“Daddy, I don’t want to go to Jimingyi”. Why not, I asked my two year old over my shoulder, while dodging trucks on the backroads of Hebei Province in June 2017. “Because it’s not good to go in there. It’s very dangerous”.
Tag: buddhism
In 2006, westerners could travel into the Tibetan regions of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces relatively freely. For one shining moment in early 2007, it looked like the group-tour-only restrictions on Tibet Autonomous Province itself would be lifted. It was a Golden Age, the time when China boosters found most evidence for their prediction that the country would continue to liberalize and ultimately democratize. The Olympics changed all that. Riots and protests brought unprecedented clampdowns in western regions. The internet was simply switched off in sensitive areas and politics nationally took a new, harder-line direction from which it’s never really diverted. Since then, troops are often on the ground in sensitive towns, and for a few years there was a spate of self-immolations. Foreigners are often thrown off buses at Kangding and other towns, long before they get anywhere near the western reaches of Tibet. Cynicism and uncertainty grows on the eastern seaboard, though you don’t notice it unless you pay attention. But out west, by most accounts, well, it’s quite, quite different to how it was when we visited.
In amongst all that, the Litang Horse Festival, a longstanding fixture on the Tibetan cultural calendar and the backpacker loop, was cancelled, and stayed that way until very recently.
On our own journey of exploration in the summer of 2006, we saw one of the last Horse Festivals before the big crackdown.
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Summer 2014: Momentarily lost in the tiny village of Hemis Shupachan, I turned down a stone alley and bumped into an old local. He greeted me warmly and asked where I was from.
“Australia? Which city? Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra?”
“Wow, you know your cities. Have you been to Australia?”
“No! But Ricky Ponting is my friend!”
Tall green trees wave in the wind, blue sky behind them. The call to prayer rises, wafts in through the open window, alluring and mysterious. We lie on the bed, staring out that window, listening to the singing float on that cool wind. Later, as the sun sets over a huge white Buddhist stupa, we sip a fresh lime soda and stare at the Kangri Range. Stok Kangri’s summit, a grey wedge of rock streaked with snow, reaches up 6,137 meters above the range. It catches the last of the yellow evening light. We are in Leh, a mountain town in northern India, and after just one day we already love it. A happy, peaceful mix of local Ladakhis, Tibetan Buddhists, Kashmiri Muslims and a sprinkling Indians from down south, this place seems to us to show that people can just get along. It’s stark but beautiful, its people practical, hardy, but above all peaceful, friendly and refreshingly warm.
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Home to pandas and spicy foods, Chengdu is, oh, right, you mean Chengde?
Yes. Chengde. Four hours up the freeway from Beijing, not four hours by plane. Chengde doesn’t, and probably never did, have pandas. But as the Qing Dynasty’s summer resort it has beautiful gardens, an impressive replica of Lhasa’s Potala Palace, laid back people and a great vegetarian restaurant. Sounds like a perfect weekend destination.
