It was a strange painting.
At the end of 2010, after returning from Nepal, I entered Tibet and took a rest for a week at the foot of Mount Karren.
I didn't immediately start looking for clues about the Ma family. After all, this journey was too tiring. With my friend's suggestion, I prepared to deal with the various burdens I gained from this trip to Nepal first.
I brought back a lot of antique ornaments with Tibetan Buddhist characteristics from Nepal, and I want to use them as samples for display and to find the real source of those ornaments in Zhangjia Ancient Building. In that place called Medog, I organized all the accessories into three large packages and mailed them to three different addresses in Hangzhou to lighten the burden of the journey.
There are two kinds of "post offices" in Medog, because Medog is a very special place. It is closed all the year round, and it is difficult to get in and out. At the earliest, the regular post office here could only receive letters, but could not send letters. Until recent years, there have been small roads that can pass mail, but the postal car is only limited to one trip a week.
Therefore, there are also private postal services in the local area, in fact, it is to find someone to take the mail package along the way. In the crowds entering and leaving Medog, it is a very common thing to help others carry mail and parcels. Some people will make some money as a middleman. The so-called "post office" I found is opened by such people, although it is not particularly safe, but At least one timeliness can be guaranteed. As long as someone leaves Medog, they can probably know when they can arrive at the post office outside, and it is safer to forward it later.
There are carriage roads, caravans and porters to leave Medog. The carriageway is not open to traffic all year round. When I came, it happened to be the season when traffic was not available. The caravans were almost extinct, so we were looking for so-called donkey friends or porters.
All the mail had to be carried out by the "postman" little by little, so the weight of the mail should not be too heavy. The process of averaging the weight of three large packages took nearly three hours.
That's when I saw the painting, and it was hanging on the wall behind the "post office counter" -- which is actually a desk with a piece of tempered glass on it.
The wall was painted with light green paint, on which hung the following things: a pair of ink paintings of "Pengcheng Wanli", with eagles and four characters; three bilingual pennants, all of which are "Purchasing gold is not ignorant" and "" "Safety Insurance" and other compliments; in addition, there is an oil painting.
Oil painting is not the kind of work that looks like it was made by a professional painter. It is a very ordinary, even a bit clumsy painting. The painting is a profile portrait of a person. Judging from the peeling degree and color of the paint, it seems that It's been on here for a long time.
The subject of the painting is a stuffy oil bottle. I don't understand Western painting, but the so-called principles of painting are the same to a certain extent. Although this is a very poor painting, it has a unique strength.
I don't know where this feeling comes from. The person in the painting is wearing a lama's clothes on the upper body and a Tibetan robe on the lower body. He is standing in the mountains, and he can see the peaks of Kal Rinci Snow Mountain behind him. I don't know if it was the setting sun or the brilliance of the beginning of the sun, which changed the tone of the whole oil painting from white to grayish-yellow.
This is a wonderful example of poor painting, but a bold use of color that brings out the mood directly.
Of course, even so, it doesn't mean that the painting is of considerable value. I was surprised because I knew the person in the painting.
Yes, the features of this man and his expression leave me absolutely no doubts.
it's him.
I'm completely at a loss as to why he would appear here, because there is really no reason for this person to appear in Medog, in a poor oil painting of Medog.
This is a portrait of a stuffy oil bottle.
First of all, I strongly deny it, because this matter is too strange, so the possibility of misreading it is very high, after all, it is words, not photos. Many details in the painting are relatively blurred, and it is also possible to cause this similarity.
However, I found myself unable to move my eyes. All the details of the person in the picture are telling me that it's a bit too similar. Especially the eyes, I have never seen a person with the same eyes as my brother. Fatty said that it was a look that had nothing to do with everything. Few people in the world can live without a connection to the world.
However, the person in this painting has such eyes.
I watched it for a long time, and subconsciously felt that the person in the painting was definitely him.
