Following up on my earlier post on the Chinese protests in relation to Tibet, there have been some further developments in the whole Chinese protesters and Chinese online media saga.

- After coming home from the protest on Saturday afternoon I rang the offices of Sky Kiwi to try and find out the reasons for my banning. Having had my IP address blocked it was not possible to look to the site itself for help. I was given the mobile number of a Sarah Li, who seems to run Sky Kiwi. I left a detailed message regarding the situation with the man who answered her mobile (she herself was apparently sick). I told him I wanted to know why I had been banned from the site. Had I offended some part of their terms of service? Had there simply been a mistake? I emphasized the irony of the situation and said that I hoped they would get back to me soon. The man promised to have Sarah call me back as soon as possible.

- On Sunday violent threats against me appeared on the site. Netizens talked of tracking me down and arranging to have me “fucked up”. Other netizens discussed my identity, describing the clothes I had been wearing at the protest and thus making me easily identifiable from photographs posted online. Ironically, while some members of the community discussed my identity, potentially with a view to facilitating my assault, other members of the community were very concerned to protect the identity of the Tibetan, in case his family were assaulted. You need to understand that Tibet is an immensely happy place, and things can easily turn violent when a Tibetan who is merely contented encounters a compatriot who is actually blissfully ecstatic.

- I spent Sunday afternoon making numerous phone calls to get the threats removed. Sarah Li never answered her phone, and nor did anyone at the other mobile numbers I was given by the office. The office kept telling me to call back on Monday, but I wanted the material removed before things got out of hand. In an incident a few years back (the China Bounder Affair to be precise) an acquaintance complained people visited his offices in China to make threats over a similar matter. In the end a guy called Wesley decided to help. It took much convincing to get him to speak English, then more convincing (including mention of police involvement if he didn’t act) to get him to actually do anything. In the end though he took action and the offensive material was removed from the site within an hour or so. Great job Wesley! You actually did something to help. Thanks.

- On Monday I had been expecting a call from Sky Kiwi (I had left enough messages by this stage). No call came. I made a reminder call and left another message for Sarah.

- I left another message at the Sky Kiwi offices on Tuesday.

- On Wednesday (today) I called the Sky Kiwi offices again. They told me to call Sarah. I did so. Surprisingly, Sarah answered her phone. I briefly identified myself and asked if she had received my messages. She said she had, and moreover had already returned my call. This was odd since she had definitely not called me. I tried to explain the situation in case she was mistaking my identity. She interrupted to tell me again that she had already returned my call. Then she told me I should not be calling her and that she had no obligation to return my calls. She said I should deal with the matter through the site. I tried to tell her that I could not do anything through the site while my IP was blocked. She hung up. I called back. She hung up again, saying she was “in a meeting”.

- Having had no luck with Sarah I tried the Sky Kiwi offices again. This time they told me to write them an e-mail since they could not deal with the matter by phone. If they could not deal with the matter by phone then what had the last four days of taking messages been in aid of? I told them this. They told me to write an e-mail and that whatever I wrote would be “given to their lawyers”. Really? What is going on here? Should this not be a simple issue of explaining their forum moderation policy to a frustrated reader/contributor. I don’t want to talk with their lawyer. I want to talk with somebody in charge and find out why a site whose members are organizing a protest against ‘media bias’ bans the one member who asks a few thoughtful questions about that protest. How and why does this happen? The answer must : 1 – site moderation policy, or 2 – site bias, or 3 – a mistake. Somebody at Sky Kiwi has the answer to my question. Can we not communicate about this simple matter without going through lawyers?

At this point I have given up trying to deal with Sky Kiwi. From Saturday through to Tuesday they were just uncommunicative and hard to deal with. On Wednesday they turned peculiar, with Sarah lying about having called me and the desk staff talking about getting lawyers involved. I have tried to understand them. There seems to be no point trying any further.

In a side note, a New Zealand journalist told me that he had tried unsuccessfully to contact one of the protesters to follow up on Saturday’s protest. The reason they didn’t want to speak to him? The protester felt that the journalist, as a Singaporean Chinese, was “not a real Chinese”.

