Let’s look at Beijing first.

A new north-southward subway line has made public transit in central eastern Beijing more smooth. The new line has run into operation in such a hasten way that many of its check-in gates are yet to be installed. The old Qian Men (前门) area that lay between the southern gate and the Temple of Heaven has basically disappeared. On top of the ruins of the demolished old buildings soon will stand brand new buildings of traditional Chinese architectural style but made of concrete and steel. The rebuilt of Qian Men has to be accomplished by the 2008 Olympics. Nevertheless, no sign of any scaffold is yet to be seen. No doubt these buildings will eventually stand up before the Olympics start, as the government will never allow itself to lose face. Whether buildings constructed in such a rush are of any architectural value is probably the last question that the government will take time to ponder.

The renovation of the echoing wall in the Temple of Heaven has been completed. Iron fences stand one meter away from the inner wall so that hordes of tourists will not be able to touch the ancient bricks, let alone to carve their names on the wall. My friend Muhsin and I stood on eastern and western end of the wall, more than 20 meters apart. I pushed my body against the fence, extended my neck so that I could speak as close as possible to the wall. While calling Muhsin’s name, I also made endeavors to hear his voice that was supposed to travel effortlessly along this wall of perfect circle. Nevertheless, I could hear nothing but nearby tourists shouting the names of their accompanies standing on the other end of the wall. Perhaps, the distance between the fence and the wall made our voices difficult to travel along the circular wall, or perhaps the wall has grown weary of transporting voices for so many tourists.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony (太和殿) in the Forbidden City is still under renovation. Nevertheless, I could at least see its glazed roof and newly painted wooden structures. It was a rare clear day in Beijing. For the first time that I realized the glorious colors of the emperial halls only look good under an azure sky. The tower on top of the Jinshan Park is also open to the public after last year’s renovation. Spending 2 RMB on park entrance and 5 minutes on climbing allowed me to overlook the entire Forbidden City standing silently amid a hodgepodge of contemporary architectures. Buildings of the Tiananmen Square, namely the national museum, the congress building, and Mao’s memorial hall are typical examples of soviet’s feverish exaggeration of superficial grandeur. The egg-shell-shape national grand theater looks more like an alien spaceship that has illegally parked in a wrong place.

We went to the Lama Temple this time. The Temple hosts the largest wooden Budda status made of a single piece of lumber. Standing underneath this giant status of Maitreya Budda, I saw an ancient white cedar with a diameter equal to the largest living Giant Sequoia, General Sherman. The cedar was ordered to be logged and brought to the Qing Empire Qianglong (乾隆) by the sixth Dalai Lama. Maitreya Budda, the Budda of the future, an easy going figure of a happy soul would lament the death of a sacred white cedar that were sacrificed only for an attempt to assault the humbleness of Budda.

I again visited the Jiankou Great Wall. Only there could I sense the stillness of the time. Feeling of both history and tranquility stayed unchanged despite the fact that a year and a half had slippered away. There were some changes. The hazy, hot air of last summer was replaced by crystal yet bitterly cold air of the winter. White snow instead of green vegetations covered the path toward the wall and made the path easy and pleasant for me to fall on. Many hikers were present this time. Their and our presence made the Wall alive. If humans were taken away, this wall would be a grotesque geological formation that had no reason to exist.

Besides all the physical changes in Beijing, cheap but nice accommodation remains unknown. This time, we stayed in a youth hostel that had windows. Nevertheless, the quad we stayed was more of a size of a single. I shouldn’t complain. After all, it is above the ground and has a warm and nice cafe to socialize.

Second, we move to Xi’an.

The city is building its first subway line through its central axle. The Carrefour where we shopped last summer is today no where to find. The street in front of the youth hostel is almost three times wider than last year. This change cannot take place without many buildings in the area having been demolished. If the city had the memory, it would remember that the only other time that it experienced the change of such astonishing scale and speed was more than 1,300 years ago, when Chang’an, the emperial capital of the Tang Dynasty was built into the largest city in Asia at that time. In fact, the scale of the new Xi’an has far exceeded that of the glorious Chang’an. The subway line extends far into the northern and southern suburban areas, where villages scattered during the Tang Dynasty.

We climbed on top of the Small Goose Pagoda. This brick pagoda was built in 707－709 AD, during the Tang Dynasty and has undergone numerous renovations afterwards. The pagoda has survived more than 70 earthquakes of various magnitudes, whereas its top was destroyed under one earthquake event. Serious haze made it difficult for us to see anything that reached beyond a few kilometers away from the pagoda. The persistent presence of the haze is not a surprise when one considers how large the quantity of pollutants need to be put into the sky in order to fuel the rapid development of this region.

