(continued)  IV. The Temple Mount.

     Before dawn the next morning Mads and I drank Red Bull for breakfast, then rode into Tongren in driver J’s white Hyundai compact. The foggily lit streets around Longwu were unobstructed, to our surprise, and J knew the way leading straight into the central yards. A wrinkled old woman circumambulated in morning prostrations. A few novices scurried though the corridors. The rest was silence, dubbed over by Central Radio news broadcasts booming from a schoolyard next door. J said that was normal. He was mumbling morning sutras to himself, on the go.

     We had to find out what was going on, so we turned down a path past the courtyards where the monks shacked up. But just then, 20 feet up the path, someone shined a flashlight on us. Mads ran, and I sort of skipped. Running only made us look more suspicious, I told him, but he was probably right. A monk told J it would be best if we got out. “There might be some fighting.”

     Truth was the monks could barely even move. As dawn broke, security forces too were circumambulating the temple. Riot police and paramilitary fanned out in ring after ring of new roadblocks, sequestrating monks from Tibetan proselytizers, and residents from other residents. "Defend the dignity of the Constitution / Strengthen the unity of the people," read one of the red banners pinned to the side of People's Armed Police trucks, signaling the Party's commitment to unify by force if necessary. Proclaimed another: "The police and the people are as united as a single individual / See who in the world can defeat them."

     We were flushed out of the protective zone, unable to return, and I wondered whether we should have run in the first place. But as day broke I made calls to monks inside the monastery, and learned that agents were guarding their every doorway. Had one of them exposed us with his flashlight? I kept calling the mobile numbers of the monks I'd met earlier. They sounded exasperated, and were non-committal about their plans. First one monk said wait till 10 a.m.. Then he said 11 a.m. Then he said noon.

      We bought time in the interim cruising around town. While the temple was frozen still, neighborhood rites were taking place in the surrounding hills. Families trickled in. Fathers burned branches of highland barley, spooned rice and wheat flour on top, then drizzled on Chinese moonshine. Young men strung up colorful streamers imprinted with scripture. They scattered paper money like tickertape, lit firecrackers, blew conch shells and howled out to the sky. When a police van on patrol drove by, they howled even harder, as if to heckle officialdom. While dodging firecracker debris we captured images of the festivities, which for a time felt cathartic. At one point a curious Tibetan decided he'd borrow my camera and video me. But then the small crowd quieted down. A few men alerted us to the presence of a clean-cut young Tibetan couple. They were actually plain-clothed minders from the district government, we were told, there to keep the gathering small and subdued. Which they did.

     All of Tongren gravitated around the temple, that morning particularly. A Holy Land current pulsed through an otherwise pedestrian Chinese town. But with the religious soul of the town shut down, local adherents had something new to pray for: the huge void in the middle. For residents, it was just another stage in the vicious cycle of rites, restrictions, protests, crackdowns, and violence, followed by more prayer to cope with it all, and more police pressure to stop it.

     There was no urge to unravel or reflect on the toxic web of history, politics and spirituality. Tibetans were just resigned to it. "My grandma tells me that normally, everyone will come together today," said one neighborhood teen. "But these police barricades are preventing that."

      Across the river from the monastery a couple of men squatted with camouflage-painted binoculars, spying for any signs of tumult across the way. We found our own observation deck nearby. But soon we got the sense not everyone around us was watching the temple. A green SUV was parked some ways off behind us, and a black Santana out in front. The wind caught the jacket of a man strolling by, and the insignia on his sweatshirt underneath peeked out: “POLICE.” Meantime J had scrambled up a knoll to relieve himself, so for a moment there we were sitting ducks. Mads suggested we drive away without our driver. I decided to retrieve J before he could finish his business.

