Riding the Iron Rooster

21: The Qinghai Local to Xining: Train Number 275

On my way to Xian to catch the Qinghai local I ran into the mountaineer Chris Bonington. He said he was in China to climb Menlungtse, a mountain near Everest and almost as high.

"We're also looking for a yeti," he said.

His good health and his courage and his tigerish way of turning his head made him seem very youthful. He had a look of smiling innocence and strength, a happy man whose life was devoted to adventuring up mountains.

He was serious about the Abominable Snowman. A previous Everest expedition had photographed a yeti footprint on the Menlung Glacier.

"Are you going to bring one back in a cage?"

He smiled. Was that a twinkle in his eye? He said, "No, all we want is a picture."

Presumably that was worth money. There was no profit in climbing a 23,ooo-foot mountain and risking your neck; but if you managed to get a picture of the great hairy monster of the Himalayas you were newsworthy and bankable. Money to finance expeditions was always a problem in mountaineering. Bonington's small team of four or five climbers had forty cases of supplies among them, which entailed hiring numerous sherpas and yaks to transport them.

Along with bear hunting in Xinjiang, and sport fishing in Liaoning, equipping mountain-climbing expeditions was another enterprise of the Chinese.

Bonington said that ninety percent of China's mountains had not been climbed and that many of them were over 20,000 feet. But it was expensive to climb in China, he said.

"For example, a yak costs thirty yuan a day to rent," he said. "I wonder how much of that goes to the owner?"

I said that I would ask someone in Qinghai, where many of the yak herds were found.

That was the first of March. In Xian I read in a China Daily that Deng Xiaoping told the visiting American secretary of state that the recent trouble in China had been caused by "a leadership crisis." It was a euphemism for a power struggle. "It is now over," he said, and added cryptically, "but it may continue for a while in the minds of the Chinese people."

Xian lay under winter mist, denuded and dusty. In sunlight it was stark, a flat city of plain buildings inside a city wall that was powerful and elegant, with great roofed gates. Xian's city wall actually looks as though it could repel an invading army. I visited the terra-cotta warriors a second time. They cast the same spell, with their eerie artistry and bizarre, half-human and buried-alive look, like an army that has been petrified by time. The curio sellers were frenzied, because this was the off-season, a winter month in which few foreign tourists visited. The Chinese are more like threadbare pilgrims than tourists. They are not spenders. They have no money. Their work units rent beat-up buses and pack them with employees, and off they go, hundreds of miles to look at a pagoda or the warriors. They also regard the hotels for foreign visitors as worth gaping at. They stood at the gates of Xian's Golden Flower Hotel ($100 a day) watching foreigners come and go. The Chinese in their innocence still regard their looking at foreigners as a form of sight-seeing.

Like many other Chinese cities, Xian was not clean, but it was very bare. The Chinese are not scrubbers, but they are inexhaustible sweepers. Sweeping doesn't freshen a city. It gives it a dis-416—concerting baldness. The effect is of a place that has been trampled.

I walked in the back lanes of the city, among the little tumbled compounds, and the stinks of dampness and dust, and the fragrant smells of cooking. I lingered near the windows of lighted rooms, where children were doing homework and women were working at kitchen tables. I saw a restaurant — tiny; filthy; people with steamers and pots on the table. I longed to go in, but every seat was taken. On my morning walks I bought the Chinese pedestrian's winter breakfast, "fried sticks" (you tiao)—deep-fried dough, which resembled elongated pieces of Yorkshire pudding. They were fried outdoors in a wok. People on their way to the factory bought little bundles of them and ate them on the way.

On this second visit to Xian I saw that the city prospered without tourists. It had a life of its own, and its economy was that of an inland capital, dealing in industrial and agricultural products. The discovery of the terra-cotta army had given a boost to the tourist trade, but the tourist economy was parallel to the existing economy. The Chinese government had a policy of being brisk with tourists — shipping them in, squiring them around and shipping them out. They hated people who lingered and found cheap rooms and simply strolled around looking through people's windows. They really didn't want me there at all. But what could they do? I didn't have a nanny anymore. They could not keep track of travelers. It was possible to arrive in China and more or less vanish. I had now managed this, and I saw people like me all the time. Their reference point was always the local post office. I saw tall, dusty long-nosed foreigners. We exchanged glances — and there was little more than that — but I recognized them as kindred souls. Were they writing books about China? Probably. Everyone seemed to be doing that. The only justification was that any travel book revealed more about the traveler than it did about the country.

