Category: China-English

We met this boy between Dege and Manigango. He had left home a month ago with his aunt and uncle, nun and monk, and their journey to Lhasa and back would take another eleven. He would walk every step of the way, and every step of the way he would prostrate himself as devout pilgrims do.

Amazingly, his uncle said, this pilgrimage was completely his own initiative.

He looked perfectly happy, creating his own slow motion road-movie.

We met briefly, twenty minutes. Then we moved on at our pace, he moved on at his.

‘No school?’, I had asked. But his uncle taught him every afternoon. I was left wondering many more things. Did he miss his family, did they carry a mobile, did they keep in touch at all? Did they ever worry they may not get enough support of local people – no lodging, no food, no alms? How about the winter cold?

Questions that only a non-pilgrim can ask, I suppose.

Five joined me on a trip through the eastern Tibetan lands of Kham and Amdo. They are places of awesome empty spaces to which the people add colour with their dress, prayer flags and architecture; and life with their welcoming and direct way of interacting with strangers passing by.

We cut south-north through the area, from Gyalthang (Ch Zhongdian) in Yunnan to Xining in Qinghai province – 2.000 kilometres along the shortest road, but we added another 1.000 of amazing detours via Pelyul (Ch Baiyu), Katok (Ch Gatuo) and Dege in Sichuan province and the Golok nomad area in Qinghai.

Unlike in the well-known triangle of Lhasa, Gyantse and Shigatse in Central Tibet there were no hordes of tourists. In fact we saw about five from abroad and five from China in three weeks – and zero during our detours. Unlike in Central Tibet there is no big influx of Han Chinese workers and traders. We travelled through a much purer Tibet than the Lhasa region is these days.

We were free to go anywhere – not a certainty for foreigners in these parts. Only at the junction that should lead us to Katok monastery we were stopped at a police checkpoint and told that we could not stay overnight in the area. I politely asked the young man in uniform to call his boss. He did, and was sorry to tell us his boss said ‘no’. I politely persisted, he called again, and he was even more sorry to tell us his boss still said ‘no’. We were allowed a daytime visit, before dark we were to be back at his checkpoint and move on.

One day we drove – make that: bumped, it was an awful stretch of road – along the Yangtse river between Baiyu and Dege. We were in Sichuan, across lay the other half of Kham in the Tibet Autonomous Region, forbidden territory for foreigners unless they have a travel permit. And these have been almost impossible to get in the past two years. I hope one day to have the opportunity to visit that other part of Kham.

For some more photo´s see http://www.flickr.com/photos/pieterneele/sets/72157627763666722/

In always-fruit-city Kunming peach season follows mango season.

This second time, under the watchful eye of the camera, we aren’t as reverent. We mostly wonder what we will look like, even though the camera woman has told us we will feature for just three seconds in her website documentary.

We had come earlier in the day, the gardener had unlocked the gate. We had climbed the stairs through the ranks of the fallen in the 1979 war with neighbouring Vietnam. Higher up on the hill, in the oldest part of the cemetery where those who died in the revolutionary war lay buried, mister Li had approached us. He pointed out the tombstones from 1950. Mao had declared this country the People’s Republic of China in1949, and the war had been won 99 per cent. But in these far-off parts the Kuomintang still resisted. He told us about the 18 year young girl from a nearby village. She was beaten, raped by 20 men and killed. Every war produces its own horror stories. He said he still couldn’t relate this without being moved. There was nothing trite about him.

The dead are commemorated once a year. Not on a day that marks the end of a war, not with pomp and circumstance. But on Qingming, the day in April when the Chinese traditionally commemorate their deceased family members, clean their graves, clear the weeds. Many still come. Mister Li administers a fund that refunds travel expenses to those who have trouble covering their own – some come from as far away as the Northeast, 5.000 kilometres from Jinping.

It is called, somewhat belligerent and heroic, Jinping’s Cemetery of the Martyrs. But it is a peaceful place, shaded by trees, the gardener sweeps leaves.

Just back in the hotel they contact us. The management invites us for dinner. And they would like to shoot some video of us. That will become those three seconds that introduce as ‘visitors from far and wide’.*

They have put a long table in an empty space of the cemetery. Dishes are being served. There is beer. Mister Li soon is inebriated and more cheerful than in the afternoon.

We get the official numbers and stories. 768 men lay buried here. In 1979 the Chinese entered Vietnam no more than 70 kilometres. Once the Vietnamese pulled back one of their armies from Cambodia, China withdrew from Vietnam. The Chinese had attacked Vietnam in response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia that toppled the Khmer Rouge regime.**

But then our camera woman, who is doing the briefing, changes course. She stresses that the Chinese and the Vietnamese people are friends. These days in Jinping county they walk across each other’s border. It was a conflict at government level. Just as the current tensions between China and Vietnam over islands in the South China Sea that both countries claim are a problem between governments, not between the people.

No unpleasant traces of nationalism run among the people who run this place. Their focus is on the human cost of war.

* The cemetery’s website is www.jplsly.com

** For a complete and objective overview of these events see Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy, The War After the War

Shot my favourite picture of 2011 on January 2nd already. Took it in Yingpan, in the southeast of Yunnan province. These kids belong to the Hmong ethnic minority.

Spring in Kunming is usually sunny and warm. Every now and then a sudden cold spell interferes. The temperature drops ten, fifteen degrees to ten, twelve centigrade. Recently it went down to four. That is rare even in January.

‘Mild climate’, people say. But there is no heating here. During the first day higher temperatures don’t give way yet in homes and offices. After that you are numbed by cold sitting behind your desk. Twelve degrees? Nobody born in the West after WW II, used to heating, can imagine anymore what it is like to experience that continuously.

When communist reconstruction started in China after world war and civil war it was decided, forced by shortages, not to install heating in apartment blocks, schools, offices, factories, hospitals south of the Yangtse River – though in winter it can easily get below zero in many places there. That policy is still intact. They may have invented laughable ways of wasting energy in China (what about, in places where central heating does exist, radiators without regulators that can’t be switched off even if outside everybody is just wearing a T-shirt), leaving several hundred million out in the cold has to be commended as an efficient conservation measure.

Of course people improvised all kinds of heating devices, and today most can afford an electric heater. But the majority stoically accepts the cold. ‘Ah, just wear several layers of clothing’. People don’t whine in this country where hardship has been part of life for millennia.

During the first day the cold doesn’t give way yet in homes and offices, but outside it is driven away as abruptly as it came. Usually within a few days. This time it took two weeks.