IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JOSEPH ROCK By Michael Woodhead 1 CONTENTS Chapter 1: How it all began Chapter 2: The young Joseph Rock and China Chapter 3: First visits to Kunming and Dali Chapter 4: Muli, Land of the Yellow Lama Chapter 5: The Glories of the Minya Konka Chapter 6: Seeking the ‘lost’ mountain of Muti Konka Chapter 7: The Great River Trenches of Asia: the Mekong Chapter 8: The Great River Trenches of Asia: the Salween Chapter 9: Yading, Holy Mountain of the Outlaws Chapter 10: Seeking the Mountains of Mystery: Travels to Choni and Amnye Machen Postscript: Joseph Rock and the real Shangri La 184 210 3 6 10 18 60 88 105 115 144 2 CHAPTER 1: HOW IT ALL BEGAN I first came across Joseph Rock’s National Geographic articles about western China in a dusty back room of a library in Auckland, in 1991. I’d just arrived in New Zealand from the UK, and was feeling a sense of anticlimax after having spent an interesting few weeks on the road kicking around south-west China. On arrival in New Zealand, where I’d intended to find work, I was soon feeling bored and restless. One cold and rainy evening I found myself browsing the travel section in the old Takapuna public library, which at that time was located next to the beach in this middle class north shore suburb of Auckland. In the musty upstairs reference section of the library there was a sweeping view from the window of the Hauraki Gulf, with boats bobbing about on the windswept grey sea. It all felt very far away from the hills and backroads of Yunnan. The brief backpacking trip I’d just made to Kunming and Dali had piqued my interest in south-west China. So when I came across some faded old copies of the National Geographic magazine on the shelves in a back room of Takapuna library, I was curious to see what the armchair travellers of the 1920s would have read about China. Opening the pages of these old magazines took me back to another world, the interwar years of America, where the advertisements were for Chrysler Imperial Eight automobiles, Palmolive Shaving Talc (“7 free shaves”), Furness Prince Lines (“12 days to Rio”) and ‘Hires Root Beer for Growing Children’. The old magazines also showed me how differently we viewed the world back then. Articles telling me about “Syrians - the shrewdest traders in the Orient”... and “Seattle – A Remarkable City”. But it was the China articles that I was really interested in. Or more precisely, it was the articles about remote areas of south-west China and Tibet that intrigued me, with titles such as “Seeking the Mountains of Mystery - an expedition to the unexplored Amnyi Machen” in which the author, ‘Dr Joseph F. Rock’ declared himself to be ‘the first white man’ to approach this area, where no Chinese dares venture ...’. The photographs accompanying the articles were of spectacular mountain country, of Tibetan warriors wearing leopard skin capes and posing with matchlock rifles, and of primitive ‘Lolo’ tribesmen preparing to cross raging rivers using inflated pigs’ bladders for buoyancy. In one article, “Konka Risumgongba - Holy Mountains of the Outlaws”, the author declared that there were still areas of China that were most difficult of access and “whose inhabitants had defied western exploration”. I wanted to know more. I wanted to see which areas of China the author was writing about, and so I took Joseph Rock’s hand-drawn maps and tried to compare them side-by-side with a map from a recent Lonely Planet China guide. On the modern map, the areas that Joseph Rock had travelled in were just blank spaces - there was simply nothing there. As my finger traced along the page to the area north east of Lijiang, there was just an empty white area between two rivers. The same blank spaces were evident on the maps I looked up in other Chinese guidebooks and atlases. Weird. This traveller and explorer from the 1920s, Joseph Rock, seemed to have visited and described wild places that were no longer on the map. I was hooked. I wanted to find out more about these wild areas of China that had now apparently receded back into obscurity. 3 Were those Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and those wild tribes shown in the photographs still there? Or had they been eliminated in the Cultural Revolution? And if they were still around, how much had they changed? Had anyone been back there? I wanted to know. I wanted to go and see for myself. But first, I should explain how I came to be in New Zealand in 1990 and why I came to share an interest in south-west China with a dead explorer. In my late 20s, I was living a peripatetic existence in London as a journalist, drifting from one casual reporting job to another, not really sure what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be in life. All I knew was that I craved travel, adventure and exploration like my literary heroes such as Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Eric Shipton and Graham Greene. I wanted to be a modern-day Eric Newby, the eccentric amateur who walked nonchalantly into the Hindu Kush to climb a few peaks after a bit of practice in Wales. The only problem with this dream was that I had no money, and Britain no longer had an Empire. Had I set foot in the Hindu Kush in the early 1990s, I would likely have found myself on the unfriendly end of an AK47 wielded by the Mujahedeen. China, on the other hand, seemed to be a more promising place to go for a bit of adventure. It was still theoretically Communist, it was cheap and there were large areas of the country that until recently had been off limits to westerners, but which were now just opening up. In the summer of 1990 I was working in south London as a reporter on a weekly newspaper for doctors. Gazing out of the office window from our Woolwich high rise, I would daydream that the sludge-like Thames was the Mekong river, and that I was embarking on a journey up into its higher reaches, in Tibet. And why not? I had little incentive to stay in the capital. I led a tenuous existence as a ‘casual’, employed on a week-by-week basis, dependent on the whim of the editor for employment. Every Friday, the rather formal and stuffy editor of the paper would summon me into his airless office, and as I stood there in silence he would tot up the number of hours I’d worked for the week and write me out a payslip, always seeming to find some reason to deduct a few quid. “Thank you. We won’t need any help next week, but stay in touch ...” he would invariably say. And so I would return to my gloomy bedsit in Eltham to listen to my Prefab Sprout records, and watch Ben Elton on Friday Night Live, trying not to worry about whether the measly pay cheque would last me through the rest of the next week. I had few friends in the capital and I missed the friendliness and directness of Yorkshire, where I grew up. I felt oppressed by London’s vast urban sprawl and I missed the north’s wild open spaces. In the flat, grey concrete maze of Woolwich council estates I yearned for the fresh air and the landscapes of the moors and the dales. I read Wainwright’s fellwalking guides and almost cried with homesickness at his description of walking the fells and dales. “The hills are my friends ...,” he wrote. I felt that way too. And so, stuck in London, I sought solace in travel books. I would daydream about going away on some offbeat foreign adventure, walking into the deserts of central Asia or travelling through the rainforests of Sumatra. I don’t know where the notion of going to China first came to me, but it appealed for some reasons. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in the previous year, 1989, China was one of the last surviving Communist states in the world. I had developed a somewhat morbid fascination 4 with Iron Curtain countries after visiting East Berlin and Prague in the late 1980s - a time when there was still no inkling that these odd, austere and rigidly controlled societies would soon be swept away almost overnight. I’d experienced a strange frisson of fascination and revulsion while travelling in these totalitarian socialist states, feeling like a voyeur from the ‘Free West’. I was curious to see what ‘communist’ China would be like, given the recent bloody crackdown of June 1989. However, I was probably more interested in seeing the ‘real’ rural China of peasants and paddy fields, rather than visiting museums, monuments or trudging round China’s drab grey industrial cities. In the Woolwich Public Library one evening, I found a dog -eared guidebook called SouthWest China Off the Beaten Track. It described a China that sounded quite both exotic and grim. The entries for remote towns in Yunnan and Sichuan were illustrated with pencildrawn maps that typically showed a single hotel open to foreigners, one or two shops, a noodle restaurant, and - if you were lucky - a bank where you might be able to exchange the Foreign Exchange Certificate (FEC) ‘funny money’ that foreigners then had to use instead of the ‘People’s Money’, renminbi. Despite a decade of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, this sounded like a poor country that was only just emerging from 40 years of being a closed society. The oppressive framework of the communist state was loosening and it looked like for the first time in forty years there were now opportunities for foreigners to get back into some of the previously out of-bounds areas and to literally go off the beaten track. Some of the descriptions in the guidebook gave tantalising glimpses of how remote parts of the country had appeared to the first westerners to see them a hundred years ago. One passage in particular, described an impressive and previously unrecorded 18,000 foot peak on the upper reaches of the Yangtze river near a place called Leibo. “As far as we know, nobody has ever DONE this region since ...” the authors wrote of their own failed attempt to reach it in the early 1980s, when they were turned back by police from a ‘closed’ area of western Sichuan. I was committed. I wanted to go to south-west China. I quit latest casual jobs and to raise the money, I spent a week as a medical guinea pig in a pharmaceutical drug testing clinic back in Leeds. I earned almost a thousand pounds at the Hazleton Clinical Trials Unit for letting them inject me with an experimental drug for hypertension. It was quite a cushy number, just sitting around on a bed all day, with a nurse taking my blood pressure every so often. The free food and accommodation also helped me save. Most of the other volunteers were long term unemployed lads, some of whom took part in this lucrative sideline on a regular basis. All without the knowledge of the DHSS, of course. They had very limited horizons. When I told them I was going to China, I might as well have said I was going to the moon. 5 CHAPTER 2: THE YOUNG JOSEPH ROCK AND CHINA Joseph Rock first went to China in 1913, on a brief visit when he was almost thirty years old. He was taking a world tour after taking extended leave from his position as a botanical researcher at the newly-established University of Hawaii. At a relatively young age, he had already achieved a great deal – in fact his accomplishments at 30 would have been regarded by many other men as sufficient reward for a lifetime’s work. From humble beginnings as the son of a Viennese servant he had emigrated to the US and had become a respected university academic and author of several landmark scientific publications that had garnered international acclaim. One of these, The Indigenous Trees of Hawaii is still a classic reference text on the subject. How had he done it? Josef Franz Karl Rock was born in 1884 in Vienna - at the time one of Europe’s great cities, the sophisticated capital of the powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother died when he was only six, and he was raised by his father and sister. It was not a happy childhood - his father worked as a servant for a Polish aristocrat, and he was a devout Roman Catholic who hoped his son Josef would enter the priesthood. But young Josef had other ideas. From an early age he developed an interest in foreign lands and their languages. When he was 10 he visited Egypt with his father and picked up some Arabic – a language he continued to learn until the age of 16, when he was able to become a part-time teacher of Arabic. He had a keen intellect and yet was also stubborn and egotistical. His inquiring mind was stultified by the rigid system of schooling in Austria and so he took to teaching himself languages and studying books alone to satisfy his need for learning. The adolescent Josef often skipped classes to wander the streets and parks of the wonderful city of ‘Wien’ and he dreamed of great adventures. Rock mixed with the Arab and Turkish traders at Vienna’s Prater Park and taught himself to read and write Chinese characters, imagining that he would one day travel to the distant and exotic capital of China at Peking. Living as he did in the household of a Count, Rock developed an appreciation of grand clothes, high culture, music and civilised manners, even though he didn’t have the means to enjoy such fine things or mix in such company. Josef Rock was a pauper and could barely afford a decent suit, let alone to go to university. Rebelling against his father’s insistence that he enter a seminary, Rock instead took to drifting around Europe, picking up odd jobs where he could and living off remittances from his older sister in Vienna. Like many impoverished people of that era, Rock developed tuberculosis, a disease that was to shape his destiny. A spell in the warm Mediterranean climate of Malta seemed to help his lungs for a while, but the jobless and penniless Rock was eventually forced to work his passage back to wintery Hamburg, where his consumptive, blood-stained tubercular cough returned. When his father died, the young Rock’s inheritance was a few meagre artefacts such as a gold watch, which he was able to sell and scrape together the cost of a passage by ship to New York. Like many Europeans at the turn of the century, Rock decided to try his chances in the New World. 6 Arriving broke and alone in the United States, Rock continued to drift, working as a dishwasher, interspersed with periods of studying English at college and staying in hospital to get treatment for his tuberculosis. Living on his wits but making no friends, Rock moved from New York to Waco, Texas, then passed a few months in Mexico before eventually ending up in San Francisco, still recovering form the devastating earthquake of 1906. Rock was still plagued by tuberculosis, and decided that the warmer climate of Hawaii offered his only chance of better health, and so he took a ship to Honolulu. It had only been 25 years since American Marines had landed in the subtropical kingdom of Hawaii and usurped power from Queen Liliuokalani in favour of US sugar plantation owners. The islands were still an undeveloped and relatively unexplored backwater, with a scattered population of fewer than 150,000 people. As a seemingly educated and urbane European, Rock was able to talk himself into a job at a local school, teaching Latin and natural history. And despite having no formal training in science, he excelled, in part due to his enthusiasm for teaching himself about the natural world through field trips. Rock enjoyed being out of doors, and found it was good for his lungs. After a year, with his tuberculosis still flaring up during his indoor confinement in the clssroom, Rock left the school to take up an outdoor job with the government forestry department, hoping this would help his lungs. The legend here is that Rock barged his way into the Hawaiian department of forestry and told them that they must have a herbarium and that he was the man to create it for them. Whatever the truth, Rock was engaged by the department as a botanical collector, tasked with collecting seeds and specimens of rare Hawaiian trees and shrubs. The now anglicised Joseph Rock applied himself with diligence and enterprise to his new role as plant colelctor. He was fortunate in arriving at a time when little was known about the flora of the Hawaiian Islands, and also because the other two foresters working for the department seemed to have neither the inclination nor the ability to get out into the field to collect, classify and study the native plants, trees, flowers and seeds. Joseph Rock had found his vocation. Over the next three years Rock embarked on a series of wide-ranging and comprehensive plant-hunting trips around the islands of Hawaii, and he pursued botanical investigations on behalf of the forestry department with zeal and scholarly thoroughness. Rock was a firm believer in being out in the field rather than cooped up in an office as an “armchair botanist”. In remote corners of the islands Rock would seek help from ranchers and plantation owners, charming their wives and children with his European manners and regaling them with exciting stories of his travels and adventures. He also studied the botanical textbooks and taught himself from the scientific literature. Within a couple of years he had published his first botanical paper and mounted an award-winning exhibit of Hawaiian flora. After another year, the up and coming Rock believed he had accrued enough experience in botany to try a move into academia. In later years he styled himself as “Dr” Rock, and some have portrayed him as a charlatan for doing this, claiming he faked his qualifications and conned his way into positions that he was not qualified for. Perhaps there is an element of 7 truth in this, for the servant’s boy from status-conscious Vienna must surely have craved the prestige of being a “Herr Doktor”. Nevertheless, Rock’s scholarly achievements in botany alone, not to mention his later anthropological work, would surely merit a PhD, even if he was never formally awarded one. He joined the faculty of the College of Hawaii – forerunner to the university – in 1911 and was to spend a very productive decade of research and scholarship there, rising to become Professor of Systematic Botany. He continued to spend much of his time in the field, collecting specimens and getting to know every inch of the islands and their plants. In the years before the Great War, Joseph Rock published prodigiously in scientific journals using English – his second language – and he wrote three major books on his subject. Rock also had a few students, but proved to be a hard taskmaster with a reputation for moodiness and an explosive temper. As the saying goes, he didn’t suffer fools gladly. After a few years at the College of Hawaii Joseph Rock felt sufficiently secure enough to take time off to make a trip around the world. Travelling via Guam and the Philippines, he arrived in Hong Kong in October 1913 for a brief stopover en route to Europe. In Kowloon, the young academic émigré thrilled at being taken for a ride on a rickshaw pulled by a fellow human being, and like modern day visitors spent time shopping in the densely packed streets of the young British colony. Rock then visited Guangzhou to see the ‘real China’. He disembarked at the Anglo-French traders’ enclave of Shamian Island on the Pearl River in the centre of the city, and was taken over the small bridge, past the Chinese sentries to enter the new Republic of China. It had been only a year or so since the Manchu Qing dynasty had been overthrown by military forces and the Emperor Pu Yi forced to abdicate following nationalist uprisings that had originated in Guangzhou. As Rock toured the streets of old Canton, he was delighted to find that it matched all his childhood expectations. The warren of streets, the smells, the noise, the markets and craft shops … the bustling crowds ordered by his rickshaw collies to “make way for the foreign devil”… and Rock noted that his European presence was resented by many, who cursed at him and kicked at his rickshaw chair: “It was the most interesting place I have seen or hope to see,” he wrote in his diary. Did he envisage then that he would be back in China within a few years, and would spend much of his plant-hunting career in th country? By 1920, it seems Joseph Rock was unhappy at the College of Hawaii. Perhaps he was getting itchy feet. There was a dispute about the housing of his vast herbarium, a spat over which he felt upset enough to resign over. Rock travelled to mainland United States, hoping to find another position as a botanist. However, despite his excellent academic work in Hawaii, Rock’s lack of formal qualifications - a PhD in particular - may explain why he was rebuffed by institutions such as Harvard, and why he also found no openings in New York. But Rock was fortunate in his timing. In the early 1920s, the US Department of Agriculture was looking for an enterprising plant collector to acquire samples of the chaulmoogra tree from Asia, because the bark of the tree was considered a possible cure for leprosy. This was a position for which Rock was ideally suited, and he was quickly hired by the department and sent on his way to Siam (Thailand). There, he mounted an expedition that travelled up through the far north of the country, into Burma and ultimately back into Bengal, India. 8 It was on this preliminary Asian trip that Rock penned the first of what would be many articles for National Geographic magazine. Rock also proved to be an industrious and prolific plant collector, and the USDA were very satisfied with his results. They were particularly impressed with Rock’s thoroughness in annotating, packing and cataloguing all his specimens. On his return, the department suggested Rock mount a further plant collecting trip into western China, to seek out samples of blight-resistant chestnut trees to replace the chestnut trees that were dying out in America’s forests. Rock headed back to China, to Kunming in Yunnan. Over the next year, his plant collecting activities in remote areas of Yunnan drew the attention of Gilbert Grosvenor the president of the National Geographic Society. Grosvenor was impressed enough to propose that the Society take over Rock’s sponsorship from the USDA, and to provide Rock with funds to allow him to travel further afield and for longer periods. With this new source of generous funding, Joseph Rock would spend the next 18 months on an epic and productive plant collecting expedition across many remote areas of Yunnan, ranging from the tropical borders of Burma and Siam to the barren mountains and highland plateaus of eastern Tibet. He accumulated thousands of samples of seeds for obscure and previously uncollected plants and trees, as well as around 60,000 herbarium samples. All were labelled and packed off to Washington. Gilbert Grosvenor later described Rock’s collection of 493 different rhododendrons gathered by the National Geographic Expedition as “one of the most remarkable ever brought together.” Joseph Rock was making a name for himself. The society donated many of Rock’s samples to his former sponsor, the USDA. The secretary for the department, Henry Wallace, wrote to Grosvenor to express his admiration of “Professor Rock’s” efforts. “Members of this department have followed with interest [Rock’s] wanderings of the last 18 months, and have particularly marvelled at his success in packing and forwarding his collection of seeds to Washington,” said Wallace. The seeds and plant specimens collected by Rock were distributed to botanical gardens in the US and in Great Britain, as well as to private nurseries and museums in the west. Rock had also collected 1600 samples of birds and 60 of animals from Yunnan, all of which were meticulously prepared and documented. His collection was described as one of the most unusual and “the most important single contribution” to the Smithsonian National Museum natural history section at that time. This was the trip on which Joseph Rock made his ‘dash to Muli’ that became the subject of an article in National Geographic magazine. Muli was where the Rock legend and myth building really began. 