 |
In Land of the Eastern Queendom, Tenzin
Jinba: University of Washington, 2014.
|
A matriarchy with Amazon-like superwomen on the ancient Tibetan plateau?
Could the old Tibetan reference to Shar Rgyalmorong (“eastern valley of the queen”) be something more than a myth
after all? Alone the idea is galvanising. However, discovering it in a real
place and in our time exceeds all expectations. Thanks to Tenzin Jinba the
world now knows:
The mythical women's kingdom of old is
for real. It can be found in present-day Danba county in Ganzi prefecture,
Sichuan province, China.
Is it for real?
"In the Land of the Eastern Queendom" is the story of how a
marginalised Tibetan region of today’s Kham proclaims itself the heir to the
legendary women’s kingdom. In the process, they establish an identity for
themselves and also improve the local economy by attracting tourists. It is the story of how
all players - the state, community elders, village folks, local tourism
administrators and county chiefs – forge a pact on the myth of the Queendom,
bordering on obsession. At times, the
account reminded me of a parody: In the movie "Waking Ned Devine", an
old man in a remote Irish village dies of a heart attack soon after learning he
won the lottery. The entire village then teams up pretending the winner is
still alive and goes on to share in the fortunes.
In Eastern Queendom too, people work together to keep up an appearance. Danba
elders, for example, deploy all their linguistic and cultural skills to reinterpret toponyms, historic events and folk
tales so these give credibility to the Queendom legend. Villagers join in the
party by recounting an episode where Chairman Mao visited Danba in the 1950s and
was received by three famous female village heads who the community claimed descended from Queens. In their
eagerness to claim the Queendom pie for themselves, individual villages in the
county also try to outdo each other by competing for the title of "the
true capital of the Queendom". Seriously and ferociously, they lobby the
authorities to enlist official endorsement and designation.
 |
Danba sits in the Tibetan periphery where far
western Kham and southern Amdo converge.
The county forms part of larger area traditionally
known as Gyalrong (also Gyarong and Jiarong)
|
The author also shows how locals make use of the Queendom label to
defend their pedigree vis-à-vis the neighbouring Khampas, who are said to look
down on the Danba Tibetans or the Gyalrongwa in general, for not being
"real Khampas" due to their mixed ethnicity and an unintelligible
dialect pejoratively referred to as log
skad or “gibberish”. The Danba Tibetans counter the prejudice by invoking
the Queendom myth: Not only are they real Khampas, but they are of superior stock
because of the supreme position of women in their society. The argument effectively
adds to the superwomen lore and works both within the context of a post-gender
society and the socialist gender perspective. Within the context of the macho
Khampa narrative however, the Queendom argument is paradoxical and self-defeating,
as the author notes. Nevertheless, he acknowledges with amazement how the people
of Danba invoke it so undeterred and in such unison.
Another invention deployed to cement Danba women as the rightful heirs
to the royal lineage are the annual beauty contests, which attracts tourists
from far and wide. Danba has an unusually high percentage of good-looking
women, so the story goes, and this is once again attributed to
“royal descent.” The author mentions however that during his entire field
research trip in Danba, the beauty queens were the only female actors visible
in the Queendom campaign. If Danba ladies really descended from queens, the
author asks, why aren't they in the lead in what must be a larger campaign to
reclaim their rights? Slowly but surely, a most promising female power
narrative circles around a lapidary physical beauty contest. The book ends with
the author concluding somewhat heavy-heartedly that it is impossible to
validate the kingdom of women in Danba. In the end, too many things just do not
add up.
“Eastern Queendom” contains
important lessons but without more context, readers may put the work aside as a
curious niche topic within the larger field of Tibetan and Chinese studies, a tragicomical account
about a peripheral place without a larger significance. After all, what is
Gyalrong famous for in Tibetan history? The only two people I have come across
in my readings are the 14th-century Buddhist friar Tsako
Ngawang Drakpa, a disciple of Lama Tsongkhapa and the contemporary writer Alai,whose book "Gesar" I reviewed earlier in the year.
Yet "In the Land of the Eastern Queendom" is not just an oddly
exotic story about a remote, heavily sinicised Tibetan area, where identities
along with the meaning of toponyms are switched at will in exchange for profits
from tourism. In my eyes, the most striking aspect about the Queendom is that
it works despite the absurdity. It works for naïve Chinese tourists, shrewd
bureaucrats, savvy locals and also for the state which uses it to bolster its
propaganda about ethnic harmony. While the charade may cause only blank
headshaking from external observers, from a local perspective, the Queendom is
an unmistakable golden-egg laying goose.
