Listen to this story

Jiayuguan (pronounced jaa·yoo·gwaan) is a popular stop on the Silk Road tourist route in China. The city hosts the westernmost gate in the Great Wall, the Empire’s final outpost. The Chinese like to recite verses about these areas where “no old friends to be found,” a sentiment that hangs heavily over this fortress.

The Great Wall here feels quite new, though authentic, and is definitely less crowded than its more famous, million-visitor-per-day stretch near Beijing.

Despite the public image, historians believe the Great Wall was never a single entity, an endless fortification line. It was more of a system of towers and other fortifications designed to spot intruders and signal the danger down the line.

The Architecture of Paranoia

I happily climb the Wall and proceed to the hill range just outside of it. These hills mark the start of something mysterious and feared, a border between the “civilised world of the Middle Kingdom” and the land of the multiple tribes of “horse-riding barbarians” inhabiting the steppes and deserts beyond and outside the Wall. It was they whom the original builders of the Wall hoped not to see in their cherished Kingdom.

People like building walls to separate themselves from the outside world. Contemporary walls in Palestine, on the US-Mexico or Belarus-EU borders are similar barriers made by humans who pursue illusory escape from the “dangerous barbarians” dreaming of intruding on their peaceful existence.

The good news, as this piece of the Wall reminds, is that these barriers are eventually overcome. What remains of the Great Wall in Jiayuguan is merely 750 meters of renovated mud-brick sections.

The Chinese state has a habit of rebuilding its history to open it to the masses, often scrubbing away the authenticity in the process. Yet, without this rebuilding and simplification, these mud walls might have simply dissolved back into the desert.

Happy People of a Lost Civilisation

I feel like the great masses of tourists pursue me wherever I go. On TripAdvisor, I find an obscure description of an acropolis of thousands of tombs, an "Underground Art Gallery." I hope there were not too many tourists underground.

The taxi drops off at the empty parking. I can spot no other visitors in the vicinity. This is success—the Great Masses of Chinese Tourists are finally left behind!

Only one ancient underground chamber located in the desert about a mile from the ticket gate is open to visitors, which partially explains the absence of tourists. So the guard needs to unlock the chamber. He shows me down a staircase.

Steps lead me into the darkness. Inside, I see walls covered with hundreds of images assembled in blocks, a bit like a cartoon book. The images show lots of happy dudes feasting, parting, or just wandering around.

From a few explanatory notes, I learn that the Chinese call these happy people Northern Wei, proto-Turkish tribes who had what looks like a very good time just about the moments when Rome was collapsing in faraway Europe.

Northern Wei is a mysterious lost civilisation. Little is known about it. But these fields of tombs show their power.

These Central Asian contemporaries of the Romans easily look like the happiest societies possible—not a single image of conflict, trouble, or struggle.

However, the underground city of the happy people appears to be as mysterious as it is unpopular with Chinese tourists. Will the story of the Wei people ever be uncovered? If so, will it make them popular like the Great Wall?

While I am reflecting on the questions, deep beneath the desert, the feasting ghosts of a forgotten kingdom seem to mock the paranoid emperors who built their great walls just a few meters above.

See the full Along the Silk Road Journey:

• Zhangye: China’s Wild West

• Jiayuguan: A Happy Underground Life on the Chinese Great Wall’s Final Post

• Dunhuang: The Library at the End of the World

  Subscribe now

Listen to this story

Dunhuang is a tiny town (by Chinese standards) of merely about 125,000 people. It used to be even smaller, serving as the final Chinese mainland outpost on the Silk Road—a vast medieval highway linking the Chinese capital to anywhere in Europe. A century ago, it would take a traveller about four days of camel ride to reach this location in the heart of the Gobi desert from the nearest town.

Subscribe now

THE ROAD

Now, Dunhuang (also known as Tun-huang and Touen-houang) is filled with tourists travelling along the modern Silk Road rather than camels. They take high-speed trains and SUVs to get here in huge numbers. The tourists flock to the local glossy bazaar in droves, bringing a busy, serious atmosphere reminiscent of a Chinese trade endeavour.

The enormous mounds of dried fruit in the bazaar remind me that Dunhuang is still Central Asia—at least geographically, though less so politically.

Dunhuang was always a true crossroads city. Tibetan Lhasa and Mongolian Ulaanbaatar are all about the same distance from here. The other two nearest capitals, Beijing and Almaty, are just about 1,000 kilometers further away. Somewhere not far, the great Gobi Desert meets the Taklamakan, another huge Central Asian sand desert.

Writer Peter Hopkirk called Dunhuang "one of the least-known of China's many wonders." Groundbreaking archaeologist Aurel Stein almost died trying to get here just a little more than a century ago. He was one of the first western scientists who reached the city, and the British King awarded him knighthood for that journey.

