The Forgotten Towers

Often the search for something rare yields not that sought, but something else just as elusive. Late last century, Frederique Darragon combed West China’s “Tribal Corridor” for the snow leopard, but kept happening upon massive, well-crafted, ancient towers, all the more curious for the fact that the tribesmen living about them knew nothing of their origins. Giving up leopards for towers, she has spent her life since trying to piece together these puzzles in plain sight.

An eight-pointed, star shaped tower fifty meters high, higher than a 15-story building. Twin towers in Remede, stoney prototypes of the Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur. For months at a time, Darragon combed western Sichuan, northern Yunnan, southern Qinghai and Tibet, gathering clues. A lot of bumping on horseback revealed that the star shaped towers only existed in ancestral lands of little-known ancient kingdoms: those of the Qiang, the Minyag along the Yalong River, the 18 kingdoms of the Gyalrong, and the all-but-forgotten Eastern Queen Kingdom.

What little we know of them fascinates, however tenuous their connection to the towers. Various Chinese annals during the Sui and Tang dynasties, a stretch of time encompassing the late 6th through early 10th centuries, describe a land where women ruled, and men served a submissive role. According to the annals, the queen lived in a nine-story tower filled with gold, and the commoners in six-story ones. What is left of that culture is most commonly identified with the Sumpi tribe.

As for the “18 Kingdoms”, the number eighteen is frequently employed in Tibetan mythology. However, Darragon found in her travels throughout the Gyalrong region that many of the villages she encountered bore the exact names of the ostensibly forgotten kingdoms. Each had at least one tower standing sentry over a fertile valley, the kind of land fiercely contested since man learned to cultivate soil. A few days on horseback would take her to another village, named for a kingdom, with an entirely different tongue.

Altogether, the tower regions comprise a territory a third France’s size, yet with only a handful of documented history, hidden in the dust of Tibet and China’s frictional history. The enduring legacy of these many fiercely independent nations are the dozens of mutually unintelligible languages spoken there today, languages which all bear tales of the days when the rivers slicing gorges through these nosebleed lands were the default route of the Southern Silk Road.

 Of this much Darragon is certain: the towers, still to be counted in the hundreds, were built between 200 and 1500 CE, and during such a long span of existence were definitely put to different use . Defence primarily, tell-tale arrow slits and anti-projectile walls on many towers’ uphill sides attest to that. Signalling, storage, and border marking as well, perhaps even as locii of the grisly Tibetan sky burial ritual .

If we have little to conjure of the Who and Why, we have a bounty of What – a profusion of widely scattered, ingenious masonry, all the more glorious for its utter innocence of touristic exploitation. Uncut stones, stacked with a preturnatural skill rivaled only by that responsible for the Inca walls of Cusco. Indigenous know-how, which without rebar or cement built sturdily enough to withstand a thousand years of earthquakes on tectonically vulnerable ground.

On a metaphysical note, many of these remote valleys hid the last remnants of the Bon religion, a faith predating Buddhism in Tibet, but swept into oblivion by followers of the Enlightened One. Some Japanese scholars hold that some of the peoples inhabiting the Tribal Corridor are descendants of the semi-legendary Bonpo Kingdom, destroyed in the seventh century. Bon runs deep with mystical astrology, and some see a link between the old beliefs of these lands and the many eight-pointed towers, particularly the twin towers at Remede. Such architectural structures were employed universally in ancient cultures as cosmic compasses, four points for the cardinal directions, the other four for the cardinal points in time, two equinoxes and two solstices.

Some so-inclined find reason enough to speculate that these towers are ancient star gates. Kooks with the naivety to entertain notions of stargates include the CIA, who between 1975 and 1979 appropriated millions from congress to investigate whether they could be used to “perceive remote visual stimuli”.

Most inhabiting this wild yet historically rich area today won’t have much to say on the subject of star gates, but still employ many of the same techniques used for the towers , only for structures far more humble. After all, they are now a humble folk, regarded as 2nd class Tibetans, with neither the resources nor the leisure to prevent the encroaching hammer of modernization on their pristine environment and traditional ways of life. Darragon, a crusader if ever there was one, co-founded the Sichuan University Unicorn Heritage Institute in 2001 to promote and protect these minority cultures. Now, all the towers are officially registered as “relics”; some are on the short list of potential UNESCO World Heritage sites. Such measures bring us no closer to unraveling the towers’ true stories, but go a ways to ensuring that someday, others may.

The Tibetan towers explained as "signal towers" unfortunately do not answer perhaps the most important question:

Why are the towers star-shaped?

Eventual suggestions that the towers could be some kind of forts or watchtowers do not respond to the above question either!

There is also an explanation that they could represent the dmu cord. According to Tibetan legend, "dmu" cord connect heaven and earth. This one I like much better, a star may symbolize connection to the sky. All those towers could have been raised as a symbol of extraterrestrial visitation on earth.

Tibet is full of ancient legends describing events related to flying machines and alien beings. The Kanjur and the Tanjur books are the two most important writings of the Tibetan Buddhists.

They state that:

"...gods regularly visited Earth in transparent flying spheres or "Pearls in the heavens." It is an interesting description because it clearly indicates that another type of flying machine, as its shape differ from the design of the "dragon", was seen on Earth.

Dealing with flying machines and the technology of the gods' later on, we will learn that our ancient visitors possessed various types of spaceships. The Rgyal-rabs is another ancient text rich on information, which support the ancient astronauts' theory. The text preserves the genealogy of ancient Tibetan rulers and refers to 27 legendary kings.

It is said that seven of these kings came down from the zenith of the sky, passing through the levels of the atmosphere on a heavenly ladder or "sky-cord." These kings, also called "gods of light" re-ascended up the sky-cord to the zenith after fulfilling their mission among the Tibetans..." Ellen Lloyd, "Voices From Legendary Times"