Excerpts

The sky was clear, cloudless blue, the sun piercing bright, and one could see far, far across the open Tibetan plain.

Dingri Maidan lay before me.

A biting wind erased any warmth that the seamless space above us may have promised. Arriving on the Dingri plain, I was eager to finally witness its daily life—what was left of it under Chinese rule. I would be pleasantly surprised, but I did not know what to expect on this first encounter.

I pulled in my chin and turned my face away from the sandy blast, squinting tightly to discern the terrain ahead of me.

I had written much about Dingri’s people but only from a distance. Fifteen years earlier I lived with Dingri refugees in Nepal. I expected the place they fled had since become a desolate scene. Now I would find out if anything endured decades of Chinese rule and the inclement environment.

On the surface the expanse around me certainly appeared desolate. This was before I stopped and conversed with its inhabitants, wandered through their humble settlements and closely examined craggy recesses of the landscape. On my second visit, in the early summer when streams flowed at our feet and green barley sprouted behind stone walls and turned the gritty earth green, I would discover just how much survived.

The slow revelation of the layers of a place’s life is what so enchants an anthropologist or biologist and helps us endure the discomforts that may attend our painstaking and sometimes-lonely work. That measured disclosure is the science of research too.

My first visit to Dingri was in early winter 1986. The entire valley appeared inhospitable. Houses, if one could distinguish them at all, were low stone dwellings huddling in a cluster on the rock-strewn plain, colorless, utterly bare of trees. I asked myself: “How do people sustain a culture here let alone eke out a living, raise sheep and horses, make themselves warm and clean, support priests and monasteries, dance and weave, and compose stories and poems, and nurse any children who survive beyond infancy only to toil similarly for yet another generation?”

I found the barrenness of the land all around me overwhelming then. If I had not so intimately studied the early 20th century history of this place from knowing its refugees in Nepal (recorded in the first edition of this book) I would not have been inclined to stop here at all.

Every season many hundreds of climbers and tourists pass through Dingri en route to the alluring North Everest (Jomolungma) base camp.

Yet so severe is the atmosphere that few pause to investigate life within it. They likely think the place is completely uninhabited. To them, little appears worth their attention except for that insensate rock and ice tower beyond. Surely these passersby conclude that any human form they may glimpse on the stony horizon must also be en route to somewhere else.

Over the course of three visits between 1986 and 1988, I would engage this place in various seasons. Week by week, moving into the terrain, I begin to notice sparse yet living flora clinging to the stony soil, pushing up through a rock crack: thick red lichens, a solitary yellow flower emerging from the fissures of a boulder, barbed green tips of submerged roots which will be harvested from the wild, first by sheep, then by children. I peer over a row of rocks piled to make a crude wall. (How is it they do not collapse in the relentless Tibetan wind?) Tenuous ‘though they appear they shelter modest fields of barley, tender and confidently green.