We talked about Tibetans.
"They have black and red faces," Mr. Xun said. "The Hans are white and red. You can tell the Hans by their red cheeks. And the Tibetans are very dirty."
"There isn't much water around here," I said.
"On the grasslands in the west of Qinghai there is no water at all. The people wash their hands in yak's milk. And they never take a bath in their whole life."
"How about the Hans?"
"We wash once a week."
Mr. Xun said he usually went to a public bathhouse in Xining for a bath—on Fridays. He lived in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of the town, with his family.
Without warning, Mr. Xun said, "'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife...' "
"You read Jane Austen, Mr. Xun?"
"My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice."
A very Chinese title, when you come to think of it. He also liked Dickens and Thackeray. There was apparently plenty of time out here on the high plains of central Asia for the plump and populous English novel. He said that he also read religious texts. After middle school he had decided to become a Buddhist. "I wanted good fortune in my life," he said. He was now a firm believer.
"Want one of these?"
"Oh, yes," he said, gratefully accepting a portrait of the exiled Dalai Lama.
I had brought fifty pictures of the Dalai Lama with me. I had been told that they were impossible to obtain in China and that I was likely to win friends among people in this region if I handed them over. It was a simple expedient. I had no personal objection to presenting pictures of this solemn bespectacled incarnation of Buddha; and it seemed to work.
On the way back to the monastery we ran into a pilgrim who said he was a yak herd—he had about thirty of them. They sold for about $100 each (but Chris Bonington was paying $8 a day just to rent them), and he had had to sell two of his yaks to pay for this pilgrimage to Taer'si with his wife and two small children. The Chinese word for yak meant "hairy cow" (mao niu). It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.
Taer Monastery is known for its butter sculptures, and as yak butter is the medium they are pungent works of art. A hall about forty yards long held statues and friezes of multicolored flowers, cherubs, trees, temples, little animals, and gods and goddesses. One of the largest statues was of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. But the Yellow Sect interprets this deity as having thirty-six forms, and in this yak-butter statue she was a mustached man.
The monk watching over the butter sculpture took the portrait of the Dalai Lama I offered him and folded it into his robes. Then he gave me a surreptitious blessing.
"You have made him happy," Mr. Xun said.
This present Dalai Lama, number fourteen, was born not far away from here at Hong Nei Village in Pingan County, in 1935. He came to Taer Monastery at the age of two, borne on a sacred white yak and guided by three lamas from Lhasa who had gone in search of him.
It happened in this way. After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, the corpse was found to be facing east. The head was repositioned, but soon after, it moved again, to face northeast. The state oracle put on his mask and went into a trance and he too faced northeast. The three lamas set out for the northeast to find the new Dalai Lama. They interviewed the parents of three or four children. One was Lhamo Dhondrub. His family was very poor. But there had been portents at his birth, in particular the strange visitations of crows in a place where there had never been any crows. Still, the lamas were not convinced. It takes a while for a Dalai Lama to be proven. But this child passed all the crucial tests, chose the correct beads when they were offered, answered all the questions, and was physically the Holy One: had oversize ears, sorrowful eyes, "tiger stripes" on his legs, and the rest of the eight bodily marks. He was brought to Taer'si and then to Lhasa. He was named: Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshi Tenzin Gyatso—Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Eloquent, Compassionate, Learned Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom.
"When he was here in Taer'si he stayed over there, in a house."
The monk was pointing at nothing.
"I don't see anything."
"His house was wrecked by the Red Guards."
This monk was one of the few people I met in China who refused to talk to me about the Cultural Revolution. He was not afraid; he was simply furious and disgusted. He lived in the stables of Taer'si, in a small cell, with another monk. On the walls of his cell were pictures of Buddha. He had a teapot, a little brazier, a pallet and a faded quilt. It was not austere, but it was very simple. Over his tiny bed was a poster of a tiger. This monk too had a large can of yak butter.
In the market outside Taer'si business was slow. There were no foreign tourists because it was winter, and there were very few Chinese tourists. The shops sold beads, brassware, wolf pelts, Tibetan cloaks and hats and horns, walking sticks, Buddhas, and trinkets. Also this—in one shop, cans of cooking fat for sale. The label on the can said,
Norwegian EDIBLE FAT Sandarit Brand—5 lbs.
Supplied by the World Food Programme
Gift of Norway
Produced by Jahres Fabrikker A/S Sandefjord Norway
"How much?" I asked.
"Fifteen yuan a can."
"How many cans do you have?"
"Plenty."
The cases were stacked in his shop. How had the stuff arrived here? Perhaps through India or Afghanistan. In any event, this free gift, courtesy of the Norwegian people, was generating income for a prosperous little shop in remote Qinghai.
In that same market, Tibeten men were haggling over gray otter pelts, and buying beads, and swapping silver for chunks of amber. There was a brisk trade in pretty ornaments, and some were trying on the Chinese-made cowboy hats that are so popular among Tibetans.
Remembering the cassette player in Mr. Fu's little car, and our impending trip to Lhasa by road, I went into a music shop and bought some tapes. When I went back to Xining I did the same, but the music shops and department stores were so well stocked, I emboldened myself and asked for tapes with political songs on them.
"What kind of songs?" the salesgirl asked. "Do you know the names."
"The East Is Red,"' I said. "And one that starts, 'I love Peking's Tiananmen Square.' The Liu River Song.' The White-haired Girl.'"
They were the Maoist revolutionary songs that had been sung for the past two or three decades.
"We don't have those."
Mr. Xun said, "We are sick of those songs."
But they had pop songs, they had Hong Kong rock, and they had tapes of Oklahoma! They also had Strauss, Mendelssohn, Bach, and the complete Beethoven symphonies, which I bought for the trip to Tibet.
A few days later, as I was walking through Xining in the middle of the day, the sky darkened. It began to snow, at first softly, and then blizzarding down. No one seemed to mind. There was hardly any traffic, anyway. And the place looked better under a few inches of snow. A blind boy was caught in it, and tapping his stick he squawked when there was no sound or echo—in just a few minutes he had lost his way because he could not hear his stick in the snow. But he turned his face up and as the snow hit it he licked the flakes from his lips. Then a troop of black-cloaked Muslims came by and rescued the blind boy. The Muslims were either old bearded patriarchs with severe eyes, or else bratty boys fooling with each other. I followed them to their mosque, which was the biggest one I had seen in China, but like every other religious building I had seen, it had a vandalized-and-renovated look.
I stayed in Xining longer than I had planned because I liked its stuffed pancakes and snowy skies, its red-cheeked Hans and the ragged Tibetans in their greasy cloaks, who went smiling down the street. I climbed all the nearby hills—to the Tao Monastery, with its cave-dwelling monks and its temples balanced on cliffs (the whole thing looks like a wooden fire escape)—and from the tops of these hills I could see that Xining was larger than I had imagined. But the rest of the town was merely brown shoe-box-shaped buildings that had no visible function. After the snow melted, the harsh wind from the mountains whirled dust into the air. It was a terrible-looking place, but it was friendly; and I liked being the only barbarous foreign devil (yang guedze) in town.