Even late on a Thursday night in clammy March the main railway station was crowded — and more than crowded. It was almost impossible for me to make my way from one side to another. I could not understand the density — the people sleeping on benches, making noodles in the corner, milling around, sitting on their luggage, nursing babies. It was a huge station and yet there was nowhere for me to sit — no spare room. There were about eight trains departing within a few hours, and they were long trains; but that still did not explain the mobs. It was amazing to see so many people on the move, and it was useful to me, because I could lose myself in the crowd.

In the sleeping-compartment lottery I was assigned with three soldiers. Even wearing thick long underwear they were much too small for their uniforms. They were young, about twenty or so, and had sweet faces. They began making tea, and remarking politely on what luck it was for them to be traveling with an American friend, and so forth.

I said, "I'd like to know whether you call yourselves 'soldiers' (bing) or 'fighters' (zhanshi)."

It was a Maoist distinction that had been introduced into the People's Liberation Army — I had been told that "fighters" was the accepted word. They agreed with this and said that "fighters" was the usual word, but that no one worried about the difference anymore. And by the way, the word "comrade" (tongzhi) was not very commonly used.

The soldiers snuggled into their berths and pulled out romantic novels; they read and dozed.

"This is very good tea," one of the soldiers said later on, lifting my can of Dragon Well Tea.

"I like green tea," I said.

"We are red-tea people," he said. "I lived on a commune that grew tea. I was too young to pick it, but my parents did."

"Were they sent there during the Cultural Revolution?"

"It was during the Cultural Revolution, but they went willingly," he said.

Farther down the sleeping car, a man was smoking a Churchillian-sized cigar. The man himself was very small, and I saw this cigar smoking as a form of aggression. The whole coach was filled with this smoke, and although the cigar was truly noxious, no one told him to lay off.

"I hate that smoke," I told the soldier. "I want to tell that man to stop smoking his cigar."

The soldier became twitchy when I said this.

"Better not," he said, and laughed — his laugh signifying, Let's pretend that cigar smoker doesn't exist.

The next time I walked past the cigar smoker I saw he had an army uniform on a hook over his berth. Officers were said not to exist in the PLA, but it was obvious that he was one — superior to the three fighters in my compartment.

I was reading Chinese Lives, which had been put together as a series of interviews by Sang Ye and Zhang Xinxin. I had met Sang in Peking just after I started my China trip. The book was a pleasure, and it was ingeniously simple and revealing. It also confirmed my feeling that the Chinese, who are supposed to be so enigmatic, can be blunt and plainspoken and candid to the point of utter tactlessness. That was why the book was so fresh.

All night the compartment door opened and closed, as people came and went. One sleeper snored for hours. Someone in an upper berth kept his light on. The door banged. There was always chatter in the passageway. The lights of stations made yellow stripes in the compartment, and then we were in the darkness again. In the morning, a man sat on the lower berth, sipping tea.

"Where you are going?" he asked.

"Xining. And then Tibet." I used the Chinese name for Tibet, Xizang.

"You'll be gasping in Tibet. It is very hard to breathe there because of the altitude."

"I'll do my best."

We were in the yellow, rubbly gorges of Gansu, one of the roughest looking landscapes in the whole of China — I knew that now. There were no trees, there was very little water except for the muddy Yellow River, which the train followed for part of the way into Lanzhou. The soil was crumbly, the color and texture of very old cheddar cheese — the sort that has remained untouched in a mousetrap all winter.

I woke hungry and decided to "register" for breakfast. For about twenty cents I bought a breakfast coupon. I was told to report at seven-thirty. I did as I was told. On the dot of seven-thirty the dining car filled with people, who sat rather impatiently. A girl in a nightcap and apron went through the car with a tray, plonking bowls down. There was a sudden hush; a silence; and then a tremendous slurping. The chopsticks clicked like knitting needles for a minute or so, and then the people stood and shoved their chairs back and went away. That was breakfast.

