When the writer Peter Fleming and his companion Ella Maillart entered the city of Xining in north-west China in 1935, at the start of their epic trek across the western deserts to northern India, they found a remote and fabulous walled city, the gateway to the Silk Road, perched at over 6,000 feet on the edge of the Tibetan plateau.
My own arrival in Xining was more prosaic. I came in by plane from Beijing one dank November morning. It was not the normal tourist season in Qinghai, but I was not entirely a tourist. I was trying to pick up clues about the life of the 10th Panchen Lama, a Tibetan religious leader second only in importance to the Dalai Lama.
The 10th Panchen Lama had stayed in Tibet when the Dalai Lama had fled to India in 1959. Beijing hoped that they could use him in the absence of the Dalai Lama to win over the Tibetans to Chinese rule, but the 10th Panchen had ended up in prison after pointing out the devastating effects of Chinese policies to the Chinese leadership. He had been released in 1978 and died in 1989. I was writing a book about the race that was then in progress between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama to find his reincarnation, and I wanted to find out more about this ambiguous figure.
The old walled city had been destroyed and Xining was now a dreary town, its streets choked with a deafening mix of buses and lorries that belched black smoke into the rain-soaked air, a jumble of tawdry new buildings interspersed with old, ramshackle courtyard houses.
I checked into a hotel picked at random from the guidebook. My heart sank as I was shown to a dank, tiny room on the fourth floor. From the grimy windows, I looked across the bleak, grey city, struggling to imagine the pad of camel hooves through narrow alleyways and the high walls that once secured this frontier town against barbarian marauders.
For the Tibetans, too, this was a borderland, a place where ethnic Tibet began to shade into other cultures and where the Dalai Lama did not hold temporal power but still commanded spiritual allegiance. To the south lay the birthplaces of both of Tibet's two most important lamas - the 14th Dalai Lama and the 10th Panchen Lama.
There was little encouragement to explore the legacy of either of the two Tibetan religious leaders. There was a reference in the official guidebook to the fact that both were born in Qinghai but the details were fuzzy and it was clear that going there was not encouraged. It was with some diffidence, then, that I broached the subject of a trip to Xunhua, the Panchen Lama's birthplace, with the taxi drivers outside the hotel. They were frankly incredulous: it was as though I had suggested driving to the moon, but after a protracted bout of bargaining two of them agreed.
Our departure from Xining that morning was a protracted affair that carried faint overtones of the preparation of a camel train for the crossing of the Taklamakan desert. First there was a stop at the spares shop to pick up a fan belt. Then the petrol station where I was relieved of £10 for fuel. Then a stop at a food stall and several chats to friends and acquaintances. Finally we got on to the road for what both drivers had assured me was likely to be a five-hour drive.
The taxi, a Toyota saloon, was highly polished but five miles into the journey began to rattle and sway on the uneven metalled road. If we ventured above 40mph, the unmistakable judder of poorly balanced wheels set in. It was going to be a long day.
The trees that lined the little terraced fields blazed with late-season colours. The road wound along the valleys, hazardous with loose mules, walking tractors that pulled out without warning, trucks that blithely pursued their right to drive in the very middle of the road.
The first breakdown came a few miles beyond Ping An. "Just a little defect," said the driver cheerfully, emerging from an inspection of the engine. "It won't take a minute." The car jerked violently then began to move forward along a road that had begun to climb intrepidly towards a set of towering snow-covered peaks. We inched our way up to the snow line beneath the great jagged mountain of Qing Shashan, and as we neared the summit we came to a juddering halt, clouds of steam pouring from under the bonnet.
Miraculously we got going again and crawled to the summit, marked in the Tibetan style by a pile of stones topped by prayer flags. The car ran gratefully down the winding road. We emerged into a beautiful wide valley bounded by deep pink sandstone crags and lush with glorious bright autumn trees.
Weathered conical sandstone peaks rose sheer from the valley floor and the turned earth and the walls that bordered the fields were a deep vibrant pink. By four in the afternoon we had crossed the infant Yellow River, already wide and powerful, setting off on its long journey to the sea. An hour later, we were in Xunhua.
A knot of men looked up from a freshly butchered sheep as we sped through the little square past high courtyard walls with richly decorated, carved gateways. We asked our way to a mud-walled compound where two monks in maroon robes were playing billiards on a table set up beside the road. Behind them, at the gate of the compound, stood two tall trees that the monks who had searched for the infant Panchen Lama had seen in a vision in the far away summer of 1935.
"Is this the birthplace of the 10th Panchen Lama?" I asked one of the monks. He stared sullenly and silently at the ground. A caretaker appeared and looked at us suspiciously, but consented to undo a large padlock that secured the main gate. We entered a paved courtyard and were steered up a steep wooden ladder to a flat roof terrace off which opened a series of rooms that had been given over to the memory of the Panchen. They contained a Buddhist altar, flanked by glass-fronted bookcases, a few photographs of the young Panchen with his parents and a formal portrait of one of his teachers.
The final rooms were locked and the sullen monk made no move to open them. "That's all there is," he said. I was hanging on stubbornly, reluctant to leave, when a young girl appeared at the top of the ladder and smilingly offered tea. She led me to an elderly man who was sitting on a wooden chair at the foot of the stairs, his chin resting on hands that grasped a walking stick. As he looked up, I recognised Gonpo Tseten, the 10th Panchen Lama's only sibling, his deaf mute brother.
