Until you’ve seen the desolation of the terrain it’s hard to understand the prayer flags that dot the Tibetan landscape. Our tour bus drives past huge areas of yellow-dry scrub and grass which morph to and from incredible desert-like dunes of sand. Everywhere there are mountains on the horizon and we drive along a seemingly endless road that continues until it meets that horizon. Not a soul is around except perhaps the odd herdsman with his cattle off in the distance. When we stop the bus and venture outside, the only sound is of the wind as it whistles unhindered across the plain.
In some places the hillside is eroded and you can see slightly reddened areas of mud adding this to the dry palette of colours. It makes you think of the surface of some distant planet. There is a suggestion of green in the landscape but it is as though the fertility has been sucked from the earth leaving only rusty browns, olives and yellows. The only natural break from this dry colour-scheme is the blue-green glow of Qinghai Lake when we reach it.
Looking again at the yellow-dry grass, it begins to make sense. The prayer flags are a sign between the people who live here of human presence and kinship. Yes, they have a religious significance too, but when you see the bright colours it gives a sense of warmth of not being the only person in the emptiness. I imagine in the past, before the roads were built and the electricity pylons erected, that it was a great comfort to Tibetans here to see bright flags fluttering in the distance and know that you might be joined by some friendly companion for a cup of yak butter tea. Even from my cosy tour bus I get a sense of this and wonder how much more intensely I would feel it if I were covering the distances on foot and out there in the harsh elements.
That day, (as my dad was still trapped in London by the volcanic ash cloud), I had decided to take a group day trip around the Qinghai Lake area. In my experience so far, group tours rarely visit all the best places and often include irritating side-trips to carpet showrooms or other shopping ‘opportunities’ so I prefer not to use them, but the choice was to pay 100 yuan (£10) for a group tour or nearer 1,000 yuan (£100) for my own car and driver… With this decision made by simple economics, I joined my group outside the hotel early that morning.
All in all it turned out to be a good day. It was my first trip with an all Chinese tour group. I only understood 50% of what was being said, but it was a positive cultural experience to travel with the mixed group from all over China. There was much singing of regional folk songs on the journey by many of the passengers on board and they were so eager to hear me sing a song in English that I surrendered to the situation and sang. I get horribly embarrassed and hate that kind of performance but somehow (in the absence of anyone I would ever see again!) it wasn’t too terrible.
In terms of where we were taken it was (as expected) a disappointment because we went to a couple of shopping sites, including perhaps the most bizarre one I’ve been to to-date, where we were encouraged to purchase spheres of red-orange stone to put in on our mantelpieces. Why anyone would want these I could not make sense of.
The other disappointing thing in terms of itinerary was the preference of the Chinese tour groups not to visit the remarkable Bird Island (see below) in favour of a couple of very mediocre ‘historic’ sites in the area. I put historic in inverted commas because I think that emphasis is placed on at least one of these sites because of the supposed significance of the location to the Chinese claims of sovereignty over Tibet. I don’t blame my travel companions (who were all just along for the ride like myself), but it felt like a latent nationalism was directing the agenda set by the tour company rather than someone with a nose for an interesting site.
I would far rather have visited Bird Island because it is a major stopping off point and breeding ground for thousands of species of migratory birds and we were bang in the middle of the breeding season (March to May), but instead we were taken to the Sun Moon Pavilion (pictured below).
The Sun Moon Pavilion was a stopping off point for the Chinese princess, Wen Cheng, on her journey to Lhasa in the 7th century to marry the King of Tibet. The Chinese government claims that this marriage and that of Princess Jin Cheng a century later, are an early ‘proof’ of the allegiance of Tibet to China through ‘Uncle-Nephew allegiance’ (that is, since the King of Tibet was the nephew of the Emperor of China, his Kingdom owed allegiance to China). Conveniently ignored by them is the subsequent Sino-Tibetan treaty (822 A.D.) still preserved on a stone stele that stands in Lhasa and its inscription that guarantees mutual respect of the borders of the two nations, an irony seemingly lost on the Chinese authorities (there were two other identical copies, now destroyed, one on the border between China and Tibet and the other in the Chinese capital of the time Chang’an).
Qinghai Lake is famous for being the largest lake in China and also for the beautiful contrast between its blue-green waters and the surrounding landscape. Unfortunately when we arrived the weather was overcast with poor visibility so the views were unspectacular. I knew that the train to Tibet I would be taking a couple of days later skirted the northern shore of the lake so hoped for better weather then.
What I enjoyed most of all about the whole day was the drive to the lake and back through a region that was so completely new to me. It was an incredible introduction to a new physical landscape and demographic of both ethnicity and wealth. I saw so many things I’d never seen before.
My experience of China so far was of several eastern provinces that are much richer (with the exception of Anhui), greener, and populated by an overwhelming majority of ethnic Han Chinese. Qinghai is very poor (this was obvious watching workers by the side of the road doing back-breaking work) and still has a substantial minority (45%) of Tibetans, Hui Muslims, Mongols and other ethnic groups, even after much Han migration to the area during the past twenty years.
To give just a small taste of some of the new sights, in addition to radically different ethnic clothing there were horses running across the road (and up the road towards our minibus at speed!), a guy riding a motorbike carrying the skins of a dozen sheep on the back and many factory workers walking by the road wearing old fashioned blue ‘Mao’ suits with faces so dirty you could barely make out their features. Qinghai’s GDP per head is 25% below the national average and only a quarter of what a Shanghaier would be expected to earn. I really noticed the serious poverty out there, so much so that I often wondered if people working by the roadside were convicts that formed part of a chain-gang or ordinary citizens. They were clearing endless scrubland, planting tiny shrubs (probably in an effort to stop soil erosion) in the huge expanse, digging by the side of the road and mixing cement by hand. Perhaps I’ll find out more as I continue the journey. The final new sight of this first trip to the ‘West’ was an icon; my first ever yak!
Here are all the pictures from that day.
