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Vernacular Tibetan Architecture, Lost and Found

Dege Old Town Old Gyelthang.

Traditional Tibetan home in Old Gyelthang, with cleaned front facade and new expatriot tenant (front right). .

"The Raven Bar," in Old Gyelthang.  The restaurant is operated by an Australian couple.

Kangding (Dartsendo)  in its narrow valley has no room to expand.

Old-style wooden shop in Kangding.

by Pamela Logan

Aug 6, 2004

Any traveler in Kham is bound to notice the "Old towns" that adjoin the county seats.  They consist of traditional Tibetan homes, similar to what you see in the countryside but adapted to the different conditions and demands of town life.  In Kham, the biggest Old Towns are found in Dawu, Ganzi, Dege, and Litang.  But probably the most cutting-edge Old Town is located in Gyelthang (also called Zhongdian or Shangri-La), in Yunnan Province.

I cite the Gyelthang Old Town as a ground-breaking one, because it is literally that.  Recently when I wandered through it, I found workers digging trenches for water, power, and sewage.  These services are notably absent in other Old Towns, which are generally left to fend for themselves while municipal energy is spent on building new concrete apartment blocks and shiny retail stores.

Not only is Gyelthang installing these much-needed services, but community leaders are taking an active interest in developing the Old Town as a place where preservation pays.  Standing there in the mud, I encountered not one, but two high officials, no less than the chiefs of Shangri-La County and Diqing Prefecture, rubbing elbows with construction workers, under a cold drizzle.  They were busily engaged in debating the merits of a new cobblestone surface being test-installed in a narrow Old Town lane.  The surface was composed of river stones embedded in concrete, and they were trying to decide whether it looked sufficiently historically accurate.

What a change!  But it's not hard to figure out why Gyelthang is interested in preserving its Old Town when, a few hours away, lies Lijiang, a little gem of a town inhabited by Naxi people. Lijiang has narrow footpaths, ancient architecture, and charming canals that make it the Venice of China and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  With the help of the Global Heritage Fund in Palo Alto, California, Lijiang accomplished a total make-over of its Old Town, subsidizing homeowners to repair and restore crumbling traditional facades.  They even tore down white-tiled concrete apartment blocks - at great expense - so that the Lijiang Old Town would be architecturally pure.  Now, tourism is big in Lijiang, hoards of people arrive daily, and the economy is booming.  This fact is not lost about Gyelthang's city fathers, who seek to follow suit.

Besides caring local leadership, another trend in Gyelthang that's helping to preserve its architecture is that foreigners have started leasing the old traditional houses, fixing them up, and turning them into tourism-related businesses.  One foreign businesswoman recently leased three houses, for periods of up to ten years, and then hired crews to begin the mammoth task of restoration.  The wooden facades, blackened with decades of dirt and soot, were scraped clean in a process that took weeks.  She is now considering how to bring light into the warrenous interiors, and, even harder, how to install plumbing. (Until quite recently, everyone in Old Town relied upon an ever-odorous public toilet).  Meanwhile, an Australian couple runs a bar and tourism business out of another house.  A third was converted to a Tibetan restaurant.  On a fourth house hangs a "For rental" sign - in English.

Already, rents in Gyelthang's Old Town are skyrocketing.  It used to be that decent people were afraid to enter Old Town after dark.  Soon, it will be a tourist mecca.  And it will look self-consciously, kitschily Tibetan.

In the heart of Kham, Ganzi Precture in Sichuan, such a trend is not even on the horizon.  Kangding (Dartsendo) is a bustling, growing city squished into a narrow valley with high mountain walls on all sides.  It has nowhere to expand but up, and no use for one- and two-story housing.  There is no old town to speak of, just a few old-style wooden shops on the streets near Anjue Monastery.  These few shops are in grim shape, and are soon to be demolished.  With them will go the last vestige of the town's original look.

