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DEGE, China - Gongxia Sangzhu has travelled seven days to buy books. From Lhasa, it was a difficult journey - past the icy beauty of Namtso Lake, through the high deserts of northeastern Tibet, and across the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, arriving at last in this tiny western Sichuan town, where the young Tibetan monk triumphantly places 175.10 yuan on the counter of the local printing house.

His purchase: texts on traditional Tibetan Buddhist debating.

"This is the heart of Tibetan culture," says Se Jia, the director of the Dege Printing House. "If you want to go to the heart of the Tibetan religion, you go to Lhasa and places like the Potala Palace. But Dege is the heart of the culture."

It seems a bold claim considering that the entire county of Dege has only 61,000 residents, but it is hard to argue when monks like Mr. Gongxia travel for a week to get here. Dege's printing house is the largest traditional press in Tibetan parts of China, and it stores an estimated 70 per cent of the Tibetan literary heritage. Like so many other cultural relics in western Sichuan, it is a testimony to the way Tibetan traditions have survived a difficult half-century.

Upstairs, sixteen workers are turning out copies of the Tengzur, a collection of 14th-century scholastic commentaries on Buddhism. The printers work in pairs, one spreading ink on a wood block while the other presses paper against the carved text.

Workers in the Printing House work in pairs to produce traditional Tibetan texts. This is the height of the Dege Printing House's technology, which hasn't changed much since 1729, when construction of the press began. There are 100 workers, over 210,000 stored wood blocks, and no mechanization. Even electricity has been avoided, for fear of fire.

But the pairs of printers move like well-oiled cogs in a machine, their work in perfect harmony. The printed text appears quickly about one page every four seconds. Still, the Tengzur is 46,521 pages long, and it will take these workers roughly a month to produce five copies of the book, whose blocks were carved in the early 18th century.

"The printing used to depend strictly on whether the [Chinese] government said it was fine to proceed," says Mr. Se. "But nowadays their biggest concern is protection. They see it more as a cultural relic than a religious center, so there isn't any [political] trouble right now."

It is something of a miracle that the press exists at all. More than other parts of Tibetan Sichuan, Dege resisted Chinese rule in the early 1950's, and as a result local policies were restrictive. Soon after Chinese occupation, the publishing house was closed and converted into a hospital, but the locals found ways to preserve their literary treasures, some of which had been carved in the 1600's.

"A lot of the doctors who came to work at the hospital were really monks," says Mr. Se. "They came because they wanted to make sure that the materials here were protected."

During the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards destroyed the local monastery, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai commanded that the Dege Printing House be spared. In 1979, the press was allowed to resume operation, and in recent years it has flourished.

But even a quick walk through Dege town shows that the Chinese are still very much in control of this region. "Long Live the Invincible Mao Zedong Thought!" proclaims a propaganda sign on the police station, while the tax bureau chimes in with "Taxes Are the Blood of the Republic!" and "Oppose the Liberalization of the Capitalist Class!"

Yet somehow the essential spirit of this place has survived the last fifty years. The propaganda is still here, but so is the press, whose titles include 'Scripture on Longevity', 'How to Chant', and 'Method of Five Aspects, Including Expelling Ghosts and Saving the Patient'. And even if the ghosts of history have not been fully expelled, workers are still printing the Tengzur, page by careful page.

sourse from: Peter Hessler, Hong Kong Standard, 1999.