Drepung Monastery, once the biggest in the world, with 10,000 monks living and studying here in the mid 17th century, stands slightly outside the city, overlooking Lhasa from high ground to the northwest.
We disembark and begin the long climb up to the heart of the complex (Buddhism is a very steep religion), until we reach the impressive portico of the Prayer Hall. Monks’ shoes, most of them modern trainers, litter the ground outside. I remove my own shoes and, pushing aside a heavy, patchwork curtain, its edges dirty black and waxy from continuous use, find myself in a candle-lit interior, the size of a small cathedral, with long lines of red-robed monks sitting cross-legged on their cushions, chanting prayers from small strips of text on boards in front of them. A number of novices race through the hall dispensing butter tea. One of them trips over Basil as he’s photographing and both he and his load fly into the air and land with a resounding crash on the stone-flagged floor. No-one bats an eyelid.
At the back of the hall, behind the line of candles, is a chamber that contains huge plaster characters from the rich cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism. Incarnations of the Buddha and various Bodhisattvas (beings who have reached enlightenment but rather than enter nirvana have chosen to return to earth and help others) as well as fierce, snarling, pop-eyed, horned figures who are their protectors.
The Communists came close to expunging Buddhism from Tibet. Six thousand monasteries, 95 per cent of all those in the country, were destroyed. But Buddhism is 2000 years old and Chinese Communism was only 60 years old, so it was not a battle they could win. Now the Chinese, comfortably in control of the political and economic life of the country, have adopted a more pragmatic attitude to the old religion. Buddhism is seen as being good for tourism, and the revival of the monasteries has been accelerating, though possession of any image of the Dalai Lama remains a political crime in China.
At Nechung, half a mile down the hill, there is a thorough restoration going on. In a courtyard some 200 feet square a small team, mostly of women, is working away. Two of them are smoothing and shaping the plaster over an incense-burning oven, others are slowly and meticulously restoring the superb 14th-century murals on the walls of the arcades. Graphic, Hieronymus Bosch-like motifs of human torment are a recurring theme. Faces and skulls alternate, bodies hang upside down from serpents like clothes on a washing line, entrails are ripped out by wolves and naked bodies sundered by leering devils.
The work force goes about its task with quiet application. The only noise comes when they get together for an arka, a song and dance routine that they use to help them flatten the newly laid clay floors. Holding long bamboo sticks with stone pads on the end, they go into a sort of builder’s line dance, rhythmically thumping the clay into place.
Someone hands me a stick and asks me to join in. Though I find myself regularly facing the other way to everyone else, I can now add Temple Restoration to my CV.
Back in the Barkor, we take lunch at a cheery upstairs cafe called Petoc. It’s shamelessly aimed at foreign travellers and our Tibetan drivers are frankly embarrassed at having to eat behind a yak-hair curtain in a recreation of a nomad’s tent. We, on the other hand, love it for its eggs and bacon, yak burgers and espresso coffee machine.
Halfway through this intercontinental fry-up our new sound recordist, a tall, thin Chinese, arrives from Beijing. Though he’s got here impressively quickly, his expression is apologetic and his face a ghostly shade of green. We later learn that he’s suffering from altitude sickness and won’t be able to work for the rest of the day.
Recount this story to John when we take him food and supplies at the hospital tonight. It cheers him up no end. He’s a lot better generally and now has only one aim - to get out of the People’s No. 1 Hospital by any means possible.
Day Sixty Eight : Lhasa
Potala Palace and Potala Square should never be confused. One is the greatest building in Tibet, and the other is a large open space created by filling in a lake and flattening a neighbourhood of old Tibetan houses in order to celebrate 20 years of the creation of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The only use of one for the other is that the best view of the palace is from the bleak square, where the wind blows the water of the ornamental fountains into your face and tourists pose in the middle of the emptiness to have themselves associated with the now equally empty palace on the hill.
The Tibetans call the peak on which the palace is built Mount Marpori and the soaring upward curve of the Potala’s walls, rising 13 storeys and nearly 400 feet (120 m) high, stirs memories of the Himalayan rock faces we’ve seen to the south. Until the first skyscrapers were built, the Potala Palace was believed to be the tallest building in the world.
The mighty edifice that swallows up the mountain top today was built on the foundations of the 7th-century original. The White Palace was completed by 1653, and the central block of upper storeys, known as the Red Palace, was added some 50 years later. The entire complex has 1000 rooms. Despite that, it wasn’t considered sufficient for the Dalai Lama of the time and within 50 years another palace, Norbulingka, was constructed on a 40-hectare site, a couple of miles to the west, in which His Holiness could spend the summer months.
A series of perilous staircases, as thin as firemen’s ladders, lead remorselessly up from level to level, through dim and dusty apartments, until we’re on the roof of the White Palace next to a room with deep red walls labelled ‘Eastern Sunshine Apartment’. This was the Dalai Lama’s bedroom and a more magnificent position could hardly be imagined. If you want to feel the monarch of all you survey, then this is the place to be, and I can imagine the young Tenzin Gyatso, the present Dalai Lama, making his early prayers as the first rays of the sun reached these gold-tipped rooftops, well before they reached anywhere else in Lhasa.
It must be 45 years since he last looked out from here over his capital and his country.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. We end our last night in Lhasa at JJ’s nightclub, whose red neon strip lighting pierces the night air, down on the square in the shadow of the Potala Palace. Conspicuous consumption is evident. Cars, some substantial, are drawn up at the door, while inside beers are ordered in 12-pack slabs and delivered by pretty hostesses to tables filled with anyone from Tibetan girls on a hen-night and Chinese businessmen entertaining clients to shifty groups of underworld heavies. It’s a big place, dominated at one end by a deep stage on which, to the accompaniment of a bellowing, distorted soundtrack, a show erupts. Strobe lights, pulsating disco music and John Travolta lookalikes alternate with Tibetan folklorique in a raucous mish-mash of old and new. I suppose it represents what’s happening in Lhasa now. The power, the technology and the marketing is all Chinese, the past that is thrown into this mix is Tibetan.
Day Sixty Nine : North from Lhasa
We check out of the Himalaya Hotel this morning. Last images: porters wrapped in greatcoats and looking as if they were in their third month at Stalingrad, cleaners moving three-foot-wide brushes soundlessly across a spotless marble floor, a girl at reception smiling as if it were Christmas as the doors swing shut behind us. Fond farewells to John P, released from the People’s Hospital and due to fly out to Kunming, Hong Kong and London later today.
The drivers are late. Most of them stayed on at JJ’s until the small hours. Migmar stamps his feet against the cold.