At the end of 2010, after returning from Nepal, I passed through the village at the foot of the Kalren peak and took a week's rest. I brought back a large number of antique ornaments with Tibetan Buddhist characteristics from Nepal and wanted to use them as samples for display. At that place called Motuo, I sorted out all the accessories into three large packages and mailed them to three different addresses in Hangzhou to lighten the burden of the subsequent journey.

There are two types of "post offices" in Metuo, and this is because they are quite a special place. It is closed all the year round, it is difficult to get in and out, all the earliest regular post office here can only receive letters, can not send letters, until recent years, there is a small road that can be posted, but the mail truck is only limited to one trip a week.

Therefore, there is also a private mail service in the local area, which is actually to find someone to bring mail packages along the way. In the crowd of people who come in and out of Metuo, it is a very common thing to help others carry mail packages, and some people will make some money as middlemen, and the so-called "post office" I found is opened by this kind of person, although it is not particularly safe, but at least it can ensure a timeliness. As long as someone comes out of the ink, they will probably know when they will be able to get to the post office outside, and then it will be safer to forward it.

There are car roads, caravans and porters, and the roads are not open to traffic all year round, and when I came, it happened to be the season when there was no traffic, and the caravans were almost extinct, so we were looking for so-called travelers or porters.

All the mail had to be carried out little by little by the "postman", so the weight of the mail should not be too heavy, and it took me almost three hours to average the weight of the three large packages.

That's when I saw the painting, and it hung on the wall behind the "post office counter," which was actually a piece of tempered glass on a desk.

The wall was painted in pale green paint, and the following items hung on it: a painting of "Pengcheng Wanli" with an eagle and four large characters, three bilingual pennants with praise such as "collecting gold" and "safety insurance", and an oil painting.

The oil painting is not the kind of work that looks like it is the work of a professional painter, it is a very ordinary, even a little clumsy, the painting is a portrait of a person, judging by the degree of peeling of the pigment and the color, it seems to have been here for a long time.

The subject of the painting is a young man, I don't know much about Western painting, but the so-called principle of painting is the same to a certain extent, although it is a very clumsy painting, but it has a different flavor.

I don't know where this feeling comes from, but the person in the painting, wearing a lama's clothes on the upper body and a Tibetan robe on the lower body, is standing in the middle of the mountain, with a view of the snow-capped peaks of the Kalrinci Snow Mountain behind him. I don't know if it was the setting sun or the glow of the beginning of the day, which changed the tone of the whole oil painting from white to gray yellow.

This is a brilliant example of poor painting workmanship, but rather bold use of color, which directly brings out the mood.

Of course, even this does not mean that the painting has considerable value, and I am surprised because I know the person in the painting.

It's a recognizance, not a familiarity, because the characteristics of this person and his expression make me absolutely not have any doubts.

It must be him.

I couldn't figure out how he should be here, because there really was no reason for this man to appear in Motuo, on a clumsy oil painting of Motuo.

This man's name, maybe only I know, he is an old friend, a good brother. This is a rather unusual character, and there are so many stories that have happened between me and him that they are recounted in another book of mine. I thought that his story would continue with me five years later. I had no idea that I would see him again in Motuo.

Speaking of which, he is not ordinary, in fact, now it has become less mysterious, this person, he is a tomb robber. Or, I should use a more neutral word: explorer.

When I first met him, he had been secretly excavating ancient tombs all over the country, but he did not possess the artifacts in the ancient tombs, and later I gradually discovered that he seemed to be looking for some secrets, some information that might be hidden in the remains of several ancient civilizations in China. A few years ago, I tried to investigate his background and what he was trying to know, and I had some results, but then I realized that my investigation was superficial.

He has also had employment relationships with international salvage companies, or in other words, has worked with them on a small scale. The international salvage company was a fairly large consortium, and they took this man very seriously, which showed the value of what he was looking for.

Just five years ago, he disappeared from our view. Of course, I know the truth about his disappearance, and I can say a lot about him, but that's not the main point of the story. What he did before is not important here, but the first thing I thought when I saw this painting was: Is Motuo part of his investigation? Does his presence here mean that what he investigated at that time is related to this place?

However, when I tried to find the author of the painting, I realized that this was not entirely the case, or that what happened in Motuo had a lot to do with my experience with him, but not absolutely. What happened here seems to have more to do with his own experience.

It's not inconsequential, and for me, his own experience is quite fascinating.

I asked the post office staff at the time, and I remember it was an old man with a typical face of the Western/Tibetan people, and I asked him who painted this picture. The old man pointed to me across the "post office" and told me in blunt Chinese that the author of the painting was Chen Xuehan.

I looked over and saw a middle-aged man in his early forties, pouring boiling water in a boiler room on the side of the road. He was supposed to be the janitor in charge of the boiler room, which had boiling water for the nearby residents to use, and a pot of triangular money. Compared with the heavy snow outside, the boiler room was warm and sweaty, so many people gathered around the boiler to keep warm, these people were dressed similarly, and everyone couldn't see clearly in the crowd.