At 15,000 feet, the early autumn winds had started to carry snow in their breath. On the road ahead was a convoy of cargo-laden trucks lumbering up the mountain pass. The colours were stark: a steel-grey road, brown mud tracks fast covering up with sleety snow, Chinese border guards in faded blue.
We turned our faces away from the unfriendly gust and took shelter under a stone column topped with a bronze figurine. I looked down at my boots dusted with snow and then up at the brass bovid looking down at me. This was why two of us were here: an odd couple from India, my colleague and renowned conservationist, the late Ashok Kumar, who was celebrating his 70th birthday, and I, about to embark on an expedition like none other.
Past the shores of Qinghai Lake, China’s largest, with its grazing yaks and shepherd tents blackened with soot and yak hair, and over the pass, we would enter the land of a mythical beast.
We were still a few hours away from Kekexili Nature Reserve in Qinghai province, and for the time being had to make do with looking up at a pair of delicately carved spiral horns mounted on a commemorative column. They belonged to the chiru, the Tibetan antelope, the beast that had dominated our lives for 15 years, and one we hadn’t yet set eyes on.
Rewind to the early 1990s when Ashok and I ran TRAFFIC-India, an organisation that combated illegal wildlife trade in India, trade in ivory and tiger bone, rhino horn and musk. The term ‘wildlife crime’ was new then. Ashok was investigating a massive seizure of tiger bones that would prompt the Prime Minister to declare the first ‘national tiger crisis’, I was undercover in the Northeast tracking the rhino horn trade into Myanmar.
Acting on a tip-off
That was when the first letter from the legendary American conservationist, George Schaller, arrived on our desk. Tibetan antelope were being killed in their thousands, he wrote, and their pelt smuggled into India. “No use in India for antelope wool,” we wrote back, imperiously ignorant about the extent of the illegal trade here. Schaller sent us back pictures as proof, chastened us, and urged us to begin a Tibetan investigation.
We dug around and found that Schaller was right: chiru were being slaughtered and the wool smuggled through Nepal into India. As the yarn unravelled, we realised that chiru wool was the same as shahtoosh, the famed Kashmiri heirloom shawl.
The shawl was made from the downy underwool of the antelope, considered the warmest and softest wool in the world. And the story that ‘moulted’ wool was collected off bushes in the windblown plateaus of Ladakh was a myth.
A Chinese officer with a seized pelt of wool
A single shawl needed three to five antelopes killed, and the northern Indian bride’s trousseau bore the blood of the high-altitude chiru. India’s fashionable women were being conned and the Tibetan population of antelope was fast hurtling down a precipitous slope towards extinction.
We had to mount a conservation battle to save the animal. But this seemed near impossible: we were dealing with a Tibetan antelope with a marginal distribution in India, and a conservation crisis that nobody was willing to associate with an Indian heirloom product. So we began with expeditions to Nepal, Tibet and China and Kashmir to gather data. Our collaborations in China led to the ‘Highway Patrol’, a yak herdsman patrol programme to save the chiru in Qinghai. The Chinese government declared the animal ‘protected’ and set up reserves for it.
Simultaneously, enforcement began at the Indian border posts where wool was seized. Shawls were seized from high-end stores. We conducted forensic tests to determine the shawls were indeed made from chiru wool. With undeniable proof now, that Kashmiri shahtoosh shawls indeed came from the endangered chiru, the long process began to upgrade the species to Schedule I of the Jammu and Kashmir Wildlife (Protection) Act and to ban shahtoosh.
Then began India’s first campaign, led by fashionistas, to protect the chiru. ‘Save the Chiru’ stalls popped up at every Lakme Fashion Week, with designer Ritu Kumar leading the campaign. A galaxy of other designers and models joined us. At one point, all of India’s Miss Universes and Miss Worlds — Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai, Yukta Mookhey and Nafisa Joseph — were faces for the ‘Alternatives for Shahtoosh’ parade.
