Darchen

Darchen owes everything to the mountain above it. Kailash has drawn pilgrims for more than a thousand years: Buddhists identify it with Demchok, Hindus with the abode of Shiva, Jains with the place where their first teacher attained liberation, and followers of Bon with the sacred mountain at the centre of their own cosmology. The settlement at the foot of the southern approach grew as the place where those journeys were fitted out, rested and completed, rather than as a farming village.

Western Tibet around it has a longer history of its own. The kingdom of Zhangzhung, the heartland of Bon, lay in these valleys before the Tibetan empire absorbed it, and from the 10th century the Guge kingdom ruled the region from citadels to the west, reviving Buddhist learning and building temples whose ruins survive. The routes over the Himalayan passes carried salt, wool, grain and pilgrims between the plateau and the valleys to the south, and Darchen sat on the line of that traffic.

Access has changed the village more in forty years than in the previous four hundred. Pilgrimage was interrupted in the middle of the 20th century and resumed from the 1980s, and the paving of the long highways across western Tibet, together with an airport a day's drive to the north-east, brought vehicles, concrete buildings, electricity and a steady flow of Tibetan, Chinese, Indian and other visitors. Government building programmes have added guesthouses, a clinic and bathrooms, and the settlement now swells and empties with the season.

The circuit is the culture. Pilgrims arrive, buy provisions, hang prayer flags and set out to walk about 53 kilometres around the mountain, most in three days, many Tibetans in one, and a few over two or three weeks by measuring the whole distance in full-body prostrations. Buddhists, Hindus and Jains go clockwise; followers of Bon, whose tradition is older than Buddhism in Tibet, go the other way, and the two streams pass each other on the path. Completing the circuit is understood to clear the effects of past actions, and a year of the horse in the Tibetan calendar is held to multiply the merit, bringing far larger crowds.

Ritual marks the route: stones added to cairns, clothing and locks of hair left at the Dolma La pass as a symbolic death and rebirth, butter lamps lit at the monasteries along the valley, and water taken from the sacred lake to the south. The festival of Saga Dawa, when a great flagpole on the plain is lowered, re-dressed with prayer flags and raised again, is the biggest gathering of the year and draws pilgrims from across the plateau.

Everyday manners are those of Tibet: tea offered and accepted with both hands, khata scarves exchanged, shoes and hats removed in chapels. The village's mixed population of Tibetan traders, Han and Hui shopkeepers, guides, porters and pilgrims makes it a crossroads in a place with almost nobody else for a hundred kilometres.

Only a few hundred people live in Darchen through the year, and the number multiplies many times over in the pilgrimage season. Permanent residents are Tibetan families from the surrounding grazing country, together with shopkeepers, cooks and drivers, many from Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai, who come for the summer and go home for the winter.

The economy is pilgrimage and herding. Guesthouses, restaurants, shops, portering, yak hire, taxis to the lakes and the collection of area and circuit fees provide the cash income; beyond the village, families keep yaks, sheep and goats on the Barkha plain and move them between pastures. Supplies come in by lorry over hundreds of kilometres of highway, so prices are high and choice is limited.

Daily life is dominated by weather and season. In summer the street is busy from before dawn, when walkers set out, until the light goes at nine or ten in the evening; in winter the wind is constant, many buildings are shuttered and the population falls sharply. Electricity, mobile coverage and running water have all arrived but can be interrupted. The concerns of the place are the pressure of growing visitor numbers on a fragile landscape, rubbish along the circuit, the distance to hospitals and schools, and how the money from the mountain is shared.

Eating in Darchen is practical rather than local: almost nothing grows at this height, and the food comes up the highway. Tibetan staples anchor it. Tsampa, roasted barley flour kneaded with butter tea into a dough, is carried by pilgrims on the circuit because it needs no cooking. Po cha, salted butter tea churned from brick tea and yak butter, is drunk all day and warms walkers coming off the pass, while sweet milk tea by the thermos is the usual alternative in the teahouses.

Yak provides most of the meat: stewed with potato and radish, minced into momo dumplings, or dried in strips and eaten raw as a walking snack. Thukpa, a noodle soup with meat and vegetables, is the common hot meal, and dairy runs through everything, from yoghurt to chura, the hard cubes of dried cheese that pilgrims chew for hours. Instant noodles, biscuits and tinned fish from the shops make up much of what is actually carried around the mountain.

The street's kitchens are largely migrant. Sichuanese cooks turn out stir-fries, rice dishes and hotpot; Hui restaurants pull lamian noodles in clear beef broth; and simple vegetarian meals are cooked for Indian pilgrim groups, for whom meat and alcohol are avoided on the journey. Chang, the barley beer of the plateau, is drunk in the villages round about, but many walkers leave alcohol alone at this altitude.