In China and Tibet, wheels speak volumes. I noticed this my first day in Shanghai, when I saw Mercedes Benzes cruise by three-wheel cargo bicycles stacked 8 feet high with bales of goods. Wheels, whether powered by legs or electricity or natural gas or petroleum, tell you everything about the user and the city you're in. For example, it wasn't until my third stop, Chengdu, that I started to see a lot of pedicabs and underpowered cargo vehicles, both symptoms of a weaker economy. In Lhasa, the colorful pedicabs were everywhere, covered with the characteristic scalloped white exterior valances you see fluttering in the mountain breezes over windows on traditional buildings all over Lhasa. Pedicab drivers tend to be Tibetans who can't speak much Chinese while more of the taxi drivers are Chinese who've come to Tibet to make money; both receive 10 yuan (about $1.30) for a trip anywhere in town.*
Traffic in all Chinese cities seems to be a mysterious game whose rules have a lot less to do with lanes and signs and signals than we're used to here, but in Tibet I had even more of a sense that a trip through town was one long series of near misses (or maybe that's just because I was viewing it from the back of a pedicab). People are constantly darting out into traffic at random; bicycles force themselves into the thick of traffic and turn without signaling; taxis and cars cut off everything smaller and weaker than they are: but the weird thing is, no one gets upset. On the wide, well-marked highways of the U.S., we've heard of countless stories of road rage. Who hasn't been cursed off or given the finger for making the wrong move or moving too slowly in American traffic? But in Lhasa, no one seems to mind any of the near misses or acts of poor judgment. Surely, there is a lot of honking, but the honk is a practical tool, not a vent for emotion. (All over China, we've discovered it impossible to sleep on our tourbuses because the driver as a matter of course must honk his horn every thiry seconds to ensure he avoids a collision.)
Maybe what happens in Lhasa traffic is that each driver survives by finding his own Middle Way.
The most important meaning of wheels in Lhasa, of course, is prayer. From what I can see, prayer is a kinetic process to Tibetan Buddhists. In order for it to happen, something has to be moving in a circular motion. It could be the large, brass fixed prayer wheels outside of monasteries and shrines; or the clockwise circumnambulation of a "kora" (or circuit) around a holy site; or the hand-held wooden prayer wheels that pilgrims spin while walking these koras. When these prayer wheels spin, the mantra of the Buddha of compassion -- Om Ma Ni Be Me Om -- which is written on coiled-up paper inside of them and is sometimes engraved on the exterior, begins to spin; the mantra is set in motion (or as the Tibetans say, "released") as it is chanted on the pilgrim's lips. Wheels and circular movement put prayer into being. Maybe it is this spinning that gives the Tibetan Buddhist his private space in the public realm, so that through all the hawking and spitting and giggling and chaos of Lhasa, there is always the spiritual, proceeding undisturbed among the secular.
*This reminds me of the most important change that has overcome Lhasa in recent years: like many cities in outlying areas of China, it has become a boom town for Han Chinese trying to strike it rich. I think the Chinese population of Lhasa may even equal or exceed that of the Tibetans. Huge swaths of the town are already Chinese, many businesses are run by Chinese, and, as I discovered by biking around the outskirts of town on Sunday, there is new construction everywhere. It's a sad fact, but it's also an unavoidable reality, and it's given parts of Lhasa something of the feel of a frontier town. At least that's the impression I got from location of my Chinese-run hotel, the Xin Ding, in the Zhonghe International Trade Zone, on an island in the Lhasa River. Right outside this would-be five star hotel (which, for the record, doesn't change money, doesn't have functioning room refrigerators [which means you have the privilege of paying outrageous prices for hot cokes and beers from the minibar], doesn't have adjustable air-conditioning, is erratic about the daily practice of vacuuming, is capricious in its deployment of pillows and soap, finds it unnecessary to hire English speaking operators, and seems to open the business center only when someone can find the key) was a warren of corrugated tin workshops where scores of workers hammered, sawed, and welded metal gates, doors, and cages (right up until 2 in the morning). Behind these were other metal smiths and tinkers, and other very basic restaurants and shops, all run by Chinese who seem to be just scratching out a living in these broken, trash-strewn, odiferous streets. There are certainly those who are very upset about this invasion of Chinese immigrants, which will only increase as a result of the new pressurized train that began service last year. And few have forgotten the brutal repression of the Tibetan uprising of 1959, the destruction of the monasteries during the cultural revoltion, or the violent suppression of Tibetan protests in 1989, just before the events in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese presence is felt not only in the myriad businesses and new apartments under construction, but also in the many military installations in and around the city, not the least of which being the huge party headquarters situated squarely below the Potala Palace, and guarded by green-uniformed soldiers standing at attention. But at least for now, the reality is that the Chinese are in the city, and the Tibetans are in the countryside. To the latter, geography is sacred; they circumnambulate not only temples and shrines, but also lakes and mountains. And while the Chinese may set up shop and sell prayer flags and jewelry in Lhasa, the holy city still derives its identity from the faithful who come from all over this vast, mountainous land, unperturbed, walking in a clockwise motion around their koras, spinning their prayer wheels, chanting their mantra: Om ma ni be me om.
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