Lets finish by analyzing this last matter. A segment of the Chinese community decides to protest what they see as ‘western’ media bias against them, a form of discrimination if you will. The point of the protest is supposedly to communicate their views to mainstream society (‘western’ society, if you like). A journalist approaches them to discuss the protest, but is rebuffed on the basis that, as a mere Singaporean Chinese, he is “not a real Chinese”.

A couple of points. . . First, who is discriminating against whom here? The discrimination within the Chinese community suddenly looks worse than the discrimination they are supposedly facing. Second, how will the protesters communicate with mainstream society if they harbor such bigoted attitudes? Are the protesters trying to engage and influence mainstream opinion (hint: this may require two-way communication), or are they just angry patriots clutching flags?

Gentle readers, it was at that point that your good narrator became involved, with ironic and entertaining results.

I heard that Chinese students in Auckland were planning to protest western media bias, and specifically New Zealand media bias. The New Zealand angle interested me because it was local, and because I had not personally noticed anything remarkable in the New Zealand media coverage*. Therefore I looked around for details on the planned protest, and found them at www.skykiwi.co.nz, New Zealand’s largest electronic media serving a Chinese audience. The protest was to be held on Saturday noon in Aotea Square here in Auckland.

Reading through the site and sensing the anger of these young Chinese I could not help feeling a little unease. I was reminded of the anti-Japanese protests (riots?) that I had attended in Shanghai a couple of years ago. That was the only previous occasion on which I had personally witnessed a protest by educated and privileged young Chinese. The day had ended with the Japanese consulate and numerous Japanese businesses seriously vandalized (in an interesting cultural aside, the mob ignored the beer fridges in the smashed up Japanese restaurants). I asked myself why privileged and educated young Chinese only ever protest foreign things. It appeared to me that they only ever become moved to express their views when the issue is Japan, or Taiwan, or Tibet, or some other perceived slight to China.

Rather than sit there asking myself this question, I went ahead and asked New Zealand’s Chinese netizens. I wrote a post asking a few things. I asked why their protests only ever targeted foreign things and never targeted their own government. I told them that I had attended the Shanghai anti-Japanese protest, and that at times it had appeared like a riot. I noted that Japanese in Shanghai had been too scared to leave their homes on that day and that numerous innocent business owners had suffered mob violence. While nobody had died or been seriously hurt in the Shanghai demonstration, were there not some parallels between the behavior of demonstrators (rioters?) in Shanghai and in Tibet? Somewhat provocatively, I asked if Tiananmen had simply made educated and privileged young Chinese too afraid to protest their own government. Finally, I asked when the Chinese media was going to ask the Chinese government to produce proof to back its allegations that the DL orchestrated the Lhasa riots.

The response was interesting. Various posters attacked me as a “foreign devil” (洋鬼子) and a “foreign pig” (洋豬). Others apparently believed I was a Chinese pretending to be a foreigner and called me a “fake foreign devil” (假洋鬼). The thread I had started was swiftly locked and I received a disciplinary message. The message gave no explanation of why the thread had been locked, but did suggest that I was not welcome on the site and should leave. I do not know if the people who abused me also received disciplinary messages.

I started another thread to ask why my previous thread had been locked. Provoked by this stage, I sarcastically suggested that the protesters were just mindlessly trotting out the party line in the manner of the Cultural Revolution period. Specifically, I took the piss with a wisecrack about them being “good children of Chairman Mao” (毛主席的好孩子們), and suggested the chairman might reward them all with a Popsicle (冰棍) if they organized a good protest. I knew that was likely to get an ‘interesting’ reaction. But really, if netizens call me a “foreign pig” and site administrators lock my threads and ask me to leave, all because I asked a question, how charming am I supposed to be?

The response was more abuse, then my account on the site was deleted and my IP address blocked. I was no longer able to even read the site without using a proxy. Of course having lived in China I am familiar with proxy servers.

I find this sequence of events hilarious. It took less than 12 hours for the NZ Chinese media most instrumental in organizing Saturday’s protest against bias in the western and New Zealand media to ban (probably) its only non-Chinese contributor. The crime was simply questioning the nationalistic tendencies of educated young Chinese. While the online Chinese New Zealand media was busy displaying its massive bias on matters Chinese, the “your views” section of the New Zealand Herald website was allowing Chinese overseas students to engage local New Zealanders in vigorous debate on the China-Tibet issue. I have no idea if the New Zealand Herald censored comments in that debate, but there is no question that the debate occurred.

