Sorry for the long hiatus in posts; it’s become increasingly hard to get online in China these days, and I figured I’d just let the blog sit for the moment. Right at the moment typing out long-form diaries seems kind of exhausting, and I don’t know who’d actually read it anyway, so I’m just going to tap up some pictures from the first part of the trek here, and then type up some other things in more detail in later posts. These pictures are from my slow and generally very pleasant walk down from Tibet (starting at Labrang) to eventually arrive by many valleys, passes, and peoples and fortresses in the loess lowlands of Ningxia.

My friend Sengge Drashi overlooking the Sangke grasslands and the fortress there. The origins of the fortress, which guards the approach to Labrang from the south, is a mystery, and even the nomads who live there now do not know who built it.

Two views of the white cliffs of Ganjia (Ganjia Drakkar), and beneath it the Swastika Fortress (Tb. Yungdrung Kar, chn. 八角城 “The Eight-Point Fort”), near Sangchu. The origins of the Swastika Fortress (in actuality, it’s shaped like a cross) are unknown.

On the road to Rebgong, at Ri’ngon Village and Shongpongji.

The valley of Rebgong is famous for the Rongwo monastery and the artistic communities surrounding it, but it also contains a fascinating collection of fortresses. Pictured here is the ‘Iron Fort Mountain’ 铁城山, which overlooks the northern entrance into the Rebgong valley and the ‘Protecting the Peace Fort’ 保安城 beneath it.

These two forts and the third ‘New Fort’ 新城 nearby are a classic example of the development of Chinese frontier fortress building. I got a nice tour from local octogenarian and former history teacher Feng Yuzhi 冯育廌, who’s a spry, interesting dude, born in 1935, and from whom I’m getting all this information. The mountainside redoubt of the ‘Iron Fort’ was built in the Hongwu reign (1368-1398) of the early Ming, when the Mongols had just been defeated, control over the frontiers was still shaky, and fortress building had not yet been standardized. Now it’s just tumbled walls snaking up and down the hills, and looks far more Tibetan than Chinese. The second, larger fortress of Protecting the Peace City, was built in the Wanli reign (1572-1620) during the ceremoniously declining years of the Ming, and contains the whole pomp and apparatus of the Ming state: Massive square walls built on the plain, a Temple of the Martial Emperor, a Temple of Walls and Moats, and a large Yamen, all of which remain more or less intact. As Feng Yuzhi relates it, back in his day, this was Rebgong: Protecting the Peace was a large, colonial administrative town, while the present Rebgong City was just a small Tibetan village surrounding Rongwo monastery. The present population of the town, which is mostly Chinese, dates apparently to the period directly after the Taiping Rebellion, when soldiers where settled here from all over the empire.

In order to handle this inflow of population, in 1911 a third fortress was built some ways up the valley, known as the ‘New Fort Village’ 新城村. This third fortress is in some ways the most interesting of the three, since it’s one of very few surviving examples of late Qing (only one year before the start of the republic!) fortress building. It’s palpably evident that by this time the strict forms of high Ming fort-building had become atrophied, but this small community of Chinese settlers facing the Tibetan frontier still felt the almost ceremonial need to wall themselves up. The back walls of the New Fort are only about chest height, but each corner of the fort is marked by tall, narrow watchtowers from which flags can be hung, and from which you can see over the treetops to the much larger Protecting the Peace Fort down the valley. These watchtowers are quite unique; I’ve never seen anything like them in other Chinese forts.

Both the Protecting the Peace Fort and the New Fort have become victim to various rural improvement schemes lately. The Protecting the Peace Fort has had all its walls painted blue and been covered by curious faux ‘rural’ sculptures emblazened with the logo of the Agricultural Bank of China, while the New Fort during my visit was renovating itself to become a ‘model village’ 示范村, re-plastering all the houses, hanging up placards, paving its roads, etc.

Two doors on the street of the Nyantok Fortress, in the valley of Rebgong. This is one of the few existing Tibetan village fortresses, along with Gomar Fort nearby. The fort is a fascinating hybrid of China and Tibet – the ceremonial “door protecting” 守门 “golden lions” 金狮 are standard on Chinese doors, as are the vertically hung good-luck charms – except the charms are written in Tibetan. The barley stalks hung over the doorways are another feature particular to this area; I never quite got around to asking what they meant.

View from the main gate into the streets of Gomar Fortress. Gomar is the best preserved Tibetan fort in the Rebgong valley. The square, cardinally oriented fortress walls themselves are obviously modeled on the Chinese forts further down the valley, but the winding maze of narrow streets inside is purely Tibetan. It’s also interesting to note that while Nyantok and Gomar Fors are mostly Tibetan, the villages directly facing it across the valley, Upper and Lower Wutun 上下吾屯, are officially registered as Monguor (Tu), and possess their own creole language of Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongol, spoken by a few thousand people.