    J drove us to an apartment block he knew in town, where at his suggestion we stayed for the next two hours. But we suspected we'd been tailed on the way there. The racket from renovations inside the building kept us on edge as well. J called a business associate of his to discuss whether the guy could run an errand to Xining, the provincial capital. This friend was standing right outside the temple at the time. “How could I possibly go to now?” his friend responded. “A fight’s about to break out!”

     But there were to be no weisang rites on the mount behind the temple that day. And no fights over it, either -- just individual acts of bloodletting. In conversations later that day with monks and others by the monastery, I learned that the "Living Buddhas" (as Chinese call them) who lead Longwu monastery had been petitioning officials to loosen the lockdown. By Monday night it appeared that police forces might relent.

     Instead on Tuesday, for reasons that were unclear, authorities squeezed tighter. Many of the monks grew agitated as the morning wore on. The most senior "Living Buddha" (in Tibetan, tulku) of the temple, a man stuck between his official and religious duties, tried to calm them. But early that afternoon, we later learned, three young lamas resorted to the most personal of protests. Two bludgeoned themselves with stones, one slashed himself with a knife. All three wound up in hospital [see “Desperate Devotion: On Scene in Tongren”].

    The knifing victim was a 21 or 22-year-old disciple of a senior monk I had met. "People living in this world need freedom," he uttered when I solicited an explanation for the actions of his charge. "Without freedom, what is the point of living?" In phone exchanges over the next few days, he was less and less verbal, whether because of the sensitivity of talking or of the ordeal itself. Word of the self-flagellations did not go far beyond the monastery. It seemed this was one ugly episode that neither Chinese nor Tibetans wished to broadcast.

     The problem for Mads and I was how to file. By now we knew we needed faster Internet access than what my mobile connection could manage. We also did not want to risk our material from the few “productive” hours we'd had inside the lamasery – the material Newsweek would need. Moreover, we had put J at risk long enough, and worried what authorities might do to him if we were caught reporting. “As a Tibetan, I want to help you,” he told us over a meal of instant fangbian mian or “convenient noodles” at the apartment. “But in the future, they [local authorities] will frown on me. And they could find any opportunity to exact revenge”

      “Because we’re foreigners?”

      “Yeah, but not just because you’re foreigners. Because I’m a Tibetan.”

 V. “Confiscation!”

      So it was destination: Lanzhou. We high-tailed it out of town in the Hyundai. On the way J picked up an old Tibetan buddy to share the driving duties. No one appeared to be following us. The few times I’ve traipsed through crisis zones in China where I wasn’t supposed to be – during floods, earthquakes, or SARS – I’ve had moments when against all my insecurities, I felt oddly invisible. When after getting just lucky enough I fooled myself into thinking I could just blend in. When I begin to lose myself in the scenery of the "open" road. Those are the moments when the real trouble usually creeps up.

     Our car got stopped about an hour out of Tongren, in Jianzha county. The checkpoint didn’t exist two days earlier when we’d rode in, and the black-clad troopers stationed there seemed not to be your typical Keystone Cops. For a second I thought about playing dumb (not hard). Maybe I'd pretend we were just innocent tourists on the way out of the hot zones.

     But the minute J pulled to a halt they opened our doors, searched the car and popped open the truck. They laid their paws on our computers and cameras without the slightest pause. I was no longer interested in maintaining my composure. In Chinese, I barked, “You don’t have any right to do that.” It worked. The policemen passed me back my now-running laptop, hesitant as an untrained father handling his first-born. Clearly he was no pro with the hardware.

      I informed the officers I was calling the Foreign Ministry in Beijing – the administrative “parents” to us foreign journalists. “Okay, that is your right.” I actually had to call colleagues at the Newsweek bureau to get this process rolling. It took a few minutes to just get the correct pronunciation of the county across. Meantime, they said they were going to take us to another checkpoint up ahead. “And then what?” I asked.

     “Then we’ll drive to the county public security bureau for questioning.”