Could there be a double standard?

Could the irony of this situation be deep enough for a pod of whales to go swimming in?

I attended the protest on Saturday and chatted with a couple of the protesters. The ones that I spoke to seemed reasonable enough, if (in my opinion) slightly misguided. My criticisms would be as follows:

First, they failed to identify any specific examples of bias in the New Zealand media. Yet their protest claimed to be (at least partially) a response to New Zealand media bias.

Second, they shot themselves in the foot by using some rotten examples to demonstrate western media bias. Most notably, one of their leading examples was the Fox News photo of Nepali police arresting a demonstrator, the caption for which read “Chinese troops parade handcuffed Tibetan prisoners in trucks”. It is obvious that the picture was incorrectly captioned and not a serious attempt to mislead. A person who believes the newspaper used the caption to trick its readers into thinking the Nepali police are Tibetan must also believe the newspaper wants to dupe its readers into seeing invisible trucks, parades of prisoners, and handcuffs. None of these things were in the photo. Why did none of these protesters have the mental facility to spot this obvious truth? Spotting this truth requires nothing more than elementary English and an open and critical mind. Do none of them possess this? To somebody like myself who has followed this story closely from the start, they were simply regurgitating the propaganda from the anti-CNN website. I think they could have done much better.  You can find biases in the western media if you look, but few of the examples they presented fitted my definition of meaningful bias.

Third, the English copy of the flier they distributed was extremely difficult to understand and degenerated into illogical rambling in places. This was an unprofessional attempt at communication. Why had a native English speaker not edited it? The copy is almost too lousy to analyze so I am not going to seriously attempt that. Notably though, the flier stated that western news organizations had been unable to report directly from Tibet because of its geographical remoteness. The flier went on to state that the students were committed to ‘Freedom of Speech’, and framed ‘freedom of speech’ as a shared western and Chinese value. How is this professed commitment to freedom of speech consistent with ignoring the Chinese government’s vigorous restriction of foreign media access to Tibet? Why talk about geographical remoteness (surely a side issue), while ignoring tight Chinese controls over media access to Tibet (surely a major issue). Are they genuinely concerned with free speech and the truth, or are they merely concerned with China’s image?

Fourth, a general survey of the discussion on Skykiwi before and after the protest reveals far more discourse on feeling good about China and abusing things foreign than there is discussion and analysis of the issues they say they are protesting. For example, one common theme in the online discussion was to draw a parallel between their protest to the anti-Japanese protests (riots?) in Shanghai. Another characteristic was describing the event as an “(ethnic) Chinese rally” (華人集會), not a protest against biased coverage of PRC government handling of the Tibetan issue by the western media. A further feature has been the protesters publishing long diatribes online that are expressions of Chinese nationalism and anti-western xenophobia, not genuine attempts to address western media biases. The failure of the protesters to identify concrete bias in the New Zealand media, plus their failure to critically analyze the media material presented by their own protest, also support my feeling that the protest was primarily nationalistic. Social anthropologists sometimes say that you should analyze what people do, not what they say they do. The protesters say they are protesting a specific grievance, but their discourse before and after the protest neglected the grievance itself in favor of simple nationalistic fervor. Of course, being motivated by nationalism is not inconsistent with being motivated by real grievances. However, I think a question should be asked about degree. To what degree are young Chinese protesters critical thinkers who analyze issues and respond rationally? To what degree are they uncritical nationalists primed to respond irrationally to all kinds of triggers?

