Returning to Tibet

...A few days before my departure, tired of Lhasa, I team up with a young California woman from my guesthouse to go trekking...

...Not wanting either, I explain that I'm staying longer...

...The ancient buildings are sturdy and merely need to be renovated, Alexander argues, not destroyed...

...I try to talk to some nomad women in their long robes cinched at the waist by hand-woven, colorful aprons...

...Superficially, the new dwellings, although taller, mimic the old, right down to the traditional Tibetan flower decorations the Chinese have painted around the windows...

...Of course, the Fund is required to hire the men used by the City Construction Committee, who know only cement-block construction...

...We take a bus to a monastery, then walk into the mountains and over a pass, encountering pilgrims with whom we exchange chocolate bars for rockhard yak cheese...

...There are traces of color on a few walls from murals the Red Guards had sanded off...

...Personal effects and statues of the Buddhas are gone, as is the Indian silver shrine in the bedroom...

...I reassure my fellow visitors that there are many Tibetan apartment buildings in other parts of town...

...Enforcement of the ban led to a confrontation in the spring of 1996 at Ganden Monastery, outside Lhasa...

...All the accoutrements of his life—personal effects, gramophone and records, gold and copper statues of the Buddha and the Eight Medicine Buddhas—were laid out, as if he might return momentarily...

...They are soon called away by their men...

...I locate the dusty street that leads to Norbulingka, a park containing the summer palaces of several former Dalai Lamas and of the present one, who has been living in exile in India since China occupied Tibet in 1959...

...As I walk around Lhasa a few days later, visiting some of the many ruined or renovated monasteries and shrines, I realize that there are far fewer Dalai Lama pictures on display than there were the last time I visited, two years ago...

...Paved near the border, it later turns to dirt but remains heavily traveled...

...This, I learn, is the result of a ban the Chinese have placed on displaying his photograph...

...He and his Portuguese assistant, Pimpim, have overseen the renovation of two apartment houses this past year...

...Because cement is prone to crack, they rarely stay watertight beyond the second year...

...But the mural on the north wall still shows the Dalai Lama surrounded by his ministers and family (many of whom are now dead), and foreign dignitaries...

...The road into Tibet traverses barren mountains and dusty plains...

...Once I get settled I head for the Tibet Heritage Fund Project...

...they have not been seen or heard from since...

...After dumping my backpack at the cheaper of the two hotels in town, I head for the tourist office...

...At last we arrive at another monastery...

...By the end of the trip I am very grateful to the Muslims, none of whom smoke...

...They will supervise the restoration next year of the Ongdue Kangsar building, formerly the home of aristocrats— an example of traditional Tibetan architecture at its best...

...We halt frequently for work gangs...

...The roofs of the old houses are topped by layer upon layer of soil, called agar, that has been pounded down to a characteristic sheen...

...Leaks are not a problem...

...Five years ago I was charmed by the place, particularly by the apartments in the palace of the present Dalai Lama...

...Only the Potala, Tibet's Vatican, is protected by having been placed on the UNESCO World Heritage list...

...It is a sad excursion...

...When we get up, we are shown around the monastery, much of which was dynamited by the Red Guards...

...the Japanese and Tibetans seem to do so in their sleep...

...We enter Lhasa by one of the new Chinese boulevards lined with ugly mirrored glass and concrete office buildings that start cracking before they are even completed...

...Supported by the Shaw Association in Paris and Norway's Lhasa Historic City Atlas Project, the Fund was founded in 1993 to try to preserve the beautiful, functionally designed native structures...

...The Fund's on-site supervisor, André Alexander, is an international volunteer from Germany...

...Even the gramophone and 78 rpm records have vanished...

...He did agree, though, that where the Fund is willing to pay for restoration it will be given the chance...

...The Chinese have been systematically pulling down the ancient structures on the pretense that they are poorly built and unsanitary...

...More important, both help resist earthquakes, a constant threat in this region...

...The taller, straight-lined new structures also block the sunlight that once reached the lower windows of adjacent houses in the narrow lanes of Lhasa...

...Sanitary facilities in the new houses, incidentally, are just as poor as in the old ones...

...I buy the package...

...Made of alternately large and small stones, they slope slightly inward...

...The supervisors are always Chinese, the workmen always Tibetan...

...Bottlenecks caused by construction slow us down...

...Nevertheless, the differences are significant...

...A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Returning to Tibet By Wanda Bliss Lhasa A gray dawn greets me when I get off the train at the station outside Golmud, a small town in northwestern China that is the only overland entry point to Tibet...

...A three-day tour and hotel room are thrown in...

...Waiting for the building to open, I notice that the fountain in front of it no longer spouts...

...There, wrapped in red woolen robes we have been given against the cold, we listen to the monks chant and drum among the flickering butter lamps late into the night...

...Nor do I see the gold throne that used to be in the assembly hall...

...Admitted to the building, I consult my weighty copy of Victor Chan's Tibet Handbook, the bible of travelers here, only to discover that almost all the objects from the Dalai Lama's quarters that Chan highlights—those I remember as well as those I have forgotten—have disappeared...

...The new buildings' roofs are made from cement...

...To a tourist viewing the local architecture for the first time, the Fund's preservation crusade may seem overwrought...

...Receiving permission to stay the night in the storeroom, we collapse among wheels of yak butter, woven straw containers of barley and boxes of canned Chinese soda, heedless of the rats chittering in the grain...

...There I discover that foreigners must pay 1,180 yuan (roughly $ 150)—17 times what Chinese citizens are charged—to make the trip to Lhasa...

...But if you don't buy the package, you don't cross the border...

...The new buildings, constructed of thin cement blocks, are less earthquake-proof...

...We make little headway because of my meager knowledge of Tibetan, but one woman digs into the recesses of her gown and comes up with a box of snuff for me to try...

...Not long ago, these road crews were manned by slave labor...

...In the morning our ride resumes...

...The walls of the traditional buildings, by contrast, feature alternating layers of straw and earth...

...The arrangement of the stones and the angling lend esthetic distinction...

...André Alexander tells me the Heritage Fund Project has held talks with the local Communist Party Secretary, Lobsan Dundup, who said the Party has no intention of sparing any Tibetan houses in Lhasa...

...Not all are open, and the grounds are overgrown and weedy...

...Practically without exception the traffic coming toward us consists of convoys of Chinese Army trucks, each with three uniformed men in the cab...

...Toward nightfall we stop at a large, badly maintained Army post where groups of young Chinese soldiers stand around chatting...

...They are colder during the winter, too, since they are not insulated...

...In some places the monks have hidden them behind draperies...

...Several monks were shot, and Ganden remains closed...

...it has become a receptacle for soda cans...

...This proves less true than it was five, or even two, years ago...

...The latter, who cheer as we pass, are paid a token salary...

...We are four Japanese, two Americans and a mixed lot of locals—mostly Tibetans wearing heavy robes and twofoot-long swords sheathed in silver scabbards, plus wispy-bearded Muslims in white knitted caps...

...After a dinner of yak cheese and tsampa—ground, roasted barley mixed with yak butter tea to form a thick gruel—we go into the chanting hall...

...The 28-hour bus ride from Golmud starts the next afternoon...

...Wanda Bliss is the pseudonym of a freelance writer who often visits Tibet— and would like to continue doing so...

...The walls of the old houses, moreover, are close to four feet thick at their base...

...Alexander has found five or six older craftsmen, however, who have worked on monasteries...

...We are told that Chinese soldiers came last August and took away five monks...

...And since sunlight is the only source of heat here, an apartment's exposure to light is a quality-of-life matter...