When the time comes to move on into Yushu for the Summer Horse Festival, the reason for our coming here, Sonam offers me a ride on the back of his motorbike. No helmets or anything like that, just hang on and go. Bounce across the meadow, accelerate up a steep embankment and onto the road, then down the hills, offering silent tributes to Chinese road-building skills as we race past shrines, beneath garlands of prayer flags, through a shallow river and into town.
Day Seventy Two : Yushu
The Yushu Hotel, its entrance garishly painted with the usual conflation of ill-tempered dragons, snowy mountains, lions, tigers and minor devils, was noisy with pre-festival singing and shouting last night.
My room has the usual idiosyncrasies. In this case, a basin pointing downwards at an angle of 30 degrees, which I don’t use, not because of its peculiar tilt, but because no water comes out of either of the taps. This is unimaginable luxury compared to the other rooms on my floor, which share a communal bathroom and a pungently malodorous lavatory, from which I can hear the sound of throats being graphically cleared. Nevertheless, this is the best hotel in Yushu, or Jyekundo as it’s known in Tibetan. This morning the narrow driveway is an ill-tempered place as dignitaries from as far away as the provincial capital Xining wait to be collected by their shiny four-wheel drives and taken the mile or so out of town to the festival ground. I meet an American in the lobby. He’s in water-management and is very excited.
‘This is the water-tank of the world, Michael.’
For a moment I feel another plumbing story coming on, but then I see his gaze is directed out to the mountains.
‘The Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Yellow, Yangtze. They all start round here.’
He shakes his head reverentially.
‘Water-tank of the world.’
We have taken a tent at the festival site. All around us people are getting ready for the parade. A man with bells around his short leather boots waves red and white scarves and tries out a few dance steps. The dancers’ outfits look central Asian, even Cossack, with embroidered sashes across chests, baggy, peppermint-green silk trousers, dark hair squeezed into nets and covered up with fiery red headscarves.
The main stand is beginning to fill up. Men in suits are arriving, TV crews running backwards before them, to be greeted with white scarves and shown to their seats. The political officials are accompanied, more discreetly, by military top brass.
Around the other three sides of the parade ground is a vibrantly colourful crowd, dressed to the nines: women in long patterned dresses, hair carefully braided, ears, necks and hands adorned with coral and turquoise and men in calf-skin shoes, shades and imitation Armani suits, which I’m told can be picked up in town for about $7 each.
A sharp crackle of fireworks starts the parade, which is led by massed motorbikes, decorated with mountains of flowers and coloured sashes, followed by the massed blue trucks from local cooperatives, bearing politically sound placards lauding the policy of opening up and developing the wildernesses of the West.
Tub-thumping commentaries in Tibetan and Chinese evoke the spirit of the Soviet era, an impression re-enforced by the arrival of massed formation tractors, motors rumbling, exhausts belching. People have only good feelings towards tractors. They are the one symbol of progress that everyone approves of and they receive by far the biggest round of applause.
By now quite a head of traffic has built up at one end of the ground, with the massed tractors finding themselves banked up against the massed trucks, who are waiting for the massed motorbikes to clear. The result is an almighty fug-filled jam, a sort of pageant of pollution.
Once cleared, a po-faced detachment of the PLA enter the arena, take up position by the ceremonial flagpole and present arms to the dignitaries in the stand. No spontaneous round of applause here.
Then, by turns, the show-ring fills up with horsemen wearing cowboy hats and jingling bells, sword-brandishing dancers in red lamp-shade hats, monks sounding long curved trumpets, children in matching blue and white track-suits and Tibetan dancers in traditional double length sleeves, which they whirl around like windmills to a tempo as jaunty as an Irish jig.
Day Seventy Three : Yushu
Much jollier up at the parade ground today. The speeches are over, the big-wigs have gone and a holiday atmosphere prevails. Screeching disco music blares out from the PA system, boys race through on scooters with girls they’ve just met on the back, children are paddling in the river, horses are being washed, a lady wearing a post-SARS face mask sells fresh-made yogurt from a bamboo churn. Picnics are breaking out, an elderly monk is shouting into his mobile phone and horses are feeding from nosebags made from plastic footballs, cut in half.
We’re quite an attraction. The children are particularly interested by my notebook and Nigel and Peter’s arms, handwriting and bodily hair being endless sources of fascination.
Occasionally I look up and think what an English scene this is. Many of the women favour wide-brimmed straw hats, others carry parasols, making parts of the camp look like a sea of Eliza Doolittles or Frith’s painting of Derby Day, yet when I look on the map we’re in the middle of nowhere with nothing for 1000 miles around. I suppose that’s why these festivals, especially one on this scale, are so important. They bring people in from their tough lives in inhospitable places to enjoy, fleetingly, the seduction and security of the crowd.
In the arena, meanwhile, dancers and feats of horsemanship alternate. The Khampa horsemen who perform with such panache are renowned for being the toughest and most warlike of the peoples of Tibet, and the only ones to offer any serious resistance to the Chinese ‘liberation’. Spurring their mounts into a full gallop, they ride in with ancient rifles, which they twirl around their heads, bring down to a firing position and aim to blow a hole in a 9-inch square of white paper sticking out of the ground. Others do hand-stands, bareback and at full speed, or hanging head-first down from the saddle try to grab as many scarves off the ground as they can while racing past.
The junction opposite our hotel, where the Xining-Lhasa road meets the southeast turn-off to Sichuan, is a hive of activity. Shops and cafes line crowded pavements where it seems everything is traded. Women are selling butter and yak cheese, which is hardened, cut into small blocks and carried on a string round the neck. More conventional necklaces are also available. They’re expensive too, made up of the highly sought-after amber and coral, as well as cowrie shells (exotic luxuries for people so far from the sea). More furtively traded, but fetching high prices, are withered black shoots called caterpillar fungus or Cordyceps sinensis.
Difficult to find, and detectable only by a thin shoot sticking above the ground, it is apparently a potent tonic highly prized by the Tibetans. A herbal cure, says Duker.
‘What does it cure?’
‘Everything.’
I buy five of the shrivelled pieces of grass for 50 yuan, nearly PS4, and find them several weeks later down one of the seams of my bag.
Day Seventy Four : Yushu
Today we leave Yushu/Jyekundo, the northernmost point on our journey.
On our way out of town, Duker insists that we stop at Gyanak Mani, believed to be the largest collection of mani stones in Tibet. Mani stones are a prominent feature of any sacred Buddhist site, and this one is particularly blessed, as it’s believed that Princess Wengcheng, the Chinese bride of King Songsten Gampo, spent time here, 1400 years ago. Mani stones usually have the mantra ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’ (‘Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus’) inscribed on them, but this stone field and accompanying walls are much richer, with some having carvings of gods and whole sections of the sutras (Buddha’s sayings) carved on them.