Just five years ago, he disappeared from our view. Of course, I know the truth about his disappearance, and I can say a lot more about him, but that's not what this story is about. What he did before is not important here. My first thought when I saw this painting was: Is Medog part of his investigation? He appeared here, does it mean that what he was investigating at the time was connected to this place?
At that time, I asked the operator of the post office. I remembered that it was an old man with a typical face of the Tibetan people. I asked him who painted this painting. The old man pointed to me opposite the "post office" and told me in blunt Chinese that the author of this painting was named Chen Xuehan.
I looked over and saw a middle-aged man picking up water from a boiler room on the side of the road. He should be the janitor in charge of the boiler room. There is boiling water in it for the nearby residents to use. Compared with the heavy snow outside, the heating in the boiler room made people sweaty, so many people gathered around the boiler to keep warm. These people were all dressed in the same clothes, so this group of people looked and felt the same when they were together.
The old Tibetan was very enthusiastic. Seeing that I couldn't tell the difference, they shouted at the boiler room: "Chen Xuehan!"
The voice was so loud that it seemed that the snow on the roof of the post office had been shaken several inches. That person called Chen Xuehan, Hearing the shouts of the old Tibetans, he raised his head in the crowd and looked at us with some doubts.
I walked over immediately, the man had a particularly dark face, rough skin, and looked younger than he looked from a distance.
I said in Chinese, "Hello, may I ask you to paint the oil painting in the post office?"
Chen Xuehan glanced at me, then nodded. I found his eyes lacklustre, the look of someone who lives a particularly peaceful life. Because of too much tranquility, he doesn't need to think about a lot of questions often, and people enter a state of special step-by-step.
I handed him the cigarette and asked him about the details of the oil painting. Chen Xuehan was a little surprised, looked at me, closed the gate of the boiling water boiler, and asked me, "Why are you asking this? Do you know him?"
His voice was exceptionally hoarse, but his words were very clear. I talked about the general situation, as well as the general background of this person and my relationship with him.
Chen Xuehan showed a slightly surprised expression, took off the gloves made of white towels, and walked out of the boiler room, "Have you recognized the wrong person, this oil painting was painted twenty years ago, how old were you then?"
I was a little surprised, I didn't expect that the painting was so old, although it did not look fresh. As for his question, I don't know how to answer it, because it really can't be explained in one or two sentences. Fortunately, he didn't seem to really want to know anything, and continued: "This person has nothing to do with me."
He added again . He pointed to a direction outside the door, where it was all white, and there was a snow mountain in the distance, "I saw that painting there. If you want to know more, you can ask the lama there."
I Looking in the direction he pointed, I saw that there was a building hidden in silver in the thick snow there.
"Where is that?" I asked.
"That's the Lama Temple." Chen Xuehan said, "I copied this painting in that Lama Temple."
"Did something strange happen at that time? Or, what is so special about that Lama Temple?" I asked, Usually, where he appears, there will always be strange phenomena. Or, the Lama Temple itself should have a lot of unusual.
Chen Xuehan shook his head and thought for a while before saying, "There is nothing strange about it, the only strange thing is that the Lama had to make me copy that painting at that time."
"Why?"
"The lama can see the cause and effect. He asked me to paint it, so I painted it for no reason. He could see everything after the painting, but I couldn't."
Chen Xuehan told me that the stuffy oil bottle in the painting should be It was a guest of the Lama Temple. The original version of the oil painting was painted by the Great Lama three days before this person left Medog, and he copied it later. He lived in the monastery for a long time that winter, and by chance saw the oil painting in the great lama's room.
Only then did I understand why the use of colors in this painting is so bold and expressive, but the painting skills are lazy and clumsy.
Many lamas in Tibet have very high aesthetic quality and professional knowledge, and many great lamas have multiple degrees from many famous foreign universities. I attribute these to the concentration behind the life of pure heart and few desires.
Thinking about this layer, thinking about what might have happened to him on the snowy mountain at that time, he was a little distracted.
"Are you going? Three hundred yuan, I'll take you there." He said, "That Lama Temple is not a local, so you can't go in."
Maybe the cause and effect the lama saw was the three hundred yuan.