Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

to believe it. My feet had migraines and heart attacks. The girl smiled sweetly. ‘Foreign feet are so big!’
    Meanwhile, on an overhead television broadcasting financial news, Edward Cheung of China Assets Management was discussing the foreign equities outlook with Brian Chu of the Associated Trading Department. I affected to relax like a consequential businessman, but the girl began pulling my fingers from their sockets. They went off like pistol-shots. When I looked across at Hongming, he was lounging in his chair while his torturer went to work, his face bisected by a hedonistic smile, his eyes closed. ‘Are you happy?’ he asked. ‘You are happy, aren’t you?’ Then: ‘Would you like to meet the Living Buddha?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said automatically, with no idea who that was. I only knew it wasn’t this.
    Then the girl transferred her attention to my toes. I had forgotten I had so many. They suffered strokes and seizures. For a while longer she beat a steely tattoo on my calves and shins, knuckling my insteps, frowning a little. Then, just as Brian Chu was clinching his theory about foreign exchange reserves, it was all over. The girls kept my dirty socks by mistake, or as souvenirs, and I hobbled off with Hongming into the shaking city lights.
     
    A Living Buddha is the highest form of Lamaist saint. He is chosen not by lineage but by divination, for he is the reincarnation of many previous Buddhas, the inheritor of a distilled holiness. The Dalai Lama is the highest of these chosen ones, and in China and Tibet there are others; but Beijing fears them as a focus of Tibetan nationalism, so they are displaced, half secularised, hidden away.
    The Living Buddha of Tianshui inhabits a small flat in a guarded compound of the National Minority People’s University, where heteaches Buddhism. There, I suppose, he has been safely sterilised by authority, and there he greets me with a heavy calm, sitting me down on a sofa upholstered with Chinese flowers before a ceremonious bowl of fruit. He emanates a sturdy power. His slippers are inscribed ‘Sport’. His shaven head emerges seamlessly from a bull neck, and his eyebrows stop halfway through their natural arc, dotting his face with a look of genial surprise. In the background I glimpse a shining coil of hair as his wife withdraws, and two teenage daughters linger in the doorway to watch us. One is dark, effervescent; the other tall and heartbreakingly beautiful. The Living Buddha smiles at them, and they vanish. Only occasionally his eyes flicker away from mine, as if a thought or question momentarily perturbs him.
    I wonder how he started on this troubled path, who chose him, why. His answers come tranquil and measured, as if he had been born into this state and nothing had ever changed. ‘By custom we identify a Living Buddha after the previous one dies. It’s done by charms, by prayer perhaps, and by the patterns on the oracle lake near Lhasa. I was chosen by the teacher of the last Panchen Lama…’ He adds without a flicker: ‘And it was confirmed by the Chinese government.’ It is my gaze that drops from his. ‘I was born in the same year as the previous Buddha–that’s important. I was just a boy, living with my parents, when the search group reached my area. A neighbour told them my birth date, and they took me away with them to the temple at Tianshui. I was selected from a thousand others.’
    ‘What did you feel about being taken away?’
    ‘I was just a child. I didn’t feel anything.’
    I search his face. Has he forgotten? Or have I? Years ago, my head full of psychologists’ clichés, I had watched in bewilderment as children in a Beijing orphanage played together with no trace of Western tension. I ask: ‘What did your parents feel?’
    ‘They didn’t want me to go. They were peasants. They wanted me to help in the fields.’ He looks down at his hands. ‘All the same, I went. But at the age of seventeen I had to leave again. The Communist