A Grudge Runs Through It (Part One)

How the CIA, the Beastie Boys and One Road Helped Put the Last Autonomous Tibetan Culture at Risk of Extinction.

There are about a dozen of us on horseback, advancing on the city at a slow pace. It’s November and it’s cold. We had been staying in villages seemingly unaccustomed to hosting guests wanting more than a plate of warm dal bhat and a cold mattress. There had been a day or two of hot water showers only, our rooms were never heated, and requests for wi-fi passwords were too idiotic to even consider. We had left Jomsom (just 50 kilometers south, as the crow flies) ten days earlier, journeying through the most jaw-dropping landscapes anywhere in the world. 

The Road to Lo Manthang, as it is now.

Above us, wind-eroded ochre monoliths, hundreds of meters high, pierce an alice-blue sky, while below, the canyon formed by the Kali Gandaki River, remains almost always in sight. Tibetan prayer flags adorn every high place, adding welcome pops of color to the raw, desolate moonscape. Ancient chortens and centuries-old monasteries round out the view.

We would get our first glimpse of Lo Manthang, the ancient, walled capital and former medieval kingdom of Upper Mustang, Nepal from the unusually windless Lo La pass. At nearly 4,000 meters, the high-alpine desert was cold, calm and quiet, no sound save for the bells that found their way onto our horses’ bridles, reins and saddles when tacking up. It was easy to imagine ourselves as ancient traders, plying the primitive route set out before us, indistinguishable and unaltered for centuries. That there was nothing in the landscape that suggested modernity of any kind helped in this regard. No buildings in the distance, no far away lights from far away towns.  

This little daydream dissolved when a convoy of Nepalese Army personnel carriers shattered the stillness of the alpine desert. Their appearance has increased of late, we were told, for ‘security reasons’.

It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, almost unimaginably and in a very short time, the ground below us will be paved, full of honking diesel lorries and busloads of tourists, when the road connecting Lo Manthang to the rest of the world is complete. It was to be the first of many revelations about how quickly, and inevitably, change was coming to Lo Manthang, reminding us, with no exaggeration or flair for the dramatic, that we may be the very last people to see Lo Manthang in its unchanged state, the last to bear witness to the only authentic, indigenous Tibetan culture in existence.  

The Nepalese army, plying the nascent road for ‘security reasons’.

While the advent of thousands of more annual visitors will serve to unmoor the social, cultural and economic foundations that anchored Lo Manthang to its past, there is a more immediate, influential, and often overlooked history that will define its future. Upper Mustang was once a base for CIA funded rebels fighting a guerrilla war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for it’s occupation of Tibet. It is this history, and the subsequent acts of Tibetan resistance it continues to inspire, that might be responsible for having the most transformative and irreversible effect on Lo Manthang since history began being recorded here centuries ago.

You can be forgiven for never having heard of Lo Manthang, and more easily forgiven for never having traveled there. Lo Manthang has a long history of isolation and discouraging visitors from outside. For centuries, the Loba (as the villagers are called) were accustomed to closing their trademark gates each night to guard against nocturnal bandits, a tradition that wasn’t abandoned until just a few years ago. So protected was this city, and the region that surrounded it, foreigners were all but excluded from visiting the Upper Mustang Region and Lo Manthang until 1992, when Nepal began issuing travel permits to the region. But those days of isolation are coming to a close, and the gates that once guarded Lo Manthang will be impotent to stop the oncoming advance of a new kind of interloper,

Admittedly, a major draw for tourists was always, in the words of the present-day Dalai Lama, “to see what Tibet was like before the Chinese invasion.” Unmolested (and uncared for) centuries-old temples, monasteries, artwork and shrines populate the former Kingdom. Until just recently, the Loba carried on with life as they had for centuries, Lo Manthang is as Tibetan as it gets, and the culture continues to be defined by its symbiotic relationship with Tibetan Buddhism today. Centuries-old festivals, rituals and ceremonies still remain as indelible and important facets of life.

