces through eastern Tibet – are now open to foreign groups with permits…and time.

Articles

• More from Amar Grover