康定 Kāngdìng — or དར་རྩེ་མདོ། Dartsedo as it’s known to Tibetans — is the first town across the border from Sìchuān in what was once the Tibetan kingdom of ཁམས Kham. For centuries it was a trading outpost, where Tibetans exchanged wool, pelts and warhorses for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain. ཁམས་པ Khampa people were the most feared warriors of the ethnic groups now referred to collectively as ‘Tibetans.’ While it lies outside of what the Chinese call 西藏自治区 ‘Tibet Autonomous Region,’ Kham is essential for understanding Tibetan history. Many prominent Tibetans — including the current Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatzo — were born there. It is a high altitude zone characterised by spectacular mountain vistas and grasslands. As John Patt said, ‘You can walk through an upland pasture in Kham at the same altitude that you fly in a jet airplane from Chicago to Milwaukee’. (Patt, 1992)
We first visited Kāngdìng, the gateway to Kham, as fresh-faced twenty-somethings back in 2013. Back then the bus ride from Chéngdū took ten hours, but that soon became twelve when the driver changed the wheels mid-journey and everyone had a roadside snack. My nose stayed pressed against the window as the humid Chéngdū plain slowly transformed into vast, hulking mountains and the air cooled and thinned. Stepping off the bus in Kāngdìng gave us the unmistakable feeling of entering a different country. Formidable Khampa men with long, black hair and wide-brimmed hats greeted us loudly, while the equally formidable 折多河 Zheduo river roared nearby. We walked tentatively up the narrow high street, excited for the hitchhiking adventures to come. Looking around, the faces, clothing, shop displays and temples we saw were all undeniably Tibetan. In the half-light of early evening, the only discernible Hàn Chinese presence were the military police stationed on every corner.
Lying on the frontline of Chinese expansion into Tibet, Kham has a complex and troubled history. It existed as both an independent state and part of the Tibetan empire in the past, and was absorbed into West Sìchuān during China’s final imperial dynasty the 大清 Dà Qīng ‘Great Qīng’ (1644-1912). The Qīng viewed Kham as an impassable wilderness of cutthroat bandits and impenetrable clan loyalties, and knew they couldn’t govern it themselves. Instead, they had Tibetans run the empire for them by offering the imperial title 吐司Tǔsī, ‘native official,’ to local leaders. This provided rights of passage and trade in exchange for tributes. It also deepened divisions between rival clans and created a feeling of dependency on the Qīng Empire, as Qīng commander Nian Gengyao explained:
Kham should be littered with Tǔsī who are wary of one-another but dependent upon (us)… By bestowing Tǔsī offices to local leaders, we will awe (wei) the people with our magnanimity and extend our influence into this troubled region without much sacrifice on our part.’ (Herman, 2014)
Sadly, expansionist tactics didn’t stop there. The Qīng seized Kāngdìng in the Battle of Dartsedo in 1701 and massacred every adult male in the city. They then took the entirety of Kham by force between 1715 and 1730. Despite the brutality of the occupation, Tibetan culture survived under the Qīng. China’s rulers at that time were a foreign minority from the northeastern Manchurian steppe, stretched thinly over a vast territory. They hadn’t the means nor incentive to eradicate Tibetan culture. This may explain why, despite being officially under the control of Běijīng since the 18th Century, Kham has remained ethnically and culturally distinct from the rest of China. Khampa Tibetans continued to thrive through nomadic pastoralism and farming, all the while practicing their unique mix of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and བོན Bön animist religion.
However, whatever fragile balance had existed between the Tibetan and Chinese civilisations collapsed amid the revolutionary fervour of the mid-20th Century. From 1949 onwards, Communist China visited murder, torture, incarceration and cultural genocide upon the people of Kham. The most revered monks and Lamas were brutalised before crowds of stunned Tibetans: one method of humiliation was forcing them to drink the urine of female cadres.
The climax of this violent decade was the so-called 大跃进 Dàyuèjìn ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958–1960). 毛泽东Máo Zédōng set out to jumpstart the economy through agricultural collectivisation and the purging of internal ‘class enemies’ through an intensification of the brutal ‘struggle sessions’ that Tibetans knew too well. The Chairman saw stockpiling grain as the key to making China’s economy mightier than those of western powers, so he sent shock troops into remote regions to hack down forests, drain lakes and flatten mountains for wheat and maize fields. He mobilised eradication campaigns of the 四害 sìhài ‘four pests’ (rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows), tipping entire ecosystems off-kilter. It was the most disastrous manifestation of the anthropocentric Chinese idiom 人定胜天 réndìngshèngtiān, ‘Humanity Must Conquer Nature,’ and nature didn’t respond kindly. In the ecological collapse that followed, 30 million people starved to death, making it the most deadly chapter of the Chairman’s reign.