9 CHAPTER 3: FIRST VISITS TO KUNMING AND DALI, 1922 AND 1990. When Joseph Rock arrived in Yunnan on a plant-hunting trip from Siam (Thailand) in 1922, the province was in a sorry state of anarchy. Like other southern provinces of China, it had slipped out of the control of Peking and was ruled by a succession of corrupt local Chinese warlords. These figures, who styled themselves as scholars and nobles, were little more than leaders of an armies of gangsters, with opium as their main source of revenue. Their rule was centred on self-enrichment from the province, rather than government of it. Tang Chiyao, for example, was nominally governor of Yunnan in 1922. He had disposed of his predecessor – a relatively decent man - by execution and he allowed his soldiers to roam the province like official highwaymen, ransacking the mule caravans and extorting taxes from wherever they could. He presided over a province whose main agricultural crop was the opium poppy, the revenue from which Tang derived most of his wealth and power. Tang’s reign would last until 1927, when he was overthrown and killed by a more politically astute rival, Long Yun. As the new nominal head of Yunnan province, Long Yun paid lip service to the rule of the Kuomintang (KMT) and its leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek in the distant capital of Nanjing. Long Yun even made some moves to contain the worst of the rampant banditry and anarchy. In this way, Long Yun managed to retain a grip on power in Yunnan into the Second World War. At a more local level, Joseph Rock in his day-to-day life would have encountered the minor officials and magistrates of rural Yunnan, who owed their positions to the tributes they paid in opium and silver to the provincial governor and his cronies. Lower down the scale were the merchants and tradesmen, with peasant farmers and coolies at the very bottom of the social ladder. As a westerner, Rock would have enjoyed the privilege of “extra-territoriality” – the imperial imposition that made foreigners effectively exempt the laws of China. In the 1920s, there were few westerners in Yunnan, and those that did find themselves in trouble would expect their consulates in Kunming to have leverage over the Chinese authorities. Most of the westerners in that part of China were missionaries who had set up churches, schools and clinics in far flung communities of the province. At that time, Han Chinese rule and influence did not extend as widely as it does see today. Yunnan province was home to many non-Chinese ethnic groups such as the Lolo (Yi), the Naxi of Lijiang and the Bai or Minchia of Dali, all of whom existed in varying degrees of independence and ethnic separation from the Han Chinese. Yunnan also had a significant Muslim population, which had risen up against the Qing Manchu rulers in the late 19th century and conquered towns such as Dali. When French explorers from Indo-China were trying to find the source of the Mekong in the 1860s, they passed through ‘Tali’. There, they found the town was the centre of an independent Islamic mini-state, presided over by a Sultan. This Muslim uprising was later put down with great ruthlessness by Qing troops, who razed whole districts to the ground without mercy. Almost the entire Muslim population of Dali was slaughtered in 1873 after the town was besieged by Qing troops at the behest of the governor Cen Yuying. He promised to treat the inhabitants leniently if they surrendered to his troops, but when the Muslim leader gave himself up, the warlord went back on his word, and killed them all. No Muslim was spared, 10 and the nearby Erhai Lake was reputed to have been full of corpses of women and children who tried to flee. The capital of Yunnan, Kunming, was then known as Yunnan-fu. It was a backward provincial town, with few amenities, and yet it had a significant foreign presence in the form of French, British and American consulates, due to its proximity to Indo-China and British Burma. Eighty years ago, Kunming had better transport connections to Hanoi and Mandalay than it did to Peking or to cities of southern China. Rock used Kunming as his base, and would often journey to the city from his remote locations in the Yunnan hinterland. It was also one of the last places that he stayed ever in China, before he was deported in 1949. My first visit to Yunnan, 1990 I arrived in the modern city of Kunming in early November 1990, after a 30-hour ‘hard sleeper’ train ride from Guilin. It really had been a ‘hard’ journey, and I’d become so sick of the staring, the spitting and the chain smoking of my fellow passengers that I’d spent much of the train trip sequestered up in the heavens, on the highest of the three bunks, trying to keep out of their way. Arriving at the ungodly hour of 5am, we were unceremoniously turfed off the train into the bitterly cold pre-dawn darkness. Unsure of where to go, I sheltered for an hour in a bleak café that was open on the station forecourt, until daybreak. I then made an abortive attempt to take a minibus into the city centre, but due to my non-existent Chinese skills ended up boarding a tourist coach to the Stone Forest by mistake. When it became apparent that the bus was not going to the city centre but heading out of town, I tried to get off. But all my gesturing and attempts at speaking Chinese to get the driver to stop were ignored. It was only when I started shouting and pulling the doors of the moving bus open that the driver pulled over. The other passengers were snickering and muttering, no doubt about the ‘crazy foreigner’ as I dragged my bag off the bus somewhere in the suburbs of Kunming, and I loudly cursed the driver, China and my stupid decision to come here. I eventually managed to flag down a taxi, and the driver was able to comprehend me enough to take me to the Camellia Hotel, one of the few places in Kunming then officially open to foreign tourists. The Camellia was a shabby, Soviet-style institution, with dim cold corridors guarded by a female concierge ‘key keeper’ who sat at a desk by the stairs on each floor. On my floor, the young woman concierge sat rugged up behind a shonky podium, tapping out a tune on an electric organ with one finger. She rose reluctantly and sullenly to open the door to my dorm room. After I dumped my gear and went for a walk about the city I had to wonder why Kunming had received such a good write up in my guidebook. After the exotic peaks and sub-tropical foliage of Guilin, the allegedly beautiful ‘Spring City’ Kunming seemed to be a grey, soul-less town of the kind that I had always expected to find in Communist China. There was little colour: the people of Kunming wore Mao suits of dark blue or green, or shabby western-style black suits with white shirts. The architecture was 11 mostly grim concrete blockhouse style, although there was an ‘old town’ consisting of poorly maintained rickety three-storey terraces. The shops were pokey and drab, and even the Vietnamese coffee shop mentioned as a highlight in my guidebook seemed to be no different to all the other grubby hole-in the wall noodle shops. It sold bitter-tasting coffee poured from a dented metal jug and bread rolls that were hard enough to break your teeth on. I ended up having lunch at a ‘Soldier-WorkerPeasant’ canteen that sold cheap dumplings. In the afternoon I tracked down the long-distance bus station and pushed my way through the chaotic hordes gathered around the ticket window to ask about travel to Dali. The only option available was an overnight ‘sleeper bus’. So be it. Anything to get away from Kunming. In Rock’s time, Dali was ruled by a thuggish psychopath called Chang Chieh-pa or ‘Chang the Stammerer’. Chang was one of the local ‘Minchia’ (Dai) people, a former muleteer who had turned to banditry. He boasted of having murdered 300 people and of his practice of eating human hearts. Chang led a band of around 5000 thieves and thugs in the Dali area, keeping them in line by forbidding opium and imposing harsh punishments such as cutting off the lips of liars. Rather than confront this local strong man, the Yunnan provincial governor bought him off by appointing him as a ‘general’ and as a sub-governor of Dali district. And yet, despite his official appointment, Chang continued his habitual plundering of trade caravans and travellers passing though the Dali area, which was three days from Yunnan-fu. It’s hard to believe now, in the days of China’s motorways and luxury coaches that whisk you from Kunming to Dali in just a few hours, that as late as the 1990s getting to Dali involved two days of horrible road travel. In 1990, the ‘highway’ to Dali was a potholed country road and on this route I took the overnight ‘sleeper’ bus to what I was led to believe would be China’s answer to the Swiss Alps. Even with a ‘bed’ seat, earplugs and an eye mask I got no sleep whatsoever as the bus jolted over a road that seemed to be 95% roadworks, while the driver kept us awake with his constant blaring on the horn. Just when I thought that I might actually nod off, at 1.30am the bus lurched to a halt at a roadside noodle stall and we were turfed off the bus for a compulsory rest stop. So it was not surprising that my first impressions of Dali were tempered by my crankiness and lack of sleep. Dali is situated at a bracing altitude of 2500 metres, and at 7.30am of a November morning in November, the town was freezing and still in darkness. I was not a happy traveller. Things picked up a little when I had negotiated myself a room at the only hotel in town that was open to foreigners - the Dali Number Two Hotel. The best thing about this undistinguished concrete pile was its ridiculously cheap room rate of seven yuan (one pound) for a dorm bed. Once installed, I found a cosy café nearby that was obviously targeted at westerners: Jim’s Peace Café. Jim was a laid back Chinese guy who spoke a kind of California hippy English that he’d presumably picked up from the many travellers passing through Dali on the Asian overland backpacking trail. Maybe he’d been partaking of the marijuana that grows freely around Dali, but Jim certainly had acquired the vague and hurried mannerisms of a pothead. I wasn’t complaining. He ran a nice café - pretty much the only café in town that catered to 12 our squeamish western tastes. I didn’t want to slurp rice gruel or beef noodle soup for breakfast, and so it was nice that “Jim’s” offered toast, muesli, banana pancakes and even coffee made from locally-grown Yunnan beans. As I began to feel more like a human again I walked the streets of Dali, and began to appreciate the town’s rustic charms. It was still essentially a small walled town, and I could understand how its traditional buildings, the lake and the beautiful mountain surroundings could lure travellers for extended stays. By mid-morning, the sun had ascended over the ridge of the surrounding hills and its golden glow bathed the long ridgeline of the Cangshan mountains to the west. There appeared to be a dusting of snow along the higher peaks. The fabric of the ancient Bai town was still intact - the wooden framed stone buildings were evidence of Dali’s reputation as a centre for builders and masons. The narrow cobbled streets echoed to the sound of hawkers and traders, and the brown-skinned Bai themselves seemed a tough but friendly people. Most of the men wore the same utilitarian blue or green Mao suits that were still standard work wear in China, but many of the Bai women dressed in their traditional blue capes and had colourful turbans fashioned out of what looked like tea towels. Although he wrote extensively about the Naxi people and their culture, Rock said almost nothing about their close neighbours, the Bai. For that, we have to turn to Rock’s contemporary and fellow Lijiang resident Peter Goullart, French-Russian émigré who was working in Yunnan to set up small scale industrial co-operatives. In his book ‘The Forgotten Kingdom’, Goullart admits that he had little liking for Dali or its inhabitants. He felt the town still had a gloomy atmosphere of death about it, and he found the Bai (or Minkia as he called them) to be rather stingy and calculating compared to Goullart’s Naxi and Tibetan acquaintances in Lijiang. The Bai women, Goullart thought, were money grabbing, and would hire themselves out as porters to carry ridiculously heavy loads simply because they were paid by weight. The Bai people’s gifts always came with strings attached, said Goullart, and they never returned the compliment of an invitation to lunch or dinner. Nevertheless, he could not help but admire their ‘uncanny’ skill in carpentry and masonry. “Even the meanest house must have its door and windows beautifully carved and its patio adorned with exquisite stone figures and vases arranged with striking effect,” he wrote. The Bai people were the craftsman of Yunnan – they built the grand houses of rich merchants and were commissioned by every minor chief and potentate to do the masonry and woodwork of their palaces, houses and temples. At the western end of town, I walked up to view Dali’s famous landmark – a trio of 9th century pagodas - I passed modern Bai craftsmen cutting slabs of marble with primitive power driven saws driven by a belt from the two stroke engine of the ubiquitous tuolaji tractor. Bai women were hauling cabbages from the fields into wicker baskets on their backs, which they ferried to a waiting truck already piled high with the winter staple. My gaze kept being drawn back to the mountains, and as a compulsive hillwalker I found myself searching out a possible walking route to the highest summit, on top of which I could just make out a small building with an antenna. I decided to try tackle it the following day, and retired back to Jim’s café for a beefsteak and chips, a ‘cold remedy tea’ and an early night. 13 Climbing the Cangshan Mountains I was woken early the next morning by two contradictory sounds: one was the scratchy Chinese erhu music being played through public loudspeakers and accompanied by a solicitous female Chinese voice that sounded to my uncomprehending ears like she was encouraging the whole town to wake up and face the day with a good socialist spirit. The other sound was a Chinese male resident of the Number Two Hotel noisily hoiking up some phlegm and spitting it out in the very echo-ey concrete communal bathroom. This seemed to sum up the constant dichotomy of China: a land of ancient culture, ritual manners and dainty music, which simultaneously offered up revolting habits such as spitting, shoving and pissing in the street. Was it just a communist thing? After breakfast I bought a few snacks and hiked across the main road and out of the old town. I passed the three pagodas again and followed a cobbled road past some vegetable fields, twisting through another small village, until the road petered out into a dirt track that ran up into the pine woods. Then the serious uphill hike started. It was a relatively peaceful walk up through the trees, but I could still hear the sounds of truck horns, quarry blasting and some sort of factory machinery in the distance. After about half an hour of climbing, I arrived, knackered, at the Zhonghesi temple. It was a beautiful and serene spot with great views over the town and the Lake Erhai beyond. From this high up, the square shape of old Dali town and its grid like street pattern was now evident. At the temple, a friendly group of walnut-brown men were sitting about in the courtyard, attired in a mixture of army and civilian clothing. Using hand gestures, they invited me to sit with them, and bade me drink some of their bitter-tasting green tea from a cracked flowery enamel mug. I couldn’t work out how to drink it without also swallowing the big green tea leaves and stalks that floated on top of the liquid. Then I discovered the joys of slurping. Using my phrasebook, the group of men explained that they were local police - gonganju and that they were up here to look for two porters presumed lost in a snowstorm, who had failed to return from a portering trip up to the TV station two days ago. The cops then rose to leave, taking a basket full of pine cones and a primitive-looking single bore rifle with them. I set off to carry on up the track through more forest, but not before a woman attendant at the temple tried to warn me against going up there. The track was well worn and soon became quite steep, emerging into a clearing and then winding up around the edges of rocky outcrops, with the occasional grand lookout. I plodded on upwards, and the trail just seemed to go on forever. I started to feel the effects of altitude - it must have been between 8,000 and 10,000 feet up and I was taking longer to recover on my regular pauses to get my breath back. It became chillier and damp, and the going became harder as the grass covering parts of the track was slippy. I didn’t feel too isolated, though, because below me I could still see the town and also hear local people working nearby in the hills, whistling and calling to each other. 14 I continued plodding on upwards relentlessly, for an hour and another hour, occasionally getting a good vantage point, but never seeming to be getting any nearer to the elusive TV station at the summit. The tiny concrete box still looked as distant as ever. By midafternoon, I had climbed well above the tree-line and was starting to get worried about the time. The sun was moving behind the mountain ridge and soon I would be in shadow and deprived of its feeble warm rays. I set myself a ‘turnaround’ time of 3pm and plodded on. The scenery was superb. The grey rock outcrops had that strange jagged appearance that I had seen in Chinese ornamental gardens - but here writ in large scale. There were occasional fir or spruce trees breaking the skyline and what appeared to be rhododendron bushes. The sky was clear and the air was sharp - and I was losing my stamina. Just after 3pm I stopped when I encountered a handful of Bai people cutting wood and bamboo alongside the track. This made me lose heart. After all my hard work I still hadn’t even ascended to a height beyond where the local people spent their ordinary working day. I sat down to have a drink and eat some of the greasy pancake-ish thing that I’d bought for my lunch. Then, with a heavy heart, I turned around and started on the great knee-jarring return trip back down into Dali. It was dispiriting because the age it took me to get down to the Zhonghesi temple made me realise how much upward effort I had put in for nothing. When I finally arrived back at the temple it was deserted, except for an old lady and a cockerel that attacked me from behind. So it was nice to eventually get back into Jim’s Café, for a well-earned beer. When I told Jim where I’d been, he smiled his hippy smile and said that I should have told him what I was doing. Jim could have fixed it. He said he could arrange a van to take me half way up the mountain, because there was a service road for the TV station that went about as high as the point I had hiked up to that day. And so it was that, two days later, I succeeded on my second attempt to knock off the peaks of the Cangshan mountains, by cheating and getting a lift half way. I made sure I was better prepared this time, spending most of the intervening day lazing around outside Jim’s Peace Café, soaking up the sun and partaking of beer, chips and whatever other western indulgences I fancied. Hanging out at Jim’s, I managed to recruit some Brits, a Mexican guy, a Swede and two Germans, who also expressed an interest in a trip up to the top of the mountains. Leaving Jim to make the arrangements, we hired bikes and freewheeled down the lanes out of Dali to see Erhai Lake. It was a lovely cool and clear day. Away from the town, the scenery around the lake was almost biblical - a couple of traditional sailing boats drifting around on the mirror-like surface of the lake, with the mountain backdrop. In the surrounding fields the Bai peasants laboured away at ploughing and planting crops by hand, while we decadent westerners sat around drinking Coke. Early the next morning we all assembled in the cold street outside Jim’s café and he marshalled us past a young PLA soldier who was standing guard at the city gate, gripping an AK47 like he meant business. A tiny beat-up minivan took us up a rough switchback dirt track, never getting out of second gear for the whole hour it took us to get to the end of the road. I was terrified by the sheer drops and wild exposure on each of the hairpin bends, but managed to control my panic until we reached the drop-off point, more than half way up the 15 mountainside. We seemed to be at about the same level as I’d reached after my tough all day uphill slog two days before. We had nice clear weather to begin with, but clouds soon built up around the peaks and threatened to envelope us. Soon we were climbing up through a swirling cold mist, along a well-cut track through the long brown grass. Suddenly, we emerged from the mist and found ourselves actually looking down on a carpet of white cloud. The summit still looked a long way off and the altitude started to kick in again, rendering me breathless after only a short period of exertion. My lungs felt as if they were going to burst and I thought my heart would rupture, and it took us more than two more hours of upward slog to get within striking distance of the summit. We reached a grassy plateau, where the birds sang and the sun shone, and it felt like I was ascending into heaven. The last thousand feet or so of ascent was relatively easy and before we knew it we had reached the “TV station” - a concrete blockhouse festooned with aerials and a large TV satellite dish. The wind was blowing hard on the summit, so we plonked ourselves down on the leeward side of the building for shelter, to have lunch and a drink. A door opened and a Chinese workman in a blue Mao suit emerged, to gaze at us for a minute with a blank expression. It was as if it was nothing out of the ordinary for their remote station to have visitors, let alone foreign ones. Without saying a word the man emptied a bin of rubbish down the side of the mountain and went back inside, slamming the door behind him. A few minutes later, another Chinese technician emerged bearing a thermos flask of hot water, which he proffered to us to fill up our mugs and bottles. I used one of the few teabags I’d brought along with me to make one of the most enjoyable cups of tea I’ve ever had – a brew wth a view. The vistas on all sides were absolutely breathtaking, looking down on the pine forests that covered the ridgelines until they disappeared into the clouds. Dark razorback ridges of rock snaked menacingly towards the other peaks in the Cangshan range, and in the distance to the north, the snow peaks of the Jade Dragon mountain range near Lijiang could be seen. And yet ironically, immediately below us, Dali was now obscured by cloud. We posed for a few pictures, and then set off down. The Germans headed back the same way we had come up, but the rest of us were still feeling adventurous and decided to explore a little further along the ridge to the south, where there appeared to be a slightly higher peak about half a mile away. The ridge track petered out and we soon found ourselves scrambling up a steep hillside covered in knee high scrub until we came out on to a narrow platform of rock that formed the summit. We were rewarded with more spellbinding views down into a series of sheer gullies and gorges that dropped off to the west. I felt giddy and lacked the courage to even stand up on such an exposed spot. Instead, I sat and rebuilt a small stone cairn that previous visitors had piled up. We reluctantly left the summit and headed down towards a small tarn on a plateau, where we rejoined a wellformed track. From here it was another knee-jarring descent, back down into the cold clouds and towards the tree line, where we crossed paths with a party of local workmen who were busy hacking away at vegetation to widen the overgrown track. There had been no sign of the two missing porters, they told us. From here it was another long and leg-torturing descent, over now familiar territory back down to the Zhonghesi temple. 