Fifth, there was some odd amateurism, or even the hint of a conspiracy. The online discussion of the protest mentioned that a Tibetan who had recently returned to (or arrived in?) New Zealand from Lhasa came past to offer words of support. The posters mentioned that this Tibetan described Lhasa to them as a thoroughly harmonious place where all Tibetans feel 100% Chinese and are hugely contented with life. He also said he had been present in Lhasa during the riots, and knew for a fact that the disorder had been orchestrated by non-Tibetan speaking agitators from outside Tibet (who were presumably agents of the DL). Having made a special trip to express his support, the Tibetan seemed to then take his leave fairly quickly, maybe without participating as a protester. There was discussion on Skykiwi about how it was not safe to post the Tibetan’s photograph online because doing so could endanger his family back home. I am not quite sure how this works since Lhasa is said to be a harmonious place inhabited by contended people. The really interesting thing however is this. The sentence previous to the one requesting the Tibetan’s photo not be published provided his full name. How can the protesters be such amateurs? Wasn’t the same person who published the Tibean’s name supposedly concerned with protecting his identity? Maybe the Tibetan told them he was happy to be represented by a name but not by a photograph? Maybe he used a false name? But if the Tibetan hid his true identity from the protesters, could his whole agenda in approaching them have been a deceptive one? I assume the protesters are simply amateurs, but the whole scenario is weird.

Well that just about wraps up what I have to say about the matter of bias in the New Zealand Chinese media and the protests against bias in the western media. Comments are welcome. Abuse is not.

Update: Some follow up to all this is here – including death threats!

* Do not take that to mean that i think the New Zealand media coverage has been problem free. I have not even read most of the New Zealand coverage because I prefer to get my news on Chinese issues from specifically China oriented sources. However, I noticed nothing unusual in what I did read. I also note that the New Zealand Herald website appears to have allowed a free debate in its online comments section, which saw an exchange of views between those supporting and opposing the Tibetan protesters (and rioters).

Once again my ten year old guidebook was less than informative. I was told to expect Ruoergai to be a small collection of ugly buildings, including one or two hotels, and inhabited mainly by a dangerous sounding dreadlocked minority called ‘Golocks’ (or something similar), who apparently liked to ride through the town on motorbikes, sporting large knives and threatening tourists. My plan was to make a dash through the gauntlet of knife wielding ‘Golocks’ and head straight to a hotel, probably remaining in my room with the door locked until morning. Of course if things went badly I would probably get surrounded by marauding ‘Golocks’ and be forced to draw my own pair of Uigur knives. I’d definitely end up having to abandon my bags as I fought the Golocks off. With luck I’d probably be able to push one of them off his bike without actually having to kill him, allowing me to steal the bike and escape. The Chinese policemen would be sympathetic about the bike theft but wonder why I was stupid enough to come to Ruoergai given the dangers of the place.

I found that whatever Ruiergai had once been, these days it was a picturesque little town recently rebuilt in a Tibetan style. There were neat rows of buildings painted with Tibetan motifs. The place was once again full of hotels. There were no obvious ‘Golocks’. It was all a bit anticlimactic and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. There were a lot of policemen cruising the streets for a small town, so maybe the place had a rough history. It was hard to imagine looking at the scene now though.

I checked into a hotel and went for walk around town. The place was a reasonable size, bigger than either Xiahe or Langmusi, but probably smaller than Hezuo. There was nothing too special to see though. I got a haircut and as the stylist cut my hair the Sichuanese boss asked me why America couldn’t be more like China, which apparently throughout history had never attacked another country but only fought wars to defend itself. He had a point about American aggression, but didn’t seem to know much about its Chinese equivalent, and was oblivious to the irony that the U.S. had also justified its Iraq war as a necessary defensive measure in the ‘War on Terror’. He seemed genuinely surprised to hear me say that China must have attacked other countries to have become a nation with such large ethnic minorities living in its extensive border regions (i.e. Uigurs in Xinjiang, and Tibetans in Tibet and the surrounding provinces), but grudgingly conceded that I could have a point.

I spent the afternoon doing a little work in a Tibetan tea shop and restaurant. I had another opportunity to try Sampa and Momo. This time the Sampa seemed to be the genuine article and the Momo were far tastier than at the previous place in Xiahe, quite delicious in fact. The Sampa was interesting but not something I’m ever likely to find myself craving in future. Besides the hard cheese it was not bad, but the hard cheese was like leather and just too hard to chew. On the other hand the butter tea used to mix the Sampa was better than I expected. Rather than being floating with oil the tea was properly emulsified. It had a sour taste a little like the Uigur milk tea, plus a nutty flavor from cracked grains that were stewed together with the tea. Pretty good stuff.