THE BAZAAR

This city bazaar is now officially called the Dunhuang Night Market. Its pace is more relaxed than that of the usually busy, crowded Chinese heartland cities, but more glossy than perhaps any Central Asian open-square trading place.

Signs across the food market feature Central Asian cities that are historically and culturally much closer to this place than Beijing: Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva.

I leave the bazaar and enter the newly rebuilt city centre. It all feels as a typical provincial China: the hordes of scooter drivers, often carrying additional loads of children facing backwards, huge masses of people, the cult of food, everything cheap (I buy sneakers for $10, they would last for a season), disturbing smells, weird toilets and hotels, huge scale of everything, and the public that feels totally indifferent to you, the only foreign-looking face around.

Subscribe now

BOOKS

The attention paid to books in Dunhuang is remarkable for this remote desert place. Books are sold in the bazaar and on the side streets. Even at the local airport, a huge bookstore featuring mostly academic works squeezes typical luxury brands.

I spend two hours with the owner of Mogao Bookstore, a recently opened spacious book establishment, which is also a cafe and even a bar, featuring some of the most trendy books published in Chinese over the last few years. The owner says he recently finished university and then worked a bit at a bookstore in a city known for its liberal attitudes.

He moved to Dunhuang to open his own bookstore. As it is near a night market, the store is open until 11 p.m. But only a few visitors come and go, buying just a thing or two. The business seems slow, while the competition is fierce, with about ten other bookstores nearby.

CAVED MONASTIC CITY

This affection for printed things is explained by something located just a few miles away. It is the Hidden Library found in a monastic city known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, or the Mogao Caves. Here, the world’s oldest dated printed book, a Buddhist scripture called the Diamond Sutra, laid hidden for many centuries.

The Diamond Sutra was printed six centuries before the Gutenberg Bible, the first European printed book. Printed Buddhist bibles were certainly in demand in this major scholarly centre, a monastic city housing 18 monasteries. Hundreds of monks, along with countless artists and scholars, pursued Buddhist knowledge here.

The monks have carved in soft stone the huge sculptures of Buddha akin to the much-suffering Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan (those that were blown by the Taliban, then rebuilt, and now threatened again).

Several empires occupied this monastic complex, each adding its flavour, until the Chinese empire withdrew from here and abandoned the city to the “barbarians.” The sand replaced scholars and gradually consumed the cave monasteries, leaving the place a forgotten ghost city.

In the early 20^th century, European, American, and Japanese adventurers-treasure-hunters-archeologists (sometimes one person covering all these roles) pursued the treasures of the monastic city. That was when the Diamond Sutra came to light.

Archaeologist Aurel Stein removed it (the Chinese say “stolen”) for the British Library, where it is now proudly displayed alongside another holy text: the much more famous but also “younger” Gutenberg Bible.

The discovery of the Sutra and the caves—equally unknown in China—caused a huge sensation in the West. The discovery was compared to the opening of the Tutankhamen tomb; the two events occurred around the same period and were followed with great public interest.

The explorers also removed numerous other manuscripts and art treasures from the caves, sometimes peeling paintings off the walls with chemical glue to carry them to Harvard, or cutting statues to take to Paris.

Now, they are hidden in the basements of world museums. So to study the early history of Tibet, one should go to the British Library or the National Library of France.

TOURISTS TAKE OVER

The Mogao Caves are now a major tourist site on the Silk Road, but ticket issuance is limited to 6,000 per day. Demand among young Chinese is huge, and tickets sell out online instantaneously during the high season.

This number seems to be the limit that the place can take. Many caves with the best art are small, dark, and fragile, and can accommodate no more than 20 people at a time. However, purchasing a ticket without a Chinese ID, a phone number, and language skills seems to be the major challenge.

The challenges of a visitor would not end at the ticket office, though. Like with many Chinese historical places, the official story told here is far from complete. It is more of a puzzle that a visitor should rebuild.

Too many episodes are simply omitted: the stories of the creation and abandonment of the place, 20th-century treasure-seeking with its fierce competition, the treachery of locals and authorities, and the fighting and disappointment that filled this place are largely left unexplained.

DUNHUANG THEATRE

I remain puzzled by the monastic city: why exactly did it flourish and fall into oblivion? Why did the Chinese occupy it in the first place, then abandon it to the Tibetans, then occupy it again, then abandon it again, forgetting everything they—and many others—created here? Wars, climate change, disasters, movement of people?

I seek answers in a theater—another newly built structure housing a show about the history of the cave city.

The show’s entertainment component is truly impressive. A few minutes in, I already feel that if it were premiered in London or Berlin, everyone would be talking about it. Instead, the talk of the Dunhang shows stays in Dunhuang.