16 Here, we paused for a very refreshing cup of strong and bitter green tea before continuing on down, almost limping into Dali and a peak-conquering victory drinking session at Jim’s Peace Café. After the initial ‘mission accomplished’ euphoria, the rest of the evening in Jim’s cafe was something of a dull anticlimax. And in the same way, after Dali the rest of my China trip was also something of an anticlimax. This was partly because I was now back-tracking through the same places: Kunming, Guilin and Wuzhou, back towards Hong Kong, with the consequent feeling that my trip had past its ‘high tide’ mark and there were no more new places to discover. On later trips I was to find this was a common feeling - once my goals had been achieved I soon lost interest and enthusiasm for China, and wanted to move on. And once I had set my mind on being in the next place, my patience with the minor irritations of Chinese life wore thin. Things that had seemed novel and absurd in the first few days of travelling in China now became a reminder of the alien environment I was in. I soon tired of the what I came to call the “Six ‘S’s” of China: Spitting, Staring, Shoving, Shouting, Slurping and the incessant Smoking. En route form Dali, when my bus stopped on a stretch of rural road for a toilet break, the male Chinese male passengers would adopt a peasant squat by the roadside and eye me impassively as they puffed on their cigarettes. They dressed in cheap black and grey suits that still had a big label sewn onto the sleeve, as if fresh from a bespoke tailor. They would hoick up a throatful of phlegm and spit it out without taking their eyes off me - was this a calculated insult? I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other as they stared and snickered at me, except for the constantly recurring word ‘laowai’ – foreigner. Sometimes I felt like I was a character in Planet of the Apes - a weak human who had fallen into a strange postapocalyptic world populated by beings who were both smarter than me and yet more callous and primitive. And yet, at other times the Chinese people I met were touchingly open and generous. Sat in the back of a long distance bus in Guangxi, I found myself wedged between a bunch of teenage kids who were already hardened manual workers judging by the dirt on their ragged suits. Despite their rough appearance they prodded me into sharing their snacks of peanuts and mandarin oranges. They spoke no English and I spoke little Chinese, but I understood their gestures when they flicked through my paperback book and gawped at the English words and gave me the thumbs up sign. “Zhen hao!” (‘Very good!’). I departed China via Hong Kong in late November 1990. This was the pre-internet era and I had been cut off from the world news throughout my three-week sojourn in rural China. It was only when I picked up a copy of the South China Morning Post at the ferry terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui that I learned that the reign of Margaret Thatcher was over. At first I was mystified to see so many references to John Major in every story, until it suddenly dawned on me that he had replaced Thatcher as Prime Minister. I had missed the end of the Iron Lady while I was in the China news black hole. 17 Yunnan Postscript From Hong Kong I flew to Perth in Western Australia and did the whole backpacker tour of the big red continent. I travelled the long dusty highway up the west coast, through rough mining towns up to the Kimberley and on to Darwin. It was days of nothing – a martian landscape. I hooked up with some other backpackers with a Kombi van and continued down through the ‘red centre’ to see Alice Springs and Ayers Rock. I saw some amazing sights, but felt strangely unsettled and somehow unsatisfied with Australia. I didn’t realise it then, but I had caught the ‘China bug’. Already I was yearning to see more of China, this country that was just so ‘other’ compared to the west. I also missed the feeling of adventure that came with being on the road in China. In Australia I was no longer the centre of attention, no longer the big tall guy in a crowd. In fact, compared to the big bronzed Aussie blokes I was just a pale and scrawny pommy bloke. Soon afterwards I moved on to New Zealand, where I found a job as a journalist and settled down in Auckland for a while, indulging my love of the outdoors with a lot of tramping and mountaineering in the rugged New Zealand bush. I was to spend the next four years in New Zealand, and during this time I married a Chinese girl from Guilin (but that’s another story) and began to study Chinese. And it was in Auckland, of course, that I also first stumbled across the articles by Joseph Rock about south-western China. I nurtured a growing curiosity about the places he described. It was not until 1994, however, that I returned to China to try see them for myself. 18 CHAPTER 4: MULI, LAND OF THE YELLOW LAMA In the April 1925 issue of National Geographic that I picked up in the library in Auckland, Joseph Rock wrote about the first trip he’d made to ‘the kingdom of Muli’ in the previous year. The account reads like a cross between the Wizard of Oz and Gulliver’s Travels. Travelling on horseback from Lijiang, the explorer finds a ‘lost’ kingdom in the remote mountains of Tibet. He visits the royal palace of Muli - a Buddhist lamasery - and discovers that this small kingdom is presided over by a corpulent, good-natured but despotic lama-king whom he befriends. This all-powerful Muli king knows nothing of the outside world, and believes it is possible to fly to the moon. The king’s subjects are not allowed to leave Muli on pain of death, and even were they able to travel further afield, they would most likely be killed by the marauding bandits who infest the surrounding mountain badlands. During his brief stay at Muli, Rock witnesses mysterious ceremonies and gets a glimpse of the darker side of the Muli ruler’s ways when he sees prisoners in the dungeons. “One of the least-known spots in the world is this independent lama kingdom of Muli ... “ Rock’s article begins, “Almost nothing has been written about this kingdom and its people who are known to the Chinese as Hsifan, or western barbarians.” This is typical Joseph Rock hype. Certainly, Muli was a little-known place, but it had already been visited and described by quite a few western explorers and botanists in the two decades prior to Rock ‘discovering’ the place. Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti, for example (who like Rock, was a Viennese botanist), wrote extensively about his visit to Muli in 1915. Other botanists such as George Forrest and Frank Kingdon Ward had also passed through Muli. As usual, Rock claims he was ‘the first white man’ in these parts. You have to give him credit, though, for arranging his visit with the top man of Muli. Rock first sent some of his Naxi plant collectors to Muli in 1921, shortly after he made Lijiang the base for his plant collecting activities in Yunnan. Using his Naxi helpers as postmen, Rock dispatched a letter to the Muli ‘king’, asking permission to visit the semi-independent ‘kingdom’. The king was in fact a hereditary Tibetan lama ruler of a small, obscure mountainous district, where the mountains of Tibet meet the valleys of Sichuan. It had a population of 22,000 people, a mix of Tibetans, Pumi, Naxi and a few Han Chinese, Muli was nominally part of the small Chinese province of Sikang. In the 1920s, however, it existed in something of a power vacuum following the overthrow of powerful Tibetan princes of Litang by Chinese warlords. Muli was a backwater and had little economic or strategic value to the Tibetans or to the Sichuan warlords. For this reason, the Muli ‘king’ was left alone to preside over his mountainous lair – for the time being. Another reason for Muli’s isolation was that much of the inhospitable high country surrounding it was roamed by hordes of murderous Tibetan robbers. These gangs of unscrupulous thieves rode out from their bases in remote mountain districts such as Xiangcheng, to raid and plunder isolated settlements and rob any travellers unfortunate enough to bump into them. When he first inquired about visiting Muli, Rock was rebuffed with a polite refusal from the king, who told Rock in his reply letter that a visit would be inadvisable because of the danger 19 posed by the bandits in the district. By 1924, however, with his plant collecting trip for the National Geographic Society about to wind up, Rock deemed it would be worth the risk. He decided to “make a dash for Muli” shortly before he was due to return to the US. In the 1990s, I also had to bide my time before visiting Muli. Although I’d first heard about Muli in 1991, it wasn’t until 1994 that I got the opportunity to try visit this mysterious place. I was working as a journalist in Auckland and had married a Chinese girl, which was another reason for me to try and improve on my basic grasp of putonghua. I made copies of Joseph Rock’s articles on Muli, and trawled the local libraries in search of modern maps of the area. This was the pre-internet era, with no Google for searching out information on western China. Everything had to be done by legwork, combing library catalogues and prying information from heavy reference books and obscure academic “China studies” journals. Even then, the pickings were meagre and inconsistent However, the fact that there was so little information available about Muli only served to spur my curiosity. At the Auckland University library I found some reasonably detailed maps of Yunnan and Sichuan, which covered the area Rock had travelled through to Muli. His ‘Likiang’ had now become Lijiang, and when he crossed the loop of the Yangtze, the town of Youngning he visited was still marked on the map, although now it was spelled Yongning. Nearby the map showed a lake called Lugu Hu where Rock had rested for several weeks while on one of his other trips to and from Muli. Beyond that, the modern maps still showed only a blank space to the north east, where Muli was supposed to be. I decided to go to Lugu Hu and Yongning and from there start walking to the north east, to try find a village called ‘Likiatsun’ that Rock had described as the first stop, a day’s travel towards Muli. Seeking Muli, 1994 In March 1994 I kissed my new wife goodbye at Auckland airport and set off to look for Muli. I flew into Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport and from the Crown Colony took a rather roundabout route through south-west China to Lijiang, travelling via Wuzhou, Guilin, Kunming, Xisuanbanna and then a long bus ride up to Dali. Dali had discovered tourists – or was it the other way round? The stone streets of the old town were now full of westerners dawdling round the many cafes that sprung up and a host of souvenir shops that were selling batik and ‘ethnic’ jewellery. The local Bai people seemed inured to the novelties of foreigners, and there was a cynical, tired atmosphere to the place. There were now several additional new guesthouses open to foreigners, and at mine I recognised some of the same westerners whom I’d seen at other places along the YangshuoGuilin- Kunming tourist trail. They were all going the same way after Dali, up to Lijiang. I hung around for a day, scoffing Dali pizza, drinking Yunnan coffee and listening to the rumours: The Chinese were building a cable car up the mountain behind Dali: the Thais were going to develop Lijiang’s Jade Dragon Snow Mountain into a ski resort, complete with an ski lift; there had been huge riots in Tibet, hundreds killed; Deng Xiaoping was dead but the Chinese authorities were keeping it hushed up. In pre-internet China, there was no real news at all. 20 At the Dali Guesthouse the next morning, I was woken up at 6.30am by the Chinese guests who were already up and about, slamming doors, clanking their washbowls and shouting to each other. I wanted to go out and say ‘Shh!’ but that was the noise Chinese parents made to their infants when they wanted them to pee. As I ate my banana and yoghurt muesli for breakfast at Marlee’s Café, I mulled over some of the looming questions about my proposed walk from Lijiang to Muli: How much food should I take? Where would I stay at night? Should I take a sleeping bag? The nearer I got to the jumping off point, the more difficult things looked. The Muli trek was no longer a wistful dream but a nagging set of mundane realities that had to be addressed. The bus to Lijiang was overloaded with young westerners and their bulging backpacks. A group of Swedes were trying to eject some truculent locals who’d occupied their designated bus seats, while a German guy directed the stacking of all the backpacks into an unstable pyramid behind the driver. Once underway, the scenery en route to Lijiang reminded me a little of New Zealand: moorland hills, grazing sheep and clear streams. We zig-zagged up to a high plateau, until suddenly the dominating Jade Dragon mountain came into view. We were in the land of the Nakhi. Lijiang: Joseph Rock’s home town in China Lijiang had come on a bit since 1924, when Joseph Rock described it as “a conglomeration of mud huts and a market place”. The old town was still there, looking a bit ramshackle, but still a thriving warren of ancient wooden houses and cobbled lanes, intersected by channelledm babbling streams. In 1994 there were hardly any tourists in Lijiang, and the streets of the old town were still the preserve of the Naxi people and their small businesses. There was, however, a grim modern ‘Chinese’ half of town, consisting of the usual ugly concrete tenements and ramshackle breeze-block shacks. The air was full of diesel fumes and the streets filled with the noise of tractors, metal saws and distorted pop music. Nevertheless, Lijiang always had the surprising and welcome sight of Jade Dragon Mountain peeking out from the end of a street, and a high-altitude glare that conferred a cheerful if somewhat eye-straining lightness to the whole town. The local Naxi kids looked gangly and knockabout, they spoke hick putonghua and wore unChinese clothes like baggy jeans and Kicker-style boots. In the alleys of the old town, elderly Nakhi women shuffled around slowly and quietly, carrying wicker baskets on their backs. They wore the characteristic Naxi blue smocks, adorned with white ‘moon’ circles on the back, and they looked fit and sprightly. Younger Naxi women wore brightly coloured modern clothing and could often be seen crouching over the clear streams washing clothes by hand. This was the town where Joseph Rock made his home from 1922 to 1949, and where he did much of his academic work on the botany and anthropology of Yunnan. 21 In the November 1924 issue of National Geographic he writes about his first impressions of Lijiang and its people in an article entitled ‘Banishing the Devil of Disease Among the Nakhi’. He describes the Naxi people with disdain as a “dwindling aboriginal tribe” who he says lived a secluded existence in the canyons and mountains of western China. According to Rock, the Naxi were a primitive people who eked out a living (“happily, as if in the Stone Age”) on the plains under the shadow of the Jade Dragon Mountain - ‘Mt Satsetso’ as he called it. Living in isolation and governed by Mongol and Manchu invaders, the Naxi, according to Joseph Rock, had adhered to their traditional religious practices of sorcery and shamanism. Rock gives a lengthy and somewhat over-wrought account of a religious ceremony that he witnessed near Lijiang. It was staged to cure a sick man, and conducted by a Naxi shamen known as a ‘Tomba’. It involved the sacrifice of a cockerel at the height of a thunderstorm, and Rock makes it sound so melodramatic that I suspect he employed more than a little artistic license to impress the National Geographic readers. His article on Lijiang does, however, include many fine portrait photographs of the Naxi Tombas in their ceremonial garments, and Rock documents the Naxi and their ways in the same methodical, scholarly manner that he used to document the novel plants, flowers and bird species of the region. And yet despite residing in the area for many years, Rock says almost nothing about the daytoday lives and personalities of the Naxi people that he lived among. For this we must turn to Peter Goullart, the French-Russian émigré who grew up in Shanghai and who lived in Lijiang at the same time as Rock. Goullart portrays the town of Lijiang in a much more cheerful and down to earth light, giving the town a human face. In his book The Forgotten Kingdom, we learn about local characters such as Madame Lee, who ran a bawdy teahouse, and her clientele such as the scheming local merchants and garrulous Tibetan traders who could be found there. Goullart was a long term resident of Lijiang and he obviously liked the place and made many friends there. He gives a very clear and sympathetic portrait of daily life in what was then a charming and rustic Yunnan mountain town. In contrast, the only thing that Rock has to say about the local people of Lijiang is that the Naxi men had become indolent opium smokers and the women seemed to do all the work. Perhaps this was because Rock was at heart more of a scholar than a social person. To avoid distractions, he made his headquarters out of town, in a village a few miles to the north called Nguluko. Here, in the shadow of the mountain peaks, Rock kept himself aloof from the town life of Lijiang, save for a handful of his Nakhi ‘boys’, the helpers who acted as his staff and plant collecting assistants. Women still seemed to be doing most of the hard work in Lijiang when I arrived in 1994. In the town’s square, which was dominated by a statue of an inscrutable waving Mao, there dainty young Nakhi women could be found sitting astride huge Soviet-era motorbikes with sidecars. At the time, these combinations served as Lijiang’s taxi fleet, and there seemed to be no male drivers for these dark blue smoke-chugging contraptions. The men of Lijiang still seemed to enjoy an indolent life spent lounging in the town’s numerous teahouses and small restaurants. They seemed subdued and lackluster, whereas 22 Naxi women had a certain spirit of independence and élan. When took a motorcycle taxi, my female driver was dressed in leathers, while her friend on another bike was sporting leopard-skin trousers with high heeled boots. The strong female character of Lijiang was confirmed by the local Nakhi identity and expert on local history, Mr Xuan Ke (“as in Ravi Shankar”). He held court most nights in a large room above a courtyard in the old town. The place was full of memorabilia, books, old furniture and photographs of old Lijiang. Western visitors would sit around for an hour listening to him talk about Mosuo suicide rituals and Nakhi dances. With his floppy hair, jeans, Hush Puppies and sweatshirt, the bouncy Xuan Ke looked much younger than his 64 years, and quite healthy for someone who’d spent 20 years in a labour camp (his support for Nakhi culture had been deemed anti-revolutionary in the 1950s and 60s). Xuan Ke’s main interest was in Nakhi music. Since his release from the labour camp he’d been leading a renaissance in Nakhi culture, one of the highlights of which was re-forming the original Lijiang Nakhi orchestra. This was an ensemble of old men who played a Nakhi interpretation of 15th century Chinese chamber music. Performances were held in the evening in a makeshift theatre in one of the courtyard houses of the old town. I went along to a concert, compered by Xuan Ke, which was attended by about 50 western tourists. “I will tell you the story in broken English about our Nakhi orchestra, that did not have a chance to practice between 1949 and 1987,” Xuan Ke told his rapt audience. Behind him, the ensemble of geriatric men in Mao caps and proletarian blue jackets adjusted their flutes, gongs and banjos. “By the way, we are called Nakhi people, not Naxi as written by the Chinese. Naxi sounds too much like Nazi,” Xuan Ke said with a wry smile. He then introduced the various members of the orchestra, starting with the oldest, Mr Zhao, who was 86 years old. “In the old days Mr Zhao went on the mule caravan through Tibet to India, twenty times. These other old men often had fathers who were officers in the Kuomintang army, so they have had quite a bad life,” he said, grimacing a little. He then introduced the other old members: an accountant, a hunter, a factory manager, each giving a little nod as they were announced. Then Xuan Ke turned to look at the photos on the wall. “Our master musicians are very old. When they die, we turn them into black and white,” he said. “These men are like me,” continued Xuan Ke, pointing to three not-quite-so-old musicians in the orchestra. “They are Sheep. That means they were born in the year of the sheep, 1930. We are all 64 years old. How do I look so young? That is because of the 20 years in prison, when I was trained like an animal to do hard work.” Xuan Ke explained that the music the Lijiang orchestra played was unique because it had survived almost unchanged from the Ming Dynasty dating back to between 1000 and 1500 AD. It had been introduced to the Lijiang region by a Chinese general, and had been 23 preserved in the same form for centuries, while mainstream Han Chinese music had continued to evolve and change character under the influence of the introduced cultures of China’s Mongol and Manchurian rulers. Now the Lijiang orchestra was the only one in China to play the original Ming dynasty style of music. The first piece of music was quite unlike the feisty local folk dances that I’d already heard. To my unmusical ears it was just a random clutter of cymbals, drums, flutes and erhu. Six teenage girls sang along in a plaintive chant. “How did we keep this music unchanged and not the Chinese?” Xuan Ke asked, when the tune ended. The old men sat behind him, smoking, picking their noses and stroking their long grey beards. “Firstly, because this is religious music used for ceremonies, and so we don’t want to change it. More importantly though, Lijiang was so remote and isolated. In 1944, when I was 14 years old, I travelled to missionary school in Kunming. It took 11 days, first by donkey to Xiaguan, then by shaking truck. There was no gasoline, the trucks ran on charcoal. Lijiang was very isolated. At that time, fighting the Japanese, there were a lot of American pilots, the Flying Tigers, in Kunming. One day, the general, Joe Stillwell, came to Lijiang. My father spoke to him because he was the only local person in Lijiang who could speak English!” he exclaimed with pride. “The third reason why our music did not change is because Lijiang is a housewife’s kingdom,” Xuan Ke continued. “Everything here is done by the wives: 95% of the butchers here are women. Men lose face if they do hard work.” (I thought of those Nakhi women in the square, sat on their big motorbikes.) “The tradition here is for the Nakhi men to enjoy smoking, drinking, painting, and playing mahjong. If a man is seen carrying a basket, everyone will laugh at his wife! So, Lijiang is a nice place for gentlemens, but in this way, the gentlemens have also lost their power - the women have the key to the bank,” he laughed. The next piece of music had only half a title: “An Old Man Sitting By the Peaceful River Doing ... “ “Unfortunately, we don’t know what the old man was doing,” laughed Xuan Ke, “It is from an old manuscript, and the worms ate away the last words of the song title, so we will never know what he was doing by the river.” Half way through this tune, a teenage girl in the orchestra stood up and played a halting flute solo. At the end, she sat down, impassive to the enthusiastic applause from the audience. “This young girl is only 16 years old. She has been playing the bamboo flute for only three months, but already she captures the soul and the colour of the instrument, don’t you think?” said Xuan Ke. “When we first started, the young people of Lijiang used to laugh at us and say ‘Your orchestra is old and ugly!’ But nowadays the young Nakhi students want to learn more about this music. Why? Because they see all you westerners coming here to listen and they think it must be something good. They always look up to the west.” Xuan Ke pulled a face when he said this. 24 “The students need to escape from karaoke,” he sneered. “You know what karaoke means in Japanese? Empty orchestra. Empty, like the young generation. Their brains are emptied by this new weapon from Japan. All the words are nonsense,” He mimicked a pop song; “He love her, he chase after her, she ... oh, terrible!” And his audience of westerners burst into laughter. “But now we are capturing more students, and that is important.” Before launching into the final tune, Xuan Ke explained that this ‘Dong Jin’ religious music was originally used as therapy, to promote harmony and inner peace. And thus it was essential that we learn to ‘receive’ the music, rather than just listen to it. The key was to know the four music ‘receiving points’ of the body, he told us, namely the end of the left eyebrow, the middle of both hands, below the navel, and the soles of the feet. “You must concentrate on each of these points in turn, in a clockwise direction,” said Xuan Ke, earnestly. And there were a few other rules to follow: “Close your eyes, but don’t refuse the light in. Close your mouth, but with a smile. Keep the tongue touching the sky strongly. And don’t think of anything else. Yes, keep everything away from your mind, especially MTV and dramatic rock singers,” he said. “If you practice this way, you will notice a warm feeling rising in your body. You will feel you are floating comfortably with the music.” I tried it during the last piece of music, but nothing happened. It still sounded like a random jumble of hollow drums and strings. Perhaps it was the uncomfortable ankle-high stools that spoiled my concentration. The next day I found that Lijiang was not such a good place for picking up information about Muli. I asked around in the local cafes, but most of the local people I asked had never heard of the place. Muli was over the other side of the provincial border in Sichuan, and might as well have been in another country. The manager of Ali Baba’s Cafe (‘Open Sesame: 8 o’clock’ according to the sign on the door) was more helpful than the others. I asked him whether it would be dangerous for me to walk alone through country areas. “Not really. The Yi people to the north are poor, so you shouldn’t let them see your money, or get them angry. But you shouldn’t have any trouble!” he reassured me. But I still had my doubts. I’d started to get paranoid after reading the ‘traveller’s tips’ notebooks in the local backpacker cafes. One person wrote of a drunken card game he’d had with Tibetans in neighbouring Zhongdian, which turned nasty and ended with knives being drawn. Another traveller wrote about having a rock lobbed in his face by an angry peasant while trekking in the Tiger Leaping Gorge. The peasant had helped this guy find his way back to the track after he got lost, but got angry when the traveller refused his demand for a ‘guiding fee’. 