A team effort

Female relic surveyors brave hardships and even the occasional wild animal to safeguard plateau's rich history, Palden Nyima reports in Lhasa.

For Tsering Chotso and her Tibetan colleagues in Nagchu city of the Xizang autonomous region, it is common for them to spend nights away from home, traveling too far over grasslands to conduct cultural relic surveys to return the same day.

As surveyors of cultural relics in places with altitudes that can reach over 4,800 meters above sea level, it is not an exaggeration to say they sacrifice their lives to perform protection work. They consistently work overtime and often encounter wild animals, such as wolves, Tibetan brown bears and wild yaks, while working in remote areas.

Tsering Chotso and her colleagues are members of the Changthang Women's Survey Team, established in June 2024, in the high-altitude city of Nagchu.

This team, comprising five young Tibetan women with an average age under 30, has undertaken the tough task of surveying and preserving cultural relics across Nagchu's expansive and challenging terrain, which sits at an average altitude of over 4,500 meters.

The team's members come from diverse backgrounds, including cultural heritage professionals and secretarial and management positions. Despite this, they all share the same dream: to step out of their comfort zones and venture deep into the heart of northern Xizang, and connect with the cultural roots of Nagchu.

Nagchu spans nearly 350,000 square kilometers, which is almost 55 times larger than the Shanghai municipality.

Over the past year, the team has meticulously journeyed through 11 counties and more than 100 villages in Nagchu. Their rigorous fieldwork and comprehensive mapping efforts have successfully documented over 800 immovable cultural relics.

These accomplishments have not only filled numerous gaps in Nagchu's cultural heritage protection but have also significantly contributed to the preservation and understanding of northern Xizang's rich cultural history.

Operating in extreme conditions, the team battles harsh weather, high altitudes and exhaustive working hours. Due to the remote locations of their work, they frequently stay overnight with local herders. The rigorous nature of their missions necessitates the use of essential equipment, such as real-time kinematic measuring instruments and drones, which often means they must forgo personal belongings to make room for their gear.

Each day of a survey requires early starting and late finishing times. Before dawn, they are already equipped and on their way to the day's heritage sites. Weather, poor road conditions, and heavy workloads each seem to present the greatest challenges.

Survey days begin before dawn and stretch late into the night. In July 2024, while surveying a remote township in Nyima county, they split into two teams to locate hard-to-find relic sites. Even after working until 10 pm, the work remained unfinished.

It was too late to return to the hotel in town, so they decided to spend the night in sleeping bags in a local herding family's home.

"That night, we only had regular sleeping bags, and the nighttime temperatures on the plateau usually drop below freezing. It was so cold, we didn't sleep at all," Tsering Chotso recalls.

During another survey in Nyima county, the team had two frightening encounters with bears.

"That day, we were collecting samples at the entrance of a cave when we suddenly heard a growl. We began shouting loudly, to scare it away," recalls Lhamo Shitso, another team member.

"Even now, we still feel a lingering sense of fear when we think back on that experience," says Lhamo Shitso, smiling.

Over the past year, they have been traveling throughout Nagchu, conducting cultural relics surveys and spending most weekends working.

As the herders in Nagchu live simple lives, finding a restaurant on the grassland is not easy, so the team often sustains themselves on instant noodles while on the road. Sometimes, when they come across herding families, they are offered yogurt and milk, she adds.

Among the team's notable achievements is the discovery of a rock painting featuring a "wheel "pattern in Nyima county, an uncommon motif in the nomadic culture of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

"Upon returning, we consulted with experts who identified the carvings as wheel petroglyphs. They explained that these petroglyphs provide evidence of early interactions between different ethnic groups and suggest that the people living in this area at the time had already developed transportation tools," she says.

During the day, they surveyed outdoor cultural relic sites. At night, they organized materials in their accommodations. But the long treks and intense work in the uninhabited areas did not dampen the team's enthusiasm.

To date, the team has completed field surveys of over 800 immovable cultural relic sites, including more than 460 newly discovered locations.

"This survey not only helped us better understand the current state of cultural relic sites in Nagchu, but also allowed me, as a Xizang native, to feel the weight of history and time while exploring the legacy of our ancestors," says Tsering Chotso.

"People often associate Nagchu with uninhabited areas, thinking it's unsuitable for human settlement. But after this journey, I believe what we call 'uninhabited areas' may well have been home to people thousands of years ago."

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