Here is the shaman Rinchen Jam on the streets of Nyantok Fort. Rinchen Jam is a thangka painter as a day job and a lhawa, or “god-man”, for special occasions. He was chosen to be possessed by the gods by a council of the elder lamas at Rongwo several years back, and while he is generally an extremely friendly guy, he’s reticent about this, because as he put it, “it’s not something he can exactly explain in a few words, and it’s something of a difficult issue.” He and his friend were nice enough to pick me of the street in Nyantok Fort and invite me to a shamanistic ceremony.

After the god has possessed Rinchen Jam, he begins to shake and froth and leads litter-bearers of the god’s image and its procession down to a spring to be washed, all the while banging a drum emblazened with chintamani jewels. The god itself is a fascinating example of the Sino-Tibetan eclecticism of the whole Rebgong Valley. The door plaque on the temple lists the diety therein, in Tibetan, as the “Incarnated Spirit Go’u mo (?) Mountain Elephant” (srid pa’i lha gnyan go’u mo ri lang). The Chinese next to it puts the inhabitant of the temple as the Spirit Erlang (二郎神), a popular Daoist diety. The Tibetans hold that the entire mountain behind Rebgong is in the shape of an auspicious elephant, and that this particular temple sits on a spur behind Nyantok Fort which represents the elephant’s trunk. But Tibetan ri-lang (“mountain elephant”) has been misinterpreted here into Chinese er-lang, the name of a god. The Tibetans are aware of the mis-translation but do not seem concerned. Rather, in good Chinese (but not at all Tibetan) folk-religion style, they are making alcohol offerings and processing the god out into the streets of the village to meet local officials.

At the end of the ceremony, the god is processed through the narrow streets of the villages surrounding Nyantok Fort and into houses of three village notables, including finally the headman of the old Mongol chiliarchy, and then rests there for a few days, after which more ceremonies commence, although I did not witness them.

Meanwhile the main part of something called the Leru Festival was taking place at Rongwo monastery in Rebgong town itself. I have to admit that I haven’t the faintest idea what the whole thing was about. Sometimes these festivals contain a displays of body piercing but I did not see any here.

Boy monk at Da’nduk monastery. There’s an interesting article about this place on Sam Van Schaik’s Early Tibet blog, in which he renders the name dan tig (in wylie romanization) and proceeds to derive it from a Sanskrit mountain named Dandaka, via Chinese Mount Tanta 檀特山. He’s deriving his argument from Dunhuang sources, which is beyond my abilities, but he doesn’t point out that there’s a widely repeated local etymology for the name. The locals write it (in wylie) da ‘dug, which has more or less the same pronunciation in Amdo dialect as dan tig, eg. something like “Da’ndukh”.

The story behind this, as told to me by locals and again by the abbot of the monastery, one Ngawang Soba, was that the famous monk-assassin Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje had used the remote cave-temples of Da’nduk as a hideout after shooting the evil last Tibetan emperor, Lang Darma, in 842. Every Tibetan knows this story: After disguising himself as a Bonpo priest and painting his white horse black with charcoal, Pelgyi Dorje rode out from the caves of Yerpa down to Lhasa, where he found Emperor Lang Darma having an outing on the Barkor. While the emperor was inspecting the stele text of the famous 822 Sino-Tibetan treaty, Pelgyi Dorje performed three obesiences. At the first kowtow he took a bow out of his sleeve. At the second he drew the bow back. At the third he shot Langdarma dead, and ended the Tibetan empire forever. He then urged his horse into the Kyichu River, washing his blackened horse white, turned his black bonpo robe inside out to reveal a white inside, and escaped.

This is the well-known part of the story, but then, according to the Tibetan folks in Xunhua, Pelgyi Dorje apparently rode hell-for-leather north across the Changtang and the passes of the Tanglha mountains to Da’nduk. (According to the Treasury of Lives article about this, Pelgyi Dorje had developed the ability to “pass freely through rocks,” and leap from mountain peak to mountain peak, which could have helped; it’s a long way from Lhasa to Xunhua.) Anyways, the Tibetan empire broke up in chaos; as Van Schaik points out in his second article about Da’nduk, the whole area of present Qinghai and Gansu, including the large cities, was at the time Tibetan territory, which were partitioned by warring generals after the collapse of the distant authority in Lhasa. Pelgyi Dorje holed himself up in the monastery at Da’nduk, which is located deep in steep and incredibly inaccessable canyons, in a place where one would generally never expect to find a temple. Unfortunately he was later discovered, and had to remove himself to a cave near the “Heavenly Lake” ch. 天池 on the other side of Xunhua county, where he spent the rest of his life, and achieved upon his death the rainbow body. Thus the monastery in the in the canyons came to be known as (wylie) da ‘duk, “Stay here now”, and the cave at the lake as yang ‘duk“, “stay again”, in memory of Pelgyi Dorje’s two escapes. The place later became a major center for the second propagation of Buddhism into Tibet, and is, I can affirm, an excellent place to hide.

