Paul's Tibet Journal: The Shigatse Insider's Tour

By Paul James

It's Monday morning and we once again find ourselves back in Shigatse. After the weekend in Zhangmu and basically the whole day on the road on Sunday, we reset overnight and got back down to the business at hand, which is to explore and learn more about the different locations in Tibet that we find ourselves in. So this go around in Shigatse we decided to forgo the monastery and instead take part in a bit of an insider's tour.

A Tibetan Buddhist religious pictogram found tacked onto many of the doors in the Shigatse hutongs. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]

Our first stop of the morning was a local carpet factory. Now, when I say that we decided to forgo the monastery, that didn't necessarily mean we weren't going to be somehow connected to it. The Tibet Gang-Gyen Carpet Factory was established in 1988 by the 10th Panchant Lama and is actually owned by the monastery itself. Somewhat non-descript, the factory actually employs over 180 people, mostly Tibetan women, who spend their days weaving, spinning and knotting ornate carpets, mainly for sale to foreign customers. At the end of the year, 44 percent of the profits go to the local monastery and the remainder goes toward upgrades and bonuses for the staffers, who appear to be mostly women in their 30's and 40's, which is what makes the brochure proclaiming that the factory doesn't employ anyone under 18 somewhat worth a chuckle. I never did find out what sort of profits they turn, but a rug of approximately 1.5 by 2 meters will run you around 7,000 RMB, or over 1,000 dollars US, and business appears to be good.

From there we went to what would arguably be the nicest smelling industrial operation in Shigatse, the local incense factory. Again, a fairly non-descript building just on the edge of town, the operation is designed to serve the incense needs of Shigatse, the surrounding counties as well as parts of Sichuan. And of course, with incense being an important element to the Tibetan Buddhist religious rites, the factory makes a net profit of some 1,000,000 RMB annually. Pretty good business for a very simple operation. One man, a-la 'the colonel's' secret recipe, whips up the incense ��batter,' if you will, with the various herbs and spices then packs it into a cylinder container. That container is then put under an industrial press, whereby another gentleman squeezes out the material in a narrow, tube-like form around a wide wheel. Once enough of the incense material has filled the wheel, it's extracted and put on a wooden board, cut to length, and then left to dry.

Our last stop of the morning was a quick tour of a Shigatse 'hutong.' Laid out somewhat in a similar style to the old hutongs in Beijing, the distinct difference is the religious paraphernalia which adorn virtually every elaborately painted door. A short-lived, but unique way to end our time in Shigatse. The next stop is another nearby county to hopefully discover more unique and intriguing aspects of life here in Tibet.