      So we drove on, one squad car behind us and one ahead. Only then did I discover that in the initial confusion, my laptop was missing. A policeman in one car somehow ended up with my laptop in his lap. I was livid, and reported to colleagues back at the bureau that they had taken away our equipment unlawfully. I was screaming bloody "confiscation", and stuffed my notepad halfway down my the back of my pants, lest they decide to take that too.

      When we stopped a few miles ahead, the first thing I did was snatch back my machine. Again I rebuked the officers for taking it. I told the police we were reporting the “illegal search” and near-“confiscation” to Beijing. They appeared indifferent.

      Over the next twenty minutes or so, ten different armed police and public security officers, uniformed and plain-clothed, browsed the pictures on our cameras. There was not much to look at. Mads had already transferred all but a few shots to an array of backup disks and drives, and stashed them away in his pockets and in shadow files on his Mac. The images on my pocket digital mostly depicted my mother-in-law connected to hospital tubes last month (she died of cancer a few days later).

     The deathbed images provoked great curiosity, and naturally I was irked by it. “Do you enjoy watching a woman die? What are you, sick?” Maybe I embarrassed them, maybe I annoyed them, but in any case they began parsing the photos quicker. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for?” I asked. I knew of colleagues who that week had had shots of protests or violence deleted on sight. One officer answered in monotone: “We are carrying out our orders.”

     The bureau called to tell me that our Foreign Ministry liaison was on the case. Our China bureau chief, Melinda Liu, got on the phone and assured me the FM could take care of it. “Just the past few days there have already been about two dozen of these run-ins.” Mads, being Shanghai-based, had called his liaison at the foreign affairs bureau there. This liaison provided him the contacts for his Jianzha county counterparts, and suggested we put in a call. That was one call we would not be making, I told Mads: we did not want to draw them out to debrief us. Better to let our guanxi in Beijing - yes, the Foreign Ministry - handle things. They may not  approve of our coverage, and they may not help us tuck into the conflict zone. But surely they could help us get out of it.

       At the checkpoint, I found, doing a tad to help out these men in black had the effect of softening them up. One of the officers was marking down our passport details, but he’d made a mess of our names and could not find my most recent visa. He wrote down the expiration date as December 2006, which obviously was not right. He appreciated my correcting them. He also took down the details from J and his friend, including their phone numbers. The two Tibetans, I could tell, were more anxious than Mads and me.

       Within minutes this checkpoint got very busy. The police were I.D.’ing every passenger on every bus, car and motorbike going north and south. Another car carrying three Westerners was stopped on the way toward Tongren. At least we weren’t them, I thought. Then, inexplicably, the policeman who’d made off with my laptop delivered some unexpected good news: we could go. Several officers shook our hands as if to apologize for the delay.

 VI. How about a Hershey bar?

      As we rode off, I called Beijing to have them call off the Foreign Ministry alerts. I felt a little silly for whipping the whole bureau into a frenzy and involving the ministry. But just as I was hanging up my phone, J’s rang. For the first time I heard him speaking Chinese over the phone, rather than Tibetan. I had a bad feeling about that. He got off the phone. “They want you to go back. They said something about making sure they look at all your pictures. If we don’t go back, they said they’d find us. What do you say?”

     There was nothing to say. I marveled at the fact J even had the balls to ask.

     We turn backed. On the way to the checkpoint, fearing we’d ended up getting separated and questioned, J and I squared our “story”: we’d hired him just that day; he had no idea we were journalists; he hadn’t heard or seen us do any reporting, and so on. J opened his glove compartment. Inside was his treasured sheaf of letters from foreign tourists. They might come in handy if he had to prove that he drove foreigners all the time for a living, and was not some mole in league with the foreign press. Normally, I’m guessing, J only carried the letters to show new customers. They were letters of recommendation, with a personal touch.

     The officers at the checkpoint told us immediately why they’d flagged us down. The Foreign Affairs bureau in Xining, the provincial capital, wanted to question us. The three Westerners, who turned out to be German journalists, were already about to be driven off in that direction. “So now you’re heading to Xining, too?” one guy smiled.

