The sweet, yet slightly rancid smell of yak butter mixed with burning juniper stayed with me for days after visiting the holy sites. I know if I ever smell yak butter again I’ll be back in Lhasa, Tibet, in the days before the first train was scheduled to arrive from China.

Last summer, my daughter, Railey, and I went on a journey, and although I wasn’t sure what we were looking for, somehow I thought we might find that indefinable thing in Tibet. My prior knowledge of Tibet—a beautiful, mysterious, and remote country—came from the movies and from my local grocery store. Ronald Colman from Lost Horizon and Brad Pitt from Seven Years in Tibet were my spiritual guides, and the monks—small, brown men in long maroon and yellow robes who I periodically ran into in the produce section—shaped my notion of Tibetan culture. I would steal glances at them as they smelled the cantaloupes and picked out oranges, and if they caught me looking, they’d flash wide smiles and their eyes would almost disappear, and I would get all embarrassed. Ithaca, New York, is home to the Namgyal Monastery, the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery in North America, so you get used to seeing the Tibetan monks around town. In winter, their maroon and yellow robes hang below puffy down jackets as they trudge through the snow and slush of upstate New York in hiking boots.

What wasn’t clear to me when we set off on our journey was how affected I would be by visiting a country that was on the cusp of momentous change. As journalists around the world were heralding the opening of the new railroad between China and Tibet, all I could focus on was what this might really mean to the Tibetan people and their culture. In the end, the most I can say is that it will be a different place than the one Railey and I visited in the summer of 2006.

I warned Railey to keep her mouth shut in Tibet because I didn’t want to be hauling her out of a Chinese prison. She’s a senior in college and is known for being thoughtful but outspoken. Flying really was the only reasonable way to get into Lhasa before the railroad, but at more than $600 roundtrip from Beijing, it is prohibitively expensive for the average Chinese worker, who earns only about $2,000 a year. The only other way to get to Tibet from China was a three-day trip over the Friendship Highway, a potholed nightmare of a road that snakes over more than 600 miles through the mountains and over permafrost plains.

The railroad will change all that. This is the highest railroad in the world, cutting through 16,000-foot mountain passes and ending at the 12,000-foot Tibetan Plateau. Cars are sealed and equipped with extra oxygen to help lowlanders acclimate to the altitude. Beijing is now only a 48-hour trip by luxury train. With roundtrip costs ranging from $50 to $320, it will now be possible for 4,000 people to visit Lhasa by train every day. Last year a total of 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Chinese, visited Tibet. Because of the train, tourism officials expect that number to jump 40 percent.

As we made our way from Gongkhar airport to Lhasa, the biggest and holiest city in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China (TAR), our bus drove alongside the Lhasa River, which winds through the gravelly plateau, barely contained by the suggestion of banks. I noticed places where dozens of poles with brightly colored flags were stuck into shallows in the river. “Tashi, Tashi, what are we looking at?” I asked. Tashi, a native Tibetan, was our guide for the week and he got used to me bugging him. He explained that they were prayer flags and that the five colors represented the five elements (blue-sky, white-cloud, red-fire, green-water, yellow-earth). They mark spots where water burials took place and signify good luck and protection. Tibetans believe that after death the soul leaves the body. The body is then taken to the mountain for a sky burial or to the river for a water burial, where an undertaker cuts up the body and feeds it to the vultures or the fish. “After all,” said Tashi, “The bodies become useless, so we give them to the animals that need them.” Then he added, “Most Tibetan people don’t eat fish.”

The TAR is 745,000 square miles in area and sits on the far western edge of China, separating China from India, Nepal, and Bhutan. The north, rich in precious metals, is home to nomadic peoples who raise yak, sheep, and goats. The eastern region, home to many Han Chinese immigrants, is forested and supports animals like tigers, leopards, monkeys, and birds. The central region is the agricultural belt where barley, wheat, canola, yak, pigs, chickens, cows, and vegetables are cultivated. It’s also the center of politics and religion with monasteries and holy sites that attract pilgrims and tourists alike.