Oftentimes, tourist towns will have a welcome center, even if that’s just a tiny kiosk hiding a ruse to sell expeditions or tours. Lo Manthang plays it differently – you are instead offered an invocation that seems to have more in common with a promise made in a storm than an actual prayer: 

Please bless this world, protect it from becoming a piteous ruined place

Where all humans are troubled with new diseases arising from human actions

Having polluted the air we breathe and all the space around us

With heaps of stinging smoke and poison clouds from uncountable factories.

A different kind of welcome.

Aspirational at best, it has all the hallmarks of the pithy yet poignant distillations of modern society Tibetan Buddhism is known for. It alludes to the greed and selfishness that accompanies and stimulates most progress, as well as providing a realistic understanding of its genuine cost. Having kept the modern world at bay for centuries, it also suggests acquiescence to a wave of change that will soon drown them, and an underlying, well-earned anxiety about those changes.

What greeted us next was the not-so-gentle reminder of the adage that travel is about the journey and not the destination. The last bastion of Tibetan culture wasn’t the Shangri La we envisioned. At first blush, the city lacks any distinction. The unpopulated streets are nothing more than corridors of dust, the ancient buildings wind shorn and weathered. I remind myself that it’s November, and most villagers have already decamped for Kathmandu or warmer climes for the winter. Streets the size of alleys disappear at right angles, forming long, thin labyrinthine and disorienting corridors that eventually spit out to the main square, an uncharacteristically bright affair, decorated with even more of the ubiquitous prayer flags we had been following for days.   

It would be easy to dismiss this ancient, lackluster and nondescript village, to downgrade it to just another hardscrabble town, with a local population eking out a subsistence-level existence. A remote and unremarkable whistle-stop tethered to the roof of the world. Nothing, I would learn, could be further from the truth.

Here, in this tiny, isolated and remote village, a movement was born. Lo Manthang is responsible for forever tarnishing China’s reputation with human rights atrocities - years before Tiananmen Square, a mark that has marred China’s international credibility for decades. Astonishing, also, to imagine that without the Loba, the worldwide popularity of the Dalai Lama, now a household name, might have gone unrealized, the Nobel Committee might never had known to consider him for the Peace Prize. The Beastie Boys, Bjork, U2 and a host of celebrities would never have coalesced around a mission to ‘Free Tibet.’ Because it was here that a legacy of resistance was born, fueled by a well-funded CIA program and nurtured for a decade.

It is also terrifying, for none of this has been lost on the Chinese.

The freshly-painted, spruced-up entrance to Lo Manthang.

A Rich History

Well inside of Mustang, and close to its capital, Chungsi Cave holds a special place in the evolution of Tibetan Buddhism. Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche), known to many adherents of the faith as ‘the second Buddha’, posted up inside this dark cave, occasionally lit by the flicker of oil lamps, for four years in silent meditation before establishing the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet. There, Padmasambhava would introduce Tantric Buddhism, a combination of mantras, meditation and ritual that distinguishes Tibetan Buddhism and is reflected in its practice today. It is safe to say that without Guru Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhism, as we know it, would not exist. It’s no coincidence, then, that Lo is recognized as the touchstone of Tibetan Buddhism.

Centuries later, a medieval Tibet would recognize the important legacy Lo Manthang had in the development of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In the 14th century, Ame Pal, a devout Buddhist from Western Tibet, built the walled kingdom with his sons to protect it from local warlords and shifting political allegiances. This feat allowed lamas from Lo Manthang to study in Tibet, and cultivated an exchange between religious teachers and pilgrims traveling from their monasteries in Tibet, an activity that ceased only when the Chinese closed the border after the annexation and take over of Tibet by the PRC.  The fundamental drive to preserve and protect Lo Manthang from destructive outside influences is now experiencing a well-intentioned resurgence, albeit for reasons Ame Pal could never imagine.