Towards midmorning, the Yellow River widened in the cheesey gorge, and we arrived at Lanzhou. I had been here before; I had no desire to stop. I bought some peanuts to eat and walked along the platform while the locomotive's boilers were filled with fresh water. I noticed that most of the people got out at Lanzhou, and very few boarded. It had rained slightly. Chinese rain often made a city look filthier and sometimes much dustier. It had had that effect on Lanzhou, which looked very dismal and rather parched after the sprinkle. The steam engine was reconnected, and we set off again, slowly, with many stops on the way.

After about fifty miles we entered the province of Qinghai. "There is nothing in Qinghai," the Chinese had told me, which gave me an appetite for the place. We were soon among big smooth mountains of mud — great heaps and stacks of hard-packed dirt. It had the look of an endless dump. It was the most infertile place I had seen in China — less fertile than Inner Mongolia, more arid even than the Turfan depression and the ravines of Gansu. The river, which seemed to have the name "the Yellow Water," looked poisonous, so the water was not a source of life; it was another way of ridding the landscape of vegetation.

But people had figured a way of living here. They had made bamboo frames and stretched plastic sheeting over them. Inside these crude greenhouses they grew vegetables. The only produce in Qinghai is grown in these things. At night the people cover them with straw mats because it is below freezing. The daytime sun warms the plants through the plastic. In ditches I could see ice, even though it was noon.

The people were so poor here they could not afford to feed donkeys or buffalos. They plowed, using two people to pull the plow and one to guide it. There they were, in the middle of the whirling dust, dragging the thing. It was the first time in my life I had seen human beings pulling a plow. They also pulled carts and wagons in Qinghai, and had totally replaced animal labor with their own. I had the impression that after the field was plowed a system of plastic greenhouses was erected over the furrows.

The mountains and heaps of mud reddened, grew brown and then gray, and became clawed with eroded gullies; and then they became rocky, and stonier. But they never looked less barren. It was odd, then, to see people preparing the ground for crops — digging, plowing, raking; and to see lives being lived — schoolkids frolicking in the playground under the red flag; other kids carrying water in buckets and picking coal out of the rubble. And in the middle of nowhere I saw a man strolling along and smiling, with a monkey skittering on a leash.

The settlements were clusters of square, squat houses with mud-walled courtyards. Walls were the rule here. And there was some irrigation, some vegetable gardens exposed to the wind and weather. But the clearest impression I had, early on in Qinghai, was of every village looking like a prison farm. Indeed, that is how many of them started out, with the villagers sent to Qinghai as punishment. They were to be reformed through labor, as the saying went, and turned from prisoners into pioneers.

The station signs were written in three scripts — Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. I had no idea how far we had come. We were traveling very slowly still. The province was bigger than the whole of Europe, but it was empty. The trees were stark and dead, like symbols of trees, the six lines that a child might draw with a crayon. The ground was bare, the houses and mountains brown, the river gray and the ice at its edges was filthy. The valley was twenty miles wide. Having seen Xinjiang, I suspected that these fields might be green in the summer and that it might not be the dreary place it seemed. But it was odd to be in this brown and lifeless world, where there is nothing visible that can be eaten. It looked like a dead planet. This is the sort of landscape that frightens visitors to China — frightens the Chinese, too. To the Chinese this was not part of the world: it was the edge of it, so it was nothing.

By talking to the other passengers I established that the mountains to the north were the Dabanshan. Gansu was on the other side. Cave dwellers inhabited some of those mountainsides, and in some cases the caves were elaborate, with windows and doors and crude plumbing. I could see on some of them a sort of superstructure protruding, a balcony which made a facade.

The train was creaking along, gaining altitude. We were now at about 7000 feet — it was chilly, the air was thin, the wind was strong. In the cliffs above the track there were caves, an opening on every cliff face, with its own shelf and precarious stairs cut into the rock. Some cave dwellers were sitting in the sunshine, others hanging laundry, hacking at troughlike gardens that seemed magnetized to the mountainside. They were cooking, too. Why think of this as a mountain when you could just as easily think of it as a tenement? That wasn't a cliff — it was the west wing, and that summit was a penthouse. There was a whole world of troglodytes here in Qinghai.