He reached out and took my notebook from my hand. "Name?" he wrote in Chinese. "Work unit?" I squatted down beside his chair and we began a conversation in my notebook, scribbling by turns in Chinese.
Gonpo Tseten was growing chatty. In a burst of inspiration, he wrote "Sino-British Friendship" on a clean page of my notebook, then scribbled, "Write your name in Big Nose writing," grinning at his own audacity. As I reached for the pad I saw his face suddenly darken. I turned to follow his gaze and saw a man framed in the doorway. His face seemed to be made of stone. My drivers froze into the wooden blankness of men who are trying to render themselves invisible. "Ganbu," they muttered. "Official."
The ganbu walked round the veranda and came and stood behind Gonpo Tseten. I wrote my name, with the date and my thanks, tore the page out and handed it to Gonpo Tseten. The ganbu took my notebook and began to scan the remnants of our written conversation. The drivers began to fidget and chatter about the immense distance of the return journey and the lateness of the hour. I said goodbye to the Panchen Lama's brother and we left him in the gathering dusk, his minder still towering over him.
A few days later, I set out to reach Takster, the birthplace of the exiled Dalai Lama. The leader of Tibetan Buddhism, according to Beijing's propaganda, is an enemy of the state, a "splittist" and even a man of doubtful spiritual credentials. All this gives the Dalai Lama's birthplace an ambiguous status as an official tourist attraction. None of the coach parties that tour the showcase monasteries of Qinghai, feeding both the local economy and the illusion that Buddhism is thriving under benevolent government protection, ever make the trip to the Takster. If you want to get there, you have to go alone.
I took a bus south to Ping An, a crossroads town that was the nearest point of departure to Takster. In the marketplace, the taxi drivers shook their heads. "You need a jeep," they said. The jeep driver shook his head, too. He would take the job, but he didn't know where it was. An old man in the crowd of curious bystanders that had gathered chimed in. He knew where it was, he said. In return for a lift, he would show us.
It was a beautiful autumn day as we sped through mud-brick villages. We dropped the old man in one of the villages and, following his instructions left the valley bottom and began to climb a metalled road, finally striking out on a muddy dirt track road that climbed into the snow-capped mountains. Two hours later, we reached the village.
As I climbed out of the jeep, a knot of people stared at me in frank astonishment. I climbed the steep path to a whitewashed house at the top of the village and stepped through a decorated doorway into the paved courtyard.
The Dalai Lama's former family home had been freshly painted and a flagpole stood in the centre of the courtyard, flanked by two incense burners. It was silent and deserted. I climbed a wooden staircase to the first floor and stood on the flat roof, admiring the view. When I turned back, I saw that a man had appeared noiselessly behind me. He was looking at me warily.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"I'm from England," I said, hoping no further explanation would be demanded. "I have come to see where the Dalai Lama was born."
"Did you come by yourself?" he said, looking around anxiously for clues as to my status in the official range of permitted visitors. He seemed reassured that I had come alone. After a pause, he added quietly, "I am related to the Dalai Lama." I asked if he had met his illustrious relative. He had, he said, in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's exile home. He smiled sadly at the memory.
The house was empty but well tended. My guide told me that it had been completely destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, as had his own house next door. The government, though, had paid for the Dalai Lama's house to be rebuilt in a brief period of relaxation of official hostilities in the late 70s.
He took up his keys and began to unlock the rooms. Inside were simple shrines to the members of what, in other circumstances, would have been the ruling family of Tibet.
As we walked through the house, I admired the freshly painted decoration on the roof beams. "It's very beautiful," I said to my melancholy guide. "Do you think so?" he replied. "I don't. If he was here, it would be so much more beautiful."
He was a man full of sadness, painfully nostalgic for the lost world in which kinship with the Dalai Lama would have marked him out for honour, not political disgrace and humiliation.
"Do many people come here?" I asked. "Not many," the caretaker replied. "Do many foreigners come here?" He laughed and shook his head.
I rose to leave. "Do you think the Dalai Lama will ever come back?" the caretaker asked me. I said, as gently as I could, that I didn't know, but it seemed complicated.
A mist had descended on the village as we had been chatting and he apologised for the unfriendly weather. "When it's clear," he said, "you can see how beautiful the Dalai Lama's birthplace really is."
"It's very peaceful," I said.
He pulled a face. "The mountains are too high," he replied, "and the road is too long."
I climbed into the jeep and looked back for a final farewell. He was standing in front of the house that he guarded so sadly. As we pulled out, a row of impassive figures, hands in pockets, appeared on top of the high bank that overlooked the road, watching us expressionlessly as we began the slithering journey back down the mud road.
Way to go
Isabel Hilton travelled independently. Far Frontiers (01285 850926, farfrontiers .com) can organise 14-day tailor-made trips to Tibet from £1,945pp including scheduled international flights, all transport and accommodation and some meals.
• Isabelle Hilton will be in Square Gardens in Edinburgh over the Edinburgh Festival. Details on: 0131-624 5050. Readers can order a copy of her book, The Search for the Panchen Lama (Penguin), for £7.99 with free UK p&p from the Guardian book service (0870 0667979).
