Baiyu County High, Wide and Lonesome

It’s common in rural China to hear neighbours criticize each other, so as a rule I pay little attention. Yet the people on the southern border of Baiyu County are unusually insistent. “Don't go there,” they say. “It’s dangerous.” They put money on it, too. There are only another 100 kilometres to Baiyu County Town, but it costs 800 yuan to find a driver willing to make the trip, and even then he’s not too happy about it.

Baiyu lies on the east side of the Jinsha River; over the water is the Tibet Autonomous Region. The only sealed road into the county runs from the town of Ganzi, to the northeast. I’m travelling from the south, from Batang County Town, and it soon becomes clear why the drivers were so uncooperative.

I turn off the southern Sichuan–Tibet highway about 30 kilometres north of Batang. The blacktop immediately disintegrates into a rutted mud track less than two lanes wide, not that there are any lanes drawn here or any need for them. No bus plies this route; nothing passes but the odd horse team and the even odder four-wheel drive, plus a random peasant searching for the shitake mushrooms that bolster the highland economy during their brief growing season in July and August. Thick forest crowds the road all the way to the first pass, where the horizon briefly widens onto a glorious pasture dotted with yaks and horses and the hand-woven tents of the three Tibetan families who live here—4,100 metres above sea level.

The valleys are narrow and heavily wooded. A lunch-stop in the one-street town of Mengyu brings further warnings: “Don’t leave anything outside, they’ll steal it,” along with sharp intakes of breath at the news that shitake are only selling for 20 yuan a pound 250 kilometres away in the Zhongdian mushroom market. The street is dominated by strutting men with moustaches and muscles, one of whom starts pawing my gear and asking how much it’s all worth. I tell him to watch out: if he accidentally fires any of the guns inside the bags, I won’t be responsible for the consequences. He backs straight off. The fact that he believes this lie tells me more than I want to know about life around here.

The county town creeps up on the visitor. It’s crammed into the valley of the Ou River less than 10 kilometres before the Ou flows into the Jinsha at the border with Tibet. As with many rural towns, a petrol station is the first sign of life; the road then follows the river round another bend and immediately enters a bustling commercial centre, hemmed in by clusters of five-or-six storey buildings. It takes a climb to the top of one of these to see what makes Baiyu unusual. It is dominated like no other by its temple, the massive Baiyusi. More than a fifth of the town’s 5,000 inhabitants occupy the temple and its attendant buildings, which fill the slopes above the east bank of the Ou. Monks and nuns throng the main street. In this deep valley, the golden roofs and whitewashed pagodas of Baiyusi are the first objects to reflect the morning sun, and the last to bid au revoir to the rays of sunset.

A 50-something man with wild hair runs a little shop on the square in front of the main prayer halls. I buy a white silk scarf (hada) and a bottle of fizzy drink and then admire the dagger sheathed at his waist. He is delighted. “This has killed three people,” he says, showing me a grin full of metal fillings. Perhaps noting my expression, he assures me that all three were robbers and that this happened before he entered the temple 12 years earlier. I’m not sure what to say to this, so I ask him instead if he knows where the Living Buddha, you know, lives.

I’m directed further up the mountain, almost to the very top of the temple compound, where a young Han Chinese monk takes my request for an audience to the Tuzong Living Buddha. I wait outside in a queue with a young Tibetan nun and a gentleman who appears to have a considerable sum of money wrapped in a hada just like mine. Five minutes later, I am ushered into the presence and present my sadly inadequate hada, which is nonetheless laid courteously across my neck by the Tuzong Living Buddha, a bespectacled 70-year-old who wears a kind expression and a lovely blouse of golden silk over his crimson robes.

The Tuzong has been in Baiyusi since the early 1940s, and I’m hoping he can answer the question that has stumped everyone else in town. I want to find the ancient route over the mountain to Kathok Monastery, about 25 kilometres away as the crow flies. Baiyusi is an important temple of the Red Sect of Tibetan Buddhism, but Kathok is even more significant. Established in 1159, it is the oldest Red Hat monastery in Kham. One of its alumni taught Kubla Khan’s Buddhist master.

I have come to the right place; the Tuzong knows the way and sketches it with generous waves of his left arm. He warns only that the mountain is “very high,” so high that his own master once turned back, exhausted, from the ascent. I press my palms together and give thanks, then forget my instructions to exit the room walking backwards. Distracted by my sudden realization of this discourtesy, at the threshold I almost tread on a nun, who is entering on her hands and knees, pressing her forehead to the floor as she goes.

I can’t quite make the nuns out. Some hours later, as I negotiate the narrow path described by the Living Buddha, I spy a group of nuns washing in the stream far below. They spot me, too, and start to wave enthusiastically and blow kisses in my direction. My imagination suggests they call, “Yoo-hoo!” as well.

Two mountains obstruct the lonely path to Kathok. It takes the best part of two days to climb the first, Shazuola, the pass over which is close to 4,800 metres above sea level. The only person I meet is a solitary monk making the same journey as me; Jimin Danzen has come all the way from his monastery in Lhasa to walk this path. I suspect he is very happy to meet me and my camp stove, as his gear consists of one umbrella and a shoulder-bag containing eight bread rolls. In the evening, after a diversion to visit the sacred lake close to the pass, we descend into a high valley that is home to a single family of herders. We pitch camp nearby and buy a pot of yak milk; now I’m happy to have Jimin Danzen with me, as the Lhasan monk speaks rudimentary Chinese whereas the herders speak none at all.

The hike from our campsite to Kathok the next morning takes another four hours, first up an easy path to the pass over Mt. Duoniela, a mere 4,500 metres above sea level, then down a steep, steep slope nearly 1,000 metres to the glittering roofs of Kathok, which are visible from a point just a few yards over the crest of the pass. Jimin Danzen swishes ahead, anxious to reach this famous site and to find the kitchen. Unlike Baiyusi, Kathok is not attached to any town. Built halfway up the mountain, the monastery is self-contained, relying for its food on the villages in the valley below. Wandering monks such as Jimin Danzen are assured of a welcome in such a place: as are wanderers such as myself.

Our journey ends with bowls of rice covered with a sludgy broth, while the kitchen monks busy themselves mixing a giant pot of ground barley and yak butter, which they plan to mould into icons for the temple.

Mangy dogs hang around the courtyard looking for scraps, reminding me of a story the Tuzong Living Buddha told. The communist Red Army passed through Baiyu in 1936, and General He Long stayed in both Baiyusi and Kathok. In Baiyu, the general noted the profusion of dogs and asked one of the monks if they could catch a few and eat them. The monk said, well, OK, but have you considered what your enemies will say if they hear you’ve been eating dogs in a Tibetan temple?

The general pondered this advice and then announced he was cancelling the dog order.