Zhaxi Wangzhag prostrated himself on a month-long pilgrimage
from his remote village at Nagqu County in northern Tibet to Lhasa, crawling on hands and knees
and refusing to walk upright.
He was fulfilling a dream and honoring a commitment to his
father, a devout Buddhist who insisted every man in the family
should perform the ritual.
The pilgrim says his knees were swollen and his back ached at
the end of the 400-kilometer trek. But he was content even as
trains rumbled past several times a day, with passengers smiling
and waving through the windows.
The Lhasa tour did not just take Zhaxi Wangzhag to the famous
monasteries, but also to herbal markets where he was convinced the
wild caterpillar fungus from his hometown promised another fortune
this year.
The lucrative Tibetan medicinal cure-all doubled his family
income last year.
As Tibetan medicine gains popularity, nearly 1,300 tons of
caterpillar fungus and other Tibetan herbs were sold to the other
parts of China last year, up 7 percent year-on-year, the regional
government says.
It attributes the growth, in part, to the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, which has carried 44,000
tons of Tibetan products to the rest of China in its first year of
operation since July 1, 2006. These include organic farm produce,
adornments, herbs, incense, dried yak meat, barley beer and even
mineral water from an altitude of 5,100 meters.
Meanwhile, the 1,956-kilometer railway has boosted Tibetan
markets by bringing in 620,000 tons of supplies, says Qiangba Puncog, chairman of the regional
government.
"Unprecedented economic growth, rising living standards, and job
creation.. are transforming life, work and attitudes, especially of
the young, in sparsely populated Tibet. And the railway is making a
big difference," wrote journalist N. Ram in the Indian newspaper,
The Hindu.
More than a half century ago, Liu Guangfan trekked three months
on camelback from Golmud City of Qinghai Province to Lhasa in order to build
the first ever highway on the "roof of the world".
With the railway, the same 1,142-kilometer journey is covered in
just 12 hours. Even Beijing is only 48 hours away from Lhasa.
"It's brought in tourists and a better life," says Losang
Cering, a taxi driver in his 40s, who earns more than 2,000 yuan
(US$270) a month, three or four times the amount he could make as a
peasant before.
The railway has created jobs for many peasants in his village
close to the Lhasa railway station. "Our village-run taxi fleet has
expanded to 70 cars from the previous 10, and the more enterprising
young men have contracted civil construction projects, and opened
souvenir stores and hostels."
The tourism boom has boosted Tibet's retail market, enabling
many peasants and herders to profit from sales of homemade yogurt,
dried yak meat and souvenirs at their doorstep.
Qamba, who runs a dairy in Nagqu, plans to buy more cattle and
double the plant's current output of 1,500 kilograms a year.
"Traditional Tibetan dairy foods are very popular with the
tourists. Many buy huge packages to take home," he says.
The immense business opportunities posed by the railway have
brought in staggering investment from home and abroad -- 4 billion
yuan (US$530 million) last year, close to the total of the previous
five years, says He Benyun, vice-director of Tibet's regional
development and reform commission.
This has saved many ailing Tibetan businesses from bankruptcy,
he says.
Investors from east China's Zhejiang Province have revived a former brick
kiln on the suburbs of Lhasa. Today the Qingda Building Material
Supplies Co. employs 40 locals and sells flooring and tiles to
China's inland provinces as well as to Nepal and India.
It has given 22-year-old Lhazhoin a job -- three years after she
graduated from a local secondary school. She's making 1,500 yuan
(US$200) a month as a cashier.
Gama Chilai has taken his extended family of 12, including his
grandmother, 73, and his son, 3, by train to Lhasa this summer.
"For many Tibetans, a pilgrimage to Lhasa's monasteries is a
lifelong dream," says the young man from Yushu, a Tibetan community
in adjacent Qinghai Province.
Yushu is about 2,000 kilometers from Lhasa. Before the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway opened to traffic, local Tibetans could only
take buses to Lhasa. The journey over the zigzagging mountain road
was tiring, dangerous and by no means cheap, says Gama Chilai.
The railway has carried trainloads of pilgrims like him into
Tibet over the past year.
Last year, 328,000 pilgrims visited the Potala Palace,
Norbuglinkha and Johkang Monastery, the top three religious sites
in Lhasa, an increase of 62,000 from the previous year, Tibet's
regional government says.
During this year's weeklong May Day holiday, more than 73,000
people visited Norbuglinkha, the summer resort of all the Dalai
Lamas. At least 40,000 were pilgrims.
Many travel by train. Pilgrims wearing Tibetan costume and
bringing articles of tribute and lamas in crimson cassocks make the
train journey to Tibet unique.
In the meantime, many Tibetans have taken the train on
pilgrimages elsewhere, to the Ta'er Monastery in Qinghai and the
Lama Temple in Beijing.
The railway has also promoted Tibetan culture and arts in the
rest of China. Tibetan theme bars, restaurants and souvenir stores
are found in many big cities.
