Journey to the End of the Empire: On the Road in Eastern Tibet

By Scott Ezell

On foot, by rattling truck and local bus, by jeep and motorcycle, American poet and musician Scott Ezell explores the Tibetan borderlands. Plotted with a line drawn on a map in Hong Kong, the journey starts in Dali, in the foothills of the Himalaya in southwestern China. The road extends north a thousand miles through towns and villages along th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camphor Press Ltd
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788692588

Scott Ezell

Scott Ezell is an American poet, musician, and multi-genre artist with a background in Asia and Indigenous peoples. He was based primarily in Taiwan from 1992 to 2004, and traveled widely in China, India, Japan, and elsewhere during this time. Since 2009 he has worked on a poetry and photography project documenting the effects of centralized state power, civil conflict, and destructive resource extraction on marginalized landscapes and communities in the China-Southeast Asia border zone. He is the author of A Far Corner, a narrative nonfiction account of three years he lived and worked with an Indigenous artist community on the Pacific Coast of Taiwan. He has released a dozen albums of original folk, ambient, and experimental music, and published poetry books including Petroglyph Americana, Carbon Rings, Swallowed by Machines, Shell Games & Ponzi Schemes, and The Front Lines of the War, which was also produced as a sound art and spoken word album. Scott Ezell is based in Chiapas, Mexico.

Book preview

Author’s Note

In September 2004 I set out on a journey along the edge of Tibet. Starting from the foothills of the Himalayas in southwest China, I traveled north into further, higher landscapes by local bus, hitchhiking, and a motorcycle I bought along the way. I speak Mandarin, which allowed me to communicate all down the road with villagers, Buddhist lamas, nomads with chunks of bone braided in their hair, and police at security checkpoints. After six weeks and 1,200 miles, I reached Kekexili, a wilderness reserve 17,000 feet above sea level. From there I crossed the Kunlun Mountains and descended to Golmud, a city at the crossroads of Tibet, China proper, and Xinjiang. That journey is the basis for the following narrative.

Over the next fifteen years I returned a dozen times to Tibet and southwest China. I witnessed transformations so shocking that I felt I was taking blows to my own bones. Massive dam systems killed rivers and displaced communities, mountains were raked apart to provide gravel for construction projects, and the region was increasingly militarized and surveilled as China tilted toward its grim police state superpower status.

Having observed these trends, it was not enough to write about Tibet merely as a fascinating landscape and culture. I began to combine the changes I witnessed with the structure of my original travels, making it a journey through time as well as through physical geographies. What follows, then, is a narrative that evokes the majesty of Tibetan landscapes, the unique dignity of the Tibetan people, and the sensory extremity of navigating almost pre-industrial communities at the edge of the map, while also encompassing the erosion of cultures and ecosystems.

Today China holds one million Uyghurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang, democratic freedoms have been smashed in Hong Kong, human rights lawyers are held in black jails, and the government openly surveils its population. But the systematic oppressions of empire are not unique to China. The seizure of land and genocide against indigenous peoples in the United States and elsewhere, the legacy of slavery and the present-day wage-slavery of the global economy, and the colonization of Tibet as a means of territorial expansion and resource extraction — these are all variations of centralized authority exerting power over minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised peoples.

This narrative journey to the end of the empire serves as a microcosm in which the terms of contemporary life stand in stark relief against the vast, raw landscapes of Tibet. Perhaps by better understanding the dynamics between centers and margins, and between authority and autonomy, we can begin to reconceive a sustainable, peaceful, and egalitarian residence on earth.

July 2021

Chiapas, Mexico

Part I: Obelisks

1

Dali, the Doorstep of Tibet

In Dali, in the southwest corner of the empire, I watched a man butcher a pig carcass on the street. Thick dead skin opened pink and gray to bones and flesh, a cubism of meat splayed out on an old army tarp. The man paused to light a cigarette, and blood stained the paper where he held it between his lips. It was September — autumn light slanted in thin and golden, like mineral oil infused with streaming photons. Water flowed down a square gutter cut in the marble flagstones on its way to Lake Erhai on the valley floor. Green mountains rose in all directions, just-spawned dinosaurs glistening in the sun. To the north, rivers and ravines spilled down like apron strings from the Tibetan Plateau. The man slit the pig open from the groin to the dead gray snout. He pulled out the viscera muck and threw it in the channel of water, washed the shit from the intestines, and rolled them up to pack away. He cut off the legs and carved out slabs of meat, stuffed them into baskets panniered to a dented motorcycle, then hacked off the head and strapped it to the back fender. The man washed off his tarp and lashed it to a basket, lit a new cigarette, and drove away in a cloud of blue exhaust.

