Drivers who frequent the one major road in the little-visited
western part of the Tibet Autonomous Region all know, or at least
have heard of, one man, and when they see him walking, they stop
and ask if he wants a lift.
Why? They say if you have to spend two weeks driving somewhere,
Tang Rongyao, 36, is the best person to talk with. He tells the
drivers stories about the sparsely scattered houses on the plateau
in which he spent his nights and his latest findings of the "lost
kingdom." In return, the drivers point out what they believe to be
clues to the kingdom's existence along the way.
Tang, who was previously a business journalist at a newspaper in
Yinchuan, capital of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, prefers to be
known as a "private archaeologist." He has put all his spare time
and life savings for the past six years into researching the
remaining population of the Xixia Kingdom (Western Xia,
1038-1227).
The kingdom, established by the Dangxiang clan (Tanguts) in the
northwestern part of the country, had territory overlapping today's
Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, as well as parts of neighbouring Gansu and Shaanxi provinces and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. After it was
crushed by the army of Genghis Khan, the kingdom left behind little
more than a few pyramids in desolate land and hieroglyphic
writings, of which no one was able to read one word until the past
century.
But Tang believes the ancient clan still has its modern
descendants. In his recent book titled "Fading Away of a Kingdom,"
he proposed that the Sherpas in the Himalayas, who earned fame as
guides to the world's highest peaks, are descendants of the Western
Xia.
He reached the conclusion after travelling throughout the 12
Chinese provinces and regions that were part of the kingdom. It
wasn't until 2004, when he arrived at tiny Sherpa communities at
the foot of the Himalayas on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau after 30
days of walking and taking lifts, that he thought himself to be on
the verge of a real discovery. He went back twice afterwards to
confirm his suspicions.
The Sherpas, with whom he stayed for two months, shared with him
their ancient art and architecture and their customs and legends.
In a lamasery in one of their villages, a 97-year-old Living Buddha
recounted stories of their ancestors who migrated, in an arduous
trip across snow-capped mountains and no-man's lands, from their
riverside cities in the east to the depths of the Himalayas.
"Our ancestors used to have a kingdom," the Buddha told Tang,
"and they battled all the way from there to this peaceful place
after they lost it."
Exhilarated at his discovery, Tang was also convinced that
people would hardly believe him. "I don't care if the established
historians nod their heads or not," he said. "Most historians have
never traveled as extensively as I did."
But the historians were more open-minded than he thought. Chen
Gaohua, the country's foremost historian who is an academician at
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "There is a
possibility this private archaeologist is correct, but he needs
much more evidence to support his theory."
In their escape, the surviving Tanguts could have chosen to go
southwest and joined the Tibetans, with whom they share a religion
and have similar ethnic origins. In extreme conditions, they could
have crossed the plateau from the north to the south and settled in
the Himalayas, said Chen, who added that he was merely speculating
on the Tanguts' tragic migration.
It was this migration of the kingdom's survivors, who fought and
died or went farther from their homeland, that attracted Tang's
interest most and finally got him to start his private research. As
a result, he has been left without money and remained single when
his peers all have children.
"I was lured by the mystified tragedy of the kingdom and its
people," he said. "In the back of my mind, I have always wanted it
to have a happy ending, like its descendants' living in a
Shangri-la."
Before, Tang was leading a typical life of an upwardly mobile
professional and had little interest in historical research or
Tanguts until he found a job in Yinchuan, Ningxia's capital, in
2000 and visited the pyramids containing the Tanguts' kings' tombs
in the city suburbs one weekend.
Tang, who loves reading and writing poems, cried when he saw the
nine magnificent pyramids standing in the vast plain in the sunset,
with the Helan Mountains in the background and the Yellow River
roaring by.
Returning downtown, he looked for books about the Xixia Kingdom
at libraries. He was so keen on the topic that he read almost all
the important Chinese-language research papers about it in the
ensuing two years.
But after reading, Tang felt unsatisfied. "Many historians are
simply copying one another," he said. "I will do what they failed
to travel."
