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
S1E11 - China's Heaven & Hell: Mystic Tibet - Part 4/5
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Perched at 4,400 meters above sea level, my second journey into Tibet began at Daocheng Airport—the highest commercial airport on earth. The breathtaking landscape transformed before my eyes as we drove through mountain passes where all four seasons appeared within a single journey, the scenery shifting dramatically with each change in elevation.
My destination was Larongar Buddhist Academy, a hidden spiritual fortress housing an astonishing 30,000 monks. Their homes—fragile wooden shacks clinging to mountainsides—stretched as far as the eye could see, creating a vast patchwork of simple dwellings where dedicated practitioners lived with almost nothing. Inside these tiny shelters, monks slept, meditated, and prepared simple meals with minimal possessions and limited electricity.
The most profound experience came when participating in the ritual of walking 108 circles around a sacred structure—a six-hour journey of spiritual cleansing. As I walked, I witnessed something few outsiders ever see: a family carrying their deceased child, wrapped like a mummy, completing the same circles as final blessings before a sky burial. This ancient practice, where bodies are left for vultures to consume, revealed a cultural approach to death entirely unlike Western traditions, born of both necessity in a frozen landscape and a different spiritual understanding of the body's purpose after death.
What stays with me most isn't the unfamiliar funeral customs or the harsh living conditions, but the remarkable contentment I observed everywhere. The anxiety that defines modern urban existence seemed absent here. People smiled genuinely, crime was nearly nonexistent, and a profound sense of peace pervaded everything. Walking those circles in the thin mountain air, alongside grieving families and devoted monks, I glimpsed a different way of understanding our brief time on earth—one that continues to challenge my perspective years later.
Have you ever wondered how differently cultures approach life's most fundamental experiences? Share your thoughts or questions about this journey into one of Buddhism's most sacred and secluded communities.
Welcome back to Asian Uncle. Last episode I was talking about my experiences in Tibet for the first time and what I had to endure and what things that I learned and, most important, the first time seeing polyandry in front of my eyes. It was something different. My second trip was also going to be very unexpected and you'll soon know why. This time I didn't fly into the airport. I flew in the last time Because LB told me that one of the roads was now open, so I would fly into this airport called Daocheng, and Daocheng Airport, like Yading Airport, are all very high in elevation, so the top three, I believe, in the world are Daocheng that's the number one, 4,400 meters above sea level, and number two is in Budan.
Speaker 1:And third would be the airport that I landed in last time. This time I was more prepared. I didn't feel I was as altitude sick as I was the first time Much better, the car ride was much shorter and the roads were slightly better, and I was wondering why we didn't fly in here last time, but apparently they just opened up the roads, so I didn't know if I wanted to talk about this, but there's a lot of roads in there that only military vehicles can go through. A lot of people have told me that it's because they can hide weapons, they can hide a lot of things that they don't want satellites to see underneath these mountains. And, of course, there's a lot of mining that goes on, because Tibet is rich in resources, given that they also developed a lot of roads, infrastructure, to facilitate all this.
Speaker 1:Apparently, flying into Daocheng, we could take this long tunnel down to where Elbi's temple was, which is where we're going to meet him. My wife was with me this time and also I tagged along another friend of mine. It was great. I had company, the weather was great. So one thing about Tibet, because the elevation is so high, when you're driving in those conditions, you could see the four seasons and you could see the weather changing as you go up in the mountaintop, as you pass, you can see the four seasons and you could see the weather changing as you go up to the mountaintop, as you pass, you can see autumn, you can see summer, you can see fall. It's great. Wherever you went, it felt like it was never the same. The weather was never the same, the scenery was never the same. It was simply amazing.
Speaker 1:But this time, going back, we didn't stay at the temple for too long, I believe only one or two days. We just got adjusted to the altitude. Everybody else did too. But Elby wanted me, or us, to see something different. He wanted to take me to a Buddhist academy called Larongar. It is the largest of its kind in the world. 30,000 monks reside there. This place, it's well known now, but back then not many people have heard of it, especially in the West. It's in the middle of nowhere Again. It's hidden in deep of the mountains and it was not a tourist spot.