Only its altitude made Xining breathtaking. In other respects it looked like what it was, a frontier town: square brown buildings on straight streets, surrounded by big brown hills. All the water on the creeks and streams had turned to ice. It was an ugly, friendly place, and its bantering people had chafed red cheeks, like bruised peaches. Its terrible weather gave it drama. Its rain was black and very cold. But it did not rain long. Most of the time it was notoriously dry — too arid for growing vegetables outside the plastic greenhouses. Snow also fell, in big, wet plopping flakes. And the wind had torn off all the topsoil. Inside of a week I experienced all those conditions — rain, dust storms, blinding sunlight and snow. If I climbed stairs too quickly, I had to stop and get my breath. I developed a plodding way of walking that enabled me to keep going. There were Muslims all over town, wearing a sort of chef's cap and side-whiskers, and there were also spitting Hans, and Tibetans who favored cowboy hats and frock coats.

"What's that music?" I asked the driver, as we traveled to the hotel from the station.

The driver said nothing, but his pal said, "Beethoven."

"Beethoven," the driver said. "I like Beethoven."

The driver's name was Mr. Fu. He said he could drive me to Tibet. It would be about five days to Lhasa, through the Qinghai desert and then into the mountains. Sleep in army camps on the way. How about it?

I said I was very interested.

Mr. Li, his pal, said, "I think it's Symphony Number Two."

"Isn't it Six — the Pastorale?"

Mr. Li laughed. He had yellow teeth. His laugh simply meant Wrong! It was a barklike noise. He said, "The Pastorale goes dum-dum-dee-dee-dum. No, this isn't Number Two. I know Two, Five, Six, Seven and Nine. This isn't a symphony. It is an overture."

Mr. Fu went fossicking in his glove compartment. He brought out the cassette holder and showed us. It was the Coriolan Overture. Mr. Fu said it was a Beethoven work he particularly liked.

"This is the best hotel in Xining," Mr. Fu said.

Mr. Li laughed in a stern correcting way. "This is the only hotel in Xining."

This hotel reminded me of something I could not quite place — a building I had known in the distant past. It had been built by the Russians, and it retained its fiftyish look. It was very musty, it was mildewed. Why did all Chinese carpets stink with decay? I hated the hotel hours. Dinner at six, no hot water until eight at night. The room girl kept the keys. The toilet didn't flush until you emptied two buckets of water into it — and that bucket was the wastebasket.

And then I remembered the old Northampton Hospital, where I had worked as a student, and thought, Of course! The Xining Guest Hotel was exactly like a madhouse. The tiny rooms, the smells of food and disinfectant and sewage, the sudden squawks from locked rooms, the TV no one watched, the scarred walls suggesting violence, the bars on the windows, the eternal figure down the shadowy corridor slowly toiling with a mop, the silent inmate squatting on a chairseat, roosting like a chicken. It was all a reenactment of life inside the old-fashioned hospital I had known. Even the room girls were more like fearless, untalkative madhouse orderlies than they were compliant Chinese fuwuyuan. And in this loony-bin-like hotel, I could not decide whether I was a patient or a visitor; but I sometimes suspected that I would be like one of those poor creatures who is taken in for observation and somehow forgotten, and twenty years later discovered behind a bolted door, driven totally insane by the place.

These anxieties impelled me to make plans for Tibet. I told Mr. Fu I wished to discuss this matter.

"My father went to Tibet," Mr. Li said.

But I asked him more questions and realized that the man had gone there twenty years ago, on horseback, as a volunteer teacher.

"There was no road then," Mr. Li said.

"There's a good road now," Mr. Fu said. "I've driven to Lhasa a few times."

But my questions elicited only vague answers from Mr. Fu, and I could not tell whether he really had driven there or not.

"And it's a lovely drive from here to Golmud," Mr. Fu said.

"I can take the train to Golmud."

