June 21, 22 - Xiahe, Gansu, China

Next stop from Langmusi was Xiahe, a few hours up the road (good roads this time, for a pleasant change).  This monastery town is home to one of the allegedly most important monasteries in Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet.  To be frank the monastery, the buildings and so on weren't all that amazing, but I was lucky enough to have 2 unique experiences there.  After checking out the buildings I was wandering the streets of the monastery complex/Tibetan part of town (it's a big area and just merges into the town on both sides without any clear boundaries) and I heard music being played - drums and bells.  I skirted around a big building into a courtyard and found a group of 20 or 30 young monks (or monks-in-training?) practicing a dance routine, accompanied by older monks playing the instruments and being instructed by one older monk in his 30s.  The young boys were all dressed in the normal monks robes (in varying sizes) and seemed to range from about 6 to maybe 13 or 14.  They performed the dance lined up in height order which made for an interesting effect.  They performed some pretty cool moves including them all bending over backwards to touch the ground in sequence and then rising up again in sequence giving a wave-like effect.  The dance routine also involved the use of brightly painted wooden swords as part of the show.  Since I was the only one watching them practice, as they finished I went over and said hi.  They tried to talk to me a bit, and the instructor spoke good Chinese so we could talk.  Next thing I knew they'd invited me to sit down and eat lunch with them - awesome!  The food arrived and between a barrage of questions (sometimes in Chinese, which I had a chance of understanding, sometimes in Tibetan, which I did not), careful inspection of my arm hair (most of these guys, even in their teens and 20s don't have any body hair to speak of, so they're fascinated) we ate.  First we had milk with a type of hard cheese then a kind of oily porridge made with rice, butter and meat chunks.  Both the meat and porridge were eaten using the fingers, mixed with handfuls of 'tsampa' (barley flour, I believe).  None of the food was bad, but certainly different from Western food or Chinese food for that matter.  After the food and a bit of a chat they all went home for a midday rest and I resumed wandering. 

Next up I came upon a monk in his maybe early 40s resting on the grass in a large courtyard.  He saw me a beckoned for me to come over and sit down, and he started talking to me in English.  It turns out that he had essentially escaped from China for 4 years to study in India (near the Dalai Lama) and had learned English there.  He told me he had applied for but been denied by the Chinese government a passport to travel so he simply walked for something like 14 days over the mountains between Tibet and India.  Talk about commitment to your religion!! Apparently there is some kind of reception system in India for people who are I suppose kind of (usually temporary) religious refugees and are traveling undocumented - this normally means the few hundred Tibetan monks who illegally walk out of China and into India each year - and they are given some kind of legal status in India and allowed to study and live there.  We chatted for about an hour about the plight of Tibetans being suppressed by the heavy-handed Chinese government, the situation with the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, and closer to home he relayed a story from about a year earlier.  As you may recall, sometime in 2009 there was some civil unrest in some of the major Tibetan cities, some protesting and even rioting I believe.  Anyway, Xiahe was one of the towns where there were protests and of course the authorities were there trying to keep things from getting out of control.  During or shortly after the protests, one of the monks who was a leader or some type of organiser (or at least according to the authorities) was simply taken away from the monastery.  He wasn't charged with anything as far as anyone knows, however he hasn't been heard from in more than a year.  No one knows if he is alive or dead, or what the situation is.  It is a little alarming to think that this thing really does still happen in China today, and I think it says a lot about how scared the government is of the monks and the power they hold to generate anti-government sentiment and potentially result in major civil unrest.  China certainly is an unusual state with a conflicted mixture of nearly unlimited personal and business freedom on the one hand, where the sky is the limit for entrepreneurs and businessmen, and on the other hand the authorities seem to sense a major threat from a bunch of harmless Tibetan monks.  Odd indeed.