"Tibetan adornments have become fashionable almost overnight.
They're beautiful," says Wang Yanwen, whose store on Zhangye Road
in downtown Lanzhou, capital city of northwestern Gansu Province, sells everything to do with
Tibetan Buddhism, ranging from beads and prayer wheels to necklaces
and bracelets ingrained with totems.
A Tibetan tap dance has gained nationwide popularity after a
group of 70 farmer-performers staged it for the lunar New Year's
Eve gala on China Central Television in February.
"I hope people from outside Tibet will also learn about
traditional art forms," says Zhaxi Puncog, a villager in Lhaze
County of Xigaze, home to the centuries-old dance.?
A Tibetan antelope runs briskly after a four-wheel drive vehicle
toward the three sheds that serve as a wildlife preservation center
in the Hoh Xil Natural Reserve 4,600 meters above sea level.
It apparently recognizes the car and its driver Gama -- many
Tibetans have no surnames -- a worker at the center.
Gama became the animal's means of survival in June 2006, when it
was found alone in the wild, barely a week old and with an injured
leg. He took it to the center, tended its wounds and kept it at a
300-hectare nature reserve alongside other Tibetan antelopes,
stocky wild horses and donkeys.
He named it Nima, which means "the sun" in Tibetan.
Gama and his colleagues work to protect wild species in the Hoh
Xil, a 45,000-square kilometer area that is an ideal habitat for
wild animals.
"Nima was obviously scared when the first train leaving Lhasa
passed the Hoh Xil," says Gama. "She was barely a month old and had
never seen or heard a train. So she ran."
Today, a daily average of six trains pass their home, but Nima
and the other animals are no longer afraid. "They simply stop
grazing and look."
Doubts and criticisms are part of the history of the "heavenly
railway" even when it was still on the drawing board. The possible
extinction of the critically endangered Tibetan antelopes has been
frequently cited by some environmentalists in arguments against the
railway.
At the wildlife preservation center, visitors have poured in.
"Many chipped in preservation funds. Some offered to work as
volunteers," says Gama.
Tibet used to have several million Tibetan antelopes, but
excessive poaching and human encroachment on their habitats caused
the population to shrink sharply in the past decades.
Until the mid 1990s, up to 4,000 antelopes in Tibet were killed
by poachers each year. Tibet has tightened supervision and patrols
in the antelopes' habitats since 1998, and established three nature
reserves to protect the creatures, covering more than 600,000
square kilometers, an area 40 times the size of Beijing.
The government made wildlife preservation a priority in its
construction of the railway to Tibet. Thirty-three special
passageways were built along the line, enabling animals to follow
their normal migratory routes unhindered.
Last year, a Chinese forestry administration report put the
population of Tibetan antelopes in Tibet at 150,000, doubling the
number of the late 1980s. The Hoh Xil alone has 50,000
antelopes.
"Next year, when we mark the second year of the railway, we'll
set Nima free far from our preservation center. It'll be time for
her to return to the wild," says Gama.
"Very likely train passengers next year will see flocks of
pregnant antelopes migrating to their breeding sites. Nima could be
one of them."
Yet a year after its opening, debate continues over whether the
world's highest railway, built at the cost of 33 billion yuan
(US$4.4 billion) is a boon or bane.
On the one hand, it drove up Tibet's GDP by 13.4 percent last
year to a record 29 billion yuan (US$3.87 billion), with per-capita
GDP topping US$1,000. In 2006, Tibetan farmers and herders reported
a per-capita net income of 2,435 yuan (US$325), up 17.2 percent
year-on-year.
The railway has linked the southwestern China region, once so
exotic even to the Chinese, ever so closely with the rest of the
country. It has carried 1.5 million passengers into Tibet, nearly
half of the total tourist arrivals over the past year.
Yet the railway has prompted worries from environmental groups
including WWF (World Wildlife Fund) over the fragile ecosystems on
the plateau.
"Once damaged, it is extremely difficult to reverse. Integrating
the needs of local development with conserving Tibet's biodiversity
is in need of urgent attention,"says Dawa Tsering, head of WWF
China's Program Office in Lhasa.
Though an assessment by environmental scientists in June
indicated no apparent damage to the environment along the route, an
official with China's top environmental protection agency recently
frowned upon tins and plastic bags littered at several railway
stations.
In 2010, about 6 million tourists are expected to flood into
Lhasa, a city with 400,000 permanent residents. "Tourism will
create mountains of garbage and sewage, far beyond the city's waste
treatment capacities."
Lhasa allows its sewage water to flood into the Lhasa River. Its
only sewage treatment plant became operational in January 2007 to
treat sewage water discharged from the railway station and the
trains.
"The real test has only started," says Zhu Xingxiang, an
official in charge of environment evaluation at the State
Environmental Protection Administration.
(Xinhua News Agency October 4, 2007)