What is important to realise here is that the goose has
"relatives" in other Tibetan areas along the frontier with similar
narratives. Herein lies the larger significance of Tenzin Jinba's work in
Danba. As chance would have it, I am female, Tibetan and hail from a frontier
family myself. Many observations made in Eastern Queendom resonate with me as I
see them being played out in my hometown as well. To this larger context of the
Queendom story, I would now like to add a few thoughts.
Whenever Tenzin Jinba detected yet another contradiction in the Queendom
narrative, I was secretly hoping that Danba could still be the women’s kingdom.
However, when he mentioned that nobody in the area had even heard of such a
place prior to 2004, my alarm bells began to ring: The story began to sound
familiar! As the author reveals, the "Queendom" idea was hatched by
the head of the Propaganda Department of the Ganzi Prefecture. The official
“saw proof” in Danba's architectural style as well as local customs and
rituals.
 |
| Popular Amdo singer Drönbe on her album "The Cluster of Golden Stars" (2009) depicted in what looks to me like a Gyalrong ladies Chupa - said to be beautiful and worthy of a queen. The marketing strategy seems to work. |
The way the Queendom was "discovered" in Danba county happened
in the same manner "Shangri-La" was discovered in Zhongdian county of
the Diqing prefecture. Prior to 2001, the locals of this Tibetan region in
Yunnan had no inkling either that they were the last paradise. State-hired
scholars then “proved” that the setting in "Lost Horizon" by James
Hilton was in fact the Zhongdian plains.
Suddenly more parallels jumped to my eye. A conspicuous one was Tenzin
Jinba's story about Danba elders' linguistic pipe dreams. They were reminiscent
of the mindboggling linguistics applied in Zhongdian to cement the case that
they were "Shangri-La". While in the Queendom, it is two villages
quarreling over who gets to be the capital city, in "Shangri-La" it
was two counties, Zhongdian and Lijiang, contesting the title. In the case of
"Shangri-La" too, the evident inconsistencies have not stopped the
hype. If visitor statistics can be trusted, the place receives more tourists
every year than the whole of the Tibet Autonomous Region combined.
In "Mapping Shangri-La – Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan
Borderlands" (2014), Emily Yeh and Chris Coggins poignantly summarise the
general mechanism how tourism development unfolds in Tibetan frontier regions.
Their observations are valuable in that they apply also to Danba and the
Queendom: The state portions "Tibet" top-down into non-threatening,
consumable pieces of Tibetanness for domestic tourists. The "product"
is packaged with an official storyline, official sites to visit and official
things to do. Tourism in the Sino-Tibetan fringe is guided and orchestrated
with visitors "educated" along the official narrative. Personal
discovery off the beaten track is not part of this package. The commodification process is duped "Shangrilazation" and has
become the default tourism approach for many Tibetan areas in the fringes. Zhongdian
"Shangri-La" is the prototype with others following such as
"Little Tibet" in Gannan (Labrang) and "Yading Shambala"(Joseph Rock's Konkaling) to mention but the better known ones.
From an absolute perspective, places like the ones mentioned above
including the Queendom are gradually exposed as faux. From a relative
perspective however, I propose we do not discard the obvious material rewards too
quickly. Thanks to tourism, locals can tap new sources of income as hoteliers,
restaurateurs, tour guides, drivers, performers, meditation teachers, language
teachers, and so forth. The hospitality industry has created attractive
alternative jobs to traditional agriculture, which also takes some pressure off
the land. While Chinese tourism inevitably brings undesired effects and a
strain on the local culture and environment, it is noteworthy however that some
locals manage to appropriate the myth to work precisely for environmental
conservation and cultural protection.
Paradoxically, Shangrilazation has also led to a revival of Tibetan
culture in some border towns with locals beginning to show a renewed interest
in their Tibetan heritage, the written language as well as Buddhism. That these
results are achieved in the name of a fictitious place should not diminish the
tangible merits.
My hypothesis is that it is precisely due to the infantile, politically
non-threatening cloak of a Chinese-created fictitious Tibetan place that cultural revival and environmental work becomes possible in the first place.
From a local perspective therefore, Shangrilazation is not the worst of
all worlds. Especially when we think back of what the Chinese thought of
Tibetans and their culture only a few decades earlier. Who would have expected
Tibet to become a dream destination for them? When was the last time Tibetans
under China had some degree of freedom to pursue and express their cultural and
religious identity? Where else in the Tibetan areas is it possible today to
engage in cultural activities without immediately being suspected of ulterior
political motives, if not in the “Disneyfied” places?