I took another wander around town in the evening but once again found nothing much of interest. In a small store I found an interesting bottle of something called ‘Za Jiu’ (å’‚é…’) or ‘Qingke Jiu’ (青稞酒), which looked to be a Tibetan beer. It was grain based but tasted was nothing like beer. It was flat, winey, and somewhere between homebrew gone wrong and a complex sour beer from Belgium. Overall it was probably closer to homebrew gone wrong than anything else, but I bought a second bottle for later anyway. Something about it was oddly like mead, with an almost primeval flavor.  The label claimed a surprising 11% alcohol by volume, which really didn’t come through in the taste. It was produced somewhere down the road in Songpan.

Still drinking the first bottle I wandered into a Tibetan restaurant and asked to see a menu. As the boss explained there was no menu I noticed how absolutely filthy the place and everyone in it was and used the lack of a menu as my excuse to make apologies and leave. I tried a busy little Chinese restaurant instead. There were no free tables but a couple of Tibetan monks invited me to join them. They were impressed to see me drinking the local brew, an attitude which hinted at less than complete devoutness but nevertheless made me well disposed towards them. I ordered some food and we chatted over dinner.

The monks were in their mid-20s but looked much older and had been monks since childhood. They came from a monastery near Langmusi and were passing through town for some reason or another. The younger one was quite well traveled and had been to Lhasa as well as some of the big coastal Chinese cities. He was vegetarian which and his older friend kept teasing him about this – behavior which didn’t seem very monk like. The older one was the more talkative of the pair but said he had never been to a big city, not even to Chengdu or Lanzhou. They talked reverentially about the Dalai Lama, lowering their voices and looking anxiously around as they did so, and expressed the hope that one day he would be return to Tibet. If I knew more about Tibetan Buddhism maybe I could have asked them some interesting questions, but I didn’t get the feeling they were necessarily that spiritual themselves.

They were actually quite funny. The older one told me that his religion meant it was absolutely forbidden for them to ask me if I had one or more girlfriends in China. The younger one leaned forward listening intently. They were clearly desperately interested in this topic! I told them that my last girlfriend had been Japanese but living in Shanghai. They tut-tuted and told me that I really shouldn’t have divulged that information. I told them it was really no problem and asked if there were any more topics we shouldn’t talk about – just in case. The older one said that we probably shouldn’t talk about things like alcohol and cigarettes, but that the most important thing was not to talk about sexual stuff. For example, he definitely shouldn’t ask me if my ex-girlfriend was pretty or not. The younger one leaned across excitedly again. I told them that I thought she was pretty but of course that was just my opinion and they might think differently. They agreed about different people having differences in aesthetic opinion, and mentioned that as Tibetans they found Tibetan girls pretty but that Chinese didn’t. Of course they added that this was all hypothetical and being monks they didn’t personally have any opinions on female beauty. The younger one asked me if I had a photograph of my ex-girlfriend. The older one frowned and scolded him in Tibetan. I didn’t have a photograph to show them in any case so had to apologize. It seemed the conversation had become too risque though so we moved onto other topics. As the restaurant began to empty I told them I’d better be heading back to my hotel and said goodbye. They gave me their phone numbers and told me to give them a call if I visited Langmusi again.

I went into a restaurant outside the Hezuo bus station and had some noodles. With time to kill I pulled out my laptop to write up some stuff for my blog. The waitress’s reaction was alarming even to somebody used to getting odd reactions from Chinese people. She shrieked in amazement, gave a little jump on the spot, ran over to ask me several questions I couldn’t understand, and started calling the rest of the staff out of the kitchen to look. The boss’s wife, who spoke much more standard Chinese than anyone else, told her I was using a computer and that computers were the absolute cutting edge these days. She said I would be taking records of the restaurant so other foreigners would be able to find it, which seemed ridiculous when she said it but in a sense she was right since I have ended up writing about her restaurant.