The show is soldout, but the audience does not stay in one place. Everyone must move between rooms, stages, and decorations, as if travelling from one immersive epoch-space into another.

This constant movement brings changes to the decoration and style of the show parts. The first few minutes feel more like a small craft play focused on ordinary folks’ tales. By the end of the play, the show becomes a grand Olympic Games opening, with flags and national pride filling the air (one of the show’s directors was apparently also responsible for the Beijing 2008 Olympics opening ceremony).

The public is guided through replicas of the caves. Religious art comes to life and figures from wall paintings suddenly dance—each playing their own role, sometimes referring to pictures created 1,700 years ago and still on the cave walls.

Moving stage mechanics raise dozens of actors above it. There is no chance to breathe out—so much is going on—water and sand are spread on actors, dancing, music, the digital installations of huge scale are introduced almost continuously.

Just like with the storyline in the monastic cave city, the show’s story lacks a line and an ending. The only thing that seems to link all the pieces together in the story is the desert and its sand. There is so much to the Chinese Dunhuang—a crossroads in the middle of dashing emptiness, so rich in memories, still largely untold.

See the full Along the Silk Road Journey:

• Zhangye: China’s Wild West

• Jiayuguan: A Happy Underground Life on the Chinese Great Wall’s Final Post

• Dunhuang: The Library at the End of the World

Subscribe now

In 2024, I went to Tibet on a tourist journey - the only legal way to get to this place available to the absolute majority of non-Chinese nationals.1 But my Tibet journey started much earlier, in 2008.

Then, a friend wrote to me:

‘Here, look at this website. It’s called Facebook. You should join it; great political things are going on there.’

Then, Facebook was only about one year old, and I was most enthusiastic about all things political. So I joined.

The ‘political things’ on this future social media giant (Facebook became public just a few months prior) my friend has mentioned turned out to be an international solidarity campaign, the first of its kind, with protests happening in regions of the world many people have not even heard about.

The name of the region was Tibet, one of the most isolated and remote provinces of authoritarian China. The campaign resonated with another thing I was highly enthusiastic about – all kinds of anti-government political rebellions, uprisings and protests.

Through this campaign, I could witness the power of social media in harnessing people's solidarity. It was not just me, but many millions of users became aware of the tragedy of Tibet, as monks were publicly burning themselves in protest on Tibetan squares.

Many similar events followed in a few years. The Arab Spring preceded the Occupy movement, the Euromaidan, and many more large protest movements and campaigns on social media supporting them. I eventually wrote a doctoral dissertation in London on the topic of protests supported and organised through social media like Facebook.

The uprising in Tibet has lost, and ordinary Tibetans perhaps hardly noticed that Facebook campaign. Despite this, Tibet remained for me linked to this great power of the internet – the power to connect people and communicate changes.

These stories are based on a talk I gave in 2024 in Oxford about my travel to Tibet:

Next: What I’ve seen in Tibet:

• Tibet. The First Truth. Isolation

• Tibet. The Second Truth. Occupation

• Tibet. The Third Truth. Time is Shrinking

• Tibet. The Fourth Truth. Happiness and Environment

I’ve also written a more practical travel-focused account for those interested in going to Tibet:

• A Journey into Tibet: Train to Heaven

My lips are dry, my skin is red from sunburn that I failed to prevent despite taking the usual measures. My breath is frequent, but my steps are slow. Walking 30 meters up the stairs feels similar to running several miles.

The trip quickly makes me more and more exhausted despite luxury apartments and constantly available comfortable transportation and food. This is all different from what I expected physically. These physical difficulties remind me about the unique environment of Tibet.

It is a place of huge tough mountains but also a land of multiple fertile valleys, as green in spring as any great reach agricultural area. This greenness features yaks (they should be kept above 3,000 meters to make them happy), a unique highland variety of barley and farming architecture, telling a story of a unique society that has been maintaining a harmonious relationship with nature.

Yaks, huge buffalo-like but extremely peacefully looking domesticated beasts, exemplify this harmony. One yak was enough to provide a family with lots of things for the whole year.

Yak’s milk is used for a great source of Tibetan endurance: buttered tea and palatable and sustaining tsampa.

Beyond the source of milk and meat, yak’s dried dung is still the source of fuel in many areas. Their hair and skin are the main material for traditional nomadic tents (some Tibetan people are still nomads), while yak butter is even used as a lubricant.

This harmony is seen everywhere: in religious practices with colourful Buddhist flags adoring mountain passes and peaks, making the view even more spectacular; in the tradition of religious pilgrimage that can take Tibetans on month-long journeys on foot on their tuberous terrains; in traditional dressing styles that are so well adapted to the life in this land of perpetual cold, and the respectful attitude towards nature and animals.