This is not to say that Shangrilized Tibetan
places do not face the same problems as other Tibetan areas. Political repression, external domination, loss of
culture and crisis of identity are omnipresent worries as Tibetans struggle to
find a halfway decent modus operandi while hoping for better times. As the author highlights
in connection with the two Danba villages that contend over who gets to be the
capital of the Qeendom: Political repression is a sword of Damocles with locals
having to walk a fine line: "If the queedom dispute were labled a
political riot, all their efforts would be rendered meaningless (p. 75)."
But while the challenges in Danba are the same as in other Tibetan areas, the
interesting point is how the Gyalrongwa deal with them. The idea of the Queendom is undoubtedly
orchestrated top down, but it is important to acknowledge that locals too are heavily
involved with many at the forefront actively shaping and implementing it according
to their own ideas rather than impassively standing beside or even opposing it.
Last but not least the question about political allegiance: What can be
said about frontier Tibetans with regard to their political orientation? Tenzin
Jinba sounds
stressed that some Tibetans
perceive the Gyalrongwa as politically indifferent and "Chinese". The
author, a Gyalrong native himself, retorts they are proud of their Tibetan
heritage, but that this pride does not automatically include support for political
protests. He consults a
reputable Lama-friend to find out more about the reasons for Danba's political
abstinence whereupon the Buddhist dignitary cites "practical
concerns" and "secularization".
In my view, we would also have to add "historical neglect by the
centre" to account for the emotional distance: Whatever nation-building
efforts may have been undertaken by Lhasa in the old days, they did not
penetrate to the periphery. The political reality in the borderlands was simultaneously
overlapping and with multiple centres of power. There were the local Tibetan
leaders, there were provincial warlords, there was the representative of the
emperor in China and later the Nationalist government; finally, there usually
was a prominent monastery affiliated with a mother institution in Central Tibet
through which the Dalai Lama made his influence felt. To safeguard local
interests in this complex power matrix, frontier Tibetans have moved in and out
of one culture, adapting their outlook to best suit the times and
circumstances.
In the case of Gyalrong, the diverse ethnicity, particular linguistics
as well different religious orientations are additional factors that
distinguish them from the pack. In Tibet proper we have an ethnically bi-polar
situation of Tibetans neatly on one side and Chinese on the other. In the
periphery however, the delimitations are less clear as Tibetans have been
living side by side with the Chinese and other ethnic groups for centuries. In
Gyalrong in particular, ethnic intermarriage has been common, which makes the
Gyalrongwa stand out even among frontier brethren. It is therefore safe to
assume that the point of departure for ethnic identity and allegiance differs
from other Tibetan areas. Using ethno-nationalist slogans of "one flesh, one blood" alone
to distinguish Tibetans as we are prone to do in exile and also in the border
areas of Kham and Amdo, will inevitably fall short and only reinforces internal
differences. In the Sino-Tibetan
fringes, ethnicity and language look more like one among several rather than the sole
decisive factor.
And while some perceive the people of Danba or the Gyalrongwa in general
as bogus Tibetans, sober-minded Westerners may perceive places like the
Queendom as too Disneylandish. For the Chinese overlords on the other hand, the
Queendom and other creations along the frontier are Tibetan enough for the
touristic experience, easy to access and politically stable. As for the
Gyalrongwa themselves, it looks to me like they are doing what many frontier
Tibetans have always been doing: Using the hype, the projections and
stereotypes, not taking things too seriously, and make the best of one's
situation and the times. Any strategy that could eventually lead to passing on
the Tibetan culture to the next generation – if only halfway intact – not only
deserves but also absolutely must be explored to the fullest. In this regard,
Tibetans in general may find something to learn from the experience of
the frontier. Accepting these marginalized groups into our fold will make us
Tibetans more resourceful and versatile on the whole.
The Queendom author is himself a role-model operating skillfully between the devil and the deep blue sea. If his work is
perceived as too accommodating, the Tibetans will accuse him of collaboration.
If his work is perceived as too opposing, the Chinese will accuse him of
secessionism. The sociology and anthropology professor of Lanzhou University
has been carefully walking a fine line, able to work with foreign universities
and share his insights with readers like us. He is also going to participate in
an international conference on Tibetan borders in Paris early next year as I have learnt. I wish him and the organisers all the very best of success. I hope
some of the insights can be applied beyond the academic discourse to provide
inspiration for a broader understanding and tolerance of what constitutes Tibetan culture and what it means to be Tibetan.
Mountain Phoenix Over Tibet
Related blogs and reviews