Tibetan regions bore the full brunt of this humanitarian, environmental and spiritual disaster. Brigades of teenagers — trained to recite Máo’s ‘Little Red Book’ by heart but clueless on high altitude survival — were dispatched to remote corners of Kham to ‘liberate’ the populace. They rounded up nomads and confiscated their animals. They destroyed barley fields, unaware that their favoured wheat and maize couldn’t survive in the thinner air. They banned markets, which were essential to Tibetans for avoiding starvation. And when Tibetans fled, they shot them or chased them off cliffs. Some Tibetans did embrace Communist ideology and even joined the Communist Party, while others resisted through guerrilla war and doomed uprisings. Hearing news from Kham in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the young Dalai Lama knew that ‘Tibet-proper’ was next in the crosshairs. He fled to India in 1959, where he’s remained since.
It could be argued that the violence in Kham was the same as that which consumed all of China. However, deeply ingrained feelings of racial superiority from the Hàn Chinese over the ethnic group they looked down upon as ‘feudal’, made the so-called Great Leap Forward a particularly dangerous time for Tibetans. As Barbara Demick explains:
As bad as it was for the Hàn Chinese, the Tibetans got it worse. The abuses started earlier and lasted longer. The Chinese deaths during the Great Leap Forward were primarily due to famine. Although many Hàn Chinese were killed during the struggle sessions, the preemptive arrests didn’t reach the same level. In some Tibetan areas, as much as 20 per cent of the population were arrested, and among those as many as half perished, according to Tibetan accounts. Some of the prisons consisted of little more than pits in the ground crammed with hundreds of people.
Life has improved greatly for Tibetans in Kham since those terrible years. However, the region has remained a flashpoint of conflict, and its inhabitants receive a disproportionate level of government interference. Tibetan language is suppressed in schools, and open reverence or even positive mention of the Dalai Lama is forbidden. Senior officials treat indigenous attitudes of ordinary Tibetans as a direct challenge to Communist Party rule, and order them to Embrace the ‘cultural symbols and images of the Chinese nation’. Vast infrastructure projects for mining, hydropower, logging and other resource extraction may have brought opportunities to some Tibetans, but they’ve also greatly damaged the ecologies on which they depend on for material and spiritual sustenance. What’s more, state-funded nature reserves have served the covert aim of excluding nomads from their ancestral lands — a phenomenon human rights experts term ‘green grabbing’. (Li and Shapiro, 2020) Before the 2008 Běijīng olympics, demonstrations broke out in the Kham county of རྔ་བ་རྫོང་། Ngaba and were violently suppressed. Of the 159 Tibetan self-immolations that have taken place in Tibet and China since 2009, over a third have been in Kham.
Still, it remains an enchanting place. Our memories of Tibetan hospitality and rugged landscapes have made us yearn to visit the region once more — something mostly impossible during the pandemic. As we piled into a car in July 2023 to take the dogs on their greatest adventure yet though, we felt nervous. A decade is a long time in China-years. Would Kāngdìng retain the charm we remembered, or would the dreaded ‘Chinese Tourism Makeover’ have made the city unrecognisable? The expansion of Kāngdìng Airport has put the city on the map to unprecedented numbers of domestic tourists, and the new express highway has cut the epic alpine bus ride down to a three-hour blast through brightly-lit tunnels. Perhaps most disconcerting of all though is the recent rebranding of Kāngdìng as ‘The Most Romantic City in China.’ 康定情歌 Kāngdìng Qínggē, ‘Kāngdìng Love Song’ — the intensely nostalgic 1930s folk ballad mentioned constantly in promotional material for the city — seems custom made to evoke an imagined past and gloss over Kham’s past traumas:
High upon the mountainside
Floats a cloud so white
There lies peaceful Kangding town
Bathed in silver moonlight
Over Kangding town, oh
Lovely maid with a smile so sweet
Li the woodcutter’s daughter
Geng the blacksmith’s eldest son
Came through the moonlight to court her
He fell in love with her smile so sweet
And her pleasing ways, oh
She could cook and she could sew
Care for him all his days, oh
We hope the above provides context to the region visited in this episode, even if it made troubling reading. While making content in China we deliberately shied away from the above topics for obvious reasons, so we now see it as especially important to share the history that continues to influence the region. With all that said, we hope you enjoy accompanying us on a journey to a part of the world that holds a very special place in our hearts. Come with us as we explore the mountains of the city’s outskirts, and reflect on the pace of change in modern China.
Stay tuned for the next episode, in which we push deeper into beautiful Tibetan regions of western Sìchuān.
Sources:
Herman, John (2014) Collaboration and Resistance on the Southwest Frontier: Early Eighteenth-Century Qing Expansion on Two Fronts, Virginia Commonwealth University
Li, Yifei and Shapiro, Judith (2020) China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet, Polity Publications
Patt, John (1992) A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands, Snow Lion Publications