In Nepal’s fabled Mustang region, the Kingdom of Lo houses priceless relics. Will a new road to China save its unique culture or destroy it?
and a green fleece jacket, the king stood in the center of a low-ceilinged room in his centuries-old palace. He was reciting a Buddhist chant and methodically fingering a string of prayer beads. Around him, the walls and wooden pillars holding up the sagging roof were decorated with intricate paintings of Buddhist deities. Some wore gold robes and reclined blissfully. Others, bearing swords and surrounded by flames, howled with rage.
committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Explorer Mark Synnott’s expeditions since 1999 and Explorer Cory Richards’s photography since 2014.The king’s full name is Jigme Singhi Palbar Bista, but he’d introduced himself to me simply as Jigme. He is slender, with thinning gray hair, and possesses an energy that belies his six decades.
Now it is Jigme who watches over these deities, at least in their physical form. In the secular world, a black-market antiquities dealer could sell this small collection for a sizable fortune. For centuries, the idea of someone taking them was of little worry here in this isolated, devoutly Buddhist city. But the outside world finally had ascended to Mustang’s doorstep, and art theft was just one of many new things that the king now had to worry about.
But even before Mustang had evolved into a vibrant trading hub, it had been an important crossroads for Buddhist scholars and pilgrims moving between India and China. Eventually, Buddhist teachings were fused with the region’s animistic practices, and Tibetan Buddhism was born. Over time, the kingdom embraced this new faith and built ornate temples and monasteries.
This was the world in which Jigme was raised, a forbidden kingdom isolated among some of the planet’s most forbidding terrain. As king, his father kept an eye on the border, but his primary job was to keep the peace. He traveled constantly between villages, settling local quarrels and disputes over property. “He rarely spent even two days at home,” Jigme told me. “He would hear of a problem or a fight, jump on his horse, and go there. His word was the final say in the kingdom.
“It didn’t upset me,” Jigme said. “I recognized that times were changing and had my own life to focus on. We were never proud of our position, and we didn’t receive any compensation for it. So we accepted it.” With the landscape coming alive in the early light, we drove along the Kali Gandaki as it flowed lazily across a wide plain, and passed foothills stratified into a layer cake of grays, browns, yellows, and reds. Herds of shaggy pashmina goats trotted alongside the road, tended by dust-covered teenage boys and girls. Terraced fields lined the fertile land along the river.
A young Lo-pa girl waits outside while her family unloads Chinese goods at their shop near Lo Manthang. Motorcycles have largely replaced horses in Mustang, once known as the Kingdom of Lo, where horsemanship and horse culture were long revered.Tsewang shined a flashlight onto the wall, and I saw the room was covered in murals. One depicted a Buddha who sat cross-legged atop a cloud beside a bare-breasted woman holding a conch shell in one hand and offering a silver bowl in the other.
In a passage behind the towering Buddha, Tsewang pointed to a spot on its hip where the statue was crudely patched with mud. “About 20 years ago,” he said, “thieves broke in here and stole theTraditionally, ritual sculptures, regardless of size, have a hollow center. During the consecration process, they are filled with written prayers and valuable objects like agate beads, bronze figurines, gold, and precious stones.
A crumbling palace in the village of Tsarang perches on a hilltop overlooking the Kali Gandaki Gorge, with peaks of the Annapurna massif rising in the distance. A severe earthquake in 2015 damaged this and other structures in Mustang.Despite Jigme’s optimistic outlook, it seemed that the return on this sizable investment was still a long way off. At that moment, Tsewang and I were the hotel’s only guests. And Jigme isn’t the only one banking on tourism.
The wind howled. Broken beer bottles and plastic wrappers littered the ground. A sign in English read: “No Parking in the No Man’s Land” and “No Photography.” Some Nepali tourists, who’d also arrived by motorbike, ignored the sign and took selfies around a squat concrete pillar that marked the Nepal-China border.
That evening Jigme invited me to dinner at the Royal Mustang Resort. Next to our table, a propane heater warded off the chill in the dining room decorated with Tibetan paintings and sepia-toned photographs of the royal family.
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