CHINA USED TO BE A WORD for crockery in the West, but now has become at once our banker, our competitor and yet supplier, and, as a dynamo, incipiently our cloud-befouler. Sixteen of the world’s twenty worst cities for air pollution smoke there, and the Gobi’s winds do blow. When you land at Beijing’s airport you may cough claustrophobically and think you need cataract surgery, the vistas appear so milky. Then the landscape unrolls as you’re traveling—continuously huffing and puffing, steaming and smelting—with people, people, hurrying and laboring minutely at extracting or earthmoving, but without the tapestry of liberties and spiritualities you’ll see in India. Fearing the ideological somersaults of the past, they live in the present, a bit robotically. Echoes are discouraged, memories dropped. On the other hand, a nation bursting at the seams with what is approaching one-fourth of humanity, of course, cannot be categorically disliked—all those live-wire youngsters, spooning lovers, hobbling oldsters—and Sun Yat-sen’s portrait had replaced Chairman Mao’s in presiding over Tiananmen Square during the 2007 Golden Week spring holiday when I visited. The police presence was not oppressive and rumor had it that his visage might someday adorn some of the currency, as China’s concept of the context in which Mao’s 1949 revolution occurred evolves and broadens.

The country didn’t nearly implode, like Russia did at first, in moving from forced collectivization toward a market economy, or need its natural resources to rescue it, as Russia did its oil fields. Instead, a dialectic flexibility, broiled through decades of Hundred Flowers cultural purges or Great Leap Forward convulsions and doctrinal flip-flops, punctuated by horrendous famine (all telescoped into half the time the Soviets had employed for their experiments), helped goose its phenomenal recent growth. Greed became admired rather than a capital offense. Yet these switchbacks have fostered a more prudently unironic attitude among middle-aged Chinese than characterizes any other dictatorship I’ve been in. Having watched not only dissenters, but advocates who, devastated after the next course correction, opted out, most Chinese have accepted being noncommittal as the normal mode, even when this neutrality is expressed through a hectoring tone—since hectoring has remained the method of discourse throughout the past half century. I dropped in on a World Trade Organization conference at my hotel and noticed how distinctly forcefully China’s delegates spoke, no matter how little objection could be raised to whatever they were saying.

The past has been erased, the present is mistrusted, and the future feared, as the cliché goes. Indeed, for example, many of the Buddhist temples that were razed in earlier sociopolitical tempests or during the 1959 conquest of Tibet have been reconstructed for purposes of tourism—yet without dormitories for the monks, who otherwise might be able to bring their actual religious spirit to life. Building cranes, enormously angular, loomed above Beijing, and cement factories fumed on any road or rail route I took out of this great boomtown. In the park adjoining the Forbidden City, each trash can had been assigned by the police to a particular homeless person to wrangle a living from. The man my friend Tenzing and I talked to was thirty-six, looked fifty-six, a yak herder from faraway Gansu Province, who said the local police there had disabled one of his hands with a knife during a false-arrest scuffle—which broke up his marriage and his livelihood—and then granted him no redress. After journeying to Beijing to appeal his case, he’d been refused a pension but permitted the right to recycle the bottles and cans from this one garbage barrel for his sustenance, and to sleep, winter and summer, under a nearby bridge. Couldn’t I, he asked, find him a job herding yaks in the United States?

It’s hard to find a translator because, although the Chinese study English in school, most of their teachers, too, have never spoken to a foreigner, or at least not an “Ocean Person,” the slang term for somebody who isn’t Asian. To do so during the Marxist years could have prompted an arrest, in the unlikely event such a chance even arose. So from embarrassment or vestigial caution, educated folk don’t regularly initiate conversations or volunteer their help in the manner common when one is traveling elsewhere. Religious input—whether of the Taoist, Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, or Muslim variety—was also consciously scrubbed out of the body politic decades ago, as well as the ethic of simple help for victims of injustice or privation, as counterintuitive to survival. Therefore displays of hospitality or kindness are rare; and I understood why a college student of mine in the U.S.—though majoring in the language—had returned from a summer trip to China saying it had been awful; he was “a slave” for a while in a village where he’d run out of money, and worked with his hands for a businesswoman for only rice for his belly, until a European couple happened to pass through and rescue him.