It took several minutes before everyone stopped crowding round watching and went back to work. Twenty minutes later a Tibetan couple probably in their late 30s came in and were similarly amazed. The woman was clearly desperate to look at my guidebook and map so I invited her to sit down and help herself. She sat and poured over them intently for an eternity. I was certain she didn’t understand the English guidebook, and she also may not have understood the Chinese characters on the map. While she did that her husband stood behind me watching me type and softly sang a Tibetan song. I noticed a few Tibetans had a habit of very unselfconsciously singing to themselves as they went about their business. When he finally spoke her husband turned out to speak reasonable Chinese, not exactly good but enough to communicate fine. He asked me where I was from, if New Zealand was in China or America, and if we had yaks there. I had to disappoint him on the yak front but volunteered sheep as a sort of consolation prize. Despite seeming so interested in the computer he never asked me a question about it. Either he thought it would have been rude, didn’t want to embarrass himself, or didn’t have the words to ask. Eventually the Tibetans’ food arrived and they went to eat.

The bus ride to Langmusi was mainly across rolling hills on a high plateau and passed lots of Tibetan settlements. There was an interesting variety of architectural styles. Some villages were of squarish mud and brick courtyard houses in a vaguely Chinese style, others comprised brick block houses wrapped in glass conservatories, and others were extraordinary medieval looking affairs of wood and mud houses surrounded by stockades and with brightly colored prayer flags fluttering in poles near the houses or on high ground somewhere nearby.

My decade old guidebook had told me that Langmusi was completely off the beaten track and had no accommodation besides one or two guesthouses, which lacked showers and were heated by fires lit in the guest rooms. I arrived in Langmusi and found a street of English signage advertising backpacker style guesthouses and restaurants. Admittedly half of the places were closed for winter and there was not a foreigner in sight, but the place was clearly not off the beaten track. In fact most non-Chinese would have an easier time of it here than in your average Chinese city.

The thin mountain air made walking with bags tiring so I walked straight into the hotel nearest the bus station rather than scouting around to see what else was on offer. Three very pretty and clean Tibetan girls greeted me. The last of the three came running out of the back office with her trousers pulled below her waist, said hello to me, spent a moment staring into her crotch and adjusting something there, and finally pulled and buttoned her trousers up and complemented me on my Chinese. She was wearing thermal underwear under her trousers so it wasn’t as though I was going to see anything on account of her trousers being down, but it was still a strange display of complete unselfconsciousness. I was quite liking how naturally the Tibetans behaved. There never seemed to be much drama in dealing with them.

Langmusi was somehow nicer than Xiahe. It was also a monastery town, but the monasteries were much smaller and complemented the town rather than dominating it. There were more locals and fewer pilgrims, which probably contributed to the much cleaner feel of the place. I guess it is hard to stay clean when on a pilgrimage.

I took a wander towards the hills above the town, passing a school on the way. The school children asked me to teach them English so I sat down with them and chatted for a few minutes. Since they hadn’t started English classes it was a bit difficult to teach them anything, and after a minute or two of asking me English words for parts of the body they got bored and invited me to play basketball. I left them to their game and walked on up the hill towards a series of prayer flags on the edge of a forest.

In the forest there was a kind of a shrine commemorating a tiger. I’m not sure what the story behind it was. Beyond the shrine was a river valley which I began to hike up. The valley appeared like an alpine wilderness in miniature, each rock or tree looming as a meaningful part of the whole scene, something like the illustrations in the Narnia books. It was very tempting to just keep walking up the valley and towards the jagged white peak that it seemed to be leading to, but the wind was picking up and clouds were gathering so I turned around round after only 30 minutes or so.

For dinner I visited a place in the town called Leishas Restaurant. Leisha was an elderly Tibetan man. He claimed to be illiterate in Tibetan, Chinese and English, but had somehow learned to cook favorites like risotto, frittatas, bruchetta, chocolate cake and apple pie, as well as a couple of stranger items like the ‘English potato sandwich’ – a chip buttie maybe? His Yak Burger, though unconventional (yak stir-fry served in a Hui Chinese flatbread), was tasty and extremely filling.

Xiahe was clearly a western tourist destination and besides me the bus had three other westerners on it, the first westerners I had seen on public transportation so far on my trip. The first part of the road to Xiahe wound through pretty mountain countryside. The area was predominantly Hui, and we passed numerous densely settled villages bursting with mosques and cherry trees. As the altitude increased the cherry trees disappeared, the villages became fewer in number and much smaller in size, the place names became Tibetan, Tibetan script appeared on the road signs, and colored prayer flags and stupas started to dot the landscape.