Drop the shawl
Elsewhere in the world, ‘O.K., Lady, Drop the Shawl ’ proclaimed Vanity Fair . Slowly, the message was being driven home: shahtoosh was unfashionable, shahtoosh was illegal and alternatives would save the chiru from extinction.
There were, of course, those who tried to buck the campaign. The wife of a former U.S. ambassador to India famously refused to give up her shahtoosh till she was coerced out of it by the Ministry of External Affairs. The wife of a prominent army officer of India once cooed in my ear: “I know the lovely antelope is dying and I so want to save it. But, darling, the shawl is so light on my shoulder!” Several Kashmiri politicians cried foul, but did not get too far.
It was proposed to domesticate and farm the chiru, and feasibility studies were done in the 1990s. But all studies concluded that it was an impractical idea. Chiru could not even survive in low altitude zoos. The under-fur is nature’s gift to the beast to keep it warm at those unyielding heights. The proposition is as impractical today as it was then: the environment ministry last month turned down another parliamentary panel recommendation to captive breed the animal.
Later, with the Kashmir government, we set up a cooperative of Kashmiri women spinners to process high quality pashmina wool and weave a superior alternative shawl, which was later given a Geographic Indication certificate.
In the early part of the new millennium, good news came in from China. With strict anti-poaching policies in place, the number of antelope was on the rise again. It was time to pay them a visit. And that’s how in 2004, Ashok and I, accompanied by our translator and guide Du Yu, found ourselves crossing the Qinghai.
Tibetan antelopes grazing in the reserve
The flight to Xining (the capital of Qinghai province) traverses a half-continent and lands you at the bottom of the roof of the world — but you still have to get to the top. A railway journey on the Xining-Golmud line goes along the banks of Qinghai Lake. This part of the Tibetan plateau that the Tibetans call Kham is a picture postcard district; deep blue lake, grassy slopes, herdsmen with their yak, and clouds rolling endlessly over the high Kunlun mountains. The rail dips up and down across the landscape and in 33 places, the Chinese have elevated the tracks to make way for animal crossings. Kiang and Tibetan gazelle dash across even as the train passes, surely something the Indian railway can emulate in tiger and elephant habitats.
We got down at a small station. In the midst of nowhere, I saw a McDonald’s and 10 multi-storey towers. “What is influencing this economic boom here,” I asked the liaison officer. “The will of Beijing,” he responded. We got into SUVs for the last leg. Uyghur, Hui and Tibetan herdsmen, each distinct in their attire, strolled across the landscape. Soon, the Kunlun mountains loomed ahead and the icy stretch began.
Ribbons and bells
We had now begun our journey into the heart of chiru land, in the Kekexili Nature Reserve. Short-cropped grass with yellow alpine flowers rolled on for miles. Two Bactrian camels, double-humped and single-minded, munched stoically on the vegetation.
Suddenly, Du Yu, arms outstretched, shouted excitedly: “Chiru!” Ashok and I whipped our faces around from the camels. The Kekexili Reserve’s director had jumped off and set up an old spotting scope. And there they were, in the distance, framed by the Kunlun, a herd of chiru, grazing calmly, unperturbed by all the fuss our party was making.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the haze of high-altitude distance-viewing, more does began to appear. There were no males, distinctive for their twisted antlers, likely having branched off into all-male herds as the breeding season was over. I knew because I had crammed up Schaller’s masterpiece Mountain Monarchs . A few young orphans roamed in the foreground. They had blue ribbons and bells around their neck. A caretaker looked after them, I was told. The Chinese had tried to take the chiru orphans to lower altitude zoos, but they had died there. Chiru are the lords of the roof of the world.
I counted the herd slowly — there were at least a hundred heads there. The plateau ahead had many such herds. There could have been no better birthday present for Ashok. I turned around to look at him and he was taking a swig of baijiu, the strong Chinese spirit, from his hip flask. Under the peaked tartan cap, the usually unemotional, battle-hardened wildlife veteran had moist eyes.
The author is Executive Director of Wildlife Trust of India and has spent three decades conserving endangered Indian wildlife .