Thus for a combination of reasons the best translators, apart from a few professionals, tend to be outlaw Tibetans who learned their English illegally in India while attending the Dalai Lama’s schools—having accomplished the perilous crossing of the Himalayas on foot for a couple of weeks, while hunted by detachments of the Chinese army, into Nepal. The return journey, years later—whooshing across a jungle river, harnessed to a hidden cable and equipped with false papers, then maybe smuggled farther underneath the packages in a mail truck—would be scary also. People not shot but captured, of either sex or any age, are kicked like a human football by the soldiers in a concrete room until they bleed from every orifice, and then starved to skin and bones for six months in prison in the “re-education” process.

In any case, the experience is transforming. A brown bear rises on her haunches for a gander at the little band of escapees sneaking across the shoulder of her snowy mountain, then wading hand-in-hand through the terrifyingly neck-deep braided channels of the Brahmaputra River. After trading some of their clothes to nomadic Nepali herdsmen for food during the final stretch of the hike toward a bus ride to the storied freedoms of Kathmandu, they reach New Delhi, and Dharamsala, or Bangalore. Tenzing is a generic name I am employing for various Tibetans who assisted me, including one who finally did break through after being caught the first time and beaten within an inch of his life, then jam-packed in a cell for months with a university student who had been turned in by his own professor, who’d walked into his dorm room unannounced and spotted a book by the Dalai Lama on the table. Both boys could scarcely walk when they were released.

So, you wind up with pickup translators who speak English like an Indian and are living in a ten-dollar-a-day Beijing hotel, or on two dollars a day in Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan—to which I now caught a sleeper from one of Beijing’s wonderfully efficient old train stations, though my compartment mates—a mother, her small daughter, and the grandmother (this family the dependents of a Xerox company district manager)—were harassed by the railroad police because the little girl was now one meter tall and didn’t yet have a separate internal passport. The deluxe train, like Beijing’s subway, its central boulevards of banks or ministries, its zoo and main amusement park, was like a cleaned-up version of the Western standard. But with no fallow patches of real estate outside, cotton or truck gardens were planted wherever colorless blocks of bare-bones cement housing didn’t adjoin another spuming surge of industry.

We chugged up into the Min Mountains, crossing several of the Yangtze’s feeder headwater valleys—the Jialing and Jiaojiang river watersheds—a lonely, lovely, severely grudging, bristly, Colorado-style, hardscrabble ranching country of cul-de-sacs short on grass but rich in rock pitched toward the sky. Soon, however, each budding watercourse was being dredged along the downslope for factory sand or roadbed gravel, as we descended to the mining pits, refinery furnaces, brickyards, and power plants of another busy city. Wheat and apple trees grew on the terraces, till rice and sugarcane, soybeans, corn, sorghum, tobacco, and pig and fish farms replaced them in the lowlands, with water buffalo at work, and mimosa, cypress, and banyan trees or cotton fields interspersed by housing blocks for the dense labor force, but much more regimentedly than in an Indian landscape.

Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, a leading upbeat little city, was never conquered by the Japanese during World War II, nor its amenities subsequently leveled by Red Guard gangs. In the Tibetan quarter, I ate yak dumplings and drank buttered tea in an upstairs restaurant where heretical thoughts could be muttered—an ochre-clad monk was eating there. Tibetan salt, herbs, and hides used to be carried the two hundred fifty miles south to Chengdu by middlemen, who traded Chinese rice, sugar, and tea for them at the end of a yak trail out of the mountains near Jiuzhaigou; and I heard stories about the Chinese conquest of Tibet during the 1950s. Doomed clan chieftains had ridden out of their villages with a couple dozen cavalry, waving their swords and bolas against the machine guns. Or, equipped per- haps with muzzleloaders and defending a defile so narrow that the invading tanks couldn’t clank through, Tibetan snipers had picked off the Chinese infantry while their women and children huddled safely in a pocket notch behind them. But never having seen an aircraft (there are still Tibetans who have not), they’d left air power out of their calculations, whereupon MiGs or helicopter gunships swept in and strafed their families, sheep, and yak herds catastrophically. The last holdout patriarch martyred himself and his two sons when their bullets ran out while besieged in a cave among the crags. But one son did survive, so his proud descendants are somehow marked with the same scar his father’s shot had left.

My informants, Tenzings all (that common Tibetan name has become more famous in its Sherpa incarnation in Nepal, the Sherpas being a people of Tibetan language and culture who are said to have originated in and migrated from the Min Shans some centuries ago), sat chatting on a bench by a goldfish pool while I visited a historical museum with life-size statuary of ancient Chinese warlords, each hugely mustachioed and ostentatiously well fed. When I asked whether the Chinese soldiers raped the Tibetan girls they captured trying to cross the border into Nepal, the Tenzings told me no, they were only whipped, but that the Nepalese soldiers on the other side might grab and  rape them before turning them loose. They said their own families in the mountains still had muzzleloaders, however, bought  from Muslim gunsmiths whose families had forged them from time immemorial, and who knew how to make nothing else. The Uygurs of Xinjiang Autonomous Region—adjoining Tibet, but also over against Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan—have a current rebellion simmering against the Chinese regime because they enjoy the advantages of resupply from neighboring sympathetic co-religionists with Kalashnikovs.

The Chinese periodically lighten up on the Tibetans, however, allowing them three children per family, for instance, instead of only one, as with the ethnic Han, who comprise 90 percent of the nation’s population. LESS CHILDREN, LESS PROBLEM, says a ubiquitous billboard. But another admonishment sounds more urgent: CHILDREN ARE NOT A TOURIST ATTRACTION —lest the toxin of child prostitution spread from nearby countries like Thailand and Cambodia, which are blighted by it. Even so, a woman who is officially summoned to the district hospital to have her tubes tied after bearing her quota, but then loses a child, may want to raise the money to visit a distant clinic sub rosa and try to get her fertility restored. Families believe that an infant can die if a spirit, and not necessarily a malign one, merely passes too quickly through the room: that its vulnerably unseated soul may be swept along.

A subway was under construction through Chengdu, but the breezy parks and college campuses, pedestrian nooks and refurbished temple architecture (though skeletally manned) and quirky shops and restaurants would probably hold their own. Leaving Chengdu’s fertile plain, we drove north through Dujiangyan, Wenchuan, Maoxian, Zhenjiangguan, and Songpan, mostly above the gorges of the Min River, which was being industrially stripped of its bed to manufacture concrete and dammed for more hydroelectricity, pluming absolute thunderclouds of dust from a sequence of emptied agricultural riverine communities. Jackhammers, bulldozers, and earthmovers were operating around the countless tunnels under construction, with one lane left for traffic. The uprooted villagers had staged several spontaneous demonstrations that had blocked this road until they were smothered by army troops, the driver told me: because in a People’s Republic any public protest can be construed as mounted against, not a corporate project, but the interests of the country’s entire populace, and therefore the dissenters deserve to be regarded as treasonous.

As we mounted past the hundred miles of denuded blast zones and hair-raising hairpin turns with ten-ton lorries rounding them, toward thinner watercourses and an alpine climate, the industrial possibilities diminished and we began seeing fruit or walnut orchards, flocks of sheep and goats, and, by the walled trading center of Songpan, gnarly-roofed Tibetan villages with yaks moseying shaggily in the meadows. North from the Huanglong highlands, we could glimpse snow-tufted mountains and the kind of passes between them that legends sprout in. Spirits—beneficent, indifferent, or malicious—inhabit all such regions and the passes are thoroughfares for them as well as for people. But certain passes are so heavily and swiftly trafficked during the night that a human traveler or herdsman caught halfway through by a storm or bad planning, who falls asleep, may lose his life’s spark—which can be blown out like a candle flame by the wind of the spirit’s passing. He’ll be found in daylight, unbruised, unfrozen.

And despite the venerable yak-train trail going by, where Tibet’s salt, sheep’s wool, and mountainside medicinal herbs and furs were bartered for Chinese rice, sugar, wheat, and tea in Songpan, it was barley, which grows in the Tibetans’ own harsh climate, that was their staff of life. Still is, my Tenzings said. They harvest the barley kernels into yak-skin sacks, then store as much as a five-year stockpile in great log caches almost the size of their houses against hard times. To grind a two-month supply into flour, each family—using in turn the village’s water wheel—first pours a quantity into a large dry frying pan lined with sand, which is later strained off and can be employed again. After three minutes on the flames, the grains begin to pop into floral form like mini-popcorn and leap up toward your face as you stir the batch with a bamboo whisk; and it is these you grind, daylong, in shifts at the water wheel. The flour alone, stored dry, will keep for about a year, or may be fermented for three months into a wine—in nine, into a kind of brandy or whiskey, which, if aged for another nine years, reaches a peak.

Barley, lacking gluten, bakes as an unleavened flatbread, soured with yak milk, but mainly is eaten as porridge, together with other staples like cheese, or with turnips, beans, cabbages, potatoes, or onions, grown in season and stewed or sautéed along with meat once a day. To prepare the meal of porridge, or tsampa, whether at home or while camped after scrambling across the steppe with a hundred browsing yaks, you fill your big wooden bowl halfway with hot tea, then add half a handful of yak butter to melt in it, and crumble in another half-handful of cheese. Meanwhile three handfuls of barley flour have been gently boiling and now are kneaded into a richly moist mixture to create an edible warm dough that you nibble in small pieces with more buttered tea as a beverage. Calves have gotten the skim milk and bean stems—or the goats and pigs have, if a family’s youngsters feel like chasing them, because the nearest escarpment can be a three hours’ hike straight up. Yaks, by contrast, may be as tame and slow as the water buffalo domesticated by the Han Chinese at lower elevations, and worth four hundred dollars apiece if broken to ride and plow with—ten times a sheep’s value, plus possessing the added advantage of furnishing eight times as much meat. This is important to Tibetans, who are not vegetarians but leery of the actual act of killing, which they believe people will answer for in a difficult, hallucinatory death. Thus having fewer scenes of slaughter to remember is better. The brother of one of my guides had just sold his entire herd of sheep in order to be free of the burden of slaughtering them for income, and not to a butcher but to another shepherd for less money.

Tibetans didn’t hunt a lot or pursue predators for fun or eat waterfowl or fish, as a rule, and so when the Chinese conquered Tibet in their 1959 blitzkrieg, resettling countless lowland Han in its territories to dilute the traditions, religion, and character of the region, it was like a paradise at first of duck-shooting and fishing for the newcomers. In many villages the work inevitably was no longer focused upon herding yaks and growing barley but skewed toward logging the forests or commerce. When I asked, in a community of ethnic Han that has been superimposed among the Tibetans in the Saba Valley, if the senior members could recall where they’d been transplanted from, their friendly faces suddenly went blank.

“We don’t remember.”

They kept a 108 penned pigs, however, the same number as there are beads on a proper Buddhist prayer string. Numbers are important. Any cluster of Tibetan villages will boast a fortune-teller schooled in reading not only the stars’ basic alignments but the permutations into which dice fall when repeatedly questioned. Up a notch, perhaps, from the dice-thrower will be the local shaman, who has learned the properties of a whole arsenal of herbs, and where to search each of them out, plus the alchemy of spells: how to cast them or break them. Individuals train and apprentice for both of these vocations, and may be tempted into venality or malice in the matter of spells, for instance. But there is also the rarer phenomenon of men who are genuine healers—inspired—born with the gift—who can’t be hired, like some of the shamans, to practice, for example, blacker arts. They simply try to heal people, blowing drops of water on them from their palms, or flicking it with a finger or a quill, to make them well. If that doesn’t work, after keeping a patient for about a week in his compound, the healer will probably refer him to a government hospital. (A fortune-teller may have originally influenced the family’s decision to try the healer first.)

The wood dove is the Tibetans’ Virtuous Bird, not to be killed. Nor should the cuckoo, which is called God’s Bird because it brings the summer. A different species, called the Cuckoo’s Wife, arrives even a little sooner; it was pointed out to me by one of my Tenzings, fluttering like an ouzel around the Pearl Shoals waterfalls in Jiuzhaigou National Park. A certain rare antelope, the takin, is the Virtuous Animal (though its preciousness to Tibetans doesn’t prevent the Chinese from shooting it), while up at timberline grows the Tree of the Gods, furnishing firewood to herders, who at that altitude will gratefully wave a spiral of smoke scented with yak butter and barley flour as a thank-you gesture to them.

Gods have generally undergone an earlier human phase, and some hubristic miscue may tumble them down into human form again, or lower, into an animal incarnation, or even one of the eighteen circles of Hell. Some spirit mountains have historically been frightening just for the wraiths and apparitions inhabiting them, who might jostle whomever they considered an intruder off a cliff. But others were deliberately left untrodden as sanctuaries for the animals living there, where wolves, leopards, bears, pandas, dholes, or eagles could den or nest undisturbed. And still other mountains have been perceived as protectors of the villages located beneath—from flood or drought, lightning, hail, earthquake, or fire—and the grazing and hay-cutting rights to their slopes inherited only by certain clans. Even before Tibetans knew about germs, they usually boiled the water they drank, as if for tea, rather than swallowing it “live” or cold from a stream. But children are not sheltered unduly from household or door- yard dirt, lest they turn sickly later on; and because their mothers work up on the sloping shingled roofs a lot, both summer and winter—whether drying foodstuffs in the sun, or freezing meat, or sweeping off the night’s snowfall—many kids roll over the edge at least once or twice and break a limb, which is regarded as toughening them. To my North American eyes, my Tibetan friends had features like Eskimos, but I heard Han Chinese mistake them for Mongolians.

In the old days, freelance Bon or Buddhist holy men went off to meditate in the mouth of a cave under a notable peak for a dozen years or so, and then returned to marry and father children like anybody else, yet were available for soothsaying or sim- ple consultation, drawing on perspectives they’d accumulated. The cave might have been visible for quite a distance because of the circle of birds perching or whirling around the entrance hole, perhaps fed by the anchorite, but lending him clairvoyance. Bon beliefs, preceding Buddhism in the Himalayas and still not wholly absorbed, are more animist and shaman-centered—surviving in spotty but potent form in isolated villages, along with the burly, “four-eyed” breed of watchdog Tibetans kept toward off bandits, leopards, wolves: so called because of its black tuft of fur over each regular eye. Families kept a cat, as well, to guard the barley stores, and a horse for prompter errands than the yaks they rode might perform.

When I asked whether yetis still roam the spirit mountains, my friends demurred, but described the females’ breasts as being so long you could run downhill to escape them because they’d trip on their teats and fall. Uphill, they threw the things over their shoulders and might catch up with you. One man had not been killed when grabbed. Instead, he’d been imprisoned inside a cave for the purpose of impregnating his captor, with a stone rolled across the front that he couldn’t budge. Yet once the baby was born, so much time had elapsed, she, beginning to trust him, grew careless about the placement of the stone. He made a break for it, downhill toward the river, because yetis can’t swim. And her dangling breasts, as well as the child in her arms, did indeed slow her up. So when he’d swum safely across, she yelled at him, holding their infant by the legs, ordering him to return. When he shook his head, she raised it up and ripped it in half, throwing a leg, an arm, and half of the rib cage over the water to him.

Between the rocks above timberline a wild sort of tobacco grows that herders can dry to put in their pipes, with an aroma like incense, that makes them feel young again as they clamber about after their animals. For nomads on the Tibetan Plateau, stretching north from the Min Shan toward Mongolia, the most lucrative occupation may not be yak-shepherding anymore, but herb-gathering on the steppes for the medicinal trade. In particular, they’ll search every May and June for a plant whose magical properties are epitomized and enhanced by its spending half of its life as an animal. Only a sharpster, gazing low as the sunrise strikes across the grasslands, can be sure to spot the twin hornlike blades before they wilt amid thicker, taller, ordinary vegetation in the midday heat. Inconspicuous as these are, yet sorcerously crossing between kingdoms—plant to animal—during the arc of the year, the organism’s leaves when powdered, or the roots and stems when soaked in whiskey for a week, often bring Tibetans relief from pain or other ills. And now they’re widely wanted for holistic rejuvenation, pinches being cooked, as “caterpillar fungus,” into the menus of the fanciest restaurants, such as the one that slowly rotates on top of the roof of Beijing’s International Hotel. A grass in the summer, a worm in the winter, between each pair of leaves, my Tenzings said, two eyes and a mouth gradually appear.

China launched a space satellite into orbit from its experimental facility in Sichuan Province while I was there. And meanwhile the inoffensive, harlequin-colored giant panda prowled remote selected bamboo forests for shoots to loll and chew on, a remarkable recent symbol the country has chosen to represent itself. Tibetan monks and nuns have been beaten to death for talking to tourists as my Tenzings were speaking to me, if it was recorded in a way that could be retrieved, so they and I were antsy not to be overheard. Yet one of them was occasionally talking on a cell phone to his dad, who was driving seventy yaks to their summer pasturage hundreds of miles away. Relentless logging and roadbuilding were altering the region, and the following spring, the Sichuan earthquakes would wreak far more terrible avalanche damage than might have been the case if all those earthmovers and bulldozers hadn’t been chiseling the valleys for more than a decade. But you can still encounter five-colored pools sinuously connected by rivulets wriggling through reed beds bursting with wildflower blossoms, warblers, butterflies—enough space and salience for solitude, or a fugitive moment of empathy with a porcupine wandering across a rockslide wipeout up in the sidehill woods.

In China’s cities no punctuation occurs in the daylight rush of human beings. Mopeds, pedicabs, motor scooters, bikes, and pedestrians interweave with hordes of autos, vans, buses, and dump trucks in the kind of democracy which Communism did bequeath, where citizens, although now quite unequal in wealth, have the same right to the road. Even afoot, they’ll step out into traffic like comrades, not peons. The street markets are ebullient, the railroad stations seethe like India’s with every condition of person—nuzzly couples courting, children dashing, families glued to one another as they thread the crowds between an avenue’s overpass and the terminal’s maw, where beggars of all ages and both sexes sprawl.

Without killing family ties, revolutionary atheism did nevertheless put a crimp into the charitable imperative that all organized religions stipulate, substituting work-to-eat strictures that become all the more severe in a country where spirituality has long been under siege. There are few mosque or temple or cathedral plazas within which souls in need may appeal for help beyond the scrutiny of civil authorities. The whims of secularism and a robotic military reign supreme. You see it not just among the police but in the train crews and street cleaners; and the cellphone epidemic places ordinary people from whom charity might be asked at a still further remove, since, when they are text-messaging or self-absorbedly conversing with distant relatives, they are not where they appear to be. India is as crowded, and yet marbled with age-old moral contexts, Jain or Hindu, Gandhian or Gurkha.

In underpasses beneath Beijing’s avenues I met blind lutenists and Tibetan silversmiths—buskers and peddlers beyond the supervision of surface constables. My guide now was a Sanskrit scholar who, even without crossing the Himalayas to worship with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, could have been loyal to him, since no one knew what he was reading. Nonetheless, he had braved the snows, lived on forged papers, evaded the Kalashnikov patrols. On the other hand, he’d never been in the capital before or flown on an airplane (as we did from Chengdu; I showed him how to stop his ears from hurting), ridden a subway or hailed a taxi. He was skeptical of the economic-powerhouse model when no backstop of ethics was provided. His Tibetan secondary school had been closed by the government for its forbidden curriculum and the studies he had completed as a fugitive in India would have sent him to prison if they had been known. Seeing me off at Beijing Airport was scary for him because when my bags were searched, if his Tibetan face had aroused sufficient suspicion for my notebooks to be looked at, he could have been seized and starved for years in jail. But all that happened was that the customs inspector yelled at me because, without Tenzing to help at the last, I was slow to follow his instructions, issued in Chinese.

Over the Pacific on the twelve-hour flight, I missed these Tenzings, now back in their precipitous valleys, milking yaks and boiling barley, or possibly employed in minor jobs where credentials aren’t called for. China’s strictures on freedom exact a great cost. And the panda’s camouflaged face, whose black-and-white pattern is familiar worldwide, looks tear-stained, much as the cheetah’s does in Africa. Tear-blotched cheetahs and pandas—whose habitats, which created their furry camouflage, have been skinned. The highway on which I drove north from Chengdu, landslide-damaged during the earthquakes of 2008, has been repaired. But China’s pell-mell secularization has not, foretelling perpetual cultural avalanches far worse than the physical ones.