China and Tibet - A Tortured History

The 14th Dalai Lama was just a child when he assumed the throne, and a teenager when the Western World went to war for the second time that century. Without a prescient understanding of world affairs, the fledgling leader was out of his depth and remained ill equipped to navigate the political landscape that was about to unfold.  The only advice he had at that time was a prophecy from his previous incarnation, ‘if we do not dare to protect our territory, our spiritual personalities including the [Dalai Lama] may be exterminated without trace, the property and authority of our… monks may be taken away. Moreover, our political system… will vanish without anything remaining.”

After World War 2, the Dalai Lama was reluctant to join the newly created United Nations. As he states, somewhat naively, in his autobiography, "It never occurred to us that our independence… needed any legal proof to the outside world.” Consequently, Tibet has never been a nation-state in the modern sense of the word, nor has any country ever recognized Tibet as such. The failure to join the UN would prove to be fatal for Tibet, allowing China to claim it as its own.

In 1949, after a protracted and bloody civil war, Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China, threatened Tibet with ‘liberation’ and China’s occupation of Tibet began when troops from its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invaded the country in 1950. In the aftermath, the PLA took full control of Lhasa and Tibet, instituting martial law and cleansing Lhasa of any ongoing resistance. The PRC would begin meting out punishments designed to challenge anyone’s faith in humanity - slaughtering tens of thousands of men, women and children, executing the Dalai Lama’s guards and destroying Lhasa’s major monasteries along with thousands of their inhabitants.

The story could have easily ended there, with China’s subsequent iron-grip on Tibet they could have controlled the narrative, and the world would be left with almost as little knowledge of Tibet as we had before the ousting of the Dalai Lama in 1959.

But a rebel movement formed alongside the porous international border, using the rugged terrain as cover and Lo as a safe haven, for the rag-tag group of resistance fighters known as the Khampa Guerrillas. Lo Manthang’s shared culture and border with Tibet made it the logical place to base the resistance. ­­­­­­

The otherworldly terrain of Upper Mustang, off limits to tourists until 1992.

A Once Covert History

No longer the domain of tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists, the CIA’s covert action to support Tibetan resistance fighters in its struggle to liberate itself from Mao’s army has recently come to light in a variety of well-substantiated articles and a 1998 documentary, The Shadow Circus.

While many of the details are sketchy, what we do know is that a 2,000 strong force of armed fighters, trained and funded by the CIA, used Upper Mustang, and, specifically, Lo Manthang, as a base for resistance from 1960 until 1974. So central was the role of Lo Manthang in the ongoing Tibetan rebellion that when the guerilla campaign was deemed inconsistent with the non-violent ethos promoted by the exiled Dalai Lama, the call for resistance fighters to lay down their arms was only respected when it came to Lo Manthang in a recorded speech by the Dalai Lama. The intransigent force based in Mustang needed to hear his voice before complying.

The common consensus now is that the CIA ‘used’ the Tibetan Resistance as a means to advance the goals of containing the ‘Red Threat’ at the expense of thousands of Tibetan lives, it had the unintended consequence of bringing to light Chinese atrocities and galvanizing international opposition to China’s violent campaign. If China had planned on drawing the iron curtain to shield its atrocities from the outside world, the resistance force prevented that outcome.

And word did get out. A quarter of a century later, calls for a ‘Free Tibet’ exploded into international consciousness, thanks to a chance meeting between Erin Potts and Adam Yauch of Beastie Boys fame, one night in Kathmandu, in 1992. Potts, an activist and scholar, would stay in contact with Yauch, peppering him with photos and information about demonstrations in Tibet and news from the activist community.

In 1996, the result of their collaboration was realized when the two successfully launched the first Tibetan Freedom Concert at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.  Over the span of five years, the concerts brought in millions of dollars and received international attention through online broadcasts and MTV. Exiled Tibetans formed an integral part of each performance, educating audiences between performances.

This tradition of resistance continues today, realized by an unending campaign for human rights in Tibet cultivated by the Tibetan Government in Exile and promoted tirelessly by the Dalai Lama. This resistance has guaranteed that China’s human rights legacy will be forever defined by the two ‘T’s — Tibet and Tiananmen Square. 

Which brings us to the road. (Read Part Two here).

Nothing’s sacred. Construction of the road begins.