I had wanted to do that. The train to Golmud was the ultimate Chinese train. The line had been constructed as far as this town, and then because of the impossibility of penetrating the Tibetan plateau, it had been abandoned, in the middle of nowhere. I would not have missed that ride for anything.

"It's a horrible train," Mr. Fu said. "It's a steam locomotive. It goes through the desert. It is very slow."

That was music to my ears.

"You drive to Golmud," I said. "I'll meet you there and we'll both go to Tibet. We'll stop on the way. I'll bring some food. We'll listen to Beethoven."

Mr. Fu did some figuring and presented me with a bill for the Chinese equivalent of $600. That included his little Japanese car and his labor as driver and all the gas. I would pay for meals.

"It's a deal," I said, and we shook on it.

The car seemed rather fragile for such a difficult trip—1200 miles across the bleakest part of Tibet. It was a Galant. I hated the name. It was a car you saw on scrap heaps. When the wind blew through Xining, Mr. Fu's Galant swayed. It was not a vehicle for Tibet. Mitsubishi said another plate. It looked like a Dodgem car.

"You think it'll make it?"

"This is a good car," Mr. Fu said.

"Remember to bring two spare tires," I said.

He swore that he would. There was something in the heartiness of his assurance that made me think he was lying to me.

After that I decided to spend my time in Xining making preparations for the journey. I bought dry noodles and canned goods and fruit and soup. I bought storage containers and canteens and thermos jugs. I bought another hat. I found a place that sold jars of quails' eggs and bought a case. The food was so cheap I did not bother keeping track of the cost — it was a few dollars, no more. In my wandering around town I discovered that a special sort of dumpling was made in Xining. It was a stuffed pancake, fried in a wok — a dough bun crammed with scallions, and they served them fresh out of the pan, hot and dripping, just the thing for a snowy day in Qinghai.

Xining was the sort of simple ramshackle place I had come to like in China. It was not pretty, but that didn't matter. The food was delicious in an unremarkable way: not fancy but good to eat. The weather was full of surprises. The people said hello to me and were pleasant to each other. I liked Xining as I had liked Langxiang in Heilongjiang — and for the same reason: it was a country town. By degrees I realized that I was the only barbarian in the place. It was off-season, the middle of March in the back of beyond. That was also the reason people talked to me. It was a novelty to see a barbarian so far from his home.

Xining had department stores — of a kind. It had movie theaters — at least two. It had an enormous mosque. But Mr. Fu's was one of only about twenty cars in the place, and as the main streets were four lanes wide, one had the impression of almost no traffic at all. The buses were the broken, rusted kind found in all parts of rural China.

It was alarming to be told by people in Xining that Golmud was horrible and primitive. Bring warm clothes, they said. Bring food. Bring water. Tea, too. Bring everything you need. Nothing is stranger than being in a fairly bad place and being told that another place — your destination — is a great deal worse. But such warnings also made me deeply curious.

They grew potatoes here. They ate french fries. The fries were thin, crunchy, greasy and unappetizing, like the ones sold at McDonald's — exactly like those.

I met a young recent convert to Buddhism, Mr. Xun, who was studying English. I told him how much I liked the stuffed pancakes. He somewhat dismissed this, as Chinese do when you mention your liking for peasant food like dumplings, or lotus roots, or fried noodles, or steamed buns. Meat was the thing.

Mr. Xun said, "Sheep vein. Yak vein. Mongolian hot pot. Caterpillar fungus. And stir-fried camel's foot. That's what I like."

There was also a variety of black moss from the mountains called "hair grass" that was tasty. They made it into soup. It was indistinguishable from seaweed. But the fact was that west of Xining, and through the whole of Qinghai and the whole of Tibet, there is only one vegetable (barley) and only one kind of meat (yak). As might be supposed, faced with only two ingredients the people of these regions have learned to cook them a number of different ways. But that is no more than a gesture. The taste is unvarying. It is the taste of yak.