The bus reached Xiahe around noon. A group of snotty nosed Tibetan children stormed the bus offering ‘taxis’ (actually pedicabs). Xiahe was a tiny one street town, with part of the main street actually running through the monastery, and so there wasn’t much need for a cab. I hopped into a real taxi van with the three other tourists though and we headed off together to look for a hotel. I chatted with the driver a little. Our Chinese conversation prompted the German guy beside me to gravely ask if I was a journalist. I said I wasn’t, and he said that hearing me speak Chinese he thought I must be “a specialist coming to report on the situation of the Tibetan people”. Germans have a way of being very serious. It would have been fun to pretend to be an undercover journalist sent to investigate rumors of a massacre of Tibetan nuns in the mountains outside town, but given my experience of plain clothes police in Yining it would probably not have been wise. China devotes a lot of resources to monitoring what visitors do in ‘sensitive’ minority areas.

The Germans somehow disappeared after we arrived at the hotel. Maybe they went on to another hotel. I wanted to shower and change out of my piss-soaked jeans but with no hot water available it seemed too hard, so after dumping my stuff I wandered along the road towards the monastery.

The town was clearly a tourist center, with lots of English signage advertising guest houses, restaurants and souvenir shops. Simultaneously though the town was clearly a genuine religious center, and the handful of tourists were easily outnumbered by hundreds of pilgrims.

The pilgrims streamed around the outer perimeter of the monastery, following a circuit around specific stupas and buildings, and spinning the prayer wheels lining covered corridors. They moved clockwise, and made multiple circuits around each stupa or building en route. The pilgrims varied in dress. Some were dressed entirely in traditional Tibetan woolen cloaks and robes, the men sporting long, uncombed hair and with horn handled knives dangling from their belts, and the women with their hair plaited, lower faces covered, and wearing heavy silver and amber jewelry. Some were dressed in factory made jeans and windbreakers. Others were dressed in strange mixtures of traditional and western styles. A few prostrated themselves every couple of steps, but most just walked briskly onwards, heads bowed, keeping the prayer wheels spinning. Some mumbled or chanted as they walked. Some walked swinging miniature hand held prayer wheels. A middle aged man who moved with the enthusiasm of a child sprang out from the procession, grabbed my hand, and dragged me with him laughing. He smacked at the prayer wheels with his free hand, sending each one spinning ferociously. He was clearly retarded. I twisted my hand out of his grasp, patted him on the back and waved goodbye as he lurched along the corridor of spinning wheels, laughing as he went. Lammist Buddhism must be a wonderful religion for a retarded person. That sounds disrespectful but is not meant that way. The guy was obviously enjoying himself immensely.

I would like to say something about the spirituality on display, but somehow the most striking thing was the filth. Obviously there were exceptions, but as a whole the pilgrims were very dirty, partly from spending weeks on the road, and partly because a lot of them never washed anyway. Many had hands caked with what looked to be weeks of accumulated dust and dirt. Their cloaks were stained with mud and grease. A stench of piss hung over the monastery itself. It wasn’t my jeans. Everywhere I saw monks and pilgrims, male and female alike, simply using walls or squatting over ditches to pee.

The thing that struck me about the monastery complex itself was the use of cloth. The temples were draped with long banners and flags, and there were poles hung with brightly colored pennants. There was a feeling of movement as the banners billowed in the wind. It was very different to the more static feel of Chinese style Buddhist temples.

On the perimeter of the monastery was a knife maker beating blades out of steel with a hammer and sending sparks flying everywhere. Filth, pilgrims, colorful pennants, blacksmiths: the atmosphere was medieval.

