The Roof of the World: Tibet, Lhasa, and the Morning at Everest Base Camp

The railway from Beijing to Lhasa was completed in 2006 and represents an engineering achievement of genuine ambition: a line running for just over nineteen hundred kilometres, much of it across permafrost at altitudes above four thousand metres, requiring refrigerated pipes drilled into the ground beneath the rails to keep the permafrost stable, a solution to a problem that did not exist in railway construction before someone decided to build a train line across the Tibetan plateau. The Chinese government described the railway as a poverty relief project, connecting Tibet’s economy to the rest of China and enabling development. Tibetan activists described it as a colonisation infrastructure, a mechanism for moving Han Chinese settlers into Tibet at scale while extracting the plateau’s mineral resources more efficiently. Both descriptions are accurate in their own terms, which is often how it goes with large infrastructure projects whose political context is contested.

The train ascends during the second night and by the time most passengers are awake it has crossed the five-thousand-metre threshold. The carriages are pressurised to compensate for the altitude, oxygen fed through vents above the seats, but the pressurisation only goes so far. I woke somewhere around three in the morning with a headache of a quality I had not previously experienced, the kind that sits behind the eyes and radiates outward and does not respond to the suggestion that it should be less severe. I got off the top bunk, aimed for the toilet at the end of the carriage, and regained consciousness on the corridor floor some indeterminate time later, having passed out from the combination of altitude and the shock of standing up too quickly. I spent an hour with my arms looped through the window bars of the toilet cubicle, face pressed to the gap, breathing the thin cold air of the Tibetan plateau at four in the morning, which is an experience I can recommend only in the sense that surviving it produces a certain perspective.

Lhasa has three hundred thousand people and sits in a valley at thirty-seven hundred metres, twelve thousand feet in the measurement that the old expeditionary accounts used. The Potala Palace rises above the city in the way that really significant buildings rise above things, not just taller but different in kind, the white and red mass of it against the sky producing something that the word impressive does not begin to address. It was the winter palace of the Dalai Lama until 1959, when the fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India following the Chinese military suppression of the Tibetan uprising and established in Dharamsala the government in exile that continues to operate today.

China has administered Tibet since 1950, when the People’s Liberation Army crossed the border and the seventeen-point agreement formalising the relationship was signed under conditions that Tibetan accounts describe as coercion and Chinese accounts describe as voluntary unification. The Dalai Lama’s flight in 1959 followed an uprising against Chinese rule that was suppressed with significant casualties, the exact number remaining disputed. In the years of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, an estimated six thousand Tibetan monasteries and temples were destroyed, some by Red Guards and some by Tibetan participants in the broader revolutionary programme that Mao’s government had set in motion. Many were subsequently rebuilt, and in Lhasa they stand again, busy with monks and pilgrims and tourists in roughly equal measure.

The soldiers in Lhasa patrol in groups of four. They appear at intervals along the main streets and on the rooftops of buildings overlooking the Barkhor, the circular pilgrim circuit around the Jokhang Temple, and they watch. They are not aggressive and they are not invisible. They are simply present, a reminder that the administration of this city is not a matter of local self-determination but of central government policy exercised from Beijing, and that the policy is implemented in a way that leaves no ambiguity about where the authority sits.

From Lhasa we drove south and west for several days, crossing passes at five thousand metres with turquoise glacial lakes on both sides of the road, stopping in Gyantse, where in 1904 a British expedition under Francis Younghusband massacred several hundred Tibetan soldiers and militia armed primarily with swords and ancient muskets, having fired on the British column first, an incident that produced a brief diplomatic crisis and a book of confident Victorian self-justification. The fort at Gyantse still stands above the town. The events of 1904 are not on the tourist information board.

Base camp, when we reached the outer perimeter, was closed to the central area because an American climber had raised a Tibetan flag the previous day. The Chinese authorities had responded by restricting access as a reminder that the mountain, like everything else at this altitude, operates under their jurisdiction. We stood at the outer checkpoint with Everest about three kilometres away, which is close enough to see the plume of cloud and ice crystals that forms at the summit when the jet stream crosses it, and Jonas produced Cuban cigars and Chris produced Scotch whiskey and Amanda and Ally and Jan and Silvina and Maria and Drujel our guide gathered in the cold and we had a drink to being there.

There is a feeling, looking at a mountain you have seen in photographs for your entire life, that is different from what photographs produce. The photographs are accurate about the shape. They are not accurate about the presence. Everest is not more impressive than its photographs; it is present in a different way from its photographs, existing in three dimensions in the actual world rather than as a flat image of itself, and the difference between the two is the difference between knowing something and being in the same place as it. I find I cannot describe this more precisely than that. Some things require you to go.