Tibetan woman Soeyak has lived in the same mud brick home in the rural village of Layew for all 90 years of her life.
The house is rumoured to be more than 1,000 years old.
“My mother and auntie were born here, and before that grandfather and grandmother,” she tells Ryan Jasper in next Tuesday’s Dateline While Soeyak’s village has been home to ethnic Tibetans for centuries, it was incorporated into China in 1928.
But this ancient home and its history could be under threat – victim to a broader push by Chinese authorities to replace traditional buildings with concrete alternatives.
“Do we have a choice? Everyone else has moved to the new houses, we’re not given a choice of where we’d like to live.”
Qinghai is home to an estimated 1.1 million Tibetans and is where the current Dalai Lama was born, in the village of Taktser.
In 2010, a Qinghai county called Yushu was struck by an earthquake that left almost 3,000 people dead and thousands more injured.
In the wake of the disaster, China rebuilt many communities with new houses.
“Because the construction of these houses is not very good, we have a new design because of the earthquake to give them a better lifestyle,” a China State Construction worker tells Dateline.
But there is a division of opinion over the Chinese government’s housing relocation plan; some seeing it as a genuine attempt to move families into newer, safer properties with electricity and other utilities, while others see it as an eradication of Tibet’s cultural past.
The Tibet Heritage Fund (THF) is an international non-profit attempting to record and preserve the design and building knowledge of Tibetan culture, before it is lost."
"Tibetan buildings, the traditional ones, are pretty much building with nature," says Anne Neumann who is interning for THF. "They’re only made of stones, mud and wood."
"Our project is to be here in Layew…and to document three buildings, because the information about these buildings is getting lost."
Modern China is often said to view old and traditional practices as backward, and there is a motivation to move forward from the past.
There is no consensus among Tibetans on whether China’s housing reconstruction plan is, in the aggregate, good or bad for Tibetan communities.
One Tibetan tells Dateline; “I think they’re pretty good. They made them [houses] for us...We didn’t have to buy them.”
But another man says, "The Tibetan houses are pretty old, they’ve been here forever. The construction of these houses to fit one family in one house won’t be big enough."
Tibetan communities are not just worried about losing a part of their culture if traditional homes are replaced – there is also a practical aspect to their concern.
The rammed earth technique used in many Tibetan constructions utilises mud and straw mixed inside a wooden frame, and is strong, sustainable and easy to repair.
“In the event of an earthquake, less people can die, so in reality it’s a lot safer,” a stonemason is Yushu tells Dateline.
“It’s timeless, ours could stand for thousands of years, but these ones you have to renovate every 20 years, that’s the difference.”
Anna Wozniak is a German architect who is working on a home restoration project in Tibet with the THF, and says rammed earth also does a better job than concrete of adapting to the environment.
“Rammed earth or mud brick can hold a lot of heat. So when you heat inside, the heat stays inside the walls. If the sun shines during the day the earth wall absorbs all this and gives it off during the night, so it’s a great material.”
“THF initiated this work to keep these houses, to preserve the old traditions, and also preserve the skills of masons, carpenters.”
“So future generations can still be able to find people who have the skills to build such a house, because that’s getting lost unfortunately.”
So can Tibet’s ancient culture be preserved in a constantly modernising China? Watch Tuesday’s Dateline at 9.30pm on SBS.