While wandering around I ran into a French guy who had been on the bus with me earlier. As we wandered we saw a group of monks rushing into one of the temples for some kind of prayer session. We wandered in and the younger monks, just boys of about 12 years old, enthusiastically gestured for us to sit down. We sat at the back and watched. The old monk leading the session chanted in the most mesmerizing fashion. The chanting was so deep, so powerful, and somehow so other-worldly that it was hard to believe it could really be coming the throat of the old man sitting a few meters ahead of me. The younger monks sat with heads bowed for a few moments, made a couple of responses, and then the session slowly but surely began to deteriorate. The old man chanted on, the middle aged monks concentrated on the prayers and responded as appropriate, while the younger monks fidgeted, kicked each other, threw their yellow hats around the room, fished raisins out of the folds of their cloaks and ate them, and made faces at each other. One group across the room was inspired by our presence to imitate Christian rituals. They enthusiastically crossed themselves, clasped their hands in prayer, and competed with one another to look pious before looking across at us and collapsing into giggles. There seemed to be absolutely no discipline, but the clowning around remained good humored and nobody ended up in tears. Just as my legs were about to give out from sitting on the floor the session ended, the children and ourselves were shooed outside, and the older monks retreated into an inner room and closed the doors.

Back on the outer perimeter of the monastery me and the French guy (Giles) tried to chat with some young Tibetan women who sat down beside us on a wall to rest from their pilgrimage. They were very curious about us. They swapped comments about us in Tibetan and giggled. A lot of what they were saying seemed to concern our appearance. Giles did much better than me in communicating with them. He spoke much slower and more basic Chinese than me, and the women could understand a lot of what he said. When I tried to talk to them in Chinese they couldn’t understand me. I tried speaking slowly and clearly but I wasn’t very good at it. Maybe I had too much of a southern accent. Language barriers prevented the conversation from going far. They told us they were in town on a pilgrimage, and that they had come from Tibet itself. We couldn’t find out how they had traveled – i.e. whether they had walked or come by bus. Giles decided to ask them to recommend a Tibetan restaurant in town. I thought he was being a tad ambitious. First, their Chinese wasn’t up to discussing the intricacies of fine cuisine (not that Tibetan cuisine is intricate). Second, I doubted they were frequent restaurant customers. We never did get a restaurant recommendation out of them, and eventually an older woman traveling with them, maybe their mother, told them it was time to stop chatting with strange guys and continue with the pilgrimage. We waved goodbye and they disappeared among the prayer wheels and other pilgrims.

I had a very late lunch with Giles. We tried some sampa and momo in a small Tibetan restaurant that seemed to be catering mainly for tourists (with an English menu etc.). Sampa is the stable in Tibet and is a dish of milled grain, which the diner mixes into a paste by adding hard cheese, yak butter, and yak milk tea. I don’t think the sampa in this restaurant was anything like what Tibetans eat. It was a sort of sweet cookie dough, shaped into balls and dipped in sugar. Giles said it was different to what it eaten before in a Tibetan area of Yunnan. Probably it was a tourist version. Momo are steamed dumplings stuffed with yak meat. The momo in the restaurant seemed to fit that description and were reasonable enough.

After a rest I had a dinner inside the hotel. The waiter was a Chinese boy from a nearby village who had just graduated from school and was preparing to take university entrance exams in English in a few months. He was a desperate to practice his English so I chatted with him for a while. He had already been working at the hotel for a week or so but had still not managed to visit the monastery even though it was located just a hundred meters away. It was typical of how employees in low end service jobs get treated in China, with their bosses allowing them absolutely no free time, even when their job is not busy – the hotel and restaurant were practically empty.

Around noon I visited the bus station to try and buy a ticket to Xiahe, the location of the largest Tibetan monastery outside of Tibet itself, and the second most important Tibetan Buddhist center in the world. Apparently the only bus left at 7am and it wasn’t possible to buy tickets in advance, so I would just have to come back early the next day.

I messed about doing some work and then spent the evening reading in a branch of the Shangdao Coffee chain. For dinner I had a Lanzhou style ‘shou zhua’ (手抓) meal. ‘Shou zhua’ literally means ‘hand grab’, and in the context of a restaurant indicates foods you eat with your hands rather than with chopsticks. ‘Shou zhua’ restaurants are all over Lanzhou and seem to be either the traditional local specialty or a recent local craze. The most popular item was chunks of lamb on the bone. The meat was tender but there was no seasoning besides five spice powder and salt. It was nothing special, but interesting to try once.