Understanding and Appreciating High Asia

Today most of us are likely to know High Asia—places like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Nepal, and Tibet—as terrains of terror, or zones of fanaticism and conflict: the abode of be-turbaned warlords, young women with assault rifles, and brutal military repression. Or, conversely, we imagine High Asia as an ethereal Shangri-la sparsely populated by people with the secret to Life. We know so little about this part of the world that we are free to fear the worst or imagine the most fantastical, and are easily led to understand it to be a place and people entirely apart from our world.

The truth is one can find warlords, gun-toting girl revolutionaries and repressive armies here; and one can also find wandering ascetics, red-robed monks living in aerie-like monasteries, and beautiful people smiling in the face of poverty. But High Asia is more: an array of natural and human-modified environments, a long, complicated history, and a home land to highly diverse human groups., which include farmers, poets, heroes, mothers, teachers—far more likely to be peaceful than ferocious. What they have in common is a high-altitude homeland and all the vulnerabilities of the world’s mountain peoples and places.

The significance of High Asia—taken here as the Himalaya-Hindukush-Pamir ranges and Tibetan Plateau —extends beyond its borders and affects more than its residents. In the fourth year of the 21st century, High Asia may prove to be a lynchpin for global peace or war. And even beyond this geopolitical importance is the central role the natural environment of High Asia plays within greater Asia. Asia’s primary rivers arise from High Asia; the mountains and their forests shape the lives and livelihoods not only of local people but of many millions more in the lands below. The interplay between people and environment here has importance far beyond the highlands.

Geography is Destiny for High Asia

Several of the world’s most volatile states intersect in High Asia. An area of critical geopolitical significance, it is now often in the news. Yet because High Asia defies conventional definitions of “region” centered on the dominant, most often lowland, societies and their interests, the area is little understood even among academic specialists. High Asia includes territories variously considered parts of South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, or Southwest Asia. The defining connection for the region comes from its geography—not the political geography that divides it into often mutually hostile states, but the physical reality of the earth’s highest-standing terrain.

In a landscape that encompasses an extraordinary complexity of important cultural and biophysical realms, altitude is the unifying factor that makes High Asia a region. Mountains create distinctive natural environments and shape unique human living spaces. High Asia’s mountains are home to groups equipped with the special knowledge and skills to survive the challenge of mountainous environments. The mountains shelter a great variety of peoples who retreated to the highlands, whether 500 years or five days ago, seeking a haven from political and economic domination. But it seems no mountain fastness protects against today’s rising tide of homogenizing, culture-obliterating globalization. Look while you can at the unique people and places of High Asia.

Natural Landscapes and Processes

The altitude that unites the extraordinary variety in landscapes, peoples, and cultures of High Asia is the result of fundamental geophysical processes. Tectonic forces began 60,000,000 years ago to ram the Indian subcontinent into the main mass of Asia. Today this collision of tectonic plates continues to crush sea-sediments into summits (Everest’s fossil shells attest to this), force the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau, and shove and distort the high mountain ranges, making this area of the earth’s surface so conspicuous on the world’s map.

The ranges rise in ranks northward from the plain of the Indus and Ganges rivers. Ever-higher hills with interstitial valleys form roughly parallel ranges in the southeast (the Himalaya), and complex knots of highlands to the northwest (Karakoram, Hindukush, and Pamirs, with associated lesser ranges). North, the Tibetan Plateau is no plain tableland, but an elevated platform from which peaks rise to 20,000 ft (6100m) and higher.

The high-rising mountains exert considerable influence on regional climate, indeed, on the climate of the entire world. Interior heating of the Tibetan Plateau during the summer months is the engine that drives the summer monsoon. Relatively cool, moist air from the Bay of Bengal is drawn toward the warm, low-pressure interior of High Asia. Forced to rise by the Himalayan foothills, the air cools, condenses, and begins the wet season that delivers the rain that irrigates the fields that grow the crops that feed most of the people of Asia. But balked by the mountains, the monsoon rains are forced to flow northwest and southeast along, not over, the mountains. This concentrates most of their effect on the eastern Himalaya’s southern flank and makes near desert of both the lands north of the mountain barrier, and areas northwest, far from the rains’ source.

The westerly Jet Stream tracks across the northern tier of High Asia, bringing winter snow to the mountains of Tajikistan, Tibet, northern Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India; snow is a smaller part of the annual precipitation farther south. In most of High Asia the mountains serve as water towers, capturing precipitation, storing it as snow, and releasing it into the rivers that drain the highlands. The rising Himalaya forced south-running rivers to bend their courses around the ends of the mountain, but smaller streams cut across the grain of the ranges, making a very intricately dissected landscape.

