An old employee of the Lhasa Automobile Team
Modern Tibetans' understanding of the automobile began in the middle of the last century, when there were no roads in Tibet, and the 13th Dalai Lama's car was dismantled in India and reassembled in a mule and horse to Lhasa. It was the first car in Tibet, and its route was limited to the one-kilometer-long city road from Norbulingka to potala Palace.
It was not until 1954 that the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and the Qinghai-Tibet Highway were opened to traffic in Lhasa, and cars drove into the snowy plateau, which ended the history of Tibet without roads and relying on animal power and manpower for transportation.
In the face of these "big guys who run faster than wild yaks", the Tibetan people gave the car a more life-like name - the yak that does not eat grass.
Since then, these "yaks that do not eat grass" have taken on the heavy responsibility of Tibet's modernization construction, and since there was no air and rail transportation at that time, more than 90% of the materials entering Tibet were transported by car. In order to meet the transportation needs of the new era, in June 1956, under the care of the Party Central Committee and Vice Premier Chen Yi, and with the approval of the Central Tibet Working Committee, the Tibet Transport Bureau was established (the predecessor of the Lhasa Motor Transport Corporation), which created a new situation in the road transport industry in Tibet.
Although the car was a "yak that did not eat grass", there were not many people who could control these "yaks" at that time, and the employees of the 8 convoys in Lhasa were almost all soldiers who had been transferred from the automobile unit, and the convoys were also formed as troops. It was not until the end of the 1960s, during the period of great development of the transportation industry, that many professional drivers were trained in society to supplement the fleet, and the transportation department was separated from the military structure and changed to local management.
Someone once described the relationship between Tibet's economic construction and the automobile: "The prosperity of modern Tibet is driven on the wheel of the car", the profession of driver is the "fragrant food" of that era, and the driver has also become the first choice for young girls to find objects. But behind the prosperity and "fragrant food", who knows the efforts and hardships of the driver group and their families?
In the era of relying on the wheel economy, drivers went to Liuyuan to pull living materials, to Golmura industrial materials, to Tibet to pull various ores, to Nepal to deliver aid materials, the snowy mountains and land left the mark of their wheels, and they stood up in hunger and cold as the backbone of Tibet's construction period.
Because transportation is a special industry, coupled with a lot of cars all year round, a long time, and the family is difficult to take care of, many drivers have given up professional women in the choice of spouses, so "family members" have become the most common group of women in the transport team.
In order to reduce the burden on the family, the "family" in their own yard to open a piece of land to engage in side business, inevitably neglected the discipline of the child, some wild and habitual motorcade children often become "fighting" experts in school, they abandoned their studies, bringing great difficulties to future employment, when faced with enterprise restructuring, this group of driver descendants who have not learned much knowledge are often difficult to face, and their survival pressure has continued until now.
At that time, the work undertaken by professional drivers was the state's command transport tasks, from Lhasa to a trip to Gansu Liuyuan takes at least a month or so, the only thing they can do in Lhasa is to bake a few cakes when their husbands go out of the car, steam a few steamed buns for them to take on the road to eat, this kind of dry food on the cold water life caused great harm to the driver's body, stomach disease has become an occupational disease of many drivers.
At the end of the 1980s, with the gradual growth of the private economy, the state-owned fleet was struggling, the driver, which was once known as the "fragrant food" of the professional scenery is gone, the older workers retire, the younger generation of workers fall into the distress of enterprise restructuring, layoffs, and reemployment, their professional skills do not have much advantage to speak of, they have been in a weak position in market competition, and their survival pressure has become a social problem.
"Going out is a day". At the beginning of this century, the transportation industry finally gradually got out of the predicament through restructuring, production conversion, and market development, and embarked on a completely different path from the traditional transportation industry.
The first team of automobiles, which was once the largest fleet in Tibet's transportation industry (at its most brilliant time, there were repair shops, primary schools and other affiliated units, with more than 2,000 employees), and it was also the first team to be restructured. Through it, we will play Lhasa, the Wheel Quartet.