Almost five million Tibetans live in China and a little more than half of them (2.7 million) live in the TAR. Most of the rest live in what is considered part of cultural and ethnic Tibet, which includes sections of three adjacent Chinese provinces. China invaded Tibet in 1950 and, according to official Chinese reports, liberated the Tibetan people from a miserable life of feudal serfdom. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual and political leader, was just a teenager when the Chinese invaded, and he fled the country by horseback in 1959. He ended up in Dharamsala, India, where he set up a government in exile. Today he monitors the Chinese occupation of Tibet from the other side of the Himalayas.

No one really knows how many Han Chinese live in the TAR today—the numbers vary widely depending on the source—but exiled Tibetans claim that more than half the population of the TAR is now Chinese, while the Chinese say it’s only 15 or 20 percent. And then there is the Chinese military, which may number about half a million and isn’t included in the population count. What is not in dispute is the fact that in 1950 the average lifespan of a Tibetan was just 36 years, while today it’s over 65.

The largest city, Lhasa, is a city of contradictions. While Lhasa is Tibet’s holiest city—home to Jokhang Temple, which houses a 2,500-year-old statue of the Buddha that was carved during his lifetime, and the Potala Palace, the winter residence of the Dalai Lamas—it is also home to many massage parlors, thousands of prostitutes, and a very noticeable Chinese military presence.

As we traveled down the main drag, we passed Lhasa’s kitschiest landmark—a golden yak statue. It’s been inexplicably placed in the middle of the road, creating the only traffic circle we saw for thousands of miles. Looking beyond the yak, we gazed at the incredible red and white, thousand-room Potala Palace, built into the top of Red Mountain, which the city now surrounds. Across from the palace is a broad plaza with a 100-foot-tall monument commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet. When we stopped to take a closer look, we encountered a fence preventing us from getting too close. As we looked back across the expanse of the plaza, we noticed the large red flag of the People’s Republic of China flapping in the wind, standing between the palace and us.

To enter the palace, we had to submit our passports and visas to the authorities. There was constant movement in front of the palace gate as pilgrims circumambulated the base of Red Mountain in a clockwise direction. Every Tibetan hopes to make a trip to Lhasa once in his lifetime to visit the Jokhang Temple and the Potala Palace, and to make several holy circumambulations. Some pilgrims choose to prostrate themselves the entire length of the journey, sometimes hundreds of miles, and resemble human inchworms as they creep ever closer to their holy destination.

Hundreds of Tibetans were prostrating themselves in front of the palace gate the morning we visited, some with rags tied around their hands to make it easier to slide forward. Those who weren’t prostrating were walking and twirling a prayer wheel—a silver wheel on a stick—in a clockwise motion and chanting om mani padmeh hom. Visiting the holy sites doesn’t guarantee enlightenment, but it does allow one to build up good karma to aid in one’s reincarnation. “Tashi, Tashi, what do the pilgrims think of the train?” I asked. “They don’t think about it,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with them.”

Tibet has a long, complicated political history filled with off-and-on alliances with Mongolia, Nepal, India, Bhutan, and China. Potala Palace was first built in the 7th century by the 33rd king of Tibet and became the seat of religious and political power when the Dalai Lamas took up residence there. It was rebuilt and expanded in the 17th century by the fifth Dalai Lama, who was the first Dalai Lama to be buried at Potala Palace, which remains the traditional burial ground for Dalai Lamas (the current Dalai Lama is the 14th). Remarkably, this landmark, along with the Jokhang Temple, was spared during the Cultural Revolution, although thousands of monasteries and temples throughout Tibet were destroyed. Only 20 of the 1,000 rooms in the palace are open to the public, and there’s speculation that many of the remaining rooms have been looted, their relics shipped off to China.

Inside the palace, we climbed up and down stairs that were often no more than ladders placed against walls. The small chapels displayed golden Buddhas, three-dimensional mandalas made from gold, and the enormous burial tombs of the Dalai Lamas, made of gold and inlaid with turquoise and coral.