Speaker 1:The facility that these monks lived in was stretched, as far as I could see, up a long entire mountainside. It was just filled with unstable wooden shacks from the lowland all the way up on all sides, and that's where the monks lived. It was definitely a fire hazard. These were just wooden boards put together and I went into one of them. I remember the nanny, the au pair, that took care of my daughter. Well, years later she would be studying here and I did go into her house and I did eat some food that she cooked. She was a great cook, by the way. It was very small. There was enough space for her bed. She could meditate on the edge of her bed, sleep on it. She had a little table that's about it a little stove where she used the little canister for the gas. Of course, there was limited electricity Only in the main temple was there electricity, but there was water and there were public bathrooms that you could use. Nonetheless, it was a big fire hazard and it did catch fire a couple of times, although nobody ever got hurt. Surprisingly, nothing really out of the ordinary so far. Main temple bunch of monks.
Speaker 1:And as we followed LB, we started making our way up towards this higher, even higher hill, and it was starting to get dark, but not yet, of course. And once we got there I found that this place was huge. It wasn't a place, it was just a circular structure, and it took three minutes to walk one circle around the structure. And let's say you're walking clockwise. On your right side it would just be filled with little small rooms that were locked and if you looked inside there would be Buddhist statues and all these ornaments inside. Very nice, the place was decorated with bright colors and at night the lights would shine.
Speaker 1:So LB told me, and my wife and the others, that it was customary for us to walk 108 circles around the structure, kind of as a way to cleanse our sins. Think of it as repenting right. So we did, and three minutes per circle. It took us roughly six hours. We didn't walk it the entire, like that night. I did maybe two, three hours that night and then I finished the rest the next day. It was grueling Walking three hours a day. It sucked.
Speaker 1:This didn't include all the walking we did otherwise, but that wasn't what got to me. What got to me is, while I was walking, I couldn't help but see some people carrying what looked like a corpse. It was a corpse, it was a body, but it wasn't that obvious, and so I slowed down as it passed me and what it did, I saw it wrapped like a mummy in cloth, and I was almost certain it was just a child. It was half the size of an adult, wrapped literally like a mummy. I'm not even joking. And I remember on my way up driving to the academy, I did pass by something similar. It was a brick hut with no doors. Why did I notice that? Because all the other houses were built with just wood boards and this one in particular was piled up with bricks and inside there were just I didn't know it was bodies at the time, but it was just stacked up with the same material, one on top of another. It looked a little bit like bodies, but I wasn't sure. Lb told me later on that indeed that's where they store their bodies, and the reason why I saw them carrying the kid with the child is because they wanted to make their final blessings. They took the child in their arms and then they walked around that ornament 108 times. At first it did send some chills down my back knowing that there was a body next to me walking the same circle and we would spend the next couple of hours together. But I do give a huge or a lot of respect to the Tibetans for the way they honor the deceased, for the way they respect the deceased, for the way they respect the deceased. Little did I know the next day I would see something even more grotesque. I'm going to preface this by saying that I was very honored to be one of the few people to see this in person, up close, before they stopped tourists from visiting this site, not the temple itself, but the burial site.
Speaker 1:Tibetans didn't have a tradition of ground burial like us, or cremation, because cremation was only reserved for the holy beings. The rest what happens? Sky burial? Most of them have even heard of it and it's a very unique way of burying somebody. It's a funeral practice where the bodies of the deceased are left out in the open to decompose and be eaten by the animals Mainly well, specifically, vultures. As insane as it sounds, it turns out that, because the land in Tibet, the land structure in Tibet, is pretty much frozen 80% of the year. So the ground is hard as rock, making ground burial nearly impossible. Cremation, therefore, is reserved only for the holy monks, like LB or anyone else that is seen as quote-unquote enlightened or enlightened beings, beings of higher presence or enlightened beings, beings of higher presence. Their remains or ashes are kept in the monastery for worship, because those monks that are cremated are also seen as Buddhas as well. They're beings of compassion, not God as how we understand it to be.
Speaker 1:I couldn't help, of course, to be mesmerized and sucked in by that culture. Despite such primitive living conditions and standards, they always seem to keep a smile on their face, or at least nothing seemed to really bother them. The anxiety that we have living in the city, the anxiety as a society we struggle with today it doesn't seem to exist there. When people were courteous towards one another, you would pick up hitchhikers, without a doubt. Crime rate was so low there that the cops were mainly used to harass the monks. It was a nice place to be, to kind of detach yourself from the world. Anyways, I went to sleep at night in the cold, even though I didn't get much rest. We lived up at the hotel hostel just right under that structure I was talking about before, when I walked around 108 times. The place was dirty, the sheets were thin and smelled bad. The elevation definitely kept me up. I was hungry and thoughts of that dead boy in the mummy, wrapped like a mummy still, kind of sent chills to my back.