Since Muhsin is Muslim, we spent much time in the Muslim Quarter during our stay. We admired the cheapness and richness of the local Islamic food, whereas our presence elicited many food vendors’ illusion of a comfortable materialistic life in Shanghai or the US. As the great modern Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu put, life is like a walled city, people living within the city are eager to leave, whereas people living outside are eager to enter the city.

Dec 19 of this year was the Islamic Holiday Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice). I accompanied Muhsin to a small mosque to attend the local ceremony. The spiritual leader spent an exceptionally long hour preaching, bombarding the materialistic society with his Xi’an dialect. I would not survived in the unheated hall if there were not hundreds Muslims around, who warmed each other with their body heat. According to this experience and my previous experiences in Chinese churches, I have been convinced that both Christian and Islamic preachers in China loved dry, loose vocal teaching that could drain the patience of the most devoted believers. Walking out the mosque after the ceremony, we first saw sheep trying in vain to avoid the slaughter and then crimson sheep blood running off the street. The surrounding air was heated by the sheep’s struggle, people’s excitement of the holidays, the everlasting trade of food and goods, and, as far as I concerned the yummy steamed beef and veggie bums.

Besides the Terra-cotta Warriors, we also visited the emperial tomb of Liu Qi (刘启), the fourth emperor of the Han Dynasty. He ruled his empire following the Taoist philosophy and thus allowed the country to regain its strength and prosperity. The clay figures in his tomb are of a much more humble form compared to the terra-cotta warriors. Nevertheless, he could not abandon the idea that his after life had to be as glorious as his living life. Therefore, thousands of clay solders, officers, dancers, pigs, horses, oxen, sheep, dogs, goats, birds have been excavated, even though the majority of the tomb remains untouched. He didn’t foresee that these clay persons and animals would eventually belonged to mobs that raided the tomb and later archaeologists that are given the power to excavate his entire tomb. And even the archaeologists and mobs cannot possess these clay sculptures forever. What is the point of holding something permanently? There is much for us to learn from Taoism.

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I was fascinated by the speaker’s talk until at the end of the presentation, when the guy revealed the purpose of his research on hibernation. He believed that the world would eventually run out of resources or become uninhabitable for human beings. So we would have to travel in space to find another planet to inhabit and there comes the necessity to find a suitable mechanism to induce hibernation to the space travelers. I took a careful look at the scientist and he was unquestionably sincere.

Compared to the development of nuclear weapon, this is all but a trivial example of how things can go wrong when sound scientific research is armed by flawed objective. It is undeniable that the mechanisms of hibernation are of great scientific interest. Nevertheless, by devoting himself to the research of hibernation with a wrong belief, this guy is in fact denying himself the possibility of achieving a sustainable civilization and maintaining the beauty of our planet.

Every scientist, please carefully evaluate the ultimate objective of your research before you bury yourself too deep into it.

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Besides the nine-day stay in Ragya, I also had a chance to visit Qinghai Lake for two days. Its name (Qinghai in Chinese, Koko Nur in Mongolian) describes the lake as a vast blue water body that resembles a sea (should also hold true for its Tibetan name, but I don’t know how to spell it). Located at an elevation of 3200 m (10,500 feet), it is a salt lake and the largest lake in China with a surface area about 5,700 km2. (For people having been to Palm Springs region, imagine a lake more than five times bigger than the Salton Sea hanging over the peak of San Jacinto Mt. )

I stayed in a youth hostel at the southeastern shore of the lake. The grassland close to the shore has undergone severe degradation and therefore has become a non-grazing zone. Further from the shore are abundant rape fields. Every July, miles of miles matured rapeseeds lay a gigantic bright yellow carpet in front of the deep blue lake. Unfortunately, I came too early to watch the big rapeseed show.

The weather had a capricious mood in this season. On the afternoon of my first day stay, the azure sky decorated by puff clouds soon turned dark and gloomy. After few hours mild thunderstorm, the rain was all of a sudden intensified by fierce wind and lasted until the second day morning. Then as whimsical as the rain, the sun appeared high in the sky. All the storm left are packs of snow on top of nearby mountains.

Despite the weather, walking along the lake shore is very enjoyable, especially when accompanied by the Tibetan larks and horned larks, who hovered high in the air to drop thousands of melodic notes. In contrast to these hospitable larks that welcomed me with their acrobatic music show in the sky, numerous frogs near shallow freshwater pools were apparently annoyed by my walk and made attempts to escape in such a careless way that I had to avoid stepping on those who jumped in front my boots. Tadpoles were swimming in these freshwater pools that are probably a product of rain fall and ground water spill. But amazingly, I also found tadpoles swimming at the edge of the lake, where water tasted salty to my tongue. This lineage of frog species probably has lived along the Qinghai Lake ever since the lake was formed by melting glaciers in Pleistocene. The lake gradually changed from a fresh lake to a drainless salt lake and salt-tolerant species of frogs likely had a chance to evolve during this lengthy period of time.

Green algae were abundant in the shallow water of rocky shores and provided shelters for some reclusive fishes and invertebrates. I found a tiny crustacean that seemed like some amphipod to me. They sometimes swam in pairs. The larger one would hold the back of the small one. I was not sure if that was a mating scene. I found them quite abundant at around 6 pm on my first day visit. Unfortunately I did not have anything with me by then to hold a specimen. I returned the next morning with a film cartridge, with the hope of bringing back a sample to contemplate. But after great searching efforts I did not find a single one. Perhaps the wave was stronger than the previous day and thus forced all these critters to hide deep under the algae. Or perhaps this crustacean, like many of its cousins, migrates between shallow and deep water on a daily base.

I also had a plan to explore a wetland 30km north of where I stayed. I rented a mountain bike from the hostel, put all my camping gears on top of my own back, and started riding toward the destination. Twenty minutes later, the chain slipped off and I was never able to let it stay in connect with the gear for more than 20 seconds of ride. I pondered for half a minute the risk associated with relying on this ill-maintained bike for my 60 km round trip without having any tool but my hands and teeth to fix mechanical problems and immediately started walking back to the hostel along the paved highway with a broken bike in hands and 50 pounds gears on my shoulder.

This incident pretty much ended my first visit to the great Qinghai Lake.

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On the 8-hour bus ride from Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province to Ragya, where the Sherig Norbu School is, there were two facts that particularly caught my attention.

First is the lush green in the town of Guide, which sits next to the Yellow River but is surrounded by a scene of high desert. The dense grooves of tall and mature trees and large fields of highland barley are in sharp contrast against the nearby barren mountains that remind me of the great basin in Nevada. Either the green of the town is the fruit of some genius work of generations after generations of local inhabitants who have negotiated with an ostensibly hostile nature or the surrounding desert scene is simply a recent revenge of Nature to humans’ greedy overexploration. More information is needed to reveal the truth.

Second is the ominous degradation of the plateau grassland. Vast sand dunes have replaced pastures and I suspect that some invasives are encroaching disturbed area along paved roads. I tried to convince a monk riding on the same bus that climate change and overgrazing should be blamed for the desertification instead of sands brought by fierce wind from distant sandy regions.

In general, the short-term (hundreds of years?) future of the Tibetan Plateau environment looks as dim as the rest of the world. Global warming and overgrazing are certainly shaping this fragile ecosystem in a drastic manner. Local economic development will definitely bring more human perturbations to the region such as the spread of invasive species and the unsanitary disposal of domestic solid waste, which is simply dumped along streams or into gullies almost everywhere.

Most part of southern Qinghai Province, including where I traveled, is the area of the origins of three grand rivers (三江源): the Yangtze, the Yellow River and the Lancang River (the section of Mekong in China). The government has established strict regulations and taken actions to protect this area ever since environmental degradation became evident. But much remains to be improved in terms of the appropriateness and scientific accountability of the policy implementation. For instance, as a quick action to halt overgrazing, the government has designated many non-grazing zones and resettled many nomads to towns, where houses and financial compensations are provided to the nomad families. Nevertheless, without being trained to take other jobs, some resettled nomads have become the cause of social instability in some regions. I also give a big question mark to the future health of these non-grazing zones. Will Tibetan Plateau grassland recover to its original state if it is depleted of yaks and sheep that, as an indispensable component of the evolution of this ecosystem, have been grazing the land for at least 7000 years?

The monsoon arrived much earlier than usual this year. The rain that normally nourishes the plateau in July and August was pouring on Ragya almost non-stop for the days I stayed there. On a gloomy day when the rain was not pouring, I spent time gazing at the Himalayan griffons gracefully circling the holy rock Armeichongon or watching a pair of black-eared kites playfully chasing each other high in the sky. Black redstarts were the permanent residents of Ragya Monastery. The males usually stood on wires or the eaves of monastery buildings, placed their vivid plumage on display and sang a unusual type of song: for every series of high pitch sound, it was often followed by a series of low pitch voice that sounded like scratching boots on a sandy bank.

As mentioned in Part I, I visited the girl school situated in a remote place. The monsoon spoiled the road to the school, which even in dry seasons would be qualified for an exciting 4WD road in the US. Our 19 year old driver carefully negotiated this road overwhelmed by rocks, mud and the torrential stream with his second-hand two-wheel-drive mini van. We got stuck in the mud once. Jumping off and pushing the van out of mud, I was awarded by thousands of mud stains on myself as well as a chance to observe a white-throated dipper resting on top of a bed rock. Last time I saw this marvelous little creature, it was more than three years ago in Koscieliska Valley of Polish Tatra Mountains.

For the nine days in Ragya, I only had two sunny days for hiking and one clear night for observing stars. For the hike, I call it a slack hike, during which I spent hours sitting on a boulder and watching seven juvenile marmots, under the supervision of a watchful mother, playing, sunbathing and foraging next to the entrances of the family’s extensive burrows. The burrows had at least seven entrances, which excited my imagination of the complexity of their underground home. The youngsters, with a body more than a foot long, worried little about the black-eared kites gliding above them. I guess they are probably too big to be consumed by this medium sized raptor. Nor were they bothered by the sudden appearance of two lammergeiers (also see description at Wikipedia). I was at first confused by this large bird, who differs from both an eagle and a typical vulture. Its head is covered with feathers. Its wing span is shorter than a large vulture but longer than an eagle. Its tail is wedge-shaped, resembling neither eagles nor vultures. Nevertheless, it is a scavenger, probably the reason why young marmots are not afraid of it. And its opportunist behavior reveals its identity of a vulture. In that sense, shall I label lammergeier as the Chinese Bald Eagle? Unfortunately lammergeier is probably not as handsome and eagle looking as the Bald Eagle to win humans’ awe and, therefore, successfully hide their vulture identity. Another interesting species of birds active around the marmot family were the Hume’s ground tits (Pseudopodoces humilis). Having a long and down-curved beak, this bird is morphologically different from any other tits and chickadees and was, until 2003, misplaced under the Corvinae subfamily, which includes jays, magpies, crows, and orioles. The ground tits constantly probed the soil near the entrances of various rodent burrows in search for invertebrates. Sensing my approach, they made high-pitch calls. I wonder if there is a mutual relationship between the ground tits and the rodents. Is it possible that the former uses its call to alert the latter of the potential of threats while the latter provides the former with a unique foraging ground that can quickly be turned into a shelter if a predator appears?

The only clear night I had in Ragya was on the eighth day of the lunar month. The moon was apparently too bright to offer me a wonderful night for observing stars. Leo was barely visible. But beneath it, Saturn was clearly the brightest object in western sky and unmistakable given its yellow hue. On the other end of the ecliptic, above the half risen Sagittarius, Jupiter was shining like a bright star in eastern sky. I was intoxicated by gazing at all the familiar or unfamiliar constellations, all of which reminded me of these lovely and peaceful nights in the American desert.

End of Part II

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Part I – Snowland Sherig Norbu School in Ragya

My main excuse for taking the trip is to help to document the story of Snowland Sherig Norbu (a place where Knowledge is valued as Treasures), a private school that provides Tibetan language and culture education for both Tibetan kids and monks from Tibetan monasteries. You can find much of the information about the school on its website. In short, Jigme Gyaltsen, the discerning and strong-willed monk founded this school in 1994, the first private school in Qinghai Province, next to Ragya Monastery, by which he was affiliated. Now the school has grown into one of the best secondary schools of teaching Tibetan language and philosophy and attracts students and teachers throughout the Tibetan region (The Tibetan region in China includes not only Tibet but also Tibetan dominated areas in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunan Province).

Three Swarthmore alumni were involved in this documentary project: Feng He ’03, Bojun Hu ’05 and I. I went as merely a visitor and, if most productive, a cheer leader, since the anxiety and uncertainty of going to grad school weighed more than anything else on my shoulder. By the time of my arrival, Feng and Bojun had been staying in school and interviewing students and faculty for a week. For the main subject of the documentary, they concurred to focus on the reasons why the students and teachers had chose this school and the plans they had for their future.

Every student (kids and monks) I chatted with chose to come to Sherig Norbu school because he, as either a Tibetan or a believer of Tibetan Buddhism, highly values the skill of mastering Tibetan language and the school is one of the best to teach beginners such a skill. Though Tibetan language class is mandatory in all public schools in Tibetan regions, the subject is not included in national college entrance exam and is, therefore, doomed to be despised in the public education system. Not to mention that the economic superiority of Han people has led more and more young Tibetans to believe that knowing Chinese is more practical and important than learning their own language.

Besides Tibetan language, other subjects taught in the school includes Chinese, English, Tibetan Philosophy (因明学), maths, and basic computer skills. Debate, the traditional learning method adopted in Tibetan monasteries, is routinely used in the school to improve the students’ logic thinking and their understanding of the subject of learning, especially Tibetan philosophy. To successfully adopt this method of teaching, it is not surprising that the majority of the teachers here are highly educated monks from prestigious Tibetan monasteries. Like the principal Jigme Gyaltsen, these masters consider teaching in a private school as fulfilling as, if not more fulfilling than studying and preaching in monasteries in terms of achieving their own enlightenment.

Other teachers are laypersons and mostly Tibetan. For many of them, teaching in the school is an opportunity to foster their knowledge of Tibetan literature and culture. Such as Brad, a young Tibetan who finished the English Training Program in Qinghai Normal University a few months ago and speaks astonishingly fluent English, has chosen to teach English in Sherig Norbu because of his strong interest in Tibetan literature and Buddhism. Mr. Meng, the only teacher in the school who is ethnic Han, came to the school to teach Chinese because he became a Buddhist six years ago and later became a student of Akka Tse-ching, the school’s vice principal and a distinguished monk from the Labrang Monastery.

We asked students about their future plans and received answers of uniformity. If a student is a Tibetan kid, he most likely has a plan of going to either Northwest University of Nationalities or Qinghai Normal University, both of which have special admission policies that aims to maximize the enrollment of ethnic minorities and therefore have accepted a large number of graduates from the Sherig Norbu School. Other universities, such as the top institutions in Beijing and Shanghai are never considered by these kids because they’ve never heard anyone from this region succeeded in being accepted by these universities. As for a career goal, almost everyone plans to return to his hometown and teach in a local school. The reason? The principal has done so and the teachers have told them this will be a fulfilling career that greatly benefits the local society. If a student is a monk, he will bring wisdom and himself back to his monastery after completing the school.

There are of course exceptions. Mark, one of the most brilliant students in the English major class has a plan of studying in the US and then return to teach locals English. Being asked why he has such a plan, he revealed his influence by an Indian teacher who as a volunteer taught in his school and advised him to aim for studying abroad in the US. As for monks, I heard two interviewees mention that their monk brothers (not affiliated with this school) went to India and later to the US. One is now a truck driver in NYC. The other is in some other business instead of a monastery.

Bojun and I also visited the girl school, which is located in a more remote area, far away from any village and town but close to the nomads’ grazing ground. The location of the school makes it more accessible to the nomad families. The accessibility is a trade-off for convenience of management of the school: no power grid has been built to this area and the school’s limited electricity comes from a gasoline generator; nor does the school have a telephone line or within the cellphone service range and making a cellphone call requires walking to nearby highland; the school is far away from any medical service facility and both students and teachers here are extremely vulnerable if certain emergency occurs. I found out the latter two factors for two girls were becoming increasingly sick when I was there and the teachers had to walk to that highland to make cellphone call arrangement so that the only pick-up truck of the girl school could return on time and take the girls to the hospital in Ragya, about an hour drive away in this monsoon season.

Were not for the inconvenience, the remoteness of the girl school would make this place a heaven. In fact, two of the Tibetan teachers have moved from their town or village to this school partially because they prefer such remoteness. Girls here are mostly around 11 to 13, naturally smart and happy (sorry for this oversimplification, but this is my general impression).

The most interesting person I met in the girl school was the English teacher Jefferey. He graduated from the same English Training Program as did Brad. Since then, he has worked as a tour guide, tutored students, planned to work for a NGO, and decided to teach in the girl school because his high lama recommended him to do so. A truly cheerful and idealistic soul, he wants his life to be filled with diverse experiences. Furthermore, being a humble person, he recognizes his ignorance of Tibetan language and eagerly absorb knowledge of his native language with the help from the Tibetan language teachers in the same girl school. He is not so sure what his future will lead him to. But he worries little about that as long as it is an exciting future. I am surprised to find a person in this remote area and from totally different background, who shares more common with me than tens of million people in a highly “civilized” city.

There are many stories about the people in the Sherig Norbu School. I will leave the rest to be told by that documentary, if it will eventually be produced and become available online.

END of Part I

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