Sucks to be a pig, someone next to me said in Mandarin. I turned and saw Liu, a skinny youth with a wispy goatee and an intelligent, skeptical look in his eyes whom I’d met a couple of days before. He was one of the local bohemians who had drifted to Dali from a more hectic urban reality elsewhere in the empire, and now spent his days drifting up and down the stone streets between cafés and cheap noodle shops and groups of friends.

Interesting place to do your butchering, I said.

Hey, man, Liu said, it’s just blood and violence — nothing new. It’s better to have it out here where we can see it, instead of hidden away in some slaughterhouse or politburo meeting.

I had no argument for that. As I traveled higher and further north along the edge of Tibet it became harder to separate a plate of meat from the animal it came from. Kiss the bloody lips of the abyss, say a prayer of thanks it’s not your turn for the knife, and continue on. Liu took a puff of the spliff that slanted perpetually from the corner of his mouth and handed it to me.

Don’t the cops give you any grief over smoking? I asked.

Nah, they don’t care, how could they? Ganja grows wild all around here. They smoke it themselves if they know what’s good for them.

What about Mao?

Chairman fucking Mao? Gimme a break, man. He wouldn’t have known a good weed crop if it bit him on his red communist pecker.

I sucked in the burning glow. The smoke scratched my lungs and emerged in gray-white clouds that drifted up into the blue. The machines were humming and groaning somewhere, but for now they were far from me.

Dali was the ancient capital of Nanzhao, an independent kingdom of the Tibeto-Burman Yi people (pronounced Ee) until Kublai Khan and his Mongol horsemen galloped down the mountains to seize it for the empire in 1253. The walled old town, with flowers growing from mossy roof tiles, was the flip side of the empire, the other side of the looking glass — not the tanks and marching boots of the Tiananmen massacre, not the factories producing mountains of plastic and electronic goods, but a far corner too remote to show up on anyone’s radar, a walled town set in a shatter zone where minority peoples had been pushed up into the folds of mountains for centuries. It was a place where you could step off the map into a saner, slower rhythm, jump off the taxman’s grid while the rest of the world went faster and faster, speeding toward the lips of the abyss.

When I came rattling on old trains across the lower belly of the empire from Hong Kong, a sign in every station said No Weapons Allowed, though police in stormtrooper boots walked up and down the platforms waving automatic weapons before themselves like wands. But here at six thousand feet, on the downslope of the Tibetan Plateau, everything was tranquil and calm, burnished with pale sunlight as if the old marble walls were illuminated from within.

I planned to travel north along the edge of Tibet as far and high as I could go, aiming for Kekexili, an extremity of wild earth three miles above sea level. But after a few days in Dali, I began to wonder if I really wanted to keep moving. Liu took his spliff back and grinned as the motorcycle exhaust dispersed into the cool clear air.

Don’t worry, man, the blood will wash away, Liu said. The annals of the former pig were already fading from where they were written across the flagstones. We left them behind and walked down Renmin Lu, People’s Street, the central artery of town. An old tractor came puttering down the road, farting out black exhaust, so primitive it didn’t even have a hood over the engine — just a noisy bristle of gears and cogs and belts set on the chassis. We strolled along behind it. The blue-veined marble of the streets and buildings was cracked and crooked, translucent in sunlight yawning from the sky. Grasses and flowers grew in the seams of tile roofs. Women from the Yi tribe, wearing sequined green jumpsuits, sat on curbs, offering baskets of strawberries and walnuts from their mountain villages, speaking their own language, squinting at passersby like we were usurpers. A man missing a front tooth and wearing an indigo Mao jacket sold bananas from a cart as he smoked a pipe, his hair dyed black with shoe polish. I had bought a bunch from him the day before. He held out a couple singles to me and said, Free! Liu and I ate them as we passed dreadlocked musicians strutting up and down the street in leather jackets and aviator shades. Dali was the dropout destination for the underground art scene in the capital when you wanted to get out of the metropolis, out of the gray fog and pollution grime that encloaked it most of the year. Renmin Lu started from the flank of the Cang Mountains to the west, came down and crossed the north–south highway, and ran through town and down to Lake Erhai. It was lined with hipster cafés, hippie bars, and cheap food stalls, with a mythic quality of timelessness, like La Rambla in Barcelona, which Lorca said he wished would continue on forever. Life was luminous and ramshackle here in this town left to its own devices at the edge of the empire, not yet improved, slicked up, and modernized to death.

We passed a police precinct, a whitewashed concrete pillbox with a uniformed officer sitting in front and sipping tea from a glass tumbler. But on the side of the building, another cop was overseeing a half-dozen men scrubbing spray-painted graffiti from the wall with wire brushes. The men were ragged and gaunt, chained with shackles on their legs, their jaws speckled with whiskers. The graffiti was abraded and half-erased, but I could still make out some of the words. Qingxie, xiejiao, ni: canted, beveled, you. I knew the meanings, but it was a strange juxtaposition, especially on a police station wall.