25 And after a traffic accident near Lijiang, an American man wrote in disgust of how he’d had to bargain with a truck driver to take his seriously-injured wife to the nearest hospital after she had been hit by a motorbike. There was no mention of Muli or even Lugu Lake in the travellers’ suggestion book. In the end, I had to fall back on the information that I’d brought with me: a small and sketchy 1924 map from Rock’s National Geographic articles, and a photocopy of a map of Yunnan and Sichuan that I’d found in a modern Chinese atlas. I decided I would try follow Rock’s route to Muli from Yongning, 100 miles northwards over the hills. But first, I would tackle the Tiger Leaping Gorge. The Yangtze and the Tiger Leaping Gorge Everyone I met in Lijiang seemed to have either done the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek or was on their way to do it. It was the thing to do. A few of those who had done the gorge mumbled about it not being suitable for anyone with vertigo, while others made cryptic comments about the dangers of the gorge and its precipitous paths. The Tiger Leaping Gorge was touted as China’s Grand Canyon, a monumental chasm created by the Yangtze river as if flows between the 5,000 metre mountain ranges of Jade Dragon Mountain and Mt Haba Shan. There was a mule track, chipped away from the sides of the canyon, which had become a popular two-day trek for the more adventurous among the western backpackers. Lijiang’s cafes displayed posters advertising the trekkers’ guesthouses set up along the track: ‘Stay at Spring Guesthouse. Free Showers’ ... ‘Try Chateau de Woody, Breathtaking Views’. Joseph Rock had also been impressed by the Tiger Leaping Gorge, although he never referred to it by that name. The ‘great Yangtze gorges’ as he termed them, get a mention as an afterthought in a National Geographic article about his later travels to the Salween and Mekong rivers in north-west Yunnan around Deqin. “By far the finest of all the gorges in Yunnan are those through which the Yangtze flows north of Lijiang. In grandeur these gorges may be compared with that of the Brahmaputra before it leaves Tibet for the Assam plain,” he wrote. Rock noted that the placid waters of the Yangtze above Shigu were transformed into a “mad torrent” as the river “pierced the terrifying gorge like a sword”. “In many places the river is only 20 yards in width and is one continuous series of cascades and rapids. The actual depth of water must be enormous because here the vast placid stream is compressed into a narrow ribbon of white foam. The cliffs rise steeply on both sides, culminating in jagged crags and pinnacles, and above these tower the ice-crowned peaks of the Likiang snow range.” The Gorge lived up to all the hype. My first glimpse of it, from the starting point of Qiaotou village, was impressive: a mountain face rising sheer up from the sandy green Yangtze 26 (known locally as the Jinsha ‘Golden Sands’ river), to be swallowed up in the clouds. The sun played on the tree-lined ridges, and in the distance, a narrow ledge of track could be seen bisecting the first grey cliff. A sign at the ticket office read: ‘The two cliffs push together as if fighting for hegemony’. Local legend had it that a tiger fleeing from a hunter had once jumped the narrowest section of the gorge, some 30 metres wide, to a rock on the other side: hence the name. But when I arrived at the first section of cliff-skirting track, I stopped dead and almost turned around immediately. It was barely a metre wide, with an unimpeded drop of a thousand feet straight down to the swirling white waters of the Yangtze. On a boulder nearby someone had painted in yellow: ‘Here is dangerously. Be careful, strong winds are not your friend’. I braved the first few precarious yards without daring to look down. Then the path turned a corner and widened out to become a solid and unthreatening walk. The first test was over. For the rest of the day, the track was a pleasant stroll through the epic canyon. It lived up to Rock’s dramatic description. Down below, the roaring Yangtze was funnelled through a narrow slot of solid rock, while its wider sections were choked with washed-up bits of timber. It seemed that pine logs were being floated down the Yangtze to sawmills in Sichuan, and a fair proportion of them never made it. Later on my travels, when I saw logging trucks struggling to haul five massive logs that had once been magnificent trees, I would wonder about the wastage of those hundreds of logs stuck in the Yangtze. Halfway along the gorge, at a spot called Walnut Grove, I came to the guesthouses. They were part of a small hamlet with a few terraces of barley, which clung to the sides of the gorge. They were overlooked by a towering wall of grey-cream rock that rose unbroken and ascended from the river up to the high buttresses of Jade Dragon mountain. It was an idyllic place. Rock stayed there overnight and he called it Djipalo. Sat outside the Tibetan chalet that was the Chateau de Woody guesthouse, with a beer in my hand, I was as happy as I could remember in a long time. “Walnut Grove? Sounds like an English pub with MGs parked outside,” said Terry, an Australian guy I had met on the trail during the day’s trek. We shared the quiet evening with a few chickens, piglets and a lazy dog for company. Scruffy local kids with snot running out of their noses shooed goats and donkeys along the path running in front of the guesthouse. “What happened there?” I asked ‘Woody’, the soft-spoken owner, as I pointed to a huge raw scar on the cliffs above the river. “Ten years ago, the rock fell down,” he said. “There were two men panning for gold in the river. Both were killed. Their comrade survived because he had just climbed up here to collect their lunch.” The fracture had dislodged several huge chunks of marble the size of houses, which had fallen into the middle of the river, and where the waters now swirled over their tops. At last light, Woody spied some more foreigners approaching from the opposite direction. It was a party of ten American kids. “Wow, man, that track was one boot wide in places,” one of them said. “You reach out to a rock for support and it just comes away in your hand. Not good for your confidence,” said a young woman. 27 Hearing this, I began to feel nervous about the next day. The Americans wouldn’t say any more. They were language students in Beijing and wanted to practice their ‘ni hao’s’ and ‘xie xies’ on Woody. “This place is awesome. Better than anything in New England,” someone said in the dark. The next day, my worries about the dangers of the Tiger Leaping Gorge were shown to be justified. After travelling alone for a couple of hours, by late morning I reached a difficult section of the track known as ‘the landslide’. A long section of the cliff had fallen away into the chasm below, and the landslide had taken the track ledge with it, leaving a near-vertical wall of raw exposed rock interspersed withlarge patches of rubble. On the top of one section of scree there was now a 100 metre stretch of a faint padded trail that had been worn by the impression of the footsteps of recent walkers. The trail was little more than a thin ledge of gravel jutting two feet out from the cliff, with a precipitous drop off to the right. In the middle of the landslide was a particularly steep section where the trail narrowed even further and seemed to disappear altogether in places, with just a hint of a line over some fallen scree and rocks. When I saw this I was terrified, and my instinct was to turn around immediately and go back along the gorge. However, this would entail a two day walk back to Qiaotou. Meanwhile, Daju village at the end of the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek was tantalisingly close, just visible on the plain beyond the landslide. So near, and yet so far away. I was wracked with indecision. The longer I hesitated, the greater my trepidation, and the harder it became to start off. The wind blew marble dust into my eyes, and spots of rain whipped my face. On my first attempt, I lost my nerve almost immediately and turned back in panic after just a few steps. I was wobbling top heavy under the weight of my backpack, which threatened to unbalance me and send me tottering over the edge, down into the river. On my second attempt I fumbled along the trail, unable to look anywhere except at my boots. I cringed at the low overhangs and muttered to myself: ‘Slowly ... slowly ... no problem ...’ one step at a time. Just when I thought the worst was over, the ledge turned around a blind corner to the left, and I saw to my horror that the track continued – more of the same - along a powdery ledge just inches wide jutting out from the cliff face. Somehow, I teetered along it, holding my breath and hoping my footholds would be solid. Palms sweating, legs trembling, I made it across onto a ‘normal’ track that was now a metre wide. I took a deep breath and swore to myself - “never again!” When I later read about western trekkers going missing in the gorge, I could easily understand how this could happen. Just one mis-step and you would disappear into the boiling waters far below. To finish the gorge trek I dropped down a relatively easy trail to a placid section of Yangtze river where the coffee-brown waters cut through a miniature alluvial plain. Waiting there was a flat-bottomed punt powered by a put-put engine, moored on the bank of the river. I was its only passenger as the ferryman took me across the Yangtze to the Nakhi village of Daju. 28 Joseph Rock had also been spooked by the dangerous trail through the Tiger Leaping Gorge. In his brief mention of the gorge he observed that beyond Bendiwan (Walnut Grove) “the trail is exceedingly dangerous, as rock slides occur continuously.” And there had also been a Daju ferry when Rock travelled through the gorge in 1923, but Rock noted the boat had recently been smashed by marauding Tibetan bandits. He was forced to turn around and return to Qiaotou. After I crossed the Yangtze, I found Daju to be just a dusty village square with a store, a restaurant and a guesthouse. There was one bus a day back to Lijiang, and I’d missed it. With nothing better to do, I wandered around the village alleys and used my Chinese dictionary help decipher the big character slogans daubed on the mud-brick walls. ‘The Soil Is The Mother Of Prosperity. Labour Is The Father!’ said one. ‘Stick To The Socialist Road! Uphold The People’s Democracy!’ exhorted another. ‘Adhere To Mao Zedong Thought!’ ... ‘Follow The Party Line Unwavering For 100 years!’ And the most recent: ‘Opening-up And Reform Is The Road To A Strong China!’. There wasn’t much else to do in Daju except sit in the restaurant and wait. “What do you do for fun around here?” I asked the waitress that evening, as we sat alone in the poky wooden room lit by candlelight. She was knitting. “Oh, sometimes I go to karaoke. Or if I’m here I talk to foreign friends and practice my English,” she replied. I was the only ‘foreign friend’ in Daju that night. The wind howled, and I went back to my creaky wooden room at the guesthouse, to listen to the scampering of mice in the roof. The next morning, before I took the bus out, I scrambled up one of the hills outside Daju in the hope of getting better views of the surrounding area. I wanted to get an idea about whether I could walk directly from Daju to the next bend in the Yangtze, and perhaps beyond, to Yongning. No chance. After an exhausting scramble, when I reached the top of the first ridge, all I could see was one enormous steep ridge after another, stretching away to the horizon. It had been hard enough climbing this one hill without a pack, and I reckoned it would be impossible for me to scale several such high ridges with a heavy backpack. I would just have to return to Lijiang and start from there. The bus ride back to Lijiang proved to be almost as terrifying as the worst parts of the walk through the Tiger Leaping Gorge. I was the only passenger on the bus as it set off two hours after its 9am scheduled departure time. The driver had been taking his time, gobbling down a bowl of greyish translucent cubes of tofu jelly and playing a game of Chinese chess. When he eventually saw fit to leave, the bus zig-zagged up a switchback road from of Daju to a dizzy height above the river. After two hours of driving I could still see the village of Daju far below us, beyond the many snaking loops of the road. There were steep drop-offs on one side of the narrow, pot-holed trail, and I didn’t have much confidence in the driver or vehicle. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other clutching his jar of tea with a cigarette between his fingers. Every few minutes he would swap hands to have a swig of tea or a drag of his ciggie, and temporarily lose control of the steering. The bus would veer across the road, teetering close to the edge, and I would cringe by the door of the bus, wondering whether I’d have time to leap out should he lose control altogether and we 29 plunge over the edge. It was a nerve-wracking ride amif spectacular scenery. We had excellent views of the thrteen snowy peaks of Jade Dragon Mountain, but I was in no mood to appreciate them. A cold wind blew through the bus thanks to the many missing or broken windows. And every so often the driver would stop the bus to top up the radiator. This he did with dirty water that he scooped up from roadside ditches. He poured it, weeds and all, via a funnel into a massive grey metal upright tank located next to the steering wheel. Finally, we crested a pass but my worries were not over. As he pointed the bus downhill the driver switched off his engine and started to coast silently and powerless back down the other side. Now I began to fret about the brakes not working with the engine off. But we made somehow made it around the switchback loops and eventually got back to Lijiang in one piece, physically, if not psychologically. Muli starting point: Lugu Lake If I had learned one lesson from my trip through the Tiger Leaping Gorge, it was that I was carrying way too much stuff. When I got back to Lijiang, I dumped my hefty backpack in a storeroom at Mama Fu’s restaurant, and bought a cheap Chinese army knapsack instead. Almost every Chinese town had a shop selling PLA kit. They stocked everything from tropical shirts and fur-lined greatcoats to accessories such as holsters and electric ‘taser’ prods for crowd control. My little olive green bag cost me about 30 kuai. I chucked out my sleeping bag, my books and loads of other junk. All I took with me was a raincoat, change of socks and toothbrush. Then I went shopping for food. There wasn’t much on offer for the would-be trekker in Lijiang. I had to make do with monkey nuts, green raisins, beef jerky, powdery biscuits and a packet of dried prunes. Fresh fruit and drinks I reckoned could be bought along the way. When Joseph Rock prepared his caravan for the trip to Muli he took a bit more than me. He had to provision for his large entourage of Naxi assistants, eleven mules and three horses. “One needs to be a good housekeeper indeed to prepare for such a caravan,” he wrote. He took supplies for a month, and this list gives an idea of how much he took: “ ... tents, folding chairs and a table, camp cot and many trunks with photographic supplies, cut films and colour plates, developer, coffee, tinned milk, tea, cocoa, butter, flour salt, sugar, some tinned vegetables (for the grassland Tibetans are strangers to vegetables), fruits, sugar ...” Travelling through highland areas where the barren soil supported only subsistence farmers, Rock and his party had to be self sufficient and bring all their own food. “The men carried brick yea and yak butter, dirty lumps of salt, Chinese brown sugar, and large supplies of native flour to make their baba (bread), sometimes shaped into round loaves, and sometimes into cornucopias, which they steamed into a large dumpling in a covered pot over a wood fire.” 30 His caravan also had to bring a multitude of technical items to support his plant collecting activities. “We took quantities of paper made out of bamboo, to be used as blotters for drying botanical specimens; two large boxes packed tight with ginned cotton to protect birdskins ... last but not least, our equipment included our trunk of medicines. I was anxious to guard against the fatal relapsing fever so prevalent in Tibetan country.” For my solo trip, the little knapsack of essentials that I’d prepared seemed pathetically inadequate, but it would have to do. The night before I departed for Lugu Lake there was some sort of activity going off in the Lijiang town square. Young women of different minorities milled around in groups, flirting with the young ‘liumang’ lads. The Nakhi girls wore the traditional blue capes with seven white cloth circles sewn on their backs, representing stars - to show that women held up the sky. Bai women, by contrast, wore a collage of pink, white and blue garments while the Yi women sported several layers of pleated dresses in the Rastafarian colours of red, green, yellow and black. Yi women also wore the craziest hats: a large flat black square like a graduate’s mortar board, with oen of the curled corners pointing forwards like a crow’s beak. The Lijiang men were much more drab in appearance: most wore the standard Chinese cheap dark suit, often with a tailor’s label still stitched on to the jacket sleeve. Likewise, they wore square plastic sunglasses with the peel-off label still stuck on the corner of the lens. In the 1990s, there was something about the new-to-capitalism Chinese psyche that made them retain the labels and shop wrappers on their purchases: cars would still have the barcodes from their Japanese shippers stuck on their windscreen, bicycles were pedalled round with the plastic bubble wrapping still entwined around the frame. Even sofas would be left with their shrink-wrap cellophane wrapping in place for months after purchase. In the new China it was important to display a brand (‘paizi’) and to visually demonstrate that something was ‘new’. On his departure for Muli in 1924, Joseph Rock had to employ a little subterfuge. The local Chinese magistrate in Lijiang refused him permission to travel, claiming that the Chinese New Year period was too dangerous a time to be on the road in rural China. This was because, in Chinese custom, all debts have to be settled on or before the Spring Festival. Many desperate debtors would therefore resort to highway robbery to acquire some quick last minute funds to pay off their creditors and thus avoid the disgrace and loss of face associated with being unable to settle your bills. However, the doughty Rock cared nothing for all this, and he bluffed the magistrate by telling him that he was only going as far as Yongning. The Lijiang official relented, but only on condition that Rock take with him with a personal bodyguard escort of 10 Naxi soldiers. Rock was not impressed with the pathetic retinue assigned for his protection. Many of the ‘guards’ were mere boys of 14 or 15, and they were armed with rusty Austrian-made muzzle loading rifles dating back to 1857. According to Rock, the guards were more trouble than they were worth, due to their penchant for plundering every settlement they passed through. “They settle on a village like flies on a pie, and rarely pay for what they eat, but bully the farmers ...” he noted. To the disgust of the soldiers, Rock made a point of making them pay for everything they took. 31 It took Rock five days to get from Lijiang to Yongning, the only significant settlement en route to Muli. He started off in the middle of January, traversing the brown and arid plain of Lijiang underneath the multiple snow peaks of the Jade Dragon mountain range. The trail passed through brooding forests of fir, larch and hemlock, through ravines and over mountain paths that Rock says were the most treacherous he had so far encountered in China. His route took him to the north-east, within a loop of the Yangtze river where the river turns north for a hundred miles and then doubles back on itself again to flow south. The land Rock passed over was sparsely populated, with just a few primitive Nakhi farmers (“as shy as deer”) who lived in mud huts (“like swallows’ nests against the cliffs”). The Naxi village women wore pleated white skirts and had huge earrings of copper and silver that were so heavy they had to be held up with string around the ears or even over their heads. Near the Yangtze, Rock passed the site of a recent battle that had been fought between a thousand Tibetan ‘marauders’ and some Qing government Chinese troops. Most of the Chinese soldiers had been slaughtered. The route to Yongning then required a steep descent into the massive canyon of the Yangtze river, crossing the wide river by a rickety local wooden ferry, and then an arduous ascent up steep cliffs on the far bank. In 1994, my trip to Lugu took me two days in an overworked minibus, travelling via a shabby town called Ninglang. The bus creaked over eroded treeless hills and took us deep into remote Yi territory. These were the ‘Lesser’ Cool Mountains (Liang Shan) and the Yi (or ‘Lolo’ as Rock knew them) were a wild, poor people who tilled a barren yellow soil. “They are very backward. They do not wash,” the Han Chinese in Lijiang had said about them. Even the Naxi compared themselves favourably with the Yi. “We Nakhi are the best educated of China’s minorities. Unlike some minorities we have a strong culture,” they said, referring to the Yi. In the countryside around towns such like Ninglang, the Yi were literally dirt poor. Their dwellings had changed little since Rock wrote of them: “The houses of these primitive people are of rough pine hoards, tied together with cane, and the roofs weighted down with rocks.” I got a chance to see a few Yi women at close quarters when some of them squeezed their way onto our bus. They smelled of the farmyard, and had freckled, weather-beaten faces and wore grubby, unwashed traditional dress, little changed since Rock described them: “The Lolo women wear skirts decorated with old fashioned flounces, reaching almost to the ground, and short jackets. Hats, with broad, flopping brims, resembling the heads of antediluvian ichthyosaurs, usually cover their wild unkempt heads.” The Yi women I encountered looked almost European - they had round eyes, aquiline noses and they spoke to each other in weird high-pitched, coo-ing voices. They were the some of poorest people I saw in China. And it was easy to believe that until forty years ago, they had been a slave society, despised by the Chinese and bestowed with the derogatory name ‘Lolo’, (‘wog’). The Yi had been divided into a noble ‘black’ Yi branch and the more servile ‘white’ Yi, most of whom were virtually slaves. And the Yi in this area had originally been outcasts from the 32 main Yi area north of Lijiang, and thus were doubly wretched. Liberation had brought them freedom from slavery, but little else in the way of development. Our bus made an overnight stop in dismal Ninglang, where there was nothing to do except sit in the room of my guesthouse and watch crap Chinese television. The lurid and stridently consumerist TV programmes broadcast from Beijing - and the advertisements in particular seemed a world away from this rural backwater of Yunnan. The following morning I was the centre of attraction at the bus station as I waited to reboard the bus to Lugu Lake. One village idiot stared at me with such intensity that I had to run around the yard and dodge inside doorways to shake him off. Back on the road, we passed through more rural emptiness. On the mud walls of one cluster of houses the local propaganda committee had daubed a large message in white paint that said in Chinese characters: “Drive Carefully - the road is dangerous and the hospital is far away!” It was thus with some relief that we finally arrived at Lugu Lake. After the barren brown countryside the lake shore seemed like a verdant earthly paradise. The blue waters twinkled in the sunlight below the crags of Lion Mountain. Cuckoos sang in the forest and the air was fresh and cool. The local people, the Mosuo, were a distant branch of the Naxi minority, a cheerful and robust people who built sturdy wooden manor houses around the lakeside and carved dugout canoes to fish in the lake. The Mosuo were famous for being a matriarchal society practising a kind of ‘free love’. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the lake, I was in no fit state to appreciate any of this. I’d started to feel queasy while sitting on the bus in the afternoon, something I put down to eating a greasy pancake bought from a street vendor in a Yi village en route. The final hour of the bus journey became a nightmare, as I tried to suppress the urge to throw up while the potholed road bounced me up and down on the back seat. On arrival at Lugu Lake, I staggered off the bus, too weak to stand up and immediately puked up in front of the guesthouse where we’d been dropped off. Feeling like death, I took refuge in the first room I could find and collapsed onto the primitive bed, doubled up with stomach cramps. In 1994 there were few if any visitors – western or otherwise - going to Lugu Lake, and there were no hotels, just a few homestay-style guesthouses. I spent my first day there alone, feeling vulnerable and thoroughly miserable as I shivered and sweated feverishly under the blankets with all my clothes on. I cursed myself for dumping my medicine kit with its antibiotics back in Lijiang. As night fell, I was visited in my room by a cheerful group of Chinese engineers from Chengdu, who had taken pity on me after seeing my plight on the bus. They brought some lemonade and said they would take me to see some ‘friends’ who might be able to help me. So I hauled myself out of my sick bed and tottered after them into the inky black darkness outside, through a maze of paths and passageways until we suddenly entered a dimly-lit spacious living room off the courtyard of a Mosuo house. Sat around a crackling fire were two Americans, who introduced themselves as Will and Eileen from LA. In my fragile state they were a most welcome sight as they beckoned me in 33 to join them, where they gave me much-needed moral support and some of their own supply of antibiotics. I began to feel better almost immediately. As I sat with them sipping tea, they enthused about the tranquility and beauty of Lugu Lake. They were so enchanted with the place that they’d extended their stay here for several days. They were particularly delighted at being able to stay in a Mosuo house amidst all the pigs, cows and geese. Being a Mosuo household, only women lived in the house: the mother and auntie in traditional blue-black gowns and turbans, and the daughter in modern Chinese dress. The father, referred to as ‘uncle’, lived elsewhere, but he popped in regularly to see what was going on. Mosuo women would typically have several different lovers before they married, we were told. A Mosuo couple would only be regarded as ‘wed’ once they had produced a baby. The woman would then bring up the child in her mother’s house, without the live-in husband. Will and Eileen told me they’d been staying with this Mosuo family for nearly a week, living off a bag of vegetables they’d brought from Lijiang. Apart from potatoes, there were no vegetables to be had at Lugu Lake. The Mosuo women cooked up some barley sugar ‘crisps’ that helped restore my energy. Later in the evening, feeling somewhat better, I sauntered back round the lake under the moonlight, passing a few fishermen huddled round fires. I was now within the realms of Joseph Rock’s hand-drawn maps. He had made several lengthy layovers at Lugu Lake on his travels to and from Muli. On one occasion, he took refuge on one of the islands from a horde of disgruntled Tibetan robbers who had been repulsed from an attack on Kunming. The island still had on it the remains of a small lamasery shown in Rock’s pictures. Nowadays the local villagers rowed tourists out to the island in dugout canoes. Rock refers to the Mosuo as the ‘Lushi’ sub-tribe of the Naxi. He makes a fleeting mention of their matriarchal lifestyle in his articles, but otherwise says surprisingly little about the Mosuo given the current lurid interest in their supposed ‘free love’ society. The famous local Mosuo singer Namu, however, recounts in her book ‘Leaving Mother Lake’ how the older generation at Lugu Lake remembered Joseph Rock as being one of the few foreigners to visit the area. He was said to be a “fat man with blue eyes” who travelled slowly because “he stared at plants for hours”. The Mosuo grew fond of Joseph Rock, and even protected him when he provoked the wrath of some belligerent nearby Yi tribes. The superstitious Yi believed that Rock was the cause of a fierce hailstorm that had ruined their crops. Thinking that Rock was staying at Lugu Lake, they took revenge by pillaging cattle and horses from the villages around the lake, burning houses and trampling crops with their horses. When Rock returned and saw the damage done on his account, he felt sorry for the Mosuo villagers. To compensate them, he built a special ‘palace’ pavilion on Nyorophu island in the middle of the lake. The pavilion was made from specially imported glass, and the Mosuo were very impressed, as most of them had never seen glass before. People came from miles around to see and touch the glass of the pavilion, and it remained a popular attraction for many years, until smashed by Red Guards in the 1960s. 34 Rock became something of a legend among Mosuo people, according to Namu. He was respected because he took the Mosuo and Naxi culture seriously and documented their ceremonies. During his sojourns at Lugu Lake, Rock acted as doctor and treated the local people for the endemic venereal disease using medicines imported from the US. He also honoured the Mosuo chief by giving him a pair of binoculars. Interestingly, Namu also claims that there were several fair-haired children in villages around Lugu Lake when she was growing up there, something she attributes to Rock’s relations wth local women. However, the only blondes I saw around Lugu Lake were the Californians. Walking back round the lake the next morning, with the water lapping quietly at the shore, I saw one of the canoes being paddled out to the island. The rise and fall of the oars and the shouts and songs carrying over the water reminded me of the New Zealand Maori war canoes, the ‘waka’. Further along the shore. I came across a group of art students from Chengdu. They were squatting with their pallets, using watercolours to portray their impressions of a white stone stupa by the lakeside. Nearby, the villagers were building a two-storey hall completely from wood, without using any nails. Lugu Lake had a restful and timeless atmosphere, and I spent a lazy day recuperating from my stomach bug. Inside the courtyard, sheltered from the gusty winds, I sat in the warmth of the weak sun among the piglets, geese and calves, and perused my maps. According to Rock’s 1924 map, Muli monastery was a 50-mile walk in a north-easterly direction from Lugu. The map wasn’t very detailed and gave no clues as to the topography. Beyond the nearby town of Yongning there were no other features to follow except for a couple of villages. I would just have to ask my way as I went along. Back in the 1920s, Rock had done the journey from Lijiang to Muli by mule in 11 days. He described it as: “ ...one of the most trying in south-western China... it takes a hardened constitution and great powers of endurance to make the trip.” My constitution wasn’t feeling too hardened. In fact, with my wobbly stomach and a rapidly dwindling supply of food, I really didn’t feel up to it. Decent food was hard to come by in these rural areas. The Mosuo seemed to survive on a basic diet of potatoes, fish, eggs and chilli. There were no shops or restaurants and our hosts professed to having no other food available. Luckily, Will and Eileen still had some of their stocks left and were generous enough to share them with me. Each mealtime they would give the Mosuo mother a cucumber or some tomatoes to fry up. An hour later we would be eating a dinner of potatoes, sausage, eggplant, scrambled egg and tomato soup, corn wine and tea. We ate squatting on tiny stools in the atmospheric dark living room where a few shafts of sunlight came in through the roof. While we sate, the old lady of the house would sit in a corner making butter tea with a plunger device. And yet, despite its beauty, Lugu Lake was a low point for me. After spending several weeks on the road, I was growing sick of China. The novelty had worn off and I was fed up with stop-start bus travel and the lousy food, I hated the stares and the sniggers that made me feel like I was an exotic animal in a zoo. 35 On top of all this, I’d come to realise that I wasn’t cut out to be an explorer: I missed my home comforts. Despite all my pretensions to be roughing it and of being a ‘knockabout sort of bloke’, all I really wanted at that moment was to be sat in a cafe sipping espresso and reading a decent English newspaper. Before coming to China I’d fancied myself as something of a modern-day adventurer, blazing a trail through the back roads of Yunnan. And here I was, patting myself on the back, thinking the journey to Lugu Lake had been a gutsy venture into the unknown. But these unassuming Californians were taking it all in their stride, treating it as they were on a visit to a theme park. They didn’t speak a word of Chinese but they were right at home, communicating with enthusiasm using sign language and a few grunts and grins. Meanwhile, I felt miserably out of my depth and isolated, like I was at the edge of the world. My attempts at speaking Mandarin were met with puzzled frowns from the Mosuo. I’d had enough of China and wanted to go home. When the Americans said they’d found someone with a van to take them back to Lijiang the next morning, I was really tempted to go with them. Somehow I managed to resist this appealing option. However, it was with a heavy heart and a sense of foreboding that I said farewell to Will and Eileen the next day. After a breakfast of roast potatoes, steamed bread and butter tea, they got into the van, heading back to the civilisation of Lijiang, while I would carry on into the unknown, hopefully to Muli. The first steps: Yongning There was no bus to Yongning, 20km to the north of Lugu Lake, so I started walking. As I made my way through the middle of the lakeside village I passed one of the Chengdu art students, carrying her paintbox disconsolately up the road, looking for inspiration. I felt the same way. But when I left Luoshui behind me and climbed the road above the lake, I felt happier and freer to be among the wind, the trees, sun and the bird song. It was good to be doing something again, rather than just sitting around. After a while, I started to sing to myself, and I plodded along cheerfully in this fashion for the next four hours, skirting pine-clad hills and onto the Yongning plain. Just before I arrived in Yongning, I came across my first signs of Tibetan influece: lying in the middle of the dusty track was a silver dagger in a sheath that somebody had dropped. I picked it up, pocketed it and carried on my way. In 1924, ‘Youngning’ was the capital of the Lushi tribe territory, governed by a chief descended from the a Mongol ruler first appointed by the Kublai Khan back in the 13th century. On his many visits to Yongning, Joseph Rock was to become good friends with this local chief, known as the ‘tusi’ or ‘dzongpen’. In fact, the Yongning chief was one of the few real friends that Rock ever made in China. On his first visit to Yongning, en route to Muli, Rock used Yongning as a rest stop after the many arduous days spent in the saddle traversing the Yangtze gorge on his way from Lijiang. Rock says that he met no Chinese in Yongning, only a variety of “opium-sodden Nakhi”, some ‘primitive’ Yi tribesmen and a handful of aggressive ‘Hsifan’, or ‘western bandits’, as the Tibetans were then called by the Chinese). 36 In 1994, Yongning had the dreary air of a Han Chinese frontier town: it was little more than a handful of utilitarian concrete buildings and a collection of log cabins around a market square, where Yi women traded a few wilting vegetables. And whereas Rock took advantage of “the monastery and its hospitable shelter”, I had to make do with the ‘County Guesthouse’: a breeze-block box surmounted by a satellite TV dish that seemed to be part of the local Party headquarters. After I checked in, I had a bizarre encounter with a young woman who led me into a shower room and made some vague gestures about disrobing. Whether she was a prostitute or just one of the staff trying to show me where the showers were, I couldn’t tell. I walked a few hundred yards down the road to look for Yongning’s Buddhist monastery, which I found was still there and intact, but under renovation to mend years of destruction and neglect. Only a single small prayer hall of the original structure remained, and the main prayer hall was quite different from the one seen in Joseph Rock’s photographs. Rock had visited the monastery and taken many pictures of the Buddhist ceremonies there, as well as photographing the oracles and shamens of Yongning. It had once been a very active monastery. Now it appeared to be almost deserted. I walked through the gateway of the ‘Zhamei Si’ and wandered among the Tibetan workmen who were milling around among woodchips and piles of bricks. I looking for someone who looked vaguely like a monk, but everyone was dressed in ‘civvies’. A man who looked like the foreman took me to one side and asked me what I wanted. “Is it possible to walk from here to Muli?” I asked. “Yes, but it’s dangerous,” he said. “It takes three days through high mountains. Even we dare not do it! You should go by bus instead, back through Ninglang and Yanyuan,” and he made a wide circular motion with his arms. But that would take too long, I thought - and anyway, I would probably get turned around by the police en route seeing as Muli was still officially a ‘closed area’ for foreigners. I pulled out Rock’s original map from my bag and showed it to the foreman, asking him about the villages shown along the route to Muli. The first one, ‘Vudju’, was now called Wujiao by the Chinese, the foreman told me, and it was a day’s walk from here. The nearby lamasery of Rendjom Gompa mentioned by Rock was also still there, he said, but now had just a single monk in residence. At that moment I noticed a dark-skinned Tibetan-looking man in a green uniform, sat around the fire having a smoke. He stood up and ambled over to see what was going on, and I realised with dismay from his arm badge that he was Gong An Ju - Public Security Bureau. My heart sank, and I expected to be questioned and warned against going to Muli. But the PSB man just smiled and stabbed his palm the air in the direction of Wujiao. “Hey If you go to Rendjom Gompa, ask for the lama called Aja Dapa. Tell him I sent you. He knows me: I’m Wangdu, the Yongning policeman.” The foreman then led me towards the prayer hall, to show me the interior of the renovated temple. Inside, once my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I saw a row of gilded statues representing former abbots of the monastery. The statues were sitting lotus-position on multi-coloured thrones, they all had neat yellow hats and were surrounded by animals and flowers. In a dark corner, a lone monk squatted on a grubby cushion on the floor, chanting and banging a 37 gong. Back out in the open air, I wanted to get a better view of my intended route to Muli, so I climbed a thousand-foot high grassy hill behind the monastery. It was only a small hill but I was soon out of breath due to the altitude. When I reached the top, which was cluttered with prayer flags, I saw snow-bound mountain peaks to the north. I almost jumped for joy: surely, those were the Konkaling peaks? Surveying the landscape ahead of me, there seemed to be a fairly straightforward route from the Yongning plain over some low hills, towards those Muli peaks. Now my intended trip looked do-able, and I was happy. The doubts of Lugu Lake were forgotten. Below me I could see the monastery of Yongning - and I realised was in the same spot where Rock had taken his photograph of the monastery more than 70 years previously. That evening, in the blacked-out village of Yongning, I sat in the town’s simple and rather basic restaurant, celebrating my first sighting of the Muli peaks, with a bottle of beer. “What do you want to go to Muli for?” the Chinese waitress asked, when I told her my plans. “The people there are poor and backward. There’s nothing to see.” To me, it sounded encouraging. I retired to my lonely and cold guesthouse room. Outside, across the street in the darkness, a small crowd gathered around a doorway that had a thick curtain draped across it. From within came torrent of crackly thuds, whacks and the staccato dialogue of a Chinese kung fu film. Walking off the map My trek to Muli monastery really began at a village called Wenquan (‘Hot Springs), about three miles east of Youngning. I hitched a ride out there on a logging truck, and found the springs were still very much a feature of the village. They had been turned into a civic amenity by plonking concrete walls around them, to create primitive cubicles. The bath-houses had steaming, slime-smeared pipes to deliver the hot water, and an attendant charged 2 yuan to fill up one of the sunken square concrete baths. The springs were popular with the local Naxi and Mosuo people, who seemed to be using them for their ablutions and for doing their laundry rather than as a spa treatment. In Rock’s day, this village was known as Wualapi, and it marked the southern boundary of the Muli kingdom. I passed up the chance for a bath, and instead set off in the mid-morning sun, along a mule track that ran through ploughed fields, in what I hoped was the direction of Muli. In the fields of reddish brown clay, a few local people were yelling at their plough oxen, trying to stir them into action. Cuckoos were singing when I left the plain and ascended into the pine forests, but walking alone I began to feel a bit apprehensive, as if someone was watching me. I fingered the Tibetan knife that I now kept handy in my pocket, and found myself jumping with a start every time my footsteps broke a twig. When I paused to sit for a rest and have a swig of water, I heard a ‘thwack’ beside me and looked up to see an old Naxi man and a young boy sat a few yards away, laughing at me, and about to throw another stone. They told me they were on their way from Wujiao to Yongning, to sell their home-made firewater at the market. They asked me the same 38 questions I was to be asked by almost every Chinese person I encountered on the road:. “Are you alone?” “Where are you heading? “Aren’t you afraid?” When I said I was going to Muli, this elicited an exclamation of surprise. “You need to be careful,” said the old man. “There are bad people on the road. They will bully you.” I asked the old man about the villages on Rock’s map. Yes, he said, as I tried to pronounce them, Vudju ... Likiasun ... he recognised all of them and he reassured me they were all still there. It was on this trail through low hills and fir and hemlock forests that someone tried to ‘bully’ Joseph Rock, when he came up against a party of Tibetans travelling in the opposite direction: “Hark! A cavalcade of 20 men approaches, clad in brilliant red garments and gold brocade jackets. They ride on red saddle blankets trimmed with leopard fur. Each carries on his left side a miniature Buddhist shrine of silver, a reliquary for protection on the journey. A lama of lower grade stops one of my men and roughly demands to know whither we are bound. Before an answer can be given, the priest motions my man to get of the path as the king’s brother is approaching.” Not to be out-done, Rock’s Naxi bodygaurd replied by demanding that the Tibetans themselves should dismount and show some respect to the ‘big foreigner’. “I now took part in the interchange of ‘civilities’,” says Rock, “... giving the lama a lecture accompanied by threatening gestures. Out comes the priest’s tongue in deference, which, with upward pointed thumbs, denotes the most humble mode of greeting where Tibetan customs are in vogue. We pass the cavalcade without a sign of recognition by either party.” As Rock progressed up through the virgin forest of firs he marvelled at the metre-thick tree trunks, noting that: “no woodman’s axe has ever echoed here.” Sadly, the same could not be said for the pine forest I saw in 1994. It had been logged haphazardly, with whole swathes taken out of some hillsides. It looked like the handiwork of amateurs, as smaller trees had been hacked down and left to rot where they fell. The forest was dotted with such clearings, and the few patches of grass I came across were usually scarred with the remains of campfires, and rutted with well-worn tracks. On either side, landslides had swept down the eroded hillsides, churning up trees and earth into ugly, twisted heaps. And yet there were still some areas of unspoiled nature and beauty remaining. When I crested a shallow ridge, the grey rocky mountain ridges of Muli came into view. They appeared larger and closer now, and were an impressive sight against the clear blue skies. Forested hills extended as far as the eye could see. Below me, in the valley, were the log cabins of Lijaisuin, the first village in Muli territory. It looked like it hadn’t changed much in the last 60 years: in fact, the village was positively medieval, with no electricity, roads or machinery of any kind. As I sauntered through the settlement, it appeared to be deserted, except for a few chickens and piglets. The inhabitants must have been working in the fields. I asked directions from an old Yi woman I found tending goats, but she just splashed her feet in a stream and giggled in a strange high-pitched voice. I got the same non-response higher up in the forest, when I 39 asked two young goatherds the way to Wujiao. They could not or would not speak Chinese, and just gestured mutely towards the top of the hill. Not surprisingly, I was soon lost amid the myriad trails running through the patchy forest, until I eventually fought my way up along goat tracks onto the next ridge, where I gained an even more impressive view of the Muli mountains. Going down the other side, I thought I could hear voices, and then came upon a group of wretched Tibetan nomads, sitting around some smouldering logs. They wore what looked like animal hides, had blackened faces and were eating meat off some bones they held over the fire. They eyed me suspiciously when I asked them the way to Wujiao, and I left without a reply, their dog snapping at my heels, as I headed further down into this creepy valley. By late afternoon my mouth was parched. Tramping down through the pines and blooming violet rhododendrons, I craved water and was wondering how much further it could be to Wujiao. I was expecting a place a bit like Yongning, with a few stores, a noodle shop and a guesthouse. My heart sank when I turned a corner and saw the collection of dirty, fly-blown log cabins. No sign of a guesthouse or shop. This was Wujiao? When I reached the first house I was so thirsty that I begged a drink of water from a Yi woman who emerged from one of the kennel-like interiors, and drank it straight down regardless of the grease-smeared bowl it came in and the bits of soot and leaves in the water. In her dirty black Darth-Vader-like robes, she stared at me and pointed further down the hill. “Wujiao...” she croaked. Thank God, this dump wasn’t it, I thought. But the real Wujiao wasn’t much better – just a collection of barrack-like buildings, with a single shop in a courtyard. Two Tibetan girls sat by the roadside sipping baijiu, and they invited me over to sit down and share their firewater. However, I desperately wanted water. I stumbled onto the wider dirt track that formed the main street of Wujiao, and in front of a kiosk met a small Tibetan man in blue Chinese working clothes. There was no running water here, he said, but he invited me into his shed and built a fire to boil me some hot water. I sat down, exhausted, but glad to have finally found someone who could speak Chinese. No sooner had I sipped my first bowl of sooty-flavoured water than I heard the sound of a car engine outside. Strange … I thought, becausde I’d thought there were no roads around here. I rushed out of the door just in time to see a Chinese Jeep screech to a halt in front of the kiosk. From it emerged three men dressed in odd bits of military uniform and clutching AK-47 machine guns. I froze with fear at the sight of the weapons, and prepared myself to be frogmarched off for