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The Ochre Border - A Journey through the Tibetan Frontierlands
Extract - Part 1
Introduction - Ochre
A small boy with a shaven head picks himself up out of the dust. His puppy – wrestling companion flicks his robe over his shoulder and walks away, the stubble on his head picked out by the early morning light. The boy shakes like a dog; a cloud of dust comes from his ochre robes. He sets off with a crab-like gait but, as he walks, he straightens and becomes older. He approaches a stranger standing in the corner of the monastery courtyard.
‘Do you read the books of Julian Barnes?’ asked the eight-year-old Buddhist novice.
This is a scene from the Spiti Valley on the Indo-Tibetan Border. If you looked at an atlas it is on the dotted line between the pink of India and the yellow spread of China; part of the border area that does not appear to belong to anyone. It is a last untainted pocket where the past runs up against the future.
India cheered Independence in 1947 and two years later Mao Tse-tung announced The People’s Republic of China. For a pregnant moment the two nations embraced each other; the new juvenile leads that had escaped from the wicked stepmother of ruling oppression. The pantomime ended in 1949 when Peking Radio and the official New China News Agency announced that ‘Tibet as well as Turkestan are integral parts of China,’ and ‘The British and American imperialists and their stooge, the Indian Nehru government,’ ran the risk of ‘cracking their skulls against the male fist of the great Chinese People’s Liberation Army’ if they gave their support to Tibet. The following October the ‘male fist’ massed on the Eastern Border and invaded Tibet.
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