As any creature might be your grandma, who knows?

PS Escape

‘We were born, and we will die. No one will be able to escape it. Only what we do during our lifetime will be taken into account. It saddens me when I realize that things are not as good as one would like to see in Tibet. But I have the ability to influence history,’ wrote Lobsang Sangay, the head of the Tibetan government in exile in 2013.

The more we experience Tibetan culture, the more interested we become in the history of this place. My travel companion reads history pages on the Chinese Wikipedia till late at night, discovering complicated relationships between the Chinese empire and Tibet. After a while, she concludes:

‘So the Chinese emperor paid Tibet for more than 40 years, so Tibetans won't attack China again. This is not equal relationships!’

What Else I’ve seen in Tibet:

• Tibet. The First Truth. Isolation

• Tibet. The Second Truth. Occupation

• Tibet. The Third Truth. Time is Shrinking

• How Easy It Is to Get to Tibet These Days

The further one gets away from Lhasa, the greater the feeling that one travels in time. In the provincial city of Gyantse, an important trade junction, we enter a ‘tea house’: a small cafe with a space for only four tables. It contains a stove, a shelf that seems to have been produced around the 1930s, and a couple of elderly gentlemen vigorously finishing their yak stew and yak butter tea, for which they paid around 1 dollar.

The smells, looks, sounds of this place and the street around it are hard to replicate. I imagine myself in my grandfather’s village house built in the 1940s in Central Belarus. Pictures can't do much to translate this atmosphere.

I know this is likely to change very soon. The cafe street is going through rapid redevelopment; traditional housing is being replaced with boring concrete buildings, cars replace yaks, and high-speed highways replace dirt roads.

The Chinese government provides loans for house rebuilding, so almost every village we pass is now a contraction site: the government builds an infrastructure while people rebuild their homes. Concrete replaces traditional structures, rivers get embodied in the concrete too, while perfect roads and railways are ready to bring in more goods and machines migrants. Time is shrinking here, just like almost everywhere, and some version of globalisation has caught up, even in Tibet.

In the second largest city of Tibet, we talk about these changes with a 40-something local who finished at Lhasa University in the ‘90s. That's where he learned English, which ‘was popular back then.’

He is very enthusiastic about Buddhism, though becoming a monk seems to be a challenge for him: ‘I would not be able to follow all the rules.’ Buddhism is not prohibited any more, as it was 50 years ago following the invasion of the Chinese Army. Though many monasteries were left in ruins, and former strongholds of anti-Chinese feeling, like the great Sera monastery, are now tourist attractions.

The local is critical of the state of the Tibetan language: ‘Young people prefer Chinese, Tibetan is useless’. Young people, apparently, seek stable and secure jobs, which are hard to find if one speaks Tibetan. ‘Tibetan is only needed in monasteries.’ This is still a rather large sector but not big enough to employ too many people.

So, young people are thinking of leaving for mainland China. That is in contrast to the millions of recent Chinese migrants who came to Tibet. The latter often see an ‘opportunity’ on this plateau being redeveloped on the Chinese government's terms.

Next: Tibet. The Fourth Truth. Happiness and Environment

Read other parts of my story of travelling into Tibet:

• The First Truth. Isolation

• The Second Truth. Occupation

• How easy is it to travel to Tibet these days?

The main reason I was so fascinated by that uprising solidarity campaign on Facebook in 2008 was the similarity between the situation in Tibet and the fate of еру country where I was born.

Just like Russia in Belarus, China ruthlessly asserts its presence in Tibet, disregarding the local culture and people as secondary to the Chinese. Chinese symbols such as official red flags are everywhere, even on the planes of the Tibetan Plateau, away from any inhabited places - just like the still-official Stalin era-designed flags are reasserted with almost maniac stubbornness in Belarus.

Chinese tourists recite propaganda stories about a foreign resident, Dalai Lama, inciting violence in China. Belarus state TV is full of similar stories, explaining anti-Lukashenka protests as foreign leader intrusion.

Hardly could I imagine finding Lhasa so similar to Minsk. Historical heritage seemed to be bulldozed here systematically and replaced with a cheap Chinese replica of the lost past. The replica is here to imitate lost architecture and cultural experience in a convenient, concrete-induced way.

Large boulevards, just like in the Stalin-era conceived centre of Minsk, link districts where multi-store buildings dominate. Chinese brands are advertised in Chinese, relying on Chinese-looking models. Lhasa hardly looks like what travellers might have encountered when they came here 70 years ago.

The fate of the national language in Tibet was remarkably relevant to the experience of Belarusians. The Tibetan language felt to be second-rated in Tibet, just like most Tibetan natives on the fast new railway are de facto subjected to second-rate sitting options through their economic inequality.