Looking from East Terrace Village 东坪乡, down over the terraced loess hills towards the valley of the Huangshui River 湟水河 and beyond it, the mountains which border Hualong. I’d gone up here, originally, to look for a fortress on the mountain ridges bordering Tibetan country, called the Old Black Fort 黑古城, and eventually found it, or something that seemed to be it, lost in the fog and rain, covered in flowers and fields of corn, wheat, potatoes, queen anne’s lace, so eroded and overgrown I had to walk the mounded rain-soaked walls twice before I was sure of what I was standing on. There were temples in every village up there, high up on the mountain peaks, but the locals wouldn’t let me in to any; sometimes you could see men in blue robes and red sashes burning incense in there, smoking away on the hilltops. People kept big singing grasshoppers in wicker cages and saw their own lives as difficult. To the north the land, which was lush, terraced, Chinese country, broke even further into deep wooded valleys and granite crags, Tibetan gorges, eventually the forbidden ranges of the Qilian, but I wasn’t going that way. I spent an afternoon in the old walled Mongol tusi chieftaincy of Linked Forts 连城, of which there were originally apparently 24, but I never worked out where they all were, and there was no place to stay, so I kept walking, passing obos on the road side.

I liked this herder guy. Down in the valley was another fortress, the New Station Fort 新站城, and apparently other, older, larger ones, which are now gone.

In Han villages nobody ever wants to let me in. I had an argument about this at one point when it was raining. The shepherds wore medieval looking sheepskin raincoats that made them look like giant walking condoms and I pitched my tent in the middle of the town square in the pouring rain to protest. Eventually the villagers relented and let me stay in an abandoned house. Later on some folks from Lanzhou who were visiting relatives turned up, slightly embarrassed, and brought me a bowl of food for dinner.

The next morning I climbed up to a pass and you could look down over the huge plains of Tibetan Tianzhu, and in the distance, the Mountains of the Longevitous Deer 寿鹿山.

The Pine Mountain Fort rises massively out of the hovels of an impoverished and wind-swept Tibetan village sitting on the empty prairie. The fort, which is enormous, was built in 1599 after the area was seized back from Anda Khan’s Mongols, along with a 200 kilometer stretch of great wall across the mountains to the north to protect it. (I’m getting this information from this article.) The Chinese people living on the far side of the mountains still remember this process, and claim that one out of every ten camels passing by in the caravan trains that came through here would be required to carry a load of mud over the passes, and by this process the fortress of Pine Mountain was eventually constructed. The ruins of another fortress are located somewhat to the north-west, which seem to be of different design, and much older. There used to be military horse farms here, but these were all moved out to Shandan on the northern slopes of the Qilian in the ’50s, and now the area is impoverished, and beautiful. The two huge concentric enclosures of the Pine Mountain Fort have been fenced off by the lone, illiterate Tibetan family that lives inside the walls, and the space is now economized as a rather large sheep pen.

What else can I say about any of this? The villages on the northern slopes of the Longevitous Deer Mountains are poor, and lovely.

Some of the forts were tiny and built by local landowners, or some were built to “fight the Huihuis“, as the residents put it, or to store valuables; some have tunnels leading out from under the porous hillsides and some are massive, guarding the routes over the mountains; some have been turned into movie sets and had massive fake churches and Tang dynasty temples and other strange things built in them and some used to be the capital of the county until it was changed to other forts and then changed somewhere else entirely once the caravan trade died out. Some of them only remain in sections and some are perfectly complete; it all became so complicated that it would take me ages to tell it to you fort by fort and both of us would eventually lose track of where they all were and what they were for; sometimes nobody was there and there was no-one to ask or sometimes the locals disagreed or sometimes I wasn’t even sure if there was a fort at all, so go figure.

Grain winnowing was taking place in this time of year, late summer. Threshing floors always seemed poetical to me, ever since discovering that English “area” comes from a Latin word of that meaning, and that Dante uses it as a diminutive for the earth itself: “As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed, from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious…”

The Qi 祁 Family put me up for a night and that’s a picture of them in their house. Half of these villages had fortresses, little ones up on the hilltops half-destroyed, or sometimes the villages were destroyed and the fortresses were whole. One of the villages had a huge watchtower sticking out of it; I thought the place was abandoned but later on I met two women, and then I thought they must have been ghosts, but they seemed too cheerful and chatty amid the bleached white ruins, with matching blue headscarves. Another village was richer than the others because there was a scenic area in the mountains up above it and a shepherd there growled at me when he found me sleeping in the desert nearby, what was I doing, all the rich people went up there and bought local women for the night, you could buy anything if you were rich… In a third village a wind was howling and nobody was about, the sky clear and cold and wildly blue in the mountain storm… In another abandoned village there were old shrine houses surrounding the massive, pushed-in walls of the village fort, and inside you could see malevolent, mud-colored little Buddhas and headless images of what might have been Guanyin, she-who-hears-the-lamentations-of-the-masses, or maybe Mary, or anybody else, now wrapped in red votive clothes in the speckled sunlight shining through the smashed-in wood-slat and cornstalk roof… I didn’t eat for two days because nobody gave me anything and at the end of it all I got to Jingtai, and crossed the Yellow River on a ferry, and went down into the grayness of the loess country, and was out of Tibet at last.