What’s wrong, what are you looking at? Liu asked.

Those words, who wrote them here?

"I don’t know, but they’ve been showing up here and there around town. Someone keeps writing them, and the police keep erasing them. Qingxie ni, xiejiao ni. You see the cop out front there? That’s what they do: just sit in the sun half-asleep, drinking their tea. Things are loose enough that someone can slip in and paint a few words on the wall during the night. But as soon as they discover it, they send a crew out to remove them."

I turned the words around in my mind. Cant you, bevel you. They’re going to cant and bevel you. They’re going to cant and bevel you. I stared at the characters as they were scoured away, the men rasping dully with their brushes. Fuck the Police or Free Tibet I could understand; they were slogans of blunt dissent, their message was compact and unambiguous. But They’re going to cant and bevel you? It was subversive at a whole different level. The phrase was abstruse and oblique but had a mysterious resonance. I turned it over in my mind. Cant you, bevel you. Shave you down, file you into angles, cut at your sense of self until you fit with the machinery, the levers and gears of the system.

The work crew scraped at the wall, dipping their brushes in buckets of kerosene. Soon the spray-painted pigments would be washed away, to drain with the blood of the butchered pig on down to Lake Erhai, which reclined like liquefied shale on the floor of the valley in the distance.

Liu elbowed me in the ribs. Come on, man, don’t stare at the cops. That’s just asking for trouble. Let’s head over to my place.

Who are those guys in leg irons? They look pretty grim, I asked as we continued walking.

Political prisoners. They make them do all the shit work, to show the people what happens to an enemy of the state. Usually they’re Tibetans or Uyghurs. Or poets.

A young woman walking toward us called out hello to Liu. She had a salamander look to her eyes and lips, as if she might wriggle away any moment, flicker her tongue or camouflage herself against a tree. She wore short cutoff jeans, flip-flops, and an indigo blouse. The lines of her body were smooth and silken against the pale marble and slanting light, and her black hair was pulled into a topknot with a chopstick stuck through to hold it together. I forgot about the graffiti and cursed myself for not being able to think of a single charming thing to say to a pretty girl — but she turned to me and said, Hey, what’s your name? Ah. I’d forgotten how simple the dance could be. Her name was Su.

She was holding a Mandarin edition of Tropic of Cancer, her finger marking a page as if she’d just looked up mid-sentence. How’s the book? I asked her.

She smiled as if the answer were self-evident. They’ve translated all of Henry Miller’s books, she said. I’ve read every one.

Thank god the Cultural Revolution was over and the sexual revolution had begun.

We walked up the street to Liu’s place. We stepped through a doorway with Café hand-painted on the door. It was a tiny space crowded with half-broken chairs and banged-up lacquer tables flecked with gold, shabby and radiant like everything here seemed to be. Liu’s girlfriend, An, stood at a counter, boiling water on a hotplate. She had round features like a Russian doll that holds concentric versions of itself.

You want some coffee? she asked me.

Only about as much as I want to take my next breath.

She laughed jovially. The water is boiling right now. We’ve got some good beans. A friend of ours grew them himself.

Where’d you get all this antique furniture? I asked.

We get it off the street, An said. People don’t want this old stuff anymore. They just throw it away, but we like it. Otherwise, what are we going to do, go to Ikea? She laughed again, and a shelf of sun fell across her eyes and lips as she poured out a cup of coffee for me.

These underground youths were part of an alternative culture that didn’t identify with the status quo, so just stepped aside to let the machinery lumber by without them. I felt right at home. They played folk music and cooked communal meals and didn’t worry about what tomorrow held, as if the future had been preempted by power structures and ideologies, old men in government buildings far away who were mummified with allegiances and loyalties and viewed the world through cracked prisms.

Come on outside. Lao Chen is here, Liu said. I took my coffee and we ducked out the back door to a walled courtyard. A couple of banana trees lifted ragged fronds to the sky; red and orange flowers cascaded next to an iron gate. Beneath a lychee tree a few young men and women sat talking around a table while a shag-headed kid played a guitar.

Hey, this is Lao Chen, Liu said. He’s always out with the hill tribes playing music. He records their songs and comes back with crazy instruments.

Lao Chen wore heavy boots, army pants with pockets everywhere, and a stained white T-shirt. He had a thick beard, an anomaly among Chinese men, who usually have smooth cheeks and at most a wispy chin beard. His eyes crinkled in a smile even before there was anything to laugh at.

You like hill tribe music, eh? I said to Lao Chen. I had traveled through Hmong and Akha regions of Laos, and had made some recordings of their music. I also thought back to the life I’d recently left behind, an island abode with guitars and recording machines, where I’d sit outside and play at the edge of the forest. At night my neighbor Graham would shout from down the road, telling me either to shut up or come over for a beer, depending on his mood.