The bodies of the Dalai Lamas have been placed in the fetal position in the open top of the tombs, and, even though we couldn’t see them, we knew they were there. The chapel walls were covered with frescoes and every surface was either carved or brightly painted. The floor is made of arga—about six inches of mud mixed with stones (some semi-precious) that is then tamped down and coated with canola oil.

Yak butter lamps and juniper incense burned in every room, creating a cloyingly sweet-smelling smoke. We were surrounded by pilgrims who carried either melted yak butter in thermoses or solid yak butter in plastic bags, and at each lamp—just an open bowl with floating wicks—they poured from their thermoses or broke off a piece of butter and added it to the lamp. The wicks sputtered and spit and the floor and walls were slick with grease. Railey spotted a wild-eyed young monk in a filthy, torn robe with long hair and a scraggly beard, and she asked Tashi what his story might be. “Oh, he probably just came out of a cave where he spent months alone,” he replied. In one chapel, a monk sat on a low bench while a cat and her kittens played nearby, important residents for keeping the rat population in check since the monks’ faith forbids them from killing any living thing.

The Potala Palace once housed thousands of monks, but now there are only 73. Chinese security guards in shiny black uniforms with walkie-talkies made their way through the crowd, ready to grab anyone who dared to take a photo.

Later, as we made our way to the temple, Tashi told us that his older brother is a lama, which means he has passed many examinations and has worked his way up the monastic ladder. He entered the monastery at the age of seven, and now comes home for two weeks at the Tibetan New Year and spends most of his time blessing the homes of family friends and neighbors. Having a lama in the family has increased their social status in the community.

Tashi, on the other hand, was the child chosen by his parents to stay at home and take care of them, and is married and a father himself. His father used to drive a truck hauling goods on a six-day route between the mainland and Lhasa, but is now retired. We ran into him, a distracted older man wearing rimless glasses, in front of the Jokhang Temple, where he was just finishing part of his morning ritual. According to Tashi, he follows the same schedule every day: he rises at four and does prostration until six, when he eats a simple breakfast. He then goes to the temple to circumambulate a couple of times, and then moves down the street to walk around the base of the palace. When Tashi sees him at lunch and tries to ask him a question, his father always answers, “If you have something important to tell me, tell me tomorrow.” Then he spends the afternoon spinning two prayer wheels at once—one in each hand.

At the Sera Monastery, a collection of buildings perched halfway up the side of a mountain at the edge of town, we saw young monks debating in an open courtyard. Standing monks asked questions based on scripture and seated monks tried to answer them. Every time a monk asked a question, he put out his left hand, palm up, pulled his prayer beads up above the elbow, and then brought his right hand down to make a sharp slap. If the seated monk couldn’t answer, the standing monk berated him and the seated monk looked humiliated. There was a fraternity or military hazing feel to the whole thing. When some of the younger monks asked questions, it looked like they were having a great time making exaggerated motions, winding up their arm slaps like baseball pitchers on the mound. One young monk—maybe seven years old—was sucking his thumb, which he eventually replaced with his prayer beads. The monastery used to house 7,000 monks but now there are less than 600, the maximum allowed by the Chinese government. We saw a teenaged girl leaving the monastery with her father. She wore a sullen expression and ashes streaked the length of her nose. Parents bring their children to have a lama put ashes on their noses to drive out evil spirits, and it made me wonder what this girl had done to merit this trip to Sera.