Mr. Xun the Buddhist convert went with me to the Taer'si, a monastery about fifteen miles southwest of Xining. The founder of the Virtuous Order (Gelukpa), a pure form of Buddhism, was born here over 500 years ago. This man, Zong Kapa, went to Lhasa and preached at the Ganden Monastery there. He was the founder of the Yellow Sect. After he had been away for some years, his mother wrote, imploring him to return. He said no, but added: If you want to do something useful, build a temple in my honor. Before the old woman could act, a pipal tree sprang up on the spot where Zong Kapa was born — the same sort of bodhi tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. The mother built a pagoda over the tree, and then built a temple. Later, in 1560, the monastery was built. Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas have visited here. The present Dalai Lama was born nearby, in the hills. The white horse of the 9th Panchen Lama dropped dead soon after bearing his master here in 1903. This animal was stuffed and is venerated in one of the temples. So Mr. Xun said.

What Mr. Xun did not say was that this monastery, recently reopened by the Chinese, had the stuffings kicked out of it, and not only in the predictable battering of the Cultural Revolution. In 1958, Mao issued the edict of Religious Reform. It began as a political program; it became religious persecution. But now, thirty years later, the Kumbum Jampa Ling — the Tibetan name of the Taer'si — is growing again. There had been 3600 monks. This was reduced to none at all. In the past few years 500 monks have established themselves, and there are Rapjung — novice monks: grinning little red-cheeked boys who trot around combining high spirits and mischief with their chores.

"In three months these people will believe in communism," Mao had said thirty years ago, as he defrocked the monks. But the monastery has re-formed, and it is vigorously Buddhist. It seemed to me that it was so far off the beaten track that it had not received the pestering attentions of the bureaucrats. The complex of temples, stupas, courtyards, the printing works, hospital, medical college (for teaching herbal remedies), and dwellings (housing thirteen Living Buddhas and their mothers), is scattered on the brown lower slopes of the valley. A small town has grown to one side of it, down the road.

Having Mr. Xun with me was a help, and being at Taer'si on a cold winter day meant that I was seeing the place with its prayer wheels turning. We followed a procession of Tu people, who wore black hats with upturned brims, and padded jackets and high boots.

The pilgrims prostrated themselves and then entered The Lesser Temple of the Golden Roof. In its courtyard they hung little swatches of sheep's wool. For a good harvest, Mr. Xun said; but this was contradicted by my guidebook, which claimed that about-to-be-slaughtered animals received grace in this way ("similarly, sheep and cows may be led clockwise around a monastery, as their final act on earth"). In this temple, children with runny noses and wild hair were snatching at the barrellike prayer wheels. A man with a shrieking voice was chanting and beating a drum inside a locked room; the incense burners were crammed with cypress leaves and smoking fiercely, and pilgrims had glued Chinese coins to the burner's side (there was a pot of fish glue next to it). On the balconies to the right and left were two large stuffed yaks draped with gauze offerings, two stuffed goats and a stuffed brown bear — they were propped up on the rails to look like judges surveying the pilgrims below, and they had wild grinning faces, due to their stretched skin and glass eyes. It was the sort of holy place which could look only bizarre to an unbeliever, and there hung about it the stink of rancid yak butter.

That is the smell of monasteries from Mongolia to Tibet, the sour, cruddy hum of yak butter. It resembles the smell of an American family's refrigerator after a long midsummer power cut. It is the reek of old milk. But yak butter is not just a ceremonial fuel. It is used for cooking, for lamps, for sculpting, and it is good for greasing axles. Yak butter is Tibetan lubricant in a spiritual and also in an industrial sense. The pilgrim who had just finished lubricating his wagon wheels brings a can of it and deposits fat yellow lumps of it in a vat near the temple altar.

Mr. Xun said there had been lots of miracles here — not just the bodhi tree that sprouted on Zong Kapa's birthplace, but clusters of trees that appeared at the Flower Temple. They were miraculous, Mr. Xun insisted. Messages had appeared on them.

"I must see them," I said.

Mr. Xun was delighted by my fervor. He introduced me to the monk at the Flower Temple.

The monk said, "Look at the trunks of these trees. Look closely."

I looked closely. There were small scratchings, like worm tracks on the flaky bark.

"Tibetan characters," the monk said.

"Read them, please," I said.

"I cannot."