Similarly to Belarus, the native language is barely used to communicate any official information. Chinese and its people also dominate businesses. Schools are exclusively Chinese-speaking, as I understand, and Tibetan is learnt as essentially a foreign language. Though most Tibetans still use Tibetans for everyday communication, it seems.

What is exactly on people's minds is hard for me to grasp. Though it's clear people here dream of the same as most humans across the world: something bigger, more, secure, maybe funnier, depending perhaps on the period of their lives.

The Chinese narrative is about the ‘liberation of Tibet’ from oppressive Feudalism and near-slavery conditions imposed by the rich theocracy of Dalai Lama in the 1950s and 60s. The narrative is hardly convincing now: why should this liberation be so synonymous with assimilation or even genocide? In 1960, the International Commission of Jurists, an organisation that later to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, concluded that the Chinese were guilty of genocide ‘by the widespread killing of Bigghist monks and lamas.’

I ask three Tibetan-looking boys who are about to finish school – they came to a temple in a remote location to ‘pray for good exams’ – about their national identity. They tell me they are ‘Chinese and Tibetan.’ They speak Tibetan with each other, but compulsory education has made them bilingual, both in terms of language and ideationally.

Despite Chinese schooling, clandestine subversion is even persistent in this remote location: one of the boys is a user of Twitter – a network banned almost from its very inception and especially hardly accessible from Tibet (my work VPN, which works everywhere, breaks in this region of Tibet).

The first thing the guide shows us is perhaps the most famous Lhasa building, the Potala Palace, which used to be part castle, part temple, and part royal residence.

Before going to the palace, the guide tells us that the current Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetans, is in India. It is a ‘political’ issue, and ‘we do not talk about it.’ Tourists in our group showed their understanding with a short ‘yep.’

I liked that the guide used the word 'political' rather than toothless 'sensitive,' a term that is more spread in the Chinese English discourse. Though another guide we meet is much more politically illusive. They would talk about British troops that destroyed a castle a century ago but would fail to mention that a much more culturally important nearby monastery was almost totally ruined by the Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

From the palace grounds and windows, one could see a huge portrait of the current rulers of Tibet and China, Xi Jinping. This view reminds me of the old black-and-white pictures of Stalin on the central squares of the Soviet Union I have seen in old documentaries.

Dalai Lama’s portraits are hard to find in Tibet. Chinese authorities relentlessly police any display of this image. One Western author told the story of a tourist book being taken away from her in the airport, as it contained the prohibited image.

The palace has about 1,600 rooms, and we visit around 20 of them. Most impressive are the private headquarters of the current Dalai Lama, where he lived as a teenager in the 1940s and 50s. It is a tiny, corridor-like long room with a shrine and a balcony. The balcony had the optic equipment he famously used to observe the town from a telescope.

When I notice his old telescope, I turn a bit emotional as I feel I get close to something personal about this figure about whom I read and heard so much.

Another local talks about ‘military and guns everywhere’ in the city. While they were saying it, two huge jeeps and armed uniformed men were passing by. Then I noticed that the palace was surrounded by the Chinese military, as if at any moment a rebellion or attack may happen.

That is perhaps why, when looking at Tibetan people, I struggled to give the right term to describe what I saw: was it apartheid? Colonisation?

Subscribe now

Next: The Third Truth. Time is Shrinking

Read other parts of my story of travelling into Tibet:

• Tibet. The First Truth. Isolation

• Tibet. The Fourth Truth. Happiness and Environment

• How easy is it to travel to Tibet these days?

I can’t believe my eyes when I wake up on the sleeper train bound for Lhasa in Tibet after an all-night journey. From the heat of the summer of the Chinese mainland, I find myself surrounded by a great emptiness covered in snow.

This emptiness pervades surrounding unpeopled mountains with the force of a living spirit and is strangely emotionally moving.

We are approaching the highest point of the 5.5 km pass. The land outside is a barren, wind-swept plane lacking any vegetation. On the parallel highway, heavy-loaded trucks slowly traverse the hills - the only human presence in the vicinity of probably 100s km.

Here, their wild donkeys and antelopes, along with domesticated yaks, dig for grass in the snow. The endless snow-covered picks do not offer any excuse. The land screams: that's not a place for a human! Stay away!

I spend the rest of the journey staring into the windows in the hope of spotting any evidence of human lift. But there are almost no towns, and few, scattered train stations seem to be located in the middle of nowhere.

Most places around the world look quite the same: people wearing the same type of shoes and clothes, shopping with the same bank cards using similarly designed mobile phones. But there are a few places that look different, as if they remain in the 19th or earlier centuries. Some parts of Tibet are this type of places.