     Our roundabout route back to Lanzhou came not too far from Xining anyway, I realized. We all piled back into the car and prepared for a detour. But then they we found of the older officers was going to go with us, too, and we had to scoot over to make room. As he was about to get in, something inside me must have snapped. I hopped up out of the car and declared “Bu xing, bu xing, bu xing --- no good, no good, no good.” We weren’t going anywhere under these conditions.

     Next thing I knew I had rattled off an uneven string of demands and rationale. I said we just wanted to go back to where we started in Lanzhou, which was in a different province, Gansu province; we had only come through Qinghai because we couldn’t get to Xiahe any other way (as they well knew). There was no need to delay us like this, I said; from our pictures, they could see, we hadn’t covered any protests (true enough). And if the Qinghai authorities were going to force us to go to Xining, finally, they would have to escort us in a separate car. If they insisted on sticking an officer in ours, I said, they would have to split the fare. The last stipulation I threw in for effect.

       I called back the bureau in Beijing and got the calls rolling once more. I stressed our key demand - that we be permitted to head directly to Lanzhou, and not pass through Xining. The Foreign Ministry liaison told the bureau she was going to place a call to the branch in Xining. We waited ten minutes while officers attended to other vehicles. Then, getting off the phone, a policeman asked to take our passports to the public security bureau to make copies. Based on our experience, that boded well.

     Another quarter of an hour passed, during which one of the public security officers, who was Tibetan, engaged me in small talk. “Caught many journalists?” I asked him. “Just a few.” He grinned in recognition when I asked him about the disturbances, but didn't say anything.

     I went around offering everyone mini-Hershey’s chocolate bars that I'd bought for the trip. The officers politely refused, but J and his friend each took one. J seemed to be chilling, but his friend looked me straight in the eyes and fretted, looking thoroughly cowed. He didn’t utter a word.

      It was an odd but telling reversal: this was the Tibetans' backyard, but I felt much more at home. Hell, once eight years ago I was detained and questioned at the Forbidden City - with my parents. On some level, this to me was a game. The object: to save myself the hassle of a trip to the god-forsaken city of Xining, and Mads a few erased photos. For our drivers the consequences might prove much more serious, however, and at this point I had little control over that. For now all I could do was try to keep everyone's spirits up. I bounced anxiously on my heels and began to whine.

      “How much longer?” I demanded to know from the remaining officers, wise-cracking: “If it gets much longer, I’m going to have to demand compensation for the time you’ve wasted!”

      That drew a few chuckles.

      Moments later the other officers got back from the station, and handed us back our passports. “That’s it. You can go.” Just like that. More handshakes. No questions asked.

      On the way back, J reviewed the highlights of what happened. He got a kick out of my remark about compensation. “Hah. You say that, and the police laugh. Do you what they’d do if we say that? They’d beat us up bad!”

     “But, you know,” he continued, “Some of those police were Tibetans. They were nicer. I think they really liked you.” Notably, J displayed no discernible resentment toward the Tibetans cops. They were not "collaborators". But I wonder now what he thinks of the "Living Buddhas" reciting the Party verdict on events on state television.  

      Later J said not to call if I needed to talk. Better to text instead and he’d call me back. But twice I texted in the following days, and he didn’t respond. So after getting back to Beijing that weekend, I rang him on another line to check in. He said local police had tracked him down and questioned him a couple times before that week was over. He was only getting back to his route again that. I told him to find a way to get in touch if there was a problem. “Shouldn’t be,” he replied, rather unconvincingly.

     We never stopped or got stopped again that day, speeding back to Lanzhou in record time. But the next day I started hitting all sorts of new new roadblocks, this time on the Information Highway. It took me 15 hours, two connections, three email boxes, and all kinds of debugging and initializing to email out a single piece on the Tibetans in Tongren.

     But that's another story.