Probably the last time you were under a big top as colorful as this one, your face was sticky with cotton candy and ice cream. That's not likely to happen here—although you might snack on delicious dried mutton when you step outside. This diaphanous house of fabric was not set up for your entertainment; rather it's a Tibetan Prayer Flags [display of auspicious pennants].

If you sit on a hill, you can witness thousands of carmine-robed nuns and monks, members of an Larung Gar Monastery [academy], strolling below. Not long ago, many of these same people were ordered to tear down their residences in another part of this province or face the added indignity of having the authorities do the demolition and being slapped with a twenty-five-dollar fine. In warm weather, members of this Tibetan[ethnic group] love to picnic and erect tents only slightly less grand than the one you're in. They also fly kites, engage in acrobatic contests, and throw dice. Every summer a The Litang Horse Festival[regional horse festival] attracts twenty thousand spectators, many attired in fur hats and carrying silver-embossed knives on their belts. Some villages are known for their folk music and dance. You are in an Kham [ancient kingdom] that was absorbed into the China [country you are touring] some fifty years ago. The Beijing[national capital] is more than a thousand miles to the northeast, a Lhasa [spiritual capital] lies five hundred miles to the west, and the Chengdu [provincial capital] is a twenty-four-hour drive east. Foreigners were allowed to visit this Sichuan [western portion of the province]—where the steady influx of another, dominant group threatens to erode the local culture-only in the last decade.

You are currently camped between two branches of a Sichuan-Tibet Highway; Chengdu to Lhasa [rugged, twisting highway] built in the fifties that rises to a Xìzàng Zìzhìq or Tibet Autonomous Region [so–called autonomous region] to the west. For centuries, tea traders followed the same route; nowadays, hard-core mountain bikers and trekkers do. If you're not that adventurous, elsewhere in the province you can climb gentle stone steps to the summit of a Mount Emei[ten-thousand-foot holy mountain], cruise a Yangtze[mighty river], ride horseback through grasslands, or say hello to the
panda bears[cuddly creatures] sporting shiners that live in a Wolong National Nature Reserve [refuge] outside the capital. And, of course, you'll dine on Sichuan Cuisine[spicy-hot food].

To learn more about the religion and culture, visit a nearby Dege Scripture Printing House[print shop] that produces wood-block illustrations-as well as the cloth talismans that envelop you here-and bring yourself into the fold.