A warming climate brings increasing unpredictability to the weather that drives the region’s agricultural cycles, and to the glaciers that are the sources of life-giving (and taking) rivers. These are the great rivers of Asia. The Ganges, Indus, Yarlung-Tsangpo (Tibet’s name for this river) or Bramaputra (the same river once it enters India) drain the highlands toward the west and south, and the Mekong, Salween, Yellow, and Yangtse drain east. Rivers once delivered both water and rich topsoil to the plains beneath the mountains (depositing sediments more than a mile deep, in the case of the Ganges). Today flooding rivers bring trouble: too many people crowd the flood plains of Asia’s great rivers, and human activities like road construction, commercial logging, and mining, as well as global warming, add extra disturbance to an already dynamic natural system.

The geophysical forces that create the region, seaming together Eurasia and India, joined widely divergent landscapes and living things. This confluence of continents creates the highest mountains, wettest hill slopes, driest deserts, and some of the most amazing concentrations of biodiversity on the earth. Though extremely diverse, there are patterns in the living, natural landscape. Altitude, latitude, and the orientation and angle of slopes are the natural agents shaping vegetation and dependent creatures. The diversity in environments thus created has called forth a great diversity of adaptations in human groups making their homes here. And humans in their turn have had substantial effects on both the natural environment and on one another.

Cultural Landscapes and History

It would seem that a region dominated by inhospitable mountain, steppe, and desert would resist penetration by outsiders. Yet appearances are deceptive: High Asia is peopled and patterned by criss-crossing flows of conquerors, pilgrims, and refugees, as well as small islands of truly indigenous peoples.

The cultural patterns of High Asia arise from nearly equal parts of physical setting and history. Rice cultivators control the richest valley bottoms and often the economy as well. Carefully engineered terraces mark the territory of many hill-dwelling groups who depend on millet, wheat, and other sturdy grains, and who must combine farming with wage-labor to support their families and fulfill obligations to money-lenders and the government from marginal lands. In the wetter forests of the southeast, shifting cultivators still use fire to convert forest to crops, though in-migration and expanding population taxes a system developed for vast unpeopled spaces. In the northwest, intricate irrigation networks water green oases of grain and fruit trees in the desert valleys. And above and beyond the limits of cultivation, herders use livestock to graze the high-and-dry places, converting wild forage to human uses.

The first migrants may have been nomadic pastoralist tribes from Central Asia and agriculturalists from Southeast Asia. Successive waves of migration followed. Aryans arrived about 1500 B.C.E., populated much of India, and developed the religious complex of Hinduism from which Buddhism arose in the sixth century B.C.E. Mongols from Central Asia moved through, and held most of South Asia under their power by the 1300’s.

The Old World’s most important highway traversed some of Central Asia’s bleakest reaches. Along the Silk Route passed traders and armies, pilgrims and proselytizers; all have left their mark. Even the religions of this region have evolved in a complex relationship with one another. Hinduism developed from beliefs and practices brought by the Aryan migrants to India who adopted earth-based religious practices of the Indus Valley civilization they displaced. The high-caste Indian prince Siddartha drew the concepts of rebirth and karma from the river of Hinduism. These became part of Buddhism, which spread throughout most of South and East Asia. In Tibet, Buddhism was incorporated into the native Bön religion when it arrived; Buddhism, in turn, absorbed elements of Bön. The Turkic-speaking Muslims arrived in the eleventh century, raiding Hindu temples and Buddhist centers before settling into various areas, particularly the upper Indus Valley, borrowing and bequeathing cultural elements among their new neighbors.

This mix of peoples, religions and cultures has made for a rich and at times volatile composition. In many places, people of different ethnicity or religion peacefully co-exist. Sometimes, the thread loosely weaving differing groups together unravels, and fierce fighting tears the fabric apart, as in Kashmir.

Over time, the region has been key to the political fortunes of outside powers from Genghis Khan’s campaigns of conquest, through the Great Game played by Russia and Britain, to the Cold War’s icy tensions, and the Soviet Union’s relations to its Central Asian republics. And today the twin incentives of subduing terrorism and controlling rich petroleum reserves keep the rest of the world’s interests high in High Asia. Yet as we hope to show, the true faces of High Asia remain veiled unless we look behind the stereotypes and try to understand more than our own “national interests.”