Oh yeah, I’m always up in the mountains, Lao Chen said. Each village has its own instruments and songs — every mountain is its own world. They’ve never heard of Michael Jackson, that’s for sure, and they don’t know how to sing happy fuckin’ birthday.

He leaned back and let loose a bellow of laughter, as if not knowing how to sing Happy Birthday was the greatest boon one could hope for in this life.

The guitar player grinned and handed me the instrument. It was an old beater missing the G-string, perfect to bang away at here among the marble walls and pretty girls and banana flowers. My fingertips had already gone soft; the calluses of another time and place had disappeared, and the wire strings bit into my skin. An brought out a porcelain flask and poured plum wine into tea cups. I took a sip, the sour sweetness spread from my tongue all through my mind. Lao Chen took a bamboo Jew’s harp from an embroidered sheath hanging around his neck and twanged along with me as I strummed. I looked up past the old tile roofs to the mountain peak way up at thirteen thousand feet. We were halfway in elevation between the mountaintop and the sea. I felt like I had just been popped out of a Jell-O mold, glistening and quivering in the sun. I crooned out a folk song I’d written in Tiananmen Square a few years before:

Gray flowers in the morning

gray flowers beneath the wheels of city streets

gray flowers raining from the sky

gray flowers filling up my mind

What vehicles drive here

what fuel does their locomotion burn

we dig the earth for combustion engine dreams but only find

gray flowers, our buried blood and bones

Busy days along the boulevard

dollars stab like knives of ideology

slick concrete carousels of riches

fertilized by gray flowers of human poverty

Tanks machine guns steel footsteps

beat popcorn smiles into the world of TV

where have all our children gone

they’re gray flowers, petals fallen from the sun

Gray flowers in the evening

gray flowers beneath the wheels of spinning stars

gray flowers straining toward the sky

gray flowers are all that’s left inside my mind

What song was that? Su asked when I finished.

Something I wrote in the capital a while ago.

But what’s it about? she asked, I don’t understand English.

Well, buried bones lifting back up to the sun, I guess. I didn’t know what to say.

I had taken my guitar to Tiananmen Square one autumn day and stood there on the concrete acreage where I remembered watching footage of tanks driving on the streets in the wake of protests on June 4, 1989. Fifteen years after the massacre, I started strumming my guitar and the song emerged of its own accord, as if the ghost of Woody Guthrie was whispering in my ear. Platoons of Liberation Army soldiers marched past me, uniforms crisp and creased, assault rifles held at identical angles at their hips, movements mechanical and precise, all the joints articulated in synchronicity. But local people wandered around looking harrowed and crumpled, as if their insides had been replaced with old straw. A pair of plainclothes police stopped and asked what I was doing. Just playing my guitar, I said. Just trying to drive a stake in the heart of the vampire. I guess I seemed harmless enough, at least more harmless than the hassle of arresting an American, and they left me alone. When I was in the United States a few months after that, amid endless news of perpetual war, Gray Flowers didn’t seem any less relevant than it had on the grand pacified stage of Tiananmen.

Lao Chen clapped his hands and said, Tell you what, man, let’s get together tonight and have a jam. We can meet up at A-lian’s bar, Sun Eyeland. It’s just up the street on Renmin Lu. You’re not busy, are you?

I’m free for the rest of my life, man.

We’ll get some friends together, have a coupla beers, get a groove going. I’ll bring my mouth organ.

What do you mean, a harmonica?

"No, it’s a hill tribe instrument made of bamboo and beeswax. They call it a khaen. Come on down, we’ll see if we can wake up a few stones."

I was flushed from sun and mountains and wine, from making new friends and from memories of old ones. I drained my glass and said that sounded good to me. But some stones are better off left sleeping.

* * *

At this point in life, my mid-thirties, I had lived in China and Taiwan on and off for a dozen years, the past three on Ha Mei, a tiny island in Hong Kong Bay, in the shipping lanes between the commercial ports and the open sea. I rented a cheap shack above a fishing village at the edge of a subtropical forest and did freelance gigs composing soundtracks for underground films that couldn’t afford to get original music from anyone else. This work stemmed from contacts I’d made when I had a minor music career in Taipei, and eventually led me to move to Ha Mei and set up a simple recording studio with tape machines and a couple of microphones. Between guitars, beer can percussion, insect sounds processed through tape manipulations, standing waves made by the wind blowing through the wire of my clothes line, and whatever else I could capture from my shack, I managed to produce music that fit the indie film genre well enough for directors to keep funneling their meager soundtrack budgets to me.

This island existence made more sense to me than anything else I’d known — living close to the bone, with pockets free of all but lint, but