We stopped to visit a farmer’s house—someone Tashi knew—in a small village of about 10 houses surrounded by neatly tended fields of barley and canola. Six people lived in the house—three generations—and when we walked into a walled courtyard we found a little kitchen with just a cooker in it adjacent to a two-room house. Downstairs was the living space where everyone ate at a long table and slept at night on carpet-covered benches built into the walls. Up an outside ladder was the other room. In front of the room was a small area of roof that held a solar cooker—two large sheets of aluminum with a metal coil at the center—that could boil a kettle of water in 45 minutes. The small upper room served as the family chapel. The walls and ceiling were beautifully painted in blue, red, yellow, green, and black, colors I came to associate with Tibet. On one wall was a framed color photograph of the young Dalai Lama sitting with Mao Zedong. Tibetans aren’t allowed to have any images of the Dalai Lama, but could get away with this one because Mao was in the photo. In the photograph, the Dalai Lama is a thin, smiling teenager. It was taken just before he left the country in 1959.

In one corner of the room, covered with a bit of lace, was a large flat-screen television. The three grown children worked in Lhasa and had pooled their money to buy the TV for their parents. There was no toilet or shower (an open pit in a corner of the courtyard stood in for the toilet), and the family cooked their food over dung that was collected and stuck on the outside of the house to dry, but they had a television. I forgot to ask what they watched.

As the days went by, I tried to sort out the details of the recent past while simultaneously speculating on what impact the railroad is likely to have. We had witnessed a timeless tableau of pilgrims inching their way across the countryside wearing the same kinds of clothes and caring about the same things their ancestors did 500 years ago. In some ways it didn’t matter who was in charge, the Dalai Lama or Beijing, as long as they could practice their devotions. But then there was the farmer and his wife whose proudest possession was a television set. That’s what many Tibetans believed the railroad had to offer. Progress. A booming tourist economy. A better way of life.

Tashi took us to visit the De Ji or Dickey Orphanage. We drove to the outskirts of Lhasa and bumped along a dusty road filled with potholes. Across the road from a military base surrounded by a high stone wall was a cluster of drab, nondescript concrete buildings. We drove into the complex and down an alley before entering a courtyard that connected four one-room buildings with windows facing the courtyard. This was the orphanage. We stepped over some foul-smelling liquid running down the side of the road and passed a large, chained dog that lunged aggressively at us. Five adult workers and 83 children between the ages of five months and 14 years called the orphanage home. The girls slept four to a bunk bed in one room, the boys in another, and the babies with the workers, lined up on carpets on a bench.

The kids stood in rows at one end of the courtyard and sang “You Are My Sunshine” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It” to welcome us. The De Ji Orphanage was started in 2002 by Dhadon, who previously ran a small teashop in downtown Lhasa. She began giving bits of food to hungry kids hanging around the shop, and soon they started sleeping in her doorway. She couldn’t stand it, so she closed up shop, found this collection of buildings, and began taking the children in. Most are orphans, but a couple of sets of siblings were dropped off by parents too poor to care for them. There are four official orphanages in Lhasa, but this is a private venture; Dhadon is moved by compassion to do this and relies on private donations to keep going. The kids who are old enough go to school, and all receive free medical care from a nearby hospital. A nun visits the orphanage several days a week and sells handmade shoulder bags to raise funds. The orphanage is raising money to build on the edge of town, where they’ve already secured a lease on the land, but no one is allowed to adopt these children yet because the orphanage has not been officially recognized by the government.

I think the Chinese will always feel two ways about Tibet. It’s difficult to try to control the people in this region, who are steeped in a religious culture that dictates the details of their daily lives. The Chinese are also up against a large, mostly Western “Free Tibet” movement being led by a charismatic leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. On the other hand, Tibet is rich in natural resources like gold, silver, copper, lithium, and timber, and its people have a fascinating culture, resources China is only too happy to exploit.

A cynic might think that the train, which was due to arrive in Lhasa two days after we left, might be a convenient way to bring more Chinese settlers to the region along with the 4,000 visitors that will be dumped into Lhasa every day. This train could also take more resources out of the country. On the other hand, an optimist might think the Chinese have pushed the railroad to Tibet because they want to present this gem of a culture to the world. Maybe China recognizes this unreachable, unknowable place as a desirable tourist destination, and that will spare the Tibetan culture. Whatever the motivation, recent Tibetan history will one day certainly be divided into the time before the train and the time after the train.