interrogation about what I was doing in a forbidden area. A suavely-dressed Chinese man appeared to be the leader of the group, and he had a brookno-argument cockiness about him that reminded me of Chinese plain-clothes cops who’d done a stop-and-search raid on my bus to Guilin. When he saw me, the leader walked over and to my surprise held out his hand to give me a firm handshake, accompanied by a friendly “Ni hao! Ni hao!” 40 Where had I come from? He wanted to know. I told him about my walk over from Yongning and - thinking that honesty was probably the best policy - about my aim of getting to Muli. “Wow! That’s tough! I really admire your spirit,” said the man, and explained that he and his group were Party officials on an ‘inspection tour’. They’d been driving all day over some rough mountain trails to see some remote villages and were now on the way back to Muli county. It would take four hours by car, twelve hours on foot to get to Muli, he told me. As we were speaking, the Tibetan shopkeeper came running out with a live chicken, which he pressed on the Party official. The leader made a show of trying to refuse, but the shopkeeper insisted: “It’s really nothing, please take it …” he grovelled. I still felt nervous with the guns being toted around, especially as the two other goons were eyeing me very coldly. The young Party man in his leather bomber jacket and neat slacks, exuded a mixture of menace and uncontested power. He simply patted me on the back and wished me good luck for my trip to Muli. “Sorry we can’t give you a lift. Full up!” he guffawed. And with that, they got back in the Jeep and took off again, leaving me and the shopkeeper in a cloud of dust, but both of us looking relieved. I went back the shack inside to finish my boiled water, and asked about the old lamasery of Rendjom Gompa mentioned by Rock, which the shopkeeper told me was only a half-hour walk away. The track down to the monastery followed a river through a dramatically narrow defile with dangerous-looking overhanging cliffs. Out the other side, perched on top of a grassy hill was a small white building with a backdrop of mountains and pine forests. This was the one-man lamasery of Rendjom Gompa. I managed to crawl up the grassy hill to the monastery, dodging an aggressive dog on the way, until I found a doorway through a whitewashed wall that surrounded the monastery. The lama, Aja Dapa, beckoned me into his dim scullery, where a young boy helper prepared butter tea around the fire. Neither spoke much Chinese, but they treated me with simple, unforced hospitality. The lama was a burly Tibetan in a maroon robe, who laughed heartily when I passed on the message from the Yongning policeman. I drank my muddy butter tea and tried to comprehend the lama’s slurred Chinese. He said his lamasery was not worth seeing: the place was falling down, the roof leaked and there wasn’t anything of cultural value to display. The lama told me he had been in residence there for four years by himself, sent from the main monastery at Muli, now known by the Chinese name of Muli Da Si (“Big Monastery’) at a a place caled Wachang. After unlocking the heavy wooden door of his prayer hall with a massive bunch of keys, he showed me some faded, soot-blackened murals on the bumpy walls. In the dim light it was just possible to make out the reds and yellows of horses and gods against a black background. There were also pitted grey scars where the faces of deities had been chiselled and gouged off during the anti-religious fury of the Cultural Revolution. “You’d be better off going to the Muli Big Monastery, much more beautiful than here,” said Aja Dapa wistfully. I thanked him and trudged back up through the gorge to Wujiao. It was a rough old place. Young Tibetan guys wearing brown off-the-shoulder capes, stetsons and with the brass scabbards of long knives dangling from their belts, loafed around 41 a couple of pool tables, playing clumsy pot-shots that sent balls flying off the table. They stared at me with a wild intensity when I walked among them and there was a dangerous air of boredom, territoriality and brooding macho restiveness. It didn’t feel safe. There was no guesthouse or anywhere else to stay in Wujiao, but my new shopkeeper friend took pity on me. He laid a few bits of sacking on the floor of his cabin for a bed, and prepared me a disgusting evening meal of noodles in a grey soup, in which floated chunks of bone, gristle and fat. Two tall Tibetan girls in western-style trousers and jackets came and stood in the doorway to stare at me as I choked down the food. They shouted questions at me in yelping voices, and couldn’t take their eyes off me. “You look handsome,” said one of them. “But you’ve got a big nose!” sniggered the other. “Are you alone? Aren’t you afraid? Where do you come from?” I gave the stock replies in Chinese. “You’re an interesting person ...” said the first girl. As with the woman in Yongning, I wondered where the conversation was leading, but the two Tibetan girls, curiosity satisfied, then abruptly disappeared. I saw the girls again later that evening, when I went for a wander to explore the village. They were in Wujiao’s only room that had electricity; the TV viewing hall. The whole village, some seventy people, had turned out to watch some Hong Kong videos that had been dubbed into Mandarin. I wondered what these country folk made of the Kowloon high-rise estates and the British-style Give Way road signs they saw on the screen. When I returned to the shopkeeper’s cabin, he brought some of his mates round to look at me. They sat on the floor, swigging baijiu from a bottle, and pinching the hair on my arms. “You must have a lot of hair on your chest, and down there too, eh?” one said, gesturing at my groin. “What do you think of Tibetan girls? More pretty than English girls?” they asked. I turned over on my bedding, pulled a spare chuba around me and tried to give the hint that I wanted to steep. Eventually they got bored of talking about my strange big boots, my ugly body hair and my funny eyes, and they left. I tried to ignore the moonlight and cold wind seeping in through the gaps in the logs. Tomorrow would be a long day, and it was time to hit the sack, literally. Walking over the pass to Muli On the third day of walking, my destination was the town I’d been told was called Wachang. I didn’t know what I’d find there, but according to my old map it was the site of the old Muli monastery. In his account, Rock described a trip over a mountain pass infested with brigands, and his map showed two peaks: Mt Gibboh and Mt Ladze. These were presumably the two greyish rocky peaks that I could see from my walk in from Yongning, and they still looked quite a long way off. Since everyone said it would take 12 hours to reach Wachang, I set off bright and early after a revolting breakfast of boiled rice and stale eggs. I bought a couple of bottles of ‘Pilu’, a 42 sticky sweet barley sugar drink, and paid the ‘benevolent’ shopkeeper a whopping 20 RMB that he was now demanding for my board and lodging. So much for generosity, but I was too tired and impatient too argue with him. He assured me there was a primitive road all the way to Wachang, and sure enough, the switchback road headed up into the pine forest and around the sides of a steep valley. I soon left the log cabins behind me, and was alone in the hushed forest, tramping along to the sounds of rushing water, cuckoos, and the wind rustling the trees. With such a long walk ahead of me, I adopted the route march tactics my dad had told me about from his army days in Italy during World War II: a five minute break every hour for a smoke or a drink. Later in the day, after relentless tramping, I would look forward to these five minutes and relish every second before I had to hit the road again. As I climbed higher into the forest I began to feel nervous and lonely. My imagination went into overdrive. Why were there no local people walking this track? Why were those men in the jeep carrying guns? Were the local Tibetans not friendly? What if there were bears or wolves about? I picked up my walking pace and made sure the Tibetan knife was handy in my pocket. The only signs of human life were the remains of campfires in the middle of the road, and the many trees felled and left to rot. Around mid-morning I was passed by the jeep I had seen yesterday in Wujiao, taking the county officials back to Muli: it laboured past in a cloud of dust, the driver yelling “Couldn’t fit you in!” and the rest of them laughing at me. Their mocking transformed my nervousness into determination: I would show them that I could do it. A couple of hours later I reached a minor pass, denuded of trees, which led through into a second, immense forested valley. This canyon was blocked at the other end by the grey-blue crags of what I assumed to be Mt Gibboh. I could see the road trailing away, skirting the high sides of the valley, following every loop and spur for mile after mile. In the distance, a tiny horizontal line ran just underneath the top of the mountain ridge: was that the road, or a geological fault? It looked so far away and unattainable. For the next few hours I was stuck on that track through the valley and it seemed like I was making pitifully slow headway: trudging round one blind corner only to see yet another corner a mile ahead. At one point I was forced to follow a long loop up into a side valley: I could see the track emerge again ahead of me just a few hundred yards away, directly across the chasm, and yet I had to follow the long side detour for an hour; the sides of the valley were far too steep and densely forested to think about cutting across. I passed frozen streams and abandoned log cabins, and had established a good walking rhythm by the time I stopped for lunch beneath the crags of Mt Gibboh. As I ate the last of my supplies (a pineapple, some peanuts and a fig cake), I gazed up at the road that disappeared through a cleft in the mountain: that was my next goal. When Rock made the same trip in February 1924 his party spent the night camped near this place, sheltering from a blizzard under the crags as “snarling leopards” prowled around outside his tent. Were there still bears and leopards around, I wondered? When Rock crossed the 15,000 foot pass the next day he was on the lookout for brigands who were said to lurk behind the crags. 43 But in 1994 I saw not a single soul in this lonely valley. By mid afternoon I was running out of steam. On resuming my walk after lunch I’d had to go through the ‘pain barrier’ because my feet had become so swollen and aching from the incessant walking, and my shoulders were painfully sore from the straps of the cheap knapsack digging into them. Eventually, I found myself almost level with a snow-capped ridge to the right, and I gulped in cold air and shivered in the increasing wind. Just before I reached the pass, a wild-looking Tibetan woman emerged without warning from the pine forest. Wrapped in an animal skin cloak, she hurled abuse at me in Tibetan and pointed back in the direction I had come from. Then, just as quickly as she had appeared, she turned and walked back into the apparently empty forest, leaving me with an uneasy feeling about what lay ahead. By the time I did reach the pass. I was so worried about the time that I forgot to emulate the example of Rock’s Tibetan guides, who had leapt into the air and shouted “La Rgellah!” (‘The Gods are victorious!’). The pass was a turn in the road, which seemed to be on almost on top of the mountain. It had a few prayer flags flapping from a couple of stone cairns, where previous travellers had left items of clothing such as trousers flapping from some bare, windswept trees. On the other side of the pass, I was presented with the view that had captivated Rock sixty years ago: “... a sea of mountains, range upon range, like the furrows in a field, with a deep ravine from north to south, down which runs the Litang River...” There was, however, no sign of Muli. I could see nothing down below in the valley that looked like a monastery or a village. Just a lot of forest and scrub, and the many bends of the switchback dirt track going down into the depths of the valley. More immediately, I was faced with a steep descent through a forest: far below I could see a few cultivated terraces, which would surely take an eternity to reach if I stayed on the endlessly spiralling switchback loops of road. It was getting late in the afternoon, and in my urgency, I opted to bypass the switchback loops of the road and cut straight across to take a more direct route. As I struck out off the road, I stumbled through banks of thorns, over fallen logs, and slipping in the soft soil. My progress was slow and painful, but I began to notice changes as I quickly lost altitude: the air became warmer and there were smells of grass and trees instead of the ice cold wind and nervous sweat of above. And the forest was different: deciduous beeches instead of the spruce and pine of the previous valley. Rock wrote of this place: “We descended through a steep forest of spruce and fir, with rhododendron trees as underbrush; lichens and mosses covered trunks and boulders. All was hushed.” Down, down, I went, for an hour and another hour, until eventually I came across the first signs of human life: a forestry station, apparently deserted except for a sprinkler system in its nursery. I walked on, and further along I met my first humans: a road gang, fixing a washedout bridge. They stared at me and told me in reply to my questions that Wachang was three hour’s walk away. Three more hours! I was exhausted and had no drink left, so I drank some water from the stream and hoped it wouldn’t be contaminated by giardia or other bugs. It was still a long plod through the valley, my mouth still dry, my lips cracked and sore. The backs of my hands were burned red by the wind and sun, and my feet were painfully tender. But there 44 were encouraging signs: I came across a few Tibetan wooden houses looking like Swiss chalets, with verandas painted in cheerful blues, reds and yellows, and I was now following a clear stream running alongside the road. I daydreamed about what Wachang might be like: a real town, perhaps, with roads and restaurants and guesthouses with soft beds. I envisioned being sat in a cosy room with a plate of stir-fried pork and tomatoes with rice, and a bottle of beer... Just around the next corner, perhaps. Meanwhile, I had become sick of the sweet Pilu juice, and sucked on some dried plums to keep my raging thirst at bay. I saw a few more Muli Tibetans walking on the road. They wore simple farming clothes, and seemed indifferent to my presence. Somewhere in this vicinity. Rock had halted his caravan to despatch a messenger ahead with his card to the King of Muli. “It would not do to arrive in Muli unheralded,” he wrote. “Some of my Nashi men who had been to Muli several times were anxious that I give proper presents to the king, lest we be uncivilly received.” Rock noted that the Muli women wore “grey woollen skirts with fringes, and leather jackets. Their wealth of hair, much of it false, was decorated with garlands of gilded Sichuan rupees.” In the 1990s, however, the Muli Tibetans had adopted contemporary Chinese attire. There was a small ‘xiaomaibu’ shop in one of the Tibetan cabins along the roadside. The owner was sat inside sipping tea with his friends, all clad in Mao Zedong jackets and proletarian caps. He didn’t seem too surprised to see a foreigner walk down out of the mountains, and was more interested in my walking stick than me. There still seemed to be long way to go down the valley, but he directed me onto a path over a nearby spur, saying that Wachang was only 20 minutes away. My heart sank as I clambered up the hill, as it seemed highly improbable that there could be a real town on the sides of this valley. I pressed on, utterly worn out, and yet having to summon up the energy to lob stones at some aggressive dogs that ran out barking at me from the nearby houses. Then, around the next corner, I got my first view of Muli. About a mile away, high upon the side of the valley, there was a crenellated mountain ridge that looked like Rock’s ‘Mt Mitzuga’. Below it, I could just make out some roofs and some white buildings of what looked like a walled village. Muli monastery, surely? I was excited because this was Muli, my goal, but disappointed because I knew this tiny settlement would he none of the soft beds or fried pork that I had set my heart on. Ah, well - it was evening and there was nowhere else to go. I would force my presence on the monks and hope their hospitality was as forthcoming as that of Renjom Gompa. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried: the buildings on the hill were not those of Muli monastery, but of its neighbouring settlement of Wachang. After struggling up the red soil of a steep, garbage-strewn hillside. I entered the complex literally through the back door - a wooden frame gateway set in the whitewashed mud wall. This led into what seemed to be a school playground, and I worked my way between some concrete walls to suddenly emerge into the centre of a village complete with main street, stores, pool tables, a market area and, inevitably, a Communist Party headquarters. 45 It wasn’t Muli monastery! Nevertheless, this was my big moment. I was now sure that the mountain ridge above was the Mt Mitzuga from Rock’s pictures. Therefore, I knew I had arrived at what had once been ‘old Muli’. So where was the monastery? What I’d not realised in my confusion on arrival at Wachang was that the Muli monastery was a separate settlement, located on the other side of a ridge about an hour’s walk away. But that did not matter right then, I was just happy to be back in ‘civilisation’. Within an hour of my arrival in Wachang, I was the talk of the town. I found myself sat in a wooden shed that contained the village’s only restaurant, with my feet soaking in a bowl of hot water. I was devouring the feast of dishes set before me by its beaming Chinese owner: fried pork, rice, egg and tomato soup, cold sliced ham, plus tea and beer. At the same time, I chatted to the village’s doctor and the local English teacher from the Middle school. They confirmed that I’d arrived in Wachang, and that this had once been known as ‘Muli’. There was now a ‘new’ Muli town, shown 100km away further south on my modern map, but this was actually a town everyone knew as Bowa. It had inherited the county name when it was made the administrative capital of Muli county in the 1950s, and. The English teacher, a bright young Han Chinese man, promised to take me to see the monastery the next day. He’d never seen a foreigner before, and wanted me to visit his school to give a talk to one of his English classes. I explained to him about how my journey was in the footsteps of Joseph Rock, but neither he nor the doctor had never heard of him. When I mentioned that I also wanted to visit the other two major monasteries in the area, they shook their heads and grimaced. “All gone,” said the restaurant owner, Mr Zhang. “There’s not much left at Kulu now. It was all destroyed in 1958. There used to be 500 monks there, but now there’s nothing really to see. Up the road at Waerdje monastery there used to be 300 monks, but now there’s just a small prayer hall. And the big monastery here isn’t what it used to be.” The local people who gathered around me in the small shack had never seen a foreigner before and couldn’t believe that I’d walked all the way over from Wujiao by myself. “Aren’t you lonely by yourself?” they asked. ‘Weren’t you scared?’ ‘Did you meet any bad people?’ I didn’t care, I was in heaven. Food, drink, sitting down. I retreated to the luxury of a real bed, albeit a filthy one with unwashed sheets, in the ‘Post Office Guesthouse’. Through its thin walls I could hear the people in the next room talking excitedly about ‘the foreigner’. I soon started itching when I lay on the bed, but even the bedbugs couldn’t stop me from falling straight to sleep. A visit to Muli monastery I didn’t know quite what to expect when I went to visit the Muli monastery the next morning. One thing, however, was certain: I knew it would not be the centre of the old ‘lama kingdom’ any more. The Tibetan monasteries hereabouts had been destroyed by the Chinese in the late 1950s, well before the Cultural Revolution, because they were the centres of political as well as 46 religious power. Even Rock had the foresight to recognise that the days of Muli’s independence would soon be over. “These chiefs are now an anomaly in China, and before long they must become a thing of the past,” he wrote of local ‘tribal’ leaders such as the ‘king’ at Muli. And if Rock’s description is anything to go by, life for Tibetan villagers under the Muli potentate was often harsh and akin to serfdom. While Muli town itself was essentially a monastic community, Rock noted that the local villagers walked around with bowed heads because they were forbidden to so much as look a monk in the eye. The king, although described by Rock as amiable, ruled despotically, served by a court of Yellow-hat Buddhist monks. He kept the mummified remains of his uncle in a gilded shrine in the dining room, and had his own turds moulded into pills, which were dispensed to his subjects as a cure for their diseases. The Muli kingdom had been poor, its 22,000 inhabitants depending for food on a few terraces of wheat on the hillsides. Some peasants survived by cutting grass, which they sold to passing caravans for horse feed. There was some panning for gold in the Litang River, the proceeds of which went to the monastery. The small plots of land often did not produce enough food to feed the local people in Muli, and the impoverished became enslaved to the local monastery if they could not pay for their food. A local folk song lament went: “Eight or nine years work earns only 13 bags of rice, Sell all your property but still not enough to buy food. Give your wife and daughter away. And be whipped and thrown into, jail.” In this respect at least, Muli had improved since ‘Liberation’. I ate steamed bread and cabbage for breakfast in the morning, and met up with the local English teacher who had promised to take me for a visit to Muli monastery. We climbed a path that rose above the town, up to a burnt-out barracks and the remains of some trenches that had been used by the PLA to defend Wachang from marauding bandits in 1958. For several years after the so-called “peaceful liberation”, the Muli region continued to be plagued by bands of Tibetan robbers, who emerged from their mountain hideouts to raid places as far afield as far as Lijiang. “What happened to them when the PLA came?” I asked. “Defeated, of course!” said the teacher, grinning. Once over the top of the ridge and through an archway, we gained glorious views in two directions. To the west was the valley that I had descended from the pass the previous day, with the neat rectangular walled village of Wachang sitting just below us. In the opposite direction, to the east, green terraces descending into an even deeper and wider Litang River valley. Up here, the soil was brown and barren. Beyond, the mountains rose up, black, their details cast into shadow. And towering over everything were the mighty blue-grey towers of Mt Mitzuga, standing out against a deep blue sky. It was at this spot of which Rock wrote: “One of my soldiers took me to an open spur and pointed north, where upon a sloping hillside lay Muli, bathed in the sunlight. I also looked 47 upon a sea of mountains, range after range, like furrows in a field, with a deep ravine from north to south down which runs the Litang river.” Before entering Muli, Rock pitched camp here and sent a soldier in to the walled city to deliver his visiting card to the Lama King. Rock wanted to make a grand entrance. While waiting, he encountered his first Muli people - some Pumi women who came to sell barley as feed for his horses. The teacher told me there were now 50 young lamas in residence at the Muli monastery, young apprentices recruited from among the local Tibetan population. Most of them could not speak Chinese, the teacher told me. He didn’t seem interested in old Muli and was more interested in talking about which countries I had visited, and how much money I earned. The first building we came upon was a white hut straddling a stream. Within was a large yellow prayer wheel, turned by water power, sending its blessings spiralling into the blue sky. Twenty minutes later up the dusty track, we rounded the corner - and there was the main entrance Muli monastery. When Rock visited Muli in 1924, it was a 400-year-old lamasery complex containing about 300 houses and temples, and surrounded by a large circular white wall. Muli was one of three large monasteries, which along with Waerje and Kulu monasteries served as alternating homes for the Muli king. Rock entered Muli with his retinue of Siamese, Tibetan and Nakhi servants, bearing the gift of a rifle for the king. He was greeted by the ‘prime minister’ of Muli and some of the king’s other servants, all clad in official red robes. They escorted Rock into the palace square accompanied by the sound of ‘trumpets, conch shells, drums and gongs, besides weird bass grumblings of officiating monks.’ My own arrival at Muli monastery was a little more low key: I was greeted at the gateway by a wizened old lama and a group of teenage monks, who were clad in maroon togas and wearing green army plimsolls. The grey-haired lama also wore a natty glittery-pink waistcoat under his gown. Looking around, it was apparent that few if any of the original buildings remained from the once-great monastery. A few tooth-like protrusions of earth and brick were all that remained of the larger halls and palaces of Muli. It looked like the whole walled town had been completely razed to the ground. One major building had been rebuilt, a large white Tibetanstyle chanting hall which now had an orange-brown tiled roof. It had a square enclosed courtyard, around which were the dormitory living quarters for the young monks. Up the hill, beyond a sad scattering of ruins, a second smaller temple had been re-built on the site of the most sacred of the former buildings, the King’s personal quarters. Bathed in the spring sunshine, the white buildings had an unearthly air as they dominated the valley and mountains beyond. Muli was still a beautiful place despite the fallen glory. Filled with anticipation, I was led through to the courtyard, where young monks squatted over easels, bowing their heads and reciting from scrolls of sacred scriptures. Their chanting suddenly died down as they realised a foreigner was present. This was the culmination of my trip, and I felt slightly in awe of the place. On his arrival at Muli, Rock had been greeted by a Tibetan lama in a crimson robe who bowed deeply, presented the king of Muli’s card and made a formal speech of welcome. The 48 visitor was invited into the king’s domain. Passing pyramids of Mani stones along the trail, Joseph Rock made the grand entrance to Muli that he desired: “A row of courtly priests stood in waiting and bowed at my approach. I was conducted along the wall to a new house with a terrace, outside of Muli proper, and when I was comfortably settled I was asked when I wished to see the king, who was anxious to see the stranger.” Before metting the king, Rock changed out of his dusty riding clothes into something more formal and suitable for meeting the regent or ‘Gyalpo’ of this tiny kingdom. He took with him his Siamese boy servant, his Tibetan cook and two Nashi servants, all dressed in their finest. They carried Rock’s gift to the Muli king: a rifle with 250 rounds of ammunition. In the palace square Rock heard the weird sounds of trumpets, drums, gongs and conch shells emanating from within the main temple. He entered via an imposing gateway flanked by two large bundles of whips and was led inside, up a dark staircase and into an anteroom guarded by a greasy curtain “black from the marks of buttered fingers”. From here he was taken into the brightly-lit reception room to meet the king himself. Rock’s description of his first meeting sounds like the scene in Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard finally meets Colonel Kurtz: “On my approach he rose, bowed and beckoned me to a chair next to a small table loaded with Muli delicacies. He occupied a chair, facing me. I had great difficulty in distinguishing my host’s features as he sat with his back to the light coming from an open bay window, while he watched every muscle of my face.” The 36-year old king was known as Chote Chaba, - or ‘Hsiang tzu Cheng Cha Pa’ in Chinese. He was a heavy, rotund man with weak muscles - “as he neither exercises nor works”. And yet his manner was “dignified and kind, his laugh gentle and his gestures graceful.” The Muli king wore the traditional Tibetan lama’s red toga-like garment, which left the left arm bare. Beneath his tunic the king wore a gold and silver brocaded vest, and had rosary beads clenched in his left hand. The king was accompanied by his two brothers: the younger one also a lama, the elder a “coarse individual who looks more like a coolie than a prince,” according to Rock. There were also several lesser lama servants in the room, cringeing with bowed heads and clasped hands, waiting deferentially for the next royal command. When dismissed, they left the room walking backwards so as not to turn their backs on the king. When Rock started conversing with the Muli king, he quickly discovered how ignorant this all-powerful ruler was of the world outside the boundaries of his realm. The king did not know who ruled China, and when Rock said he was from America, the king asked how long it would take to ride there on a horse. Chote Chaba admired Rock’s binoculars, thinking they could see through mountains, and he also believed that thunder was made by dragons within the clouds. And yet despite the isolation of Muli, there were a few odd western touches to the King of Muli’s living quarters. A row of kerosene lamps had been hung up for decoration, even though there was no kerosene for hundreds of miles (“no matches or candles could be had here, and the black 49 greasy necks of the lamas - including the king and Living Buddha - showed that soap was not in demand” wrote Rock]. Rock also spied some coat hooks on the pillars - “like you would expect to see in a cheap German beer garden”. And the king had his servants to bring out a collection of old photographs that depicted scenes from around the world: the White House, Windsor Castle and Norwegian fiords, for each of which Rock was asked to provide an explanation. Later on, Rock was to come across a room in the monastery that was full of photographic equipment, all completely unused because the Muli lamas had no idea how to operate it. The gear had been a gift from a wealthy Chinese trader. Rock suggested to the king that the glass photographic plates would be better used to glaze the windows of his palace. Another room was fond to be full of clocks, all ticking away, even though none of the lamas was able to tell the time. On my arrival at Muli in 1994, the head lama invited me to look around the place and take pictures, waving his hand in the direction of the small rebuilt prayer hall, and then leaving me to my own devices, to wander about. Entering the main prayer hall I saw there was a 10foot high gilded Buddha. This was a poor substitute for the 50-foot high golden Buddha statue that had taken pride of place in the main temple when Rock had visited Muli. I wondered what had happened to the original big gold Buddha - presumably shipped off and melted down in the name of the people. Along the back wall of the prayer hall I saw a row of warlike gods, representing the spirits of Mt Mitzuga: they rode ferocious green and white lions and were armed with bows and arrows, or swords. Some of the gods had several pairs of arms and legs, others had crowns of skulls. All of the statues were covered in robes of the most beautiful hues of blue, orange, green and pink. Rock wrote of them: “A long flight of rocky steps led to the inner shrine, housing many gilded gods under yellow silk umbrellas ... in the centre was one swaddled in yellow cloth, entirely hidden, too sacred to be gazed upon.” Emerging from the gloom of the temple interior back into the sunlight, I left the main temple behind me and climbed up the hillside. I wanted to photograph the temple from the high spot where Rock had taken his panoramic picture of the entire temple complex, entitled: ‘The Lama City of Muli on the slopes of Mt Mitzuga’. I found myself standing in about the same spot where Rock had taken the photograph, and the contrast was startling. Now the encircling walls had gone, and the once tight cluster of white buildings was no more, with just a few brown stumps sticking up out of the arid earth where they had once been. It was a folorn sight. As I gazed at the remnants of Muli, a pair of swifts wheeled screeching over my head. The atmosphere of this new Muli made me want to leave: the ghosts of the old were still around, and it felt like they were pushing me away. I strode over the hillside to visit the only other rebuilt structure at Muli - the smaller prayer hall at what had once been the very apex of the circular white wall that enclosed the lama city. It was a beautiful, serene place, with a few apple trees growing around the entrance, where it was possible to just sit and contemplate the silence. The small building was cared for by a solitary monk who smiled and showed me the various effigies within. 50 When Rock visited, this place had been the king’s residence, known as the ‘Churah’. It was where Rock had taken his portrait photographs of the king sat on his throne, posing in his most ceremonial robes, covered with ornate blankets and surrounded by the best furniture and carpets in the palace (and with his three King Charles spaniels shooed away at the last moment). Using his cumbersome Eastman Kodak box camera mounted on a tripod, Rock also made portraits of the king’s household and deputies: his military chief, the chief magistrate, and the Living Buddha on horseback. Rock photographed the Muli king’s soldier bodyguards in their ceremonial robes, and also took a portrait of the Living Buddha of Muli - a boy of 18 in his splendid robes, mounted on a specially decorated horse. In return for taking the portraits, the king rewarded Rock with some bolts of cloth and a rosary bead bracelet that had been wrapped around the king’s left wrist. On his first visit to Muli, Joseph Rock was to spend three days there, being hosted and entertained by the king. After their first meeting, there were more exchanges of gifts - Rock gave the king some silver coins and three cakes of scented soap (“the greasy black necks of all the lamas, including the king and Living Buddha, showed that soap was not in demand.”) This display of largesse and Rock’s large entourage must have convinced the king that Rock was a man of high status. In a short time, Rock was to develop friendly ties with Chote Chaba that enabled him to return on several subsequent occasions and to use Muli monastery as his base for exploring further afield. The king was a useful friend to have, as his word was law in the surrounding districts. Rock heard that the Muli lama king had once been a living Buddha, and in 1924 he was surrounded by cringing lama courtiers. They crawled into his presence on their hands and knees and would not dare look at the king until he had touched them on the shoulder. On his first evening in Muli, Rock was invited to dine with the king. After delivering a lecture on life in western countries, Rock was enjoined by the king to partake in some Muli delicacies. However, Rock noted drily that the quality of the banquet dishes left something to be desired, and seemed to be at odds with the expensive golden plates on which the food was served. The meal included servings of rancid yak cheese that contained bits of yak hair. To drink there was the usual butter tea [”like liquid salted mud”] served in exquisite porcelain cups with silver filigree. Rock was given some of the ‘choicest items from the king’s larder,’ which included a chunk of ham that was so worm-ridden that, according to Rock, it literally walked around by itself, propelled by “squirming maggots the size of a man’s thumb”. Rock had his servants throw the rotten meat to some Muli peasants ho were waiting outside his room, and observed that they fought “like tigers” over it. The banquet also included hotpot and vegetables, with a dessert of pure cream, which the king lapped up from the bowl with his tongue. After dinner, Rock retired to his room. With the sounds of drums, gongs and the deep bass voices of some of the lamas reciting their prayers in the background, Rock took time to read the king of Muli’s card. The Muli king’s full title was: “Self existent Buddha, Min Chi Hutuktu, possessor of the first order of the striped tiger, former leader of the Buddhist church in the office of occupation commissioner, actual investigation officer in matters relating to the affairs of the barbarous 51 tribes; honorary major general of the army and hereditary civil governor of Muli. Honorific: Opening of Mercy.” During my stay at the Muli monastery, there was some kind of ceremony taking place. The monks gathered in the main prayer hall and the entrance doorway was now shielded by a rug-like heavy black curtain, in front of which two young monks stood guard. From within came the sound of mass chanting by the forty or so monks. They squatted or sat in rows of low cushions arranged on the floor. Their chanting was accompanied by occasional outbursts of thumping on the drum and the blowing of a horn and ringing of sacred, highpitched bells. The incessant chanting varied in both volume and pitch and had a mesmeric quality. Sometimes it was long and drawn out, and the rise and fall of voices in unison reminded me of the football anthems sung by the crowds on the football terraces at Anfield. One of the chants had passages that were uncannily like “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. At times, the chanting would become faster and louder, rising to a crescendo that was accompanied by drums, gongs and horns. Then it would abruptly die away to a background of deep baritone murmuring, presumably done by a senior monk who must have had excellent control of his diaphragm. The repetitive chanting would then start to gradually build up again, this time in a different cadence and with different emphasis. While all this was going on, young monks were running back and forth, in and out of the prayer hall, bringing in bowls of butter tea from the scullery for the chanters to drink. This was done without any regard to continuity - a monk chanting solo might stop in mid sentence to have a very loud and slow slurp of tea, and then recommence as if nothing had happened. At other times, a monk would appear in the doorway and blow a conch shell, from which a forlorn wail echoed over the courtyard and beyond, into the hills. The chanting went on all afternoon and into the early evening. Before dinner, I took the opportunity to visit some young monks in their dorm rooms. Their living arrangements were just as I would have imagined boys living at a British public school. The young monks slept four to a room in bunk beds, and they had pictures of motorbikes and pop stars torn out from Chinese magazines stuck up on their walls, while one or two had radios or cassette players in their rooms. The young lads were very inquisitive, following me around and crowding round me eagerly every time I entered a room. They would fight for the privilege of sitting next to me, and liked to finger my jacket and inspect my books and diary as if these things were of great value and importance. They sniggered awkwardly amongst themselves when I asked them questions, and they appeared to be quite scared of the senior ‘prefect’ monks who enforced discipline, and who would appear from time to time to utter some sharp rebuke. After a night spent in a mouse-infested guest room at Muli monastery I felt a twinge of regret when the time came for me to leave. I said my farewells to the few people who were hanging around the monastery ‘shop’ and walked back around the hillside to Wachang. On my return, the town seemed like a much jollier place after all the sombre chanting and the ghostly memories invoked by the ruins of the monastery. The Muli monastery had become a pitiful place, only a shadow of its former grandness, whereas the modern village at Wachang seemed to be a vibrant place of the here and now. At one end of the bumpy main street (there were no cars or roads to Wachang, the nearest highway was down in the valley) 52 was a primary school, where children could be heard rehearsing Tibetan peasant songs. At the top end of the street, the Muli Middle School kids yelled out of the windows at me. Wachang, whose name literally meant ‘slate tile factory’, had become a typical Chinese small country town, complete with a single concrete high-rise building topped with a satellite dish. It had a Post Office, a Tibetan guesthouse and a store that sold the basics of rural life: packs of dried noodles, knives, bottles of baijiu and pictures of fluffy kittens. As I walked up the main street I was called over by a rough-looking guy who was squatting on his haunches by a wall. By now I was getting a bit fed up with being pestered by everyone in town. However, something in the man’s demeanour made me go over to him. “ID card!” he barked out, as I got near him, and he whipped out a police badge from his jacket. “Where have you come from ..?” he demanded to know, as he flicked through my passport. When I told him I’d walked over from Yongning, he asked to see my Closed Area Permit. I played the part of the dumb foreigner, apologising profusely and showing him the page of my passport with my Chinese visa and its many official stamps. I told the cop that I would be leaving first thing the next morning to go back to Lugu Lake. This seemed to placate him a little. He made an ostentatious show of studying my passport and visa, grunted, and then handed me back the passport and waved me on my way. Before I left Wachang, I kept my promise to the English teacher and went to give a talk to his English class at Muli Middle School. I’d been expecting an informal chat with a class of about thirty kids, so it was a bit of surprise when I walked into the playground to be confronted with the whole school assembled there. There must have been about 200 pupils sitting on benches around a specially erected wooden platform, all of them gawping and pointing at me in excited anticipation. The teacher had rigged up his karaoke machine as a makeshift PA system and my hesitant Mandarin words emerged from the speakers in muffled, triple echo. “Teach them a few words of everyday English,” the teacher mumbled to me. So I introduced myself and started by telling the pupils that instead of yelling “Allo!” to every foreigner, it would be much nicer for them just to say “Hi!”. A few in the assembled ranks started repeating “Hi” to each other. There was an awkward pause and I then toyed with the idea of teaching them all to say “Have a nice day”, but settled instead on the more mundane “How are you?”. And that just about exhausted the snotty-nosed crowd’s rote learning ability for the day. “Tell them how important it is to learn English,” hissed the teacher, “Many of the pupils are not enthusiastic.” So I tried to explain to the crowd that English was the international language, and would be useful in many different fields. But to myself I thought - what use would English be to a village full of Tibetan kids who would mostly end up working in the fields, and who would probably never meet another foreigner? Just as I was getting into my stride, telling the kids about our strange English habits (“Never ask an English person how much they earn ...”), the teacher told me to wind up my talk with a song. The only one he thought we all knew was Happy Birthday, which I sang to puzzled stares. Without further ado, the gathering broke up, and for the rest of my stay in Wachang I was plagued by shouts of “Hi! How are you?” from every kid in town. 53 While I was visiting the school, I went for a peep at the spartan classrooms, and gave a reading of ‘The Farmer’s Buried Treasure’ in English to another one of the classes. The school seemed to be the social centre for the kids of Wachang. They were at the windows, shouting, from first thing in the morning until I retired to my room at night. The classes finished officially at 5pm, but the pupils hung around in the classrooms all evening, doing their homework, chatting and practising their disco dancing steps to seventies western music played on an old cassette. I realised that the Muli kingdom I had come looking for was no longer there: Modern Muli was a world away from the kingdom of cringeing peasants of sixty years ago, when the villagers lived in fear of the monks. It was still poor, but not wretchedly so: everyone had enough to eat. There were secret policemen, but the one who had accosted me on the street later invited me over for a game of cards. Muli was now just another small and overlooked corner of the Great Harmonious Chinese Family, with all the fruits of ‘Socialism With Chinese Characteristics’. The theocratic, despotic rule of Tibetan lamas had been replaced by the all-pervading influence of the Han Chinese cadres, and the Party’s pragmatic slogans of socialist construction. The fabric and culture of Tibetan Muli had been eradicated in the name of Mao, and now the old kingdom had been forgotten by the young generation, whose materialistic outlook was similar to that of millions of other Chinese. Sat in the Wachang restaurant shack that night, I met a ‘Minorities Expert’ from Chengdu. I could tell he wasn’t from Muli because he was wearing a tie. He told me he’d been sent from the Sichuan Minorities Institute to document the fast-disappearing traditions of the more remote mountain tribes in the province. At last, I thought, the Chinese were doing something to preserve the cultures that they had so long tried to suppress. But this man had little time for Muli and its people, whom he dismissed as just dirty Tibetans. “That’s why I only eat at this restaurant, because it is run by a Han Chinese and therefore the hygiene is OK. The Tibetans don’t even wash their hands,” he told me conspiratorially. The ‘minorities man’ was just using Muli as a stopover on the way to visit some other matriarchal Mosuo people, further to the north. He warned me not to venture into the hills around Muli because of the danger of being robbed by itinerant Tibetan thieves or attacked by wolves or bears. “Bears? Was that why the men I saw in the jeep were carrying guns?” I asked him. ‘No, that would just be for shooting birds,’ he replied. But it didn’t seem likely to me. You don’t use an AK47 to bag pheasants. Saying farewell to Muli My original plans for re-tracing Rock’s travels around Muli were, with hindsight, wildly overambitious and unrealistic. ‘Destination Konkaling’ had been the unofficial theme of my trip to Muli when I was planning it in the comfort of my living room. I’d had the blasé notion of continuing in Rock’s footsteps from Muli to ‘Konkaling’ - the trio of sacred mountains about 100km to the west, which had been the former lair of the bandits in Rock’s day. 54 At Wachang I went for a recce up the ridge above the town to survey the countryside for a possible route. And I realised that walking to Konkaling from here was just not on in my present circumstances. The sheer scale of the terrain, plus my lack of supplies and equipment ruled that out. I’d been lucky to get as far as Muli carrying nothing more than a knapsack full of peanuts and biscuits. That sort of minimalist approach would not get me to Konkaling: a journey there would require camping equipment, plenty of food and a stove, and preferably a few companions for safety. As I looked over the rise and fall of the huge hills, it suddenly became clear that this was the end of my Muli trip. From here on, it would be homeward bound all the way, and I would have to leave Konkaling for another day - or for someone else to re-discover. I told myself it was probably just another Chinese outpost by now, something like Wujiao or Wachang, with concrete apartments, karaoke parlours and roads clogged with logging trucks. But it still nagged me that I wouldn’t really know until I’d been there. On his last day in Muli, Rock was honoured with a special sending-off ceremony at sunset by the monks to ward off any bad spirits. Under the window of his room at the monastery, the lamas gathered in a circle around an oak brush bonfire. They were wearing their full ceremonial crimson robes and capes, and on their heads they wore the yellow-crested hats, like cock’s combs. With a beating of drums, crashing of cymbals and the blowing of the bass notes on huge 12-foot long trumpets, the lamas, lead by a ‘ghiku’ dispelled the demons by throwing images of them into the flames. Early the next morning, Rock again met with the king of Muli, to say his farewells. The king presented Rock with a tray loaded with parting gifts - among which were a golden bowl, two Buddha statues and a leopard skin. The king accompanied Rock to the gates of his palace, where his appearance in public caused the lowly folk of Muli to flee in terror. The officials, magistrates and lamas of Muli formed up in a line to the gate and bowed to Rock as he departed just before sunrise. As Rock rode