There are a few souls, however, who are quietly shedding tears at the passing of Kangding's architectural history.  Cultural Relics Administration Bureau chief Tashi Tsering told me how the city once looked.  "In front of Anjue Monastery there was a big courtyard, at the same location where the Ganzi Workers Union has its employee apartments" [one of which, incidentally, is occupied by Kham Aid Foundation as our field office].  "There were no cars, just horses, donkeys, and yaks.  Traders brought tea in from Ya'an, and when they reached Kangding, they stayed in one of 48 guesthouses around the square.  The guesthouses had storage for trade-goods, and translators to facilitate communication between traders from different places.  The chief trade items were Ya'an tea, Tibetan timber, medicine, salt, and hides."

Now, all of those 48 guest houses are gone. The square is gone, too, though there remains a bit of open (paved) space in front of the Kangding Hotel and Anjue Monastery.  The town is dense with construction projects, and one can hardly walk anywhere without having to climb over rubble.  Decisions about the razing of old buildings lie not with the Cultural Relics Bureau, but with the Construction Bureau, which is not interested in preservation.  The Construction Bureau even has jurisdiction over monasteries, and they have done building projects at some of the temples in Kangding - at the request of the monks, who, ironically, are not much more interested in preservation than Kangding's ordinary citizens.  Only a few folks, like Tashi Tsering, are voices in the wind, opposing destruction of the city's ancient architectural heritage. They are losing the battle.

Out in Dege (Derge) County, things are a little better.  They have a pretty good Old Town, mainly centered around the Dege Printing House and the Tangtang Gyalpo Temple.  Even there, though, homeowners have begun to alter the appearance of Old Town by repairing their houses with

 nontraditional materials like bricks and concrete.  Last year, however, the county chief declared a city-wide ban on exterior alterations to traditional structures.  They are seeking to win World Heritage Site status for the Printing House, and if they succeed, abundant resources and expertise will be brought to bear on preserving the neighborhood.  For a few years, Dege's Old Town was teetering, but now, with both local and outside support, it looks like it has pulled back from the brink.

 

In Old Towns and in the countryside, traditional houses can be seen, but they are not, for the most part, especially old.  Tibetan construction techniques as practiced in Kham do not yield buildings that are especially durable.  That's because, in most areas, homes are constructed with "soft" materials such as timber and clay.  Timber is vulnerable to termites, which multiply during the damp summers.  Clay roofs do not provide adequate protection from rain, and need constant upkeep.  Occasionally, a fire destroys homes or even entire villages. 

Furthermore, Kham is an earthquake prone region, and periodic shakers take a severe toll on traditional houses.  (A 1973 earthquake completely flatted the town of Luhuo/Trango). As a result, homeowners are constantly rebuilding. Sometimes, when rebuilding is just too much work, they abandon their homes, cart away the recyclable parts, and start again elsewhere.

One house that is truly old is located in Maisu District, Dege County.  It is locally famous, reputedly being the first house ever built in Tsento Da valley.  It even has a name, Nyera Son House. Legend says the Princess Wen Cheng stayed here 1300 years ago during her long journey from Chang'an to meet her arranged husband, King Songtsen Gampo, ruler of Tibet.  It seemly highly unlikely to me that Wen Cheng could have stayed there, but the house is unquestionably older than anything else around that neighborhood, and certainly must have been the finest house, too.  Most probably, it was the manor house of the local feudal lord.

Nyera Son House is certainly big.  Three stories high, and at least 30 meters on a side, roughly square in shape, with a central courtyard. 

Inside is a maze of rooms - the lower floors and ordinary rooms for regular inhabitants, the upper floors and finer rooms reserved for incarnate lamas, who had a special kitchen of their own, and quarters for their servants.  We were told that a couple of tulkus had been born within the walls.

Now the house is lived in by two monks, one of whom, Yongdon Gyantso, inherited the house from his mother.  It's in decrepit shape, and may only last a few more years before parts begin to collapse. The task of restoration - and even maintenance - is way beyond Yongdon Gyantso's means.  The two occupy only a few rooms; the rest are abandoned.  The walls are eroding, the clay roof is overgrown with weeds, and water leaks through and is hastening decay of the interior.