"Do they say anything?"

"We do not know. But I will tell you this. They are not man-made."

He did not mean worms. He meant something supernatural.

He saw some Chinese tourists smoking.

"Do not smoke!" he said in his Tibetan-accented Mandarin. "It's all wood, and if this catches fire, who's responsible? This temple is seven hundred years old" — it wasn't, actually, but I felt he wanted to make them feel bad—"and you don't care! All this yak butter would go right up in smoke!"

After the Chinese tourists left, the monk said, "They don't care. They smoke all the time. They throw cigarettes everywhere — even under these holy trees."

It was fairly obvious that the Tibetan monks disliked the Chinese, but they shrugged and grumbled rather than revolted. At the monastery printing works several monks told me that during the Cultural Revolution they had been sent to work at a power station.

"How did you like that?"

"It was a waste of time," one said.

This printing works was medieval in its way of working. The monk inked a slab of script and then pressed a rectangle of rough paper over it. He peeled this off and hung it to dry, a finished page of text.

One page was a ribbon of writing.

"Stick that over your door and thieves will never come in."

"What does it say?"

"It is Indian writing, Sanskrit. We don't know."

He inked another slab and printed a new piece of paper.

"If you put that on your house your guests will always be happy."

But as with the first one, the message was incomprehensible to him.

I went to the Meditation Hall and was almost overcome from the smell of yak butter. I went to the kitchen. It had the look of a tannery — full of deep vats, each one about seven feet across.

"This kitchen was last used in 1958," Mr. Xun said. "Those cauldrons could cook thirteen yaks at a time. The whole monastery could be fed in this kitchen."

The remains of the 3rd Dalai Lama are at this monastery, in a temple called The Nine-Roomed Hall. This man, Bsod-nams-rgya-mtsho, was the first to be called "Dalai." The Mongol chief Altan Khan conferred this title on him when he visited the Khan's court in the sixteenth century. Dalai means ocean in Mongol and it implies boundless wisdom. But the special features of The Nine-Roomed Hall are not the bones of this holy man. Interest in the place is usually centered on two tall demons.

"Notice the curtains?" Mr. Xun said.

Dusty drapes covered the bases of the statues.

"They have put them there so that you cannot see the figures beneath them."

"Why would they cover those figures?" I asked.

"One is an ox having sexual intercourse with a lady," Mr. Xun said.

"What sort of lady would have intercourse with an ox?"

"I don't know," Mr. Xun said, "because it is covered up."

The buildings were not beautiful, nor even pretty, but they had a rough mountain charm, and some of the carved pillars looked both godly and weird. The attractiveness of the place was in its life, its pilgrims and monks, the novice monks fetching water and eating Popsicles, and penitents draping the white and yellow gauze on the statues, and burning butter, and whirling prayer wheels, and prostrating themselves in a sort of religious athleticism that was very impressive — they are required to flatten themselves against the ground 100,000 times a year. It is not a fastidious kowtowing but a calisthenic so vigorous they wear mitts and knee pads to prevent bruising.

Mr. Xun and I walked down the road, past the souvenir stalls and the little shops, and had lunch in a restaurant that was otherwise empty. We had grilled yak meat, melon, squash, pig fat, buns, seaweed soup and french fries. The yak meat stuffed into the buns was my Dish of the Day, and I entered it into my notebook under dumplings and smoked duck and all the rest of the dishes I had favored.

We were sitting near a Franklin stove with a ten foot tin chimney. Mr. Xun said that he had visited the United States the previous year. He had been an interpreter for a trade delegation. In order to secure this job he had had to pass a competitive exam in English. He said he had traveled all over.

"I went to San Francisco," he said, and smiling, he told me how much he had hated Chinatown. He regarded the very word as insulting, but also he had found it all hackneyed, ridiculous and embarrassing. "And the food was bad," he said.

"What did you think the first time you saw New York?"

"Not as nice as Vancouver."

I then asked him what he had bought in the United States to take back to China.

"A pen. A book of stories. A photograph album."

He had no money. But what things he would have bought if he had had the cash! A refrigerator, a motorcycle, a television, an electric noodle maker!

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.