Fosco Maraini called Tibet of the 1940s 'perhaps the only civilization of another age to have survived intact into our own time'. He continued:

Visiting Tibet ... means travelling in time as well as space. It means for a brief while living as a contemporary of Dante or Boccaccio, ... breathing the air of another age, and learning by direct experience how our ancestors of twenty or twenty-five generations ago thought, lived and loved.

Settled farming is often impossible on the Tibetan Plateau, and its rare inhabitants are mostly nomadic people who live by their travelling herd: yaks, donkeys, and other animals that seem to be in abundance. Their large white tents, sometimes single or in groups, are often the only signs of human civilisation visible on the Plateau.

Quite colourfully dressed people, some caring children on their backs like people do in Latin America, got on the train at the 9:30 am stop.

Women's faces are covered in scarves, their clothes look handmade. The ancient European jackets that many local males wear remind me of one that my grandfather wore in a Belarusian village 30 years ago when -- he would always take it on his visits to the town to collect his state pension.

The landscape, people’s dresses, and multiple other unusual things surrounding me heavily underline Tibet’s apartness. This apartness helped Tibetans to preserve their unique culture until these days - but also made them vulnerable to any potential invader strong enough to cross the mountains and deserts surrounding this land.

I am thinking that Tibet was always famous for its geographical isolation and, frequently, for self-isolationism. The land is huge and poor, and no one was especially interested in colonising it. Just like the Chinese and the Japanese, the Tibetans banned almost any foreigners from entering their land during the colonisation era, safe for merchants and Buddhist pilgrims.

That's why Buddhist Indians serving as British superspies (known as pundits) were the first to accurately map these lands. The spies entered the country with caravans pretending to be pilgrims and used their prayer beads to count each of their steps.

“It was the winter of 1865. The leader of the caravan, bringing goods from Ladakh to Lhasa, had agreed to allow this good natured pilgrim to accompany them on the final, three-month stage of their journey to the Tibetan capital. What they did not know, and never did discover, was that this was no Buddhist holy man. Had they suspected this, and troubled to count the beads of his rosary, they would have found that there were only one hundred of these, instead of the sacred one hundred and eight.  

[…]

The spies were trained by endless practice to take a pace which, whether they walked uphill, downhill or on the level, always remained the same […]. At every hundredth pace a bead was slipped. Each complete circuit of the rosary, therefore, represented ten thousand paces - five miles in the case of Nain Singh, who covered a mile in two thousand paces. Because the Buddhist rosary has attached to it two short secondary strings, each of ten smaller beads, these were used for recording every completed circuit of the rosary.

Based on the knowledge collected by the bead-counting spies, British officials drew maps later used to briefly invade Tibet from India via Himalayan passes.

Tibetans met the imperialist invaders with mostly medieval weaponry. They believed they would be victorious because their theocratic leader Dalai Lama, arranged a special prayer ceremony safeguarding the fighters from physical injuries. And in any case, as everyone knew from childhood, even if they fell in this battle, they would be reincarnated into some advantageous being.

Tibetans weren't always that defenceless. While Europe was going through the darkest ages of Medieval days, Tibetans built a huge empire and fought the Chinese so successfully that they signed a treaty on unheard-of terms. So, more than a thousand years ago, the Chinese Empire recognised the independence of Tibet, something they almost never did in relation to anyone. Tibetans then quite rightfully believed that they were the overlords of Imperial China.

I look at the window again: the emperors of China and the military might of Tibet have gone. The great emptiness is still there.

Next: The Second Truth. Occupation

Read other parts of my story of travelling into Tibet:

• How easy is it to travel to Tibet these days?

Red-Star Permit to Tibet

Since I was around 20, I imagined Tibet as an isolated land full of politically rebellious monks, secluded valleys, and ancient mysteries. It definitely remains one of the least accessible large inhabited areas of our planet. Unless you are a Chinese national.

To cross the forbidden frontiers of Tibet, a foreigner requires official papers featuring multiple communist red star stamps (“permits”). Only the Chinese bureaucracy can issue them. The traveller should also buy the service of a compulsory guide, complete with their car, driver, and the most luxurious (to the local standards) hotel stays.

These permit-packages start at around $500 for five days in Tibet. This is the shortest possible journey that would mean only two meaningful days in the capital: a day for arrival, another day for departure, and perhaps a day for acclimatisation. This is in a country where a cup of tea can cost you $0.1 and a good lunch around $1.

For some, I assume the most politically unstable parts, such as areas in Western Tibet that border India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, even those multiple precautions and your guides (who may also spy on you, who knows) are not enough – only Chinese national can travel unrestricted in Tibet.

