Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

They were engagingly friendly. A family from Xining poured a pot of instant noodles and offered sightseeing tips. A policeman who often traveled the route explained why the door to the “hard-seating-class carriage” was kept locked. Two young sightseers from Hong Kong shared their herbal remedies for altitude sickness and talked enviously about the pioneering character of the mainland.

“There is an amazing can-do spirit in China these days,” said Susan Hong, a math teacher from the former British colony. “We used to have a bit of that in Hong Kong. But now we are so conservative compared to the mainland. Anything seems possible in China these days. It’s very exciting.”

But there was a dark side. As I got ready to turn in, Wang qualified the level of his friendliness. “I am happy to share food and drink with you. We are friends with all countries now, except Japan. If you were Japanese I would not share my food with you. And I would not let you sleep in the bunk above me.”

A little drunk, he repeated the threat for the third time as I clambered up to my bed. It was almost the highest I had ever slept—both from the floor, which was about two meters below my third-tier bunk, and from sea level.

Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen or the frequent patrols by ticket inspectors, but I had trouble getting to sleep. My mind raced back across the contrasting impressions of the previous few hours: the warmth of my fellow passengers, the sometimes alarming nationalism of Wang, and the can-do spirit that had impressed the tourists from Hong Kong. Behind was Han China, the materialistic, modernizing, go-getting world of Wang. Ahead was Lhasa, the capital of what was once arguably the most spiritual, traditional, and remote land on the planet. In the former, nature was there to be conquered. In the latter, it was there to be worshipped. In my muzzy-headed state, the journey started to feel like something more than a simple ride along a track. It was a trip back in time, tracing human development in reverse. Or so it felt.

Brits should be cautious about high places. We are not used to them. Ben Nevis, at 1,433 meters the tallest mountain in Britain, would be a minor foothill in the Himalayas. Up on the roof of the world, it is all too easy to misjudge scale, to forget the sudden changes in the weather that occur that close to the clouds, and to be confused by the tricks that the mind and the body play when deprived of the usual amount of oxygen.

My background reading suggested that the rarefied air could go even further to a man’s head when it was mixed with a desire for power. In 1903–4, Major Francis Younghusband, one of the most intriguing and ignominious figures in British imperial history, led a military mission into Tibet that turned into an invasion. Based in India, he was supposed to settle a border dispute near Sikkim. Instead, he marched 2,200 troops all the way to Lhasa, crushing any sign of opposition on the way. A museum in Gyantse depicts the massacre that took place there when Younghusband’s Maxim guns and cavalry mowed down 700 monks in four minutes. The Tibetans, who were armed with nothing more than muskets and boulders, were cut down by bullets and swords even after they turned their backs and attempted to flee. 3Even for imperial-era London, Younghusband’s actions were considered excessive, as was the harsh indemnity that he imposed on the Dalai Lama. The terms were eased, but Britain maintained a presence in Tibet until 1947. Younghusband’s “invasion” was to be Britain’s last colonial adventure in Asia.

For the forty-year-old major, it was a turning point. The awe-inspiring sight of the Potala Palace, temples, and monasteries in Lhasa mixed with remorse in his oxygen-starved brain and set him suddenly on a spiritual quest. The experience, he wrote, “thrilled through me with overpowering intensity … Never again could I think evil, or ever be at enmity with any man. That single hour on leaving Lhasa was worth all the rest of a lifetime.” After a period wandering the mountains and leading an ascetic life, he returned to Britain, helped found the World Council of Faiths, espoused the creation of a new religion, and advocated a doctrine of mystical beliefs and free love. 4

Younghusband fascinated and appalled me. In conquering Tibet with a tiny army, he reached the peak of the British Empire and his own military career. On the way up, he was a hero; on the way down, a villain. Little wonder that he looked for an alternative direction with esoteric mysticism. The more I read about him, the more compelling was his story. A classically repressed Victorian with an imperial superiority complex as full as his walrus mustache, he was at various times a journalist, a guru, a war criminal, and a Great Game spy.

He was also a British version of the indomitable old man in Yugong Yishan. In his youth, Younghusband was the first European to travel overland from Beijing to India, en route crossing the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas. Toward the end of his life, he organized some of the first expeditions up Mount Everest. In between he attempted to explore the psychic realm, claimed there were extraterrestrial beings on a planet called Altair, and heretically called for a replacement religion for “puny and childish Christianity.”

Judged by today’s standards, Younghusband was an arrogant jingoist, who wrote in 1898 of “John Chinaman” failing to be a “perfect animal” and Indian Baltis as “a patient, docile, good-natured race whom one can hardly respect, but whom one cannot help liking in a compassionate, pitying way.” 5

His value system was based upon power: Superior races exploited nature. Inferior ones were condemned by their failure to do the same.

It was a common view at the height of the British Empire, where like all colonialists of the era and many Chinese today, the justification for conquest was civilization: the living standards of “less advanced” people would be raised slightly as partial compensation for stealing their natural resources. In Younghusband’s philosophy this was an ethical imperative, as the epigraph to this chapter attests.

The self-righteousness of those who plunder resources continues today.

When it opened in 2006, the railway across the roof of the world was hailed by China as a means of improving the living standards of remote, undeveloped Tibet. Supporters of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the region, condemned it as a political tool, a weapon of cultural genocide, and a means to suck natural resources from the Himalayas. 6

The Sky Train is indisputably a triumph of engineering. At its maximum altitude in the Tanggula Pass, the track runs 5,072 meters above sea level, higher than Europe’s greatest peak, Mont Blanc, and more than 200 meters above the Peruvian railway in the Andes, which was previously the world’s most elevated track. Building a railway through this terrain required the blasting and building of seven tunnels and 286 bridges.

China’s statistics are always mind-boggling and often unreliable, but they serve as the scripture of China’s materialism, evidence of the powerful gospel of “Scientific Development.” So was the speed at which the track was laid, three years ahead of the original seven-year schedule. For the disciples of the economic miracle, it was proof that China was overtaking the United States.

Like many other Chinese modern megaprojects, the Golmud-Lhasa railway is a realization of the dream of the ultimate mountain-moving man, Mao Zedong. As early as 1950, the chairman sent engineers to Tibet to look into the construction of a railway, and in 1973 he announced the project to the outside world. 7

Construction began the following year on the first part of the route from Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai Province, to Golmud, the garrison town in China’s wild west. After it was completed in 1984, the engineers were stuck. For the next twenty years, this was the route to nowhere. Flanked by mountains, Golmud appeared as much of a dead end as the ocean.