a weeklong series of reports NBC News broadcast from throughout China in 1985, as the pace of change was picking up under the direction of Deng. Beijing was becoming a modern capital, with luxurious hotels and free-enterprise cafés. The hutongs, rudimentary communal villages in the heart of Beijing, were being cleared to make way for high-rise apartmentsand stores carrying Ralph Lauren, Nike, and other high-profile Western goods.
I wanted to visit Tibet, I said to Beijing officials, the Buddhist kingdom now under the military if not the spiritual control of the Chinese government. Han Chinese who had no appreciation of the Tibetan culture were being shipped in from the country’s coastal areas to take up residence and the government infrastructure was under the control of Beijing. The Chinese government was happy to help until they discovered that my carefully arranged five-day trip to Tibet was not a feature on tourism. I was determined to show how the Beijing rulers were systematically trying to wipe out any memory of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who had fled to India with the help of the American CIA in 1959.
Meredith and I flew to Lhasa, the exotic capital, elevation just short of twelve thousand feet, and took in the monumental Potala Palace, where we shared a cup of rancorous yak butter tea, the local specialty, with a picnicking Tibetan family. It was a cordial and useful ceremony, for we learned how hospitable the Tibetan people would be and how to forevermore feign an appreciation for yak butter tea.
Chinese officials rolled out the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking lama, who stayed behind when His Holiness fled to India, becoming Beijing’s front man in the government’s attempt to say all is well in the Holy Land.He was a large man of few words who carried himself with the physical weariness of an actor in a role he reluctantly filled. With Han Chinese officials monitoring our conversation, he invited us to his home temple, Tashilhunpo Monastery in Xigazê, a sprawling city southwest of Lhasa reached by a tortuous mountain road under constant repair by work gangs with shovels and, when we were there, no heavy construction equipment.
Our guesthouse quarters were just above pigsty standards. Fortunately we had our own sleeping bags, some water, and food from Lhasa. When I walked into our room Meredith said quickly, “Don’t touch a thing.”
I said, “I thought no hot water.”
She said, “Right.”
I pointed to an exposed lighting fixture in the ceiling in which water was pouring down a bare electrical wire, hitting the cement floor boiling hot.
At dawn the next morning we were escorted into an ancient chanting room at the monastery, which dates to the fifteenth century. It was a mystical scene, lit by yak butter lamps and the first rays of a new day making their way through cracked and dirty windows at the back. The ocher-colored wooden pillars had a dusky hue, exposed as they have been to centuries of smoke from candles and heaters fueled by yak dung.
Rows of wooden benches in a kind of amphitheaterwere filled with pubescent boys and their elders ranging in age from late teens to what appeared to be many in their eighties or nineties. All were wrapped in crimson robes trimmed in gold as they answered the head priest who led the chanting, pausing occasionally for a yak butter tea break. The tea was served by strong-armed teenagers who walked through the congregation with four-foot-long ornate wooden pitchers, replenishing the small wooden bowls that had been tucked into the robes of the faithful.
Meredith sat quietly at the back, surely one of the few Anglo women ever to attend morning services. We were both deeply impressed by the devotion to their faith of the priests, a faith that had no discernible connection to the central government in Beijing.
When we returned to Lhasa I decided to test the insistence of our Chinese minders that the self-exiled Dalai Lama no longer had any standing in Tibet.
I wanted to visit Tibet, I said to Beijing officials, the Buddhist kingdom now under the military if not the spiritual control of the Chinese government. Han Chinese who had no appreciation of the Tibetan culture were being shipped in from the country’s coastal areas to take up residence and the government infrastructure was under the control of Beijing. The Chinese government was happy to help until they discovered that my carefully arranged five-day trip to Tibet was not a feature on tourism. I was determined to show how the Beijing rulers were systematically trying to wipe out any memory of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who had fled to India with the help of the American CIA in 1959.
Meredith and I flew to Lhasa, the exotic capital, elevation just short of twelve thousand feet, and took in the monumental Potala Palace, where we shared a cup of rancorous yak butter tea, the local specialty, with a picnicking Tibetan family. It was a cordial and useful ceremony, for we learned how hospitable the Tibetan people would be and how to forevermore feign an appreciation for yak butter tea.
Chinese officials rolled out the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking lama, who stayed behind when His Holiness fled to India, becoming Beijing’s front man in the government’s attempt to say all is well in the Holy Land.He was a large man of few words who carried himself with the physical weariness of an actor in a role he reluctantly filled. With Han Chinese officials monitoring our conversation, he invited us to his home temple, Tashilhunpo Monastery in Xigazê, a sprawling city southwest of Lhasa reached by a tortuous mountain road under constant repair by work gangs with shovels and, when we were there, no heavy construction equipment.
Our guesthouse quarters were just above pigsty standards. Fortunately we had our own sleeping bags, some water, and food from Lhasa. When I walked into our room Meredith said quickly, “Don’t touch a thing.”
I said, “I thought no hot water.”
She said, “Right.”
I pointed to an exposed lighting fixture in the ceiling in which water was pouring down a bare electrical wire, hitting the cement floor boiling hot.
At dawn the next morning we were escorted into an ancient chanting room at the monastery, which dates to the fifteenth century. It was a mystical scene, lit by yak butter lamps and the first rays of a new day making their way through cracked and dirty windows at the back. The ocher-colored wooden pillars had a dusky hue, exposed as they have been to centuries of smoke from candles and heaters fueled by yak dung.
Rows of wooden benches in a kind of amphitheaterwere filled with pubescent boys and their elders ranging in age from late teens to what appeared to be many in their eighties or nineties. All were wrapped in crimson robes trimmed in gold as they answered the head priest who led the chanting, pausing occasionally for a yak butter tea break. The tea was served by strong-armed teenagers who walked through the congregation with four-foot-long ornate wooden pitchers, replenishing the small wooden bowls that had been tucked into the robes of the faithful.
Meredith sat quietly at the back, surely one of the few Anglo women ever to attend morning services. We were both deeply impressed by the devotion to their faith of the priests, a faith that had no discernible connection to the central government in Beijing.
When we returned to Lhasa I decided to test the insistence of our Chinese minders that the self-exiled Dalai Lama no longer had any standing in Tibet.
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