Beyond this, most foreign travellers require a Chinese visa, which would take effort to get and, as a rumour says, almost impossible to obtain if you are a journalist or academic or declare your plan to travel to Tibet. I don't need a visa, which is one of the really few advantages of my passport.

Train to the Sky

The train ride to Tibet is an adventure on its own. This train line claims to be the most elevated in the world. It takes around 20 hours for a train to traverse the Tibetan Plato to get to the capital, Lhasa. Altitude on this route rarely drops below 4,000 meters, and one of the passes that the train concurs reaches 5,702m. Everest is not that much higher up at 8,800 m. Very few people on this planet live at these Tibetan altitudes.

At night, once the train climbs to 4,000 m, the crew switches on the oxygen supply through a plane-like O2 supply system.

I wake up and find myself in the middle of a snowy desert. I feel as if I have drunk all night. I experience a headache and lack of oxygen. I hear like a young lady from a neighbouring compartment vomits in the washing basin. It is one of the typical symptoms of mild high-altitude sickness.

Two other women travellers from the Chinese province of Guangzhou decide to step down at the next station: it's already too difficult for them to sustain altitude sickness. And we haven't even reached the 5,000 m. I go to sleep again, which helps.

Foreigner means trouble

Stupid paperwork wasn't always around. Sometime after the collapse of the Soviet system and before Tibetans rebelled against Chinese rule in 2008, many foreigners travelled to Tibet. For example, two Russian students seized a moment in the 2000s and cycled around the plateau on rustic bikes they found in a Chinese city on the way.

One of them eventually dropped into a coma in the middle of the journey because of altitude sickness. The Chinese military from a nearby base saved the Russian student, and he continued his way, eventually descending into India.

These days, this journey would be impossible for a foreigner to make. The Chinese government is afraid that foreigners will contribute to the dissident movement and rebellion that occurs in Tibet every ten years or so, most recently in 2018.

As a reminder of the possibility of subversive foreign influence, the major roads in Tibet feature checkpoints bolstering signs in Chinese: ‘Do not let the spy get through!’ At one of those checkpoints, the guide takes our passports away from us ‘for our safety’, and we see them again only in a few days.

Tour operators often employ or are led by Tibetans and are likely to be sympathetic to the resistance cause. However, they require foreigners to sign a contract that requires them not to "spark political troubles." Even once this agreement is signed, tour operators cannot guarantee the trip: another “trouble” might happen at any time.

The most spectacular train journey in the world?

Foreign tourists have now been replaced by Chinese. Since the opening of the railway and multiple plane connections, Lhasa has become much easier for them to get into.

The two most luxurious carriages on that high-altitude train seem to be almost exclusively packed with Chinese tourists. They say they will join jeep tours from Lhasa across great ancient trade routes that stretch across Tibet and take a couple of weeks to complete.

Most fellow Chinese train passengers seem to have little knowledge of Tibet. Liu, a woman in her 40s, is different. Her piercing eyes scan the landscape with expertise. She is a Buddhist and is going on a long journey to Tibet for the second time.

Liu bursts with Buddhist terminology and plans to take a 15-day journey around the holy mountain of Kailash. Some people walk around it on foot, the most devoted – or sinned? – crawl on their knees.

There is a belief that if a person walks around the holy mountain once, their sins will be gone. If one walks two times, their future sins will be written off as well, at least for the next five years.

Can this be the most spectacular train journey in the world? I'm thinking of my previous visits to the mountains. I had never seen such huge stretches of almost plain land dotted with so many snow peaks at such a high altitude. I'm not sure I have ever climbed that high as well. Breathing gets difficult with every kilometre, the headache worsens, and even a few steps produce as much exhaustion as a 5-minute run.

Everyday Life in Lhasa

Touristic places of Lhasa where the guides bring us feel unscrupulous. An opportunity to see people's everyday life feels much more revealing and precious. We escape from our guides to see the everyday life.

Once on the street, I feel very foreign – but in a good way. Random Tibetans would smile at me and try to speak to me with their few introductory English words.

Schoolkids in their red pioneer ties seem to be especially friendly and cheerful when they notice me. You get ten smiles from a group of ten Tibetans and one smile, if you are lucky, from a group of ten Chinese. I enjoy talking to these kids on a system of smiles and gestures.

We go to a park where people dance in a circle, repeating simple movements in a traditional way (called Guozhuang Dance in China, I’ve been told), and sing, old and young alike. This feels cheerful and immediately elevates my mood.

We wander around the old Lhasa city, full of similarly-looking five-store buildings, and sit in the outdoor gym-turned playground. Kids here speak a mix of Tibetan and Chinese – a bit like Chinese migrant children in Western countries who often use Chinese and a language they learn at a local school to play with their peers.