He began to follow possible migration routes of the founders of
Xixia and those of the kingdom's survivors. Actually, he traveled
so much that his newspaper, the Yinchuan Evening News, shifted his
beat of coverage from finance to archaeology. His boss agreed to
let Tang fax his stories to the editorial office, but he has to pay
his own travel expenses most of the time.
Tang knows how to save money. His friend, an oil tanker driver
who often goes between Yinchuan and Lhasa, introduced him to other
drivers, and in the end Tang became friends with more than 100
drivers of all kinds of trucks traveling on the Qinghai-Tibet
Plateau.
During his trips, he met a Sherpa from time to time and began to
suspect that the Sherpas, whose origin remains unknown, are
actually descendants of the Tanguts. When he finally decided to
visit the Sherpa villages at the beginning of 2004, he had to wait
four months before two of his driver friends called him from Gansu
in April.
They said they were going to drive an oil tanker to Xigaze,
Tibet. Upon receiving the call, Tang took a bus to Gansu and walked
10 kilometres to the small village where the drivers lived. He
stayed at their home for three weeks before they started.
It took 10 days to drive from Lanzhou, Gansu's capital, to
Xigaze. From there Tang walked and hitchhiked for 20 days until he
reached the Sherpa villages of Lixin and Xuebugang in the
Himalayas, which are northwest of Zham Town, on the border between
China and Nepal.
In several lamaseries along the way, Tang found frescoes
portraying people holding peonies. Peonies, growing in the Yellow
River Valley, were the favorite flower of the Tanguts. They
appeared in many relics of the Xixia Kingdom, ranging from
paintings and frescoes to pottery and gold objects.
Following what he called "the peony route," Tang became more and
more curious about the Sherpas. The Sherpas he met on the way told
him that the word "Sherpa" means "people from the east," and that
their ancestors migrated to Tibet centuries ago from an unknown
place.
He finally made his way to Lixin, a Sherpa village about 4,000
metres above sea level. The Sherpas call it Yitulu, meaning "where
white flowers blossom."
Stepping into the lamasery at the village, Tang said he gasped.
There it was, at the entrance of the lamasery a giant statue of the
"Sensual Buddha," showing a goddess mounting Buddha in their
"double meditation." The two wore their hair and clothes in the
Tanguts' style.
"It can be understood that procreation became the top priority
of the Tanguts after they had traveled such a long and arduous way
to get there," Tang surmised.
Beside the "Sensual Buddha" stood the statue of a man who was
also dressed in the Tanguts' style, at least in the eyes of Tang,
similar to the murals found from the Xixia ruins in Yinchuan.
Holding a volume of scriptures in his right hand, he had a sad,
concerned look.
The 97-year-old Living Buddha at the lamasery, whose name is
Baima, told Tang that even he didn't know what was special about
the statues. "They were handed down by our ancestors," he said,
"and we worship them as our ancestors did."
In another conversation, Tang said Baima told him: "Our
ancestors said that we used to have a kingdom at some place in the
north, which was very far away. On the way from escaping from
fierce enemies, they founded the city of Qamdo (Changdu, east of
Lhasa), which means 'where we battled' in our language."
In Tang's eyes, the Sherpas' adoration of the white colour,
their marital customs and festivals all hinted at their origin in
the Xixia Kingdom. Even their practice of concealing their family
names added to his evidence.
"We Sherpas memorize our family names," said Pasang Norbu, a
veterinarian in Zham. "We will never use them, but we tell them to
the girls we prepare to marry so that the husband and wife will not
come from the same large family."
To decipher the mystery, Chen suggested that the easiest way is
to compare DNA samples in the remains of ancient Tanguts and those
in the modern Sherpas.
But Tang said he was not ready to relay the suggestion. He would
prefer the Sherpas live in peace in the remote villages where trees
of red roses grow taller than people and incredible snow-capped
mountains are reflected in sheltered lakes.
(China Daily September 9, 2006)