up into the hills along the track heading back towards Lugu Lake and Lijiang, he marvelled at the “vast sea of ranges, pink and yellow, with black slopes indicating fir forests ... the deep valleys lined on both sides with snowcapped crags.” Muli lay on the hillside below him, “beautiful in the morning sun, an oak forest surrounding it like a sombre garland.” The visit to Muli had obviously left a deep impression on Rock: “A peculiar loneliness stole into my heart as I rode through the firs draped with long yellowish lichens. I thought of the kindly, primitive friends who I had just left, living secluded from the world, buried among the mountains, untouched by and ignorant of Western life.” Heading back along the same route on which they’d come from Yongning via the Gibboh Pass, Rock’s party ascended up to a camping ground at 12,000 feet amid a fir forest, where they rested for a night as they prepared to re-cross the Gibboh pass. “There I let my dreams take me back once more to Muli, that weird fairyland of the mountains, where its gold and riches of the Middle Ages contrast with butter lamps and pine torches.” On a smaller scale, , I received a send-off from Muli similar to Joseph Rock’s: he was presented with mandarins and walnuts by the king’s secretary, and was escorted by some 55 Muli soldiers. I was given a bag of oranges by the town’s English teacher, and escorted to the start of the track by the restaurant owner, Mr Zhang. “I really admire you,” he said, shaking my hand as we stood on the rim of the valley. “You can really eat bitterness, and not many people can do that these days.” I thought how absurd this was, a man eking out a living in a remote corner of China, describing a city softy like me as tough. I thanked Mr Zhang as sincerely as I could and left him with my walking stick, which he had much admired. Unlike Rock, I didn’t go back the way I came from Yongning, but went south instead, down the Litang River valley, intending to get to the county’s administrative centre of Muli- Bowa about sixty miles away. It was a relatively simple three hour descent down a walking track to get to the bottom of the valley, passing a few Tibetans leading their mules and their tinkling bells until I caught sight of my first logging truck on the ‘highway’ that ran along the floor of the valley. The valley was a vast curving spread of wheat terraces, surrounded by the snow-tipped Muli peaks. I was able to flag down the first truck that came along, and hopped aboard to sit next to the surprised but welcoming Chinese driver. What followed for the next two hours was a white-knuckle ride as the overloaded truck wallowed in low gear up the twisting, dusty dirt road. There were often steep drops off the edge straight down to the river, and the driver steered the truck precariously to within a few inches of the edge. Therefore I was quite relieved when his truck broke an axle going over a big pothole, and stopped, giving me a chance to hop off. It didn’t take me long to get another lift: logging trucks were passing every few minutes minutes, each loaded down with five or six massive timbers of up to a metre in girth. At this rate, I thought, Tibet would have no forest left in ten years time. This time, I got my lift on a supply truck, and sat on some boxes on the back, marvelling at the panoramic views my perch afforded of the spectacular mountain scenery of the valley. I felt a mixture of exhilaration and terror as the truck hugged the corners, and I gazed back at the receding form of Mt Mitzuga. My fellow passengers riding in the back of the truck were a trio of grumpy Chinese labourers, who seemed indifferent to both scenery and danger. About half an hour further on, high up on the mountain road, the driver blared his horn at a group of brightly-dressed Tibetan lads trying to hitch a lift. The truck stopped and they also clambered on the back. They were a boisterous, rosy-cheeked bunch, on their way to Bowa to sell some traditional Tibetan herbal medicines in the market. Most of theTibetan lads wore dark red cloaks with stetsons, fur hats or trilbies. They beamed at me and one of them nipped me on the arm with his greasy finger and thumb, asking questions in fudgy Mandarin: Had I been to Lhasa? No? What a pity. Would I like to buy some Tibetan medicine? He pointed to a gazelle horn sticking out of his sack. No, thanks. The rest of the Tibetans gathered round, putting their arms around me and pulling at the hair on my arms: “So ugly this hair! Hey, we can give you some oil to get rid of it...” said one. “Are you married? Do you think Chinese girls are good looking?” asked another. “Would you like to sleep with one?” I began to feel menaced by these guys: the younger ones seemed 56 friendly but the older ones now looked coldly at me. And they all carried those Tibetan daggers at their waists. They continued their barrage of questioning, wanting to look in my bag, and for me to show them my camera. I fobbed them off, and for a while they changed the subject. “Has your wife got a like yours?” one of them asked. “No,” I replied. “That’s just as well, because yours is big enough for two people!” Laughs all round. “Which is better, England or China?” asked another. They’ve both got good points, I said. I noticed they referred to themselves as Chinese rather than Tibetan. “What do the English think about giving Hong Kong back to us Chinese? They must he really unhappy!” “Most British people couldn’t care less,” I said. Then we got back onto the subject of money. They wanted to know how much English money I had, and what an English pound note looked like. I told them I didn’t have any. They jeered and said they didn’t believe me, and then wanted to know what was in my money belt. “You foreigners are rich. Give us 50 yuan for food. We haven’t got any money!” one of them complained. I didn’t reply. “It’s very dangerous around here, you know. Thieves, bad people. You could get stabbed or shot. Aren’t you afraid?” one of the cockier and more aggressive kids asked me. When I said no, another one replied: “You should be - but we can protect you, if you give us 50 yuan.” He leaned over me, putting his face close to mine: “This guy here is a kung fu expert, he could kill you with his bare hands,” he said. “Have you ever been stabbed or shot? Do you know what it feels like? Someone round here could kill you very easily,” he now had his arm around me. I mumbled something about not being able to spare any money. “What about your camera? How much is that worth?’ shot back one of them. It was like being attacked by a pack of dogs. “How about you swap it for this knife?” prodded the Tibetan next to me. He pulled out the blade from its sheath and held it an inch away from my face. “Look, it’s really sharp...” and he held the blade so the tip touched my skin. They all laughed, and one of them said: “He’s scared.” He was right. They had my undivided attention now, and I noticed with detachment that the Tibetan holding the knife had a locket of the Dalai Lama around his neck. I looked around for help and to see what the other passengers were doing. The Chinese labourers were crouched near the cab of the truck and looking the other way. We were in the middle of nowhere: no villages or friendly policemen to seek help from. I sucked in my stomach muscles involuntarily, expecting a sudden thrust of a blade. Fortunately, at that moment the truck juddered to a halt, and the truck driver climbed out to inspect a wheel. The tense atmosphere was broken, and I leaped up, pulling my bag with me, and jumped over the side of the truck. The driver was busy fiddling with the wheel nuts and I padded round the side of the truck, my mind racing and my hands and legs shaking, wondering what to do. Should I stay here? Would these Tibetans muggers jump off here too, if I didn’t get back on the truck? Could I run into the forest and hide? I had to think quick as the driver was now getting back in the crowded cab and starting up the engine. He leaned out and waved me back on board. When I told him that I was going to walk, he asked me what the problem 57 was. I murmured something about the ‘bad egg’ Tibetans on the back wanting to take my money. He thought for a moment and sniffed. “Get in,” he said, and I squeezed into the cab beside him with the other two passengers. When we were rolling again I told him what had happened, and he just laughed. “Oh, they’re just a bunch of kids, nothing to be afraid of.” Nevertheless, he stopped the truck a few minutes later at a corner and unceremoniouly booted the Tibetan guys off the back of his truck. They grumbled, but complied. I sighed a huge sigh of relief. It had been close. Returning to civilisation It took me another three days of hitching on trucks and riding overcrowded buses to get back to Lijiang. I loved riding on the trucks: stood up on the back in the open in the sun, facing ahead and looking over the driver’s cabin I felt like I was a panzer commander. I wore a scarf over my face to keep the dust out, which along with my baseball cap and sunglasses disguised my foreign-ness and helped me avoid the now routine stares of passers by. It was tiring though, and after a couple of hours of standing up I would try sitting down on the flatbed, only to be bounced jarringly around with every pothole and end up covered in dirt. The scenery was spectacular down the Litang River valley; the same epic hills as surrounded Muli, covered in pine and spruce, and barely inhabited but for a few Tibetans and Yi eking out an existence from the narrow terraces of barley. But as we travelled further south the landscape became progressively deforested, until there was only a little bit of scrubby bush left on the skeletal hills. On my first night I stopped over in Bowa-Muli, a Tibetan-Han outpost in the hills. Its only interesting feature was a department store with a Tibetan section selling prayer wheels, portable shrines, chubas and multi-coloured woven belts. It did, however, herald my return to ‘Laowai!’ territory, where all the sinicised Tibetans gave me gormless stares and screeched “All-ooo!” at me as they went past. I didn’t care, and in fact I felt better for being back in a ‘Chinese’ area. I felt safer and I liked knowing what to expect - the Chinese attendants in the guesthouse had the same matter-of-fact practicality as anywhere else, which felt reassuring after the friendly but unpredictably wayward treatment I had received from the Muli Tibetans. In Bowa-Muli I spent the night in one of the creepiest lodging places I’ve ever stayed at. Not wanting to miss the early morning bus, I took a room at the Muli Bus Station Guesthouse. This proved to be a prison-like bare concrete cell on the bus station courtyard, with no windows. I felt like Steve McQueen in his Great Escape cooler cell. And just to make it better, the manager locked me in to the room when it got dark - for my own safety, he told me, as there were many petty thieves in town. I just had to trust his word that he ould unlock it in time for the 6.30 am bus in the morning. My second day on the road turned into a nightmare of a journey on an overloaded bus that lurched along pencil-thin mountain roads from Bowa to Yanyuan. I boarded the ancient bus at the crack of dawn, when the dogs were still howling and the cocks half-crowing. There was a rowdy scrum of would-be passengers by the door, through which I managed to squeeze onto a ledge near the driver. 58 It was already standing-room only when I boarded, but the horde of peasants were still climbing in through the windows bringing their sacks and satchels with them. Eventually, I found myself hemmed in by a knot of unkempt Tibetan labourers with brown teeth and shaggy hair, as the bus shuddered into life and rolled out of the forecourt. About half a mile out of town the ribbon of nice smooth tarmac ran out and the road reverted to gravel. The bus coasted and bumped down a ledge that had been hacked and chiselled out from the face of a sheer vertical cliff. The overloaded vehicle rolled and swayed from side to side. It was a long drop from the edge of the road straight down the steep sides of a scrubby canyon into a void of boulders and landslides. I was already scared, but looked on in horror as ahead the road-ledge skirted around a large outcrop of overhanging rock jutting out from the cliff. The road surface at this point sloped about 20 degrees downwards away from the cliff, with only a flimsy, flattened crash barrier between us and oblivion. I whimpered and turned away, unable to watch; it would take only one misplaced rock or a skid on a patch of loose gravel to send the whole bus sliding straight over the edge. When I looked again, we’d cleared the outcrop and I prayed that it would be the last such threat. Unfortunately, this was to be just the first of many road nightmares. For the next four hours I squirmed in my seat in extreme discomfort, feeling a mixture of terror, boredom and leg cramp as I was hemmed in by chain-smoking peasants. I tried not to look out of the window each time the bus veered round another blind corner, swaying between some rocky protrusion and a dizzy drop-off, but I was scared to distraction. I couldn’t read a book or think of anything else while the prospect of a violent and messy extinction was so close at hand. This was a different kind of fear from the calculated risks of walking the Tiger Leaping Gorge: at least there I’d been in control of my own destiny. Here, I was helpless, at the mercy of an insouciant driver and his clapped-out wagon. It didn’t help that we could see ahead, across the loops in the mountain road, to sections of road where the edges had collapsed and the remains shored up with piles of packed stones. And when we stalled on the middle of a rickety wooden bridge some 500 feet over a chasm, or when the driver tried to overtake an overloaded logging truck whose timbers had tipped the vehicle back onto its rear wheels, I bunched my fists, closed my eyes and wished I was back at home. The other passengers seemed curiously untroubled by these perils of the route. When we reached a mountain pass that marked the end of the Muli hill country, the passengers disembarked for a pee-break with a nonchalance that I thought was either extreme ignorance or the ultimate in stoicism. I sipped a can of coconut juice and revelled in the simple pleasure of breathing, and of being alive. After the pass, the rest of the day’s journey was a welcome anticlimax, a relatively stress-free trundle down a gravel road to a nowhere town called Yanyuan, where I cooped myself up in my hotel room to escape the stares and ‘Allo’s!’. The evening was passed, like so many others in Chinese small towns, with a bottle of the weak local beer and a bag of peanuts, sat in front of the TV. The TV news showed the same items every night: scenes of Chinese Party leaders in conference, sitting inert behind rows of long desks with their lidded cups of tea beside them as some Party bigwig lectured them on a 59 point of the economy; or the rural scenes of peasants spraying their crops with weedkiller as the announcer described a new productivity scheme. The national news gave extensive coverage to visits from leaders of obscure countries: Prime Minister Li Peng meets the president of Surinam, and mouths the same platitudes about greater co-operation and stronger ties between developing countries. And as in the west the news finished off with a human interest story: a postman in Hunan who is retiring after 40 years of dedicated service. His post-round seems to involve fording flooded rivers and scaling muddy hills to get the mail through to grateful villagers. These TV items were interspersed with unannounced adverts for air conditioners and cold remedies. With the advertising industry still in its infancy, the Chinese TV commercials relied heavily on simple computer graphics and booming, God-like voice-overs to say how grand their products were. I hitch hiked on another truck from Yanyuan to Ninglang. More rough roads, but nothing as scary as the “road from hell” along the cliffs from Muli. At one point we had to cross the Sichuan-Yunnan border, and there was a checkpoint. The driver told me to keep out of sight of the paramilitary border guards by lying down on the tray of the truck. As I hid there, I heard the driver talking to the guards while getting his papers checked. Suddenly, a shot rang out: BANG-thud. And another: BANG-thud. Thinking that I was being flushed out of my hiding place I raised my head to look. It was the bored guards fooling around with a pistol, engaging in a bit of target practice at a tree trunk. Back in Lijiang, I felt deflated because my forward journey was over. All that remained was to retrace my steps via Kunming and Guilin, back to Hong Kong. Without the goal of getting to Muli, my everyday, real-world worries resurfaced: nagging thoughts of bills to pay and jobs that needed to be done back home. I’d been a long time in China, perhaps too long: my mind started playing tricks on me. I found that the background babble of Chinese voices began to sound like snatches of English: I would turn suddenly on the street when I thought I heard someone behind me say “... yes, sausages ... that’s the one...,” only to see a couple of old Chinese ladies or a pedicab driver. My bedraggled appearance after a week on the road attracted a few odd stares from the westerners who were in Lijiang. When I went to shave off my stubble and use some muchneeded shampoo in the shower, it felt like I was washing off all my experiences of Muli. I emerged squeaky clean, to enjoy a feast of steak and chips in ‘Pete’s Cafe’. On the cafe wall in Lijiang I read a traveler’s handwritten notice: ‘I have a ‘Great Locos of China’ to swap. It’s a vast volume and a really riveting read. The chapter that refers to the engines that ploughed the route from Beijing to Chiangjao in the North-East is really quite fascinating - a remarkable account. Anyway, this especial edition is ready to he swapped. If you’re interested please contact Trevor (Guesthouse 3, room 402). I’m not too picky about the book I swap it for, but if anybody has a copy of the current edition of the Modern Model Railway Makers Manual or the Casey Jones 1957 Annual, I’ll be jubilant.’ Underneath this notice was another hastily scribbled addition: ‘Room Mate Exchange ‘We want to swap anything with two legs for Trevor, a happy little British boy. He enjoys train watching, plane watching, bird watching, wears knickers and keeps a fascinating diary. Send resumes and enquiries to D&K, room 402.’ 60 The cafe sold ganja pancakes and little bags of hashish, which pleased Alan from Blackpool very much. He had travelled down from Beijing and had very little nice to say about China. All the Chinese he had met were cheating, unfriendly slobs. The women were hideously ugly and the men had disgusting eating habits. The food made him retch and the beer was like piss. Twenty four hours later I was sat in the pokey Vietnamese coffee shop in a side street of Kunming. This time around, their crusty bread rolls seemed delicious and the aromatic fresh Vietnamese coffee gave me a much-needed hit of caffeine. I was back in a real city, where shops had nice things, where there were real restaurants and hotels and taxis, and where the girls had legs and figures that turned my head. I bought a soft-sleeper ticket to Guilin and spent the next two days on the train by myself, enjoying the relative luxury of the compartment. As we cruised at a leisurely place through the karst landscape, I tried to read the last of my paperbacks (Tai Pan - never mind the quality, feel the width), but I was already thinking ahead to the next destination of Joseph Rock that I would like to visit. Muli Postscript Joseph Rock was to make several more visits to Muli and its king in the 1920s, using it as a base or a stopping off point on the way to places such as Konkaling (Yading) and Minya Konka (Gongga Shan). Rock enhanced his reputation with the thousands of botanical specimens he collected, preserved, catalogued and despatched from Muli via Likiang to Washington. Muli also provided Rock wth the material for his influential articles for the National Geographic, which he portrated as a Shangri-La –like lost kingdom. The king of Muli did not fare so well. As Rock had predicted, the age of the local kings and their fiefdoms was over. Chote Chabe was killed in 1934 by a Chinese warlord who had designs on the Muli gold mines. He was superceded by another living Buddha born in Litang. Muli is still off the beaten track. Few tourists go there because it is a ‘dead end’ and there are no great scenic or cultural attractions. It has no great mountains like Yading, no great rivers like the Nujiang. There are no well preserved ‘old towns’ or colourful ethnic minorities like those of Lijiang. There is just isolation, poverty and a dead end road. A few Chinese trekkers pass through the valley from time to time, on their way to Yading via the back door route of the Shuiluo river valley. The Muli monastery still stands alone on the hillside, and a few more of its buildings are slowly being rebuilt. With the coming of the internet, Muli is losing some of its isolation and mystique. You can Google Muli and read about forest fires in the area, or about how migrant workers from Muli are now in places as far away as Guangzhou. The monks of Muli have a website now too, giving some information about their Buddhist teaching. The Muli local government also has its own website, with a few photographs of Muli’s scenery and of Pumi people celebrating in their ethnic costume. However, if you want to go see the scenery of Joseph Rock’s Muli, you will have to go soon. There are plans to build hydro-electric dams in the Litang River valley, flooding much of the valley and submerging monasteries such as those one at Waerdje and Kulu. In a sense, Muli will once again be a lost world, only this time the relics will be submerged rather than obscured. 61 CHAPTER 5: THE GLORIES OF THE MINYA KONKA. Joseph Rock starts off his October 1930 National Geographic article “Glories of the Minya Konka” with a typical flourish of exaggeration: “Strange as it may seem, hoary old China still holds within its borders vast mountain systems wholly unknown not only to the western world, but to the Chinese themselves.” What a load of guff! Far from being ‘wholly unknown’, by the early 20th century, the 25,000 foot high mountain peak of Gongga Shan in western Sichuan - known then as Minya Konka - was already well known to the Chinese. It had also been visited by several Europeans including Rock’s fellow botanist Ernest Wilson, in 1908. In his article, Rock describes the epic journey he made to a remote mountain of sublime beauty. It was an article that could well have inspired the Shangri-La legend as expounded by James Hilton in his novel Lost Horizons. The scenarios are similar, and Hilton’s novel came out in the mid 1930s - shortly after Rock published his articles in National Geographic. Rock writes of his journey to a tiny monastery located in an isolated valley, where the ‘Konka Gompa’ temple is perched above a glacier that flows the foot of a huge mountain. According to Rock, this monastery was cut off from the rest of the world by snow-bound passes for six months of the year, and its views of the mountain were so spectacular that a visit was deemed by Buddhists to be the equivalent to ten years of meditation! Rock says he was inspired to make the trip to Minya Konka after glimpsing a view of this ‘mysterious’ peakfrom afar, while exploring the Konkaling mountains near Muli in 1928. Observing the peak from the south west, at a distance of about a hundred miles away, Rock claims to have been smitten by the sight of this ‘unknown’ peak. “I decided then and there to spend the following year exploring Minya Konka,” he writes. And thus it was that in the spring of 1929 Rock mounted an expedition to Minya Konka from his base at Ngluluko near Lijiang. Unlike his ‘quick dash to Muli’, this was to be a major undertaking, and Rock planned for a journey of several months and to be accompanied by an entourage of 20 Naxi porters, bodyguards and helpers and 46 mules carrying supplies. To reach Minya Konka, Rock’s caravan once again had to travel north-east from Lijiang, via Muli, on a journey that would take several weeks over terrain of epic scale. It would involve the crossing of the vast canyons of the Yangtze and Yalong rivers, and surmounting several high mountain barriers to reach the domain of the ‘Minya’ Tibetans. In contrast to the ‘uncouth, impudent’ and aggressive Tibetan robber tribes that he’d previously encountered around Muli, Joseph Rock was to find the Tibetans he met in the Minya region to be ‘a gentle race’. The Minya Tibetans were a settled, agrarian people who lived in fear of marauding Xiangcheng Tibetan bandits. They built watchtowