The Lost Tomb : Tibetan Sea Flower

Chapter 7: Tibetan Oil Painting

It was a strange picture.

After returning from Nepal at the end of 2010, I went to Tibet and rested for a week at the foot of Ka'er Ren Mountain.

I didn't immediately start looking for clues about the Ma family since the journey was too tiring. With my friends' suggestions, I was prepared to deal with all kinds of encumbrances gained from my trip to Nepal.

I brought back a large number of antique ornaments with Tibetan Buddhist characteristics from Nepal, hoping to use them as display samples and to find the real source of those ornaments from the Zhang Jialou. In the place called Motuo, I packed all the ornaments into three large packages and mailed them to three different addresses in Hangzhou to relieve some of the burden.

Because Motuo was a very special place, it had two kinds of "post offices". Motuo had been closed off for many years and was difficult to get in and out of, so the regular post office here could only receive letters but couldn't send them. Only in recent years was there a path through which mail could be sent, but the mail trucks were only allowed once a week.

As a result, there was also a non-governmental postal service in the local area, which was really just finding someone who would be willing to take packages with them when they left. It was very common for people entering and leaving Motuo to help others carry mail and parcels, and some people even made money as middlemen. The so-called "post office" I found was opened by this kind of person. Although it wasn't particularly safe, it could at least guarantee the time. As long as someone left Motuo, you could estimate when they would get to the post office outside, and it would be safer to forward the packages later.

The only ways to leave Motuo were by bus, caravan, or porter. The bus route was often closed to traffic throughout the year, which was when I came. The caravan was almost extinct, so I was looking for the so-called backpackers or porters.

All mail must be carried out by the "postman" bit by bit, so the weight couldn't be too heavy. As a result, I spent nearly three hours dispersing the weight of my three large packages.

It was at that time that I saw the painting hung on the wall behind the "post office counter"—it was really just a piece of toughened glass set up on a desk.

The wall was painted with light green paint, on which hung the following things: an ink brush painting with an eagle and four big characters that read "Peng Cheng Wan Li" [1]; three bright, bilingual banners that had encouraging praise such as "pick up money but don't hide it" [2] and "safe and secure"; and an oil painting.

Oil paintings aren't the kind of thing that you can tell with a glance were done by a professional artist, but this one was a very common, poorly drawn painting of a person's profile. Judging from the degree of peeling, and the color of the pigment, it seemed like it had been here for a long time.

The subject of the painting was a young man. I didn't know anything about Western paintings, but the so-called principle of painting was the same to a certain extent. Although this was poorly done, it had a unique style.

I didn't know where this feeling came from. The person in the picture was wearing a lama's clothes on his upper body and a Tibetan robe on his lower body and standing in the mountains. You could see Ka'er Ren Mountain's other snowy peak behind him. I didn't know whether it was the setting sun or the brilliance of dawn, but the tone of the whole painting had changed from white to grayish yellow.

This was an excellent example of poor painting, but the bold use of color directly brought out the artistic concept.

Even so, it didn't mean that the painting had any obvious value. But I was surprised because I knew the person in the painting.