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of fake rock jutted upwards, behind a central platform upon which lay three grey stone skulls jumbled and huge, fangs gaping at the sky. We wandered upon the platform, amidst young women demonstrating unencumbered consciences by lying down within the circular depression apparently used to lay corpses – a custom showing, via their readiness to face death, their lack of sin. On the slopes above, a scattering of monks mixed with local Tibetans and Han Chinese tourists hefting their cameras. Cars and trucks drew up, holding within them the deceased and their families. Swaddled in sheets, they were taken first to the central platform, then to its side where, discolored with death, they were unwrapped and laid naked upon the ground. Beating lazy wings the vultures circled above as the monks, clad in heavy aprons over the saffron of their robes, began their work. Making long and deep incisions down legs, arms, and back, they butchered the deceased and exposed the red and white of their innards to the sky. Cuts were made wider, skin and fat flayed. Arms and legs, where rigor mortis had set in, were hacked with a butcher knife, crunching as bones shattered underneath. Heads were scalped. Double now in their nakedness the dead looked pitiful and somehow absurd, denuded of their dignity along with their skin. Whether curious or ghoulish, the crowd inched forward until it was mere feet away from the cutting of the dead and, according to my young monk, worrying the vultures who now squatted waiting upon the slope, intent upon the sight below. However, crowd control in Khampa is a rough affair. Seeking to make us move back, a monk ran at us shouting and waiving a flail – it seemed perhaps a slingshot, or a length of leather, but was in fact a long and thick strip of human skin, yellowed and fatty and dangling
in his hand. The crowd recoiled, with pudgy Chinese screaming for their children to get out of the way, a solitary dreadlocked Westerner sprinting up the slope. They probably didn’t warn of that in the Lonely Planet. Freed of onlookers, the monks poured barley butter upon the flayed remains and called up to the birds. Squawking, they rushed hopping down to the corpses, tumbling over themselves and squabbling with loud cry over their waiting’s reward. They stripped the bodies down to the bone, and then fought over bare ribcages and loose skulls glistening under the sky. As the vultures roiled yaks stood confusedly about, gazing with dumb bovine incomprehension at the proceedings beneath them. A monk sat burning incense, chanting, and banging a small drum – it was his job to frighten away those restive spirits who still failed to realize they and their bodies were no longer attached. Beside him stood some relatives of the deceased who with their phones aloft stood recording the entire event. To the Tibetans, the sky burial is but the last stage in a funerary process lasting several days, usually in the homes of the dead. By this point, the souls of the deceased are judged to have fled, their bodies being as mere empty containers to be disposed of. Photos and videos are thus not inappropriate, and of no real importance – the young monk I was with encouraged me to take some, he even posed himself, and took the opportunity to take some of his own. Bones now bared, it is the work of the monks to pound the remainder down into paste and mixed with roasted barley flour which is rolled by hand and fed to the birds; a process simply regarded as “boring” by my guide. Together we walked out across the grassland, green and warm on a summer’s afternoon.
real chinese
tǔ
tuhao New Money Hot on the heels of the hated gao fu shuai (tall, rich and handsome) have come the new scapegoats for online China’s burgeoning dislike of those who flaunt their wealth. World, meet the tuhao. Tu literally meaning “dirt” but used as a euphemism for anyone or anything seen as rural, rough or unrefined, is paired with hao, a word which incorporates the meanings of both wealth and power. Tuhao was a common phrase used in 1940s and 50s Communist Party propaganda urging rural workers and farmers to rise up and overthrow local landlords – the tuhao – that the Party claimed had disenfranchised the masses.
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Today, however, the tuhao are those who flash their wealth with the purchase of extravagant and unnecessary luxuries. Tuhao may be richer than the equally-maligned gao fu shuai, but are sneered at for their perceived lack of refinement which, in an increasingly snobbish online environment, places them below the gao fu shuai in China’s social caste system. While the gao fu shuai might lavish expensive but tasteful brand-name goods on their partners, tuhao typically go for the more expensive but far less tasteful or subtle gesture. When a millionaire in Jiangsu reportedly shaped millions of yuan in banknotes into mutton pancake rolls as a gift to his fiancée,
háo
for example, he was castigated as a tuhao. The term took off after online portal ifeng. com posted a picture of an extremely luxurious and star-studded launch party held by a Chinese movie company. The accompanying caption “In this hot summer, let me fan the heat away from the tuhao” immediately went viral, spawning legions of imitations. When Apple launched the gold handset of its new iPhone 5, which was widely mocked for being tacky, it nonetheless became a number one seller in China. “[Gold] is really the color of tuhao, since it’s the only way to distinguish the iPhone 5 from other [iPhone] handsets,” ran one post. NEWSCHINA I December 2013