Adults stare at their phones. Younger people dress in European clothes, while older people often prefer more traditional garments, especially females. Many bypasses have very traditional outfits.

We go to the market, where a mix of Chinese and Tibetan traders are selling very cheap stuff, mostly barley. My partner suddenly displays an amazing talent for bargaining, something I had no idea she could do.

It was fun buying stuff with her. I would select a necklace, and then she would ask about the price in Chinese. The price would often be 70% higher than what we would eventually pay. One woman asks for the price four times higher than we pay eventually.

Life in the city feels so normal under this bright and, it seems, so close sun. Or is it an illusion?

Our Itinerary

DAY 01. ARRIVAL IN LHASA BY AIR OR BY TRAIN

DAYS 2-3. LHASA’s MAIN ATTRACTIONS: POTALA, THE GREAT SERA MONESTERY, etc

DAY 04. LHASA (3656m) – GYANTSE (3977m) – SHIGATSE (3845m)

DAY 05. SHIGATSE

DAY 06. BACK TO LHASA

DAY 07. DEPARTURE BACK

Next: What I’ve seen in Tibet:

• Tibet. The First Truth. Isolation

• Tibet. The Second Truth. Occupation

• Tibet. The Third Truth. Time is Shrinking

• Tibet. The Fourth Truth. Happiness and Environment

Disinformation also kills. The case of Su Chii-cherng, who was a Taiwan diplomat in Japan, is illustrative. A disinformation campaign was launched against him while he was posted to Japan as Taiwan’s representative. Several Taiwan tourists got into trouble while travelling in Japan. When they asked for help, Su Chii-cherng allegedly dismissed them instead of assisting on behalf of the government he represented. The disinformation campaign, shared across social media and replicated by news organisations, narrative claimed that it was the Chinese embassy that ended up helping the Taiwan tourists.

This was a lie. Later, a student in Taiwan was linked to this disinformation campaign. The truth emerged too late - the diplomat killed himself a few days after the disinformation campaign was launched.

Disinformation as a part of military ambition

Dinformation kills possibly right now an even greater number of humans who are part of the military conflict in Ukraine. The Russian government uses this social media and traditional media to persuade its citizens, as well as citizens of other countries, to join Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian government uses multiple fabricated narratives in this persuasion – or propaganda - campaign. For example, the Russian government’s propaganda claims that those Ukrainians fighting Russians are not defending their own country, their own families and homes. Instead, they need to fight Ukranians because they support the fascist and Nazi ideologies that allegedly prevail in Ukraine since the Euromaidan revolution of 2014. Another claim used by the Russian government argues that Ukraine is essentially the same country as Russia and, therefore, Russia has the full right to determine what is happening in Ukraine politically and culturally.

Another place where a military conflict is anticipated in the coming future is Taiwan. This perhaps explains why some rankings consider Taiwan one of the places “most affected by disinformation.” Over the last few years, Taiwan has risen sharply in these rankings. Many people link most of the campaigns that the Taiwanese face to China’s growing ambition to submerge the country—a goal that has only expanded since 2020.

The Microsoft threat intelligence team confirms this suspicion. According to its reports, China became the first nation it “observed” to use AI content “in attempts to influence a foreign election.” The inauthentic use of AI during the Taiwan 2024 presidential elections included spreading AI-generated audio, creating AI-generated anchors and AI-enhanced videos. All this audio and video content was used to target some prominent anti-China politicians.

Another example of AI use during the Taiwan 2024 elections includes AI-generated avatars and images circulated on social media platforms mimicking voters and promoting false narratives about political candidates, campaign issues or election integrity.

Those China-influenced elections became so prominent that other countries started considering them as a possible blueprint for how future AI-affected elections across the world will look like. This is important because many leading information experts anticipate that the use of AI will only worsen the state of the global information environment, and developing countries might feel the hit first.

Some other countries involved in a military conflict or located close to it, such as Latvia and Palestine, are also prominent destinations for information campaigns, according to the same ranking. Beyond disinformation campaigns, another ranking focused on cyber threats placed Taiwan as a top target in the Southeast Asia region. This highlights how military activity goes hand in hand with disinformation and cybertroop actions.

Moving forward

It’s hard to estimate the support for the invasion of Ukraine in Russia. Though we definitely know that many people who joined the Russian forces as volunteers and participated in the war are the victims of the Russian state propaganda.

The stories of the Taiwan diplomat and Russian volunteers remind us that propaganda is dangerous and it can kill people, while the stories of Chinese involvement in foreign elections show how AI can be abused in the future.

This highlights the importance of the strong regulation of AI algorithm development by public bodies.

Based on a talk given by Dr Aliaksasndr Herasimenka at the University of Oxford on September 16, 2024.