Asian Uncle
Welcome to Asian Uncle, the unfiltered dive into Asia - from the back-alley brothels to the shadowy underworld gang, from hardcore military life to the spiritual mystique of Tibet. This isn't your grandma's history lesson on sanitized travel guide. Asian Uncle pulls back the curtain on the continent's most controversial, misunderstood and surreal corners.
Each episode, we explore the raw, untold stories - whether it's the truth behind Thailand's nightlife, untold life of pimping in China or Yakuza's business empire. Come with me on my journey that explored the hidden and dark world of Asia that you never learned about in school.
Asian Uncle
S1E9 - China's Heaven & Hell: Mystic Tibet - Part 2/5
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Few travel experiences have challenged my worldview like my journey to a remote Tibetan mountain temple. Arriving after a bone-jarring twelve-hour drive through rugged terrain, I expected to find an ornate religious structure. Instead, I encountered hundreds of orphaned children living as young monks, their curious faces lighting up at the sight of my camera.
The high priest's quarters—a simple wooden shack reinforced with stones—shattered my preconceptions about religious leadership. But nothing prepared me for what came next: discovering that two brothers in his family shared one wife. This practice of polyandry, virtually unknown in Western society, initially shocked me. Yet as I learned about the harsh realities of life at high elevation—where agriculture yields only potatoes, barley and buckwheat, where medical care is inaccessible, and where family resources must be carefully preserved—I began to understand this marriage system as an ingenious adaptation to extreme circumstances rather than an exotic curiosity.
The social dynamics fascinated me most. Children always call the older brother "dad" regardless of biological parentage, while the wife holds significant power in the household. Brothers coordinate their marital time using the simple signal of a hat on the doorknob. In a place where most homes lacked electricity, running water, or natural gas during my 2010 visit, these pragmatic family arrangements ensured survival. This experience taught me that cultural practices can only be properly understood within their contexts, and that human ingenuity finds remarkable ways to adapt to challenging environments.
The next time you encounter a cultural practice that seems incomprehensible, I encourage you to dig deeper. What environmental challenges might have shaped it? What practical problems does it solve? Share your experiences with unfamiliar cultural practices in the comments below, and subscribe for more stories that expand our understanding of our diverse world.
We finally arrived at the temple later in the evening. I would say the drive was around 12 hours or so. We left around 7 o'clock in the morning. We got there right before sundown. I was already tired, not from the drive alone, but from the bumpiness of the roads. We were going at most 20 miles an hour the entire time. It wasn't far, but nonetheless you couldn't drive fast. When we finally got there, I didn't see anything. I was imagining a grand temple, but we weren't at the temple yet. Instead, I saw a bunch of little monks All 12 Like 5, 6, 12 year olds, like little kids, not 5, 6, 12 year olds, like little kids, not 5, 6 of them, hundreds of them.
Speaker 1:I would later find out that there are over 100 orphans in that temple alone and some of them were left there by their parents because they couldn't afford having a child or if both parents were deceased due to illness. That was fairly common accidents illness because you were so far away from any hospitals or medical treatment that if you did get sick or ended up bleeding or injured, your life would be at risk. They would greet me with the hadas. Hada is a color silk, like a scarf. Tibetans put it around your neck as a sign of welcome and respect. The little monks were adorable. Some were as young as 5, most of them were under 12.
Speaker 1:I had never seen so many orphans or even kids in my entire life, and so, as I made my way to the mountain, they took me to the high priest's room. It was a wood shack reinforced by some rocks. It wasn't what I imagined. I thought he would live in a grand temple, but instead he lived on the outskirts, and by then the sun had already gone down, so I couldn't see very clearly. And when the wooden door opened into the room, I saw a bunch of monks sitting around a small fire right next to the high priest. They all smiled and greeted me warmly. I could tell the younger monks had their eyes on my camera. For some reason, these monks the Tibetans in general are always so curious about technology in general, especially cameras. So I gave it to them, I handed it to them to borrow to take pictures as they like, and I showed them how to use it, and they grabbed it and hurried out to test. It was pretty cool. They did take some very nice pictures, by the way, and so I sat quietly next to the high priest and some of his family members and a lady was pouring tea for us. I was quietly sitting next to LB and some of his family members and a young lady was pouring tea for us and I was introduced to her. She is the sister-in-law of the high priest and she is the wife of the man who drove me to the temple, so that linked it up and of course I smiled back and she left shortly after and another man came in. Apparently, he was the younger brother of the driver. So these were three brothers. Lb was the middle child. He had an older brother and a younger one.
Speaker 1:What happened next absolutely blew my mind. I was not ready for it. The younger brother brought back the same lady that just poured us tea yes, the driver's wife, his older brother's wife and said of course it was translated, but he said this is my wife. I was like what you mean to tell me that you and your older brother have twins, wives, or what do you mean Apparently? It's probably my headache.
Speaker 1:It never even occurred to me that they were practicing polyandry. And what does that mean? It means that these two siblings, these two brothers, share the same wife. This is in a society where resources are limited and women have more than one husband at a time and normally are married to siblings and they're placed on a higher level or higher class in society. I was determined to know more. This was something I've never even heard of. I thought to myself was this a common practice within Tibetans? But it wasn't, because in fact, only a few places or a few cultural backgrounds practiced it, and I was lucky enough to be there, to be in one of them, to experience it. To tell you the story, like I know, for most of you, if you're conservative especially, it might sound a little awkward, okay, especially at first. But believe me, once you understand the reasoning behind it, the social structure, you'll kind of understand why. And it really isn't what most people think.
Speaker 1:Tibet and most of its prefectures are all located in high elevated areas, harsh climate, and they were not centralized districts. There were some cities, like Lhasa, but most of them were scattered all around. Most resources were scattered all around, so it became hard to obtain medicine, it became hard to obtain food, it became hard to obtain food, education that was all lacking. And another thing too is, because of the high elevation and the harsh climate, agriculture was nearly impossible. So what do they grow there? They grow potatoes, barley, buckwheat and a variety of other roots.
Speaker 1:For meat. They have yaks. They're kind of like cows, but they're not, and it's really tasty. By the way, it's kind of like beef without any game, any that gamey taste which beef does have. Sometimes it does not have at all. I've eaten it raw before. It is just amazing, amazing. But most monks there don't eat meat or anything Of a byproduct of meat. They're vegans. So imagine making a meal out of those ingredients. I know a lot of you are vegans out there, vegetarians. It's hard enough for us Imagine them. Imagine with only three ingredients Potato, barley and buckwheat. Now, how many of you even know what buckwheat is? I didn't even know until I researched it. Oh, this is what it is.
Speaker 1:On present day, most of its prefectures in Tibet remain in poverty and people did trade for the most part as a job. And even when I visited my first time there in 2010, there was not electricity yet in the entire temple, except for the high priest's room. He had a little power generator. There was no running water and there was no natural gas. So, dude, you cooked with wood that you had to chop yourself right water pump. There was a small pump but the it wasn't. It was just a pipe leading down from the top of the mountain it um from the glaciers, so it wasn't consistent. It wasn't. It was probably very clean, but it wasn't somewhere like. It wasn't advanced. There's no technology behind it, so they live very distant.
Speaker 1:Having said that, life there, even with new technology, was so hard that most families there, impoverished families especially, could not one afford to have a single wife, or even wives in general, or two, could not afford to split family assets, and that became something very important in their culture. What I mean by not splitting the family asset or the family wealth is because survival was so hard, resources were so scarce that whenever you obtained some you wanted to make sure it didn't leave the family. And especially males, siblings. They tend to marry and then they leave home and that's a way for them to keep it inside within the family. This practice was only between brothers. You're not going to have an outsider or your cousin. This is strictly between two blood brothers. This became part of their culture for centuries upon centuries. For us Westerners we would automatically think that siblings sharing a wife would cause probably more problems, but in their culture, surprisingly, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:The family structure is a lot different. For instance, the eldest or the older one is mostly running business, driving trucks whatever he's doing, even driving a cab and not around the house. Like I mentioned before, if you want to make money you have to leave home, and the youngest tends to the family and does all the farming, including picking the cordyceps out back up at high elevations. These are called caterpillar fungi, and these are caterpillars that dig themselves into the ground, into the cold, and then it starts to spore and turns into fungi. There's actually no clinical proof of these being good supplements for your body, but nonetheless they're seen as luxury products in China and they're sold for a very, very high price.
Speaker 1:Anyways, interestingly enough, the next question is what about their kids? So here it is. If they had kids, no matter whose it is, the child would always call the older dad and the younger uncle. The child would always call the older dad and the younger uncle. Okay, the wife decides who joins her in her chambers, and mostly giving way to the older when he returns from a long trip. Does that make sense? So the high priest lb, his, his brothers had shared the same wife and he did have kids themselves, and their kids would call the older one dad, younger one uncle, regardless of whose it is. And do they know whose it is? That's for the women to decide.
Speaker 1:In Tibetan culture, women, like I said before, are placed in a very higher class. Now there's deities that are women. They respected women a lot, so therefore it was up to the woman to decide whether or not she told, and for the most part, they didn't. They abide by the culture. The older one is the dad, younger one is the uncle, and that was it.
Speaker 1:So how would you know if somebody's in there, for instance, when the older brother comes home or when the younger brother comes back and the older brother's in there?
Speaker 1:How would you know if somebody's in there, for instance, when the older brother comes home or when the younger brother comes back and the older brother's in there? How would he know? Well, his hat would hang on the doorknob and that would be a signal that somebody's in there or your brother's in there. I'm going to just give you a second to let that sink in. So I know it's a little bit weird, a very awkward tradition, something that we might not be able to accept as of now, but it does have its reason and in fact polyandry is not only limited to Tibetan culture. There are some weird cultures all over the world, for instance Manchurians. We would marry the wives of our brothers if he were ill or died in combat. Marry the wives of our brothers if he were ill or died in combat. There will always be ways for nomadic tribes especially, or tribes that or a population with less people, to be able to hold in their resources that make sense. We could cut that out if it doesn't sound too good.
