Cctv news(Reporter He Chuan) Less than 200 kilometers south of Lhasa, there is a snowy town called Zedang. At night on December 20, 2016, the street lights in the town were bright and people and cars were mixed. In the corner of the street, a row of small shops filled with mangosteen, strawberries, kumquat, ponkan and other fruits are particularly eye-catching in the night in a plateau town with an altitude of more than 3,500 meters.
In the front row of Mr. Zhang’s fruit shop is a kilo of cherries in 80 yuan.
The reporter randomly walked into a roadside stall without a store name and found that the richness of fruit types inside was amazing: fruits that can be seen in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are basically available here. One basket of fresh cherries especially aroused our curiosity: Where did this valuable anti-season fruit come from and where did it go? Who is consuming these fruits?
Mr. Zhang, the owner of the fruit shop, told the reporter affirmatively: "Most of the guests in these two months are locals. This cherry is a catty in 80 yuan, which is already a preferential price. The people here like it very much. It’s strange to eat it. A basket of cherries can be finished in three or four days."
Mr. Zhang comes from Pengzhou, Sichuan, and has been doing fruit business in Tibet for three or four years. In a few words, Mr. Zhang answered the whereabouts of these fruits. When talking about the recent business situation, Mr. Zhang had reservations: "The business is not good recently, and it sells more than 2,000 yuan a day, which is much worse than the tourist season."
December is the off-season of tourism in Tibet, and tourists habitually conclude that winter in Tibet must be ice and snow, so the number of tourists who choose to visit Tibet in winter is much less than that in spring and summer. But even so, according to Mr. Zhang’s conservative view, the monthly turnover of this small fruit shop in the off-season has reached 60 thousand yuan. Excluding the basic expenditure of about 10 thousand yuan per month, according to the gross profit of 30% of the vegetable and fruit industry, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang earn at least 15 thousand yuan per month in this season.
"When my new friends in the mainland asked me if your children were going to ride over the snow-capped mountains when they went to school, I silently took pictures of eating cherries in frozen Tibet, as well as local strawberries, pineapples and cherry tomatoes and sent them to him." Tsering Tashi, a local youth from Zedang Town who went to college in Beijing, told reporters humorously: "What is used to in Tibet today is the secret of Tibet for many people who don’t understand the development and changes in Tibet in recent years."
This strawberry is produced in a greenhouse in Lhasa, Tibet.
According to the official website of Xizang Autonomous Region government, the per capita disposable income of Tibetan farmers and herdsmen reached 8,244 yuan in 2015, up by 12% over the previous year, and has maintained double-digit growth for 13 consecutive years. This is the confidence that people in Xizang can consume a catty of cherries in 80 yuan. People in Xizang’s happy life now is an open secret in every place in Tibet.
Until the end of the interview, Mr. Zhang did not tell reporters where these cherries came from. In fact, it’s no mystery: about 100 kilometers from Zedang to Lhasa is Gongga Airport. Here, fruits from all over the world and all over the country can arrive on the same day or the next day. In other words, bananas picked from Hainan Island in the morning can be placed in the living room of college student Tsering Tashi’s home at night.
The Tibetan secret hidden by a cherry is the happy life that people in Xizang has become accustomed to.