Nevertheless, when we wandered around the many disused chambers, we made some interesting discoveries about the valley's history. It was obvious that the house had been occupied by officials during the Cultural Revolution, for, here and there, we found tattered relics of that era.  A poster on the wall, barely legible for soot and dirt, declared "Learn from Dazhai.  Follow the Socialist Road."  In a cabinet we found a bit of newspaper dated 1967 with a headline that mentioned Mao Zedong and the soon-to-fall leader Lin Biao.  But even beyond these obvious signs, there was subtle Chinese influence in the furnishings of the house - painted Buddhas that were fat and not thin, Chinese characters beautifully inscribed as part of decorative murals.  Its history appears to be complicated - not just a simple division between Tibetan and Chinese eras.  But it would take an archeologist and lots of time in order to sift through and decipher it all.

A more obvious bit of Chinese history is visible in Dege town, in the old Granary, which occupies choice real estate near the town's produce market. In the early decades of the Communist era, all grain was State-owned, and farmers were obliged to bring their harvest to a central location where it was redistributed by the government.  The Granary is a large, gray-brick barn-like building.  However austere that era was, they did build handsome structures, for the Granary has got beautiful (though scratched and dirty) heavy wooden banisters inside, the walls are solidly built, and the windows are surmounted by Communist stars formed from panes of glass.

The granary is now owned by the Commerce Bureau, and divvied up into small units.  The lowest floor is full of small cave-like shops; one larger unit is occupied by the Salt Bureau. The ground floor is a huge, dimly-lit, old-style department store with all its merchandise out of reach and  protected from customers by heavy wood counters - which themselves must be at least 20 years old - topped with thick glass. 

Upstairs is an internet cafe.  Across the street, a large block of concrete towers is going up.  We were told that the Granary, too, would be torn down and replaced in the near year or two.  With sensitivity to Tibetan history an only recently-discovered community value, it's unlikely that sensitivity to Chinese history will arrive in time to save this building.  But then again, maybe that's okay, for after all, the town was Tibetan first.

Remaking is certainly the order of the day in most, if not all, towns in Kham.  Manigango, for instance, is in the process of near-total demolition and rebuilding from scratch.  So is Xinduqiao.  There is hardly a town in Kham that has not got some major construction going on. But there is a difference between today's construction and the building that went on, say, ten years ago. The difference is, Tibetanness is now architecturally fashionable.

In the last year or two, Gyelthang underwent a complete facelift, with every building on the main streets, no matter how humble, receiving Tibetan-inspired embellishments.  All of those little retail shops fronted by aluminum roll-doors - they all got stencil-spray-painted with a big red and yellow Tibetan design.  Even car repair shops got a painted stripe across the top of their facades, with rows of white circles within the stripe.

"New-style" Tibetan building - a concrete apartment block with exterior embellishments.

Kangding (Dartsendo), having joined this trend a little later, is taking it to even bigger heights.  Not only have they been painting everything, but most exposed buildings have got new added sculptural texture: rows of Escher-esque cubic decorations surmounting each window and under every eave.  They scraped off all the old white a-la-1980s tile, and are applying new surfaces of fake stonework on the lower stories, and paint on the upper ones.  Inside, these building are the same old concrete apartment blocks and offices they always were, but outside, each has its own individual Tibetan look: color scheme, texture, and added designs - no two alike.

As I write this, the town is in a fever pitch, for in a few weeks they will host a Khampa Heritage and Arts Festival (Aug 27-Sept 1), with invitees not only from the rest of Ganzi, but also from the Kham-speaking parts of Yunnan, TAR, and Qinghai.  Everyone hopes that the facelift can get done in time, but there are probably a dozen buildings still with scaffolding in front.

In sum, "new-style" Tibetan architecture is undergoing a boom, whereas traditional Tibetan vernacular buildings are only hanging on.  But Gyalthang Old Town's hot property market offers reason for hope that preservation will become trendy.  Perhaps in a few years we'll see outsiders buying up Tibetan buildings in towns like Dege.  They can revitalize traditional Tibetan Old Towns, though at the cost of commercialization and mass tourist influx. There is, indeed, no turning back the clock in Kham.  I just hope that Tibetans are content with where they're going, and derive all the benefit that's due them as the originators of this charming - and so far enduring - architecture.