By Phuntsog Wangyal
In June 2005 I visited my native homeland, which is now known as Kandze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. This prefecture is not in the Tibet Autonomous Region but is situated to the east of the Yangtse River in Sichuan Province. It has 18 counties in an area of 153,870 km2 with a population of approximately 1 million people. The population is 80% ethnic Tibetan – farmers in the valleys, and nomads over the highlands.
After nearly 50 years, I was able to spend some four weeks in the Kandze area. It was so wonderful to be back and especially travelling through green valleys full of barley and wheat fields, high passes surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and wild grasslands with hundreds of yaks grazing. Now and then you pass by beautiful lakes, clean and clear with magnificent reflections of the surrounding mountains. You breathe in the pure air, relax in the peace and tranquillity of the atmosphere and become overwhelmed by the magnificent view of such a beautiful natural landscape. The scenery could have been that of parts of Switzerland or Canada. During my childhood we took it all for granted; it never occurred to us that we lived in the most beautiful and peaceful country in the world.
My earlier visits to Kandze, in 1980 and 1996, were only for a few days and under a very strictly controlled situation. This time I had a wonderful time visiting my relatives and seeing some of the projects that Tibet Foundation has been funding since 1992.
My relatives and I fully enjoyed our reunion and it was a very pleasant and emotional time for all of us. None of my immediate relatives survived nor did our old house where I was born and brought up. All I could meet were second and third generation relatives – children of my aunt and their children, and to see a village that has changed so much that I could hardly recognise it.
Daima Khak, as we used to call our village, was a small village of just 32 households with no shop of any description. I remember we had one Han Chinese elderly man, a carpenter by profession married to a Tibetan lady. He was a small man, very kind to children. I remember him making wooden toys for us. He used to smoke a pipe with a long handle and spoke Tibetan with a very funny accent. Now, the village is known as Daima Xian (Xian being a Chinese word for village or small town). Daima Xian has 44 households, 10 of which are of families with mixed marriages. There are all together 22 shops of which Han Chinese from outside the Kandze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture own ten.
In spite of a long period of separation we could easily communicate with each other and in a language we all still believe is Tibetan. But Tibetans have many dialects, different from one place to another – so the saying – ‘Every lama has his own tradition and every valley has its own dialect’. I noticed that just as we all have changed, so did our language – so drastically that we often needed to remind each other of our own dialect.
Living in Britain for over 30 years it was quite natural that I happened to use some English or sometimes even Hindi words that I learnt in India that my relatives did not understand. On the other hand they used many Chinese words that I could not understand either. Many resent these changes and others take them as a natural process of a big acculturation that has been taking place in all Tibetan areas for over five decades.
The Tibetan culture’s meeting with the great wave of Chinese culture means that Tibetans can no longer live in isolation and speak only Tibetan as they used to. They now live in a country that has become a part of a big country: China. Others live in exile in different parts of the world. “In such a situation the best we could hope for,” said an officer, “is to try our best to keep and continue our own culture as much as we can.” I certainly tried to revive my knowledge of our own dialect as I could not have done in exile. At the end of my visit I had learnt from my relatives many local terms and phrases that I had forgotten, living in exile so long.
So many other things have changed too. During my childhood, we mostly ate ‘tsampa’, (roasted and ground barley). Rice was a rare commodity reserved only for the rich. It was not a normal tradition to cultivate fruit and vegetables. Many vegetables did not even have Tibetan names but Chinese names. But now it has become quite normal that many Tibetans eat rice and cultivate vegetables on a large scale. In fact many young Tibetans even prefer eating rice to tsampa.
Traditionally, butter was locally available and it was used on a daily basis for food as well as for ‘butter lamps’. Now it is a rare commodity. Many could not afford butter but buy cheap oil imported from China. Similarly, sheepskins and leather goods, and woollen cloth were very much used. It is no longer the case; they are too expensive for most of the local Tibetans. You see more Tibetans using cotton and artificial fur coats and canvas shoes imported from China.
I had time to visit some of the places where I once played as a small child in the early 1940s, where I fought the People’s Liberation Army in 1958, and where as a member of the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Delegation I met thousands of Tibetans greeting us in 1980 with great emotion.
During my childhood we played with nature in a natural environment – in streams, with pebbles and stones, flowers, animal bones like knuckles and so on. These days, you could see children playing with plastic toys of all kinds, paper kites with designs and motifs traditionally unknown to Tibetans and games of war fighting with sophisticated replicas of modern armaments.
In my village, in fact in the whole of Kandze Prefecture, there was no electricity, no motor road, let alone television or mobile phones. Lights from burning butter and ‘thong-chu’ oil from the bark of birch-like trees were the only lights we had. Sending messages through a runner or courier or travellers was the only means to convey news from one place to another. Caravans of yaks and mules travelling from one place to another were common scenes and the only means of transport in the old days. That is no longer the case today.
Most of the households in Daima Xian have electricity, many have televisions and some even telephones at home. You see many people with fancy mobile phones and riding motorbikes, not riding horses any more. Many use cars, buses and trucks as the main means of transport. Some regard all this sudden change, a transformation from 18th to 21st century in less than 50 years, as a miracle and a great achievement but others regard this as a great interference into native culture and a disaster for the country. One could see that the debate is, in reality, very academic. What has changed has happened and there is no sign of an end to it but there is every reason to believe that it will go on changing.
It was quite natural that while visiting places where I had once witnessed the greatest change in our life – going into exile – the memory of my past experience returned. I first left my native home, Kham, Eastern Tibet and escaped to India in 1959. Just a teenager but driven by the hardship of living in a time of political uncertainty and facing unprecedented political and social changes brought by the Chinese, many of us took arms fighting them. Witnessing close friends shot dead in front of your own eyes, leaving behind your very dear relatives and the country that you loved so much and arriving in a country (India) that was completely unknown to us was something of a shock to me as a teenager then. I never had any idea that we were going to stay in exile that long. Sadly it soon became apparent that I was wrong, and it also became, as it were, a ‘wake up call’ to a people who remained so long in isolation from the rest of the world.
In 1980 I returned to Tibet. I travelled over three months from Dhartsedo in the east to Shigatse and Lhasa in the west as a member of the Second Delegation sent by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I remember seeing great destruction of monasteries and temples, poor living conditions of ordinary Tibetans and the uncompromising hard attitude of the local administrators in these areas. It was, indeed, a sad visit at a wrong time with a poorly managed programme. Perhaps our expectation was also too high.. The situation was so discouraging then that I never thought there would be a time for me to visit these places again nor to meet even these people in a more promising situation.
Compared to that, my personal observation during my recent visit to Kandze Prefecture in June last year is more positive. Perhaps I have grown up and my expectations are more realistic. My overall impression is that things seem to be getting better. The government is investing a lot of money to improve the situation. You could see lots of development activity – modern roads, new tunnels through high mountains, new building of hospitals and schools, many new and better houses for ordinary people, and rebuilding and renovating many monasteries and temples.
There are political restrictions such as intolerance of the Dalai Lama’s photographs in public places and a ban on the display of Tibetan flags or sentiments against the Party. In spite of this, I could meet most people in a relaxed atmosphere, comparatively speaking. I made my own programme of visiting various places and meeting as many people as I liked. I never felt that I was being followed or observed, as was the case in the past. I felt quite positive and encouraged.
This visit was also my first ever visit to Sershul, a nomadic area where Tibet Foundation has one of the best and most successful aid projects in the area. I visited the hospital, medical college, Tibetan medicine factory, old people’s homes and some of the nomad families that the Foundation has been supporting. It was nice to see that the Foundation’s support was much appreciated and our projects produced practical and positive results for the general public. I was, indeed, very pleased.
On the way I visited Rongpatsa and saw two primary schools that the Foundation has been supporting – Daima Xian, a state run school of some 108 students and Gyalten, a privately run school of 280 students. Local government has invested large sums of money for building these schools and encouraged parents to send their children to school. Due to poverty and the demands of heavy farming work at home, and a lack of adequate facilities at the schools, many families were not attracted to sending their children to school.
I always feel it wrong to deny children a decent education. Education is the only means by which they learn how to face hard challenges ahead with a greater degree of success. It is also important for us in the West to realise that they need any help we can give and the time is now. During my visit we have made a commitment to give funding for meals at these schools, Gyalten and Daima Xian. In addition to 28% of funding from the local government the Foundation has committed to give the remaining 72%.
I also had the opportunity to visit other middle schools in Kandze and Dhartsedo where the Foundation has been sponsoring children. In all these schools, children learn Tibetan in addition to other subjects in accordance with the national curriculum. I was very impressed by rather a high standard of knowledge of Tibetan language in Dhartsedo School. Here I also noticed that all girls wore ‘chupa’ (traditional Tibetan dress), although very few boys did.
All students in Tibet learn Chinese language just as all Tibetan children in exile learn English. Without Chinese language it is almost impossible to get a decent job and sometimes even to communicate amongst Tibetans themselves. I found it interesting to observe that Tibetan officials coming from different parts (West and Central Tibet, Amdo in Qinghai and Gansu, and Kham in Sichuan and Yunan) communicate more comfortably in Chinese than in Tibetan. The names of many commodities used daily are in Chinese. Similarly, the names of most modern technologies used today are also in Chinese. You could easily see that knowledge of Chinese language is becoming almost a necessity to improve one’s standard of life in the fast-growing economy of modern China.
During my childhood I learnt Tibetan language in a village school and religious subjects in a monastery. Tibetan language was the medium of instruction. There were no subjects like geography, economics or science. Tibetan was the only language known to us. Morality and ethics were all based on Buddhist values.
Today, all Tibetan children are exposed to subjects like modern science, technology, economics, socialist studies and state laws. Chinese is the medium of instruction. In addition to Tibetan in primary and middle schools, all children study Chinese and in some cases even English. Children below the age of 18 are not permitted to enter a monastery to study, although the rule is rarely observed. Religion is no longer an important subject for children to learn.
In the past I never really had time to make a proper visit to Dhargye monastery, where I studied Buddhism in late 1950s. Dhargye monastery was one of the best-known Buddhist monasteries in the East. It was known to have some 2,000 monks. During my first visit in 1980, it was in ruins, not a single building standing, completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. During my second visit in 1996 it was being rebuilt with permission and support from the government.
During my recent visit I found the monastery functioning. I was able to make traditional offerings of food, tea and 50 yuan to each monk attending the assembly. There were some 200 monks, both young and old. I met the Abbot, his deputy and some of the administrators. A large part of the monastery had been rebuilt. The conditions in the monastery were still very basic. They have regular assemblies of chanting and classes for learning Buddhism. The system of education is still the same as before although everything is done on a much smaller scale.
It seems the rule is that monasteries have to be self-supporting, not dependent on either the state or the people. Ordinary people are, however, allowed to make offerings voluntarily. It is amazing that in spite of some 50 years of communist rule, people still have a strong devotion to religion, and they are very respectful to anything that is religious. Lamas are highly respected by the people and in some cases they still have influence in some social welfare projects such as education, healthcare, old people’s homes, and even in settling local disputes between different groups. Many non-governmental social projects are being managed or run under the supervision of Lamas.
An official told me that as long as the monasteries do not get involved in anything that is political or in opposition to the State and the Party, they are free to function normally. But one could imagine that it is not always easy to define what is and is not political. It is obvious that a communist is not expected to promote religion. It is also not necessarily correct to assume that his duty is to destroy religion. In the end much depends on the individuals concerned.
Throughout my tour I saw many monasteries and temples. I visited quite a few other monasteries, retreat centres and nunneries. This was a big contrast to what we witnessed in 1980 – ruins of monasteries and temples. Many were already beautifully finished and some were being rebuilt and renovated. So much money has been invested in them that one wondered where the money was coming from. To my surprise, I was told that recently Chinese from China were donating more money than anyone else.
Epic stories of the heroic king Ling Gesar are famous and very popular among the Tibetans, especially among nomadic communities and in Kham. There is a great revival of this aspect of Tibetan culture. Encouraged by officials of the United Front Department in Beijing I went to see a very challenging project in Dhartsedo, a project of painting epic stories of Ling Gesar in hundreds of ‘thangkas’ (paintings with brocade borders). There are nearly 100 Tibetan artists from different parts of Tibet painting these thangkas. Eventually there will be, I was told, more than 1,000 thangkas.
Earlier in Beijing I was introduced to some members of the China Association for Preservation and Development of Tibetan Culture, a non-governmental organisation set up with the support of the United Front Department in 2004 with Ngapo Ngawang Jigme as its head. According to them, the primary function of this Association is to promote Tibetan culture. After a brief introduction to the Association, they said that they would like to cooperate with the Foundation in promoting Tibetan culture. They mentioned this Gesar project and encouraged me to see the work which is being undertaken with government funding.
Tibet Foundation has supported projects in education, healthcare and social welfare, and relieving poverty and improving the living standards of Tibetan people. Whatever support we have been able to give, be it building a school or setting up a health clinic or sponsoring children’s education or supporting old people’s homes, our support has been acknowledged as having a practical impact on the lives of these ordinary people. I was pleased that we took on this challenge of helping Tibetans in Tibet some 13 years ago and since then we have successfully continued to make improvement in all directions.
It is very rewarding to see this progress; a success story can be hard to come by in a much politicised Tibetan world. I strongly feel that we owe this success to the authorities for giving us their official support; our partners (local communities, schools, hospital and various institutes) for giving us their full cooperation; and to our donors in the West for making continued contributions towards our aid programme.
Because of the remoteness and vastness of the country, Tibetans are still very poor and the conditions in which they live are underdeveloped. Compared to the national Chinese average, the standard of education is very low, facilities available to the children are poor and teachers are poorly trained. The local people are rarely consulted for their needs and opinions. Ordinary people are still quite ignorant of their rights or they are not given the full information they deserve.
People still need more support for their children’s education, better attention paid to their requirements such as healthcare, and more cooperation from the government and more support from non-government charities like Tibet Foundation. I would like to take this opportunity to appeal to all readers of this article to favourably consider giving their support to these Tibetans.
I raised these questions to various levels of authorities in Kandze, Dhartsedo, Chengdu and Beijing. All the authorities that I met, without any exception, acknowledged this and gave me assurance that they would continue to make further efforts to improve the situation. They also invited Tibet Foundation and other non-governmental organisations to support their efforts and continue helping these people.
Throughout my visit I was warmly received by everyone, including the authorities at every level – central, provincial and county. My special thanks go to the relevant officials in the Chinese Embassy in London, others in the United Front Department in Beijing, specially Mr Sithar and Mr Yao Mochen and all those officers and people in the Kandze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture who were so kind to me and supportive of the Foundation’s work in Tibet.
I am particularly thankful to the people of Kandze Prefecture for their hospitality and for receiving me with great respect. In most places I was treated almost like a high Lama visiting his disciples. I will always cherish their sense of friendship and warm feelings. I would like to convey my deepest gratitude to each and every one of them and to tell them that we are committed to continue giving whatever support we are able to give.
I would like to encourage all our supporters to continue their support, and invite those who are in contact with us for the first time to please lend a helping hand and join us in helping Tibetans. I assure you that any support you give will make a big difference in the lives of many people. Thank you.
Phuntsog Wangyal was a member of the Second Fact-Finding Delegation sent to Tibet in 1980 by the Dalai Lama. He was the first representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to London at the Office of Tibet and an elected member of the Tibetan Parliament-in-exile from 1990 to 1995. Phuntsog co-founded the Tibet Foundation (www.tibet-foundation.org) and is presently serving as a trustee of the British charity. Phuntsog can be contacted: phuntsogw@yahoo.co.uk
