Seeking Traditions in Modern Tibet

Wide city roads. Newly built urban squares. Towering buildings. Shuttling taxicabs and cars.... "We have what you have," many Tibetans tell the visitors with great satisfaction. Indeed, they also wear Tibetan fashions, use mobile phones and beepers, cook with liquefied gas, make buttered tea with household mixers, cross rivers in power-driven boats, travel in automobiles.... Only 20 years ago, however, these same Tibetans lived in houses with iron-sheet roofs, drank tea boiled using cow dung as fuel, crossed rivers in yak hide rafts, wore polu woolen robes, lit yak butter lamps, traveled on horse back.... While Tibetans take zest in modern life, visitors go to Tibet for its traditions. They need to have a taste of tea cooked over burning cow dung, experience staying in iron-sheet-roof huts and crossing rivers in yak hide rafts.... Where can they have the experience? Well, to have the experience, one must know the following stories so that they will be able to know what experience they should have.

Polu: Materials Used to Make Tibetan Garments

ZHAXI CERING

Polu refers to hand-woven woolen fabrics widely believed to have been carried to Tibet from India. However, archaeologists have unearthed such hand-woven woolen fabrics in Normohong, Qinghai Province, and stone coffins in Luohu, Sichuan. They were mostly dresses of the dead, and some were woolen ropes used to bind things. Though rotten, remnants show these woolen fabrics possess different kinds of patterns, including some exquisitely designed geometric patterns. Polu woolen fabrics come in different types according to their quality. They are very durable, dont fade even when washed frequently and aired in the sun. Dyed in varied colors, Polu is one of the major clothing materials loved by the Tibetans. It is often used to make colorful drapes favored by women. In the past, only the nobles were afford to buy such wear, but now even ordinary people in Tibet have adopted the habit. Chasing fashions available to the public, polu woolen fabrics are used to make light, warm and colorful Tibetan fashions today.

Buttered Tea: Boiled Using Cow Dung as Fuel

RONGTIE

Cow droppings are dried ad used as fuel in Tibet, except in the forested areas where firewood is extensively available to the locals. In the past, when peasants paid their taxes in kind to the manorial owners, they often paid in firewood and dried dung. In the vast grasslands, the herders gather cow and sheep droppings while herding these animals. They bring them back home, have them dried and piled up into mounds.

In the freezing winter, they burn the dung to keep warm and make buttered tea. At that point of time, the Tibetans sit together around the fire fueled by dried cow dung, sipping the buttered tea while telling each other tales, or eating mutton or beef. In Lhasa, many residents used to purchase dried cow and sheep droppings transported from the pastoral areas and from Nyingchi. Before the advent of winter, there were people who herded beasts of burden, loaded with bags of dried cow and sheep droppings, to Lhasa and transported daily necessities back home.

Later, when power stations were built, many in the city bought electric stoves to cook and make tea. In the mid-1980s, oil pipes were laid from Lanzhou to Lhasa. In the 1990s, liquefied gas stations were set up in Lhasa, and the locals turned to cooking gas. Many in the city even adopt solar energy stoves. Nonetheless, there are old ladies in the city who still demand dried cow and sheep droppings as fuel, which sell at a very high price in the market!