We never originally planned to come here to this city on the northwest edge of the Tibetan plateau, yet we’ve been resting in Xining for several days.

Soap Making

Our Tibetan friend has been wanting to start a business that would help young women in her community get involved in entrepreneurial ventures. Unfortunately, there is not much for people to do in her community, which is a Tibetan speaking community that largely herds yaks and sheep to make money. Then, she decided she would try to use the fat from the animals that they raise to build a business making speciality Tibetan soaps.

The only problem: our Tibetan friend had never made soap.

Master at Work

Fortunately, Galen is not only a professional photographer, but he has also dabbled in soap-making. So, as a part of our Silk Road travels, Galen taught our friend how to make soap using local sheep fat.

Rendering the Fat

This normally would not warrant discussion on the blog but, later, our friend told us something that made me want to report our soap-making experience.

Soap is Made

Our Tibetan friend had originally said that we could stay with her uncle, who lived in the Kumbum Monastery, one of the most important sites in Tibetan religion. She also wanted us to do our soap making experiment at his facilities in the monastery. Our friend later told us that her uncle rejected the idea as too dangerous. If we had joined him at the monastery, he would have fallen under police suspicion, and the police would have almost certainly raided our soap-making experiment. In the end, we had to make soap at the house of a friend of hers, a Tibetan girl who was working in the ethnic affairs office of the government.

I did not mention this fact in the post, but any foreigner that leaves the city of Huazangsi is supposed to have their cab register them. We did not know that, but our cab did, and she made sure not to tell the police because she knew that the police would probably not have approved of us going to Maya Snow Mountain.

Xinjiang, the northwestern corner of China, where we will be throughout much of July, is now the part of China with the most ethnic tensions. But Tibet and Tibetan areas around Tibet are still very sensitive for the Chinese. With every thing we have done in these Tibetan parts of Gansu and Qinghai province, the threat of police action has hovered over us. Looking back at the other posts, my readers may have gotten annoyed with how I never used the name of our Tibetan friend, nor did I put any up close photos of her on the blog. We did this to avoid identifying her, not because she did anything wrong (she didn’t), but because we have had to tiptoe around every thing we did in this leg of the trip.

And in a few days, in a post on our next adventure, the police became directly involved in our Silk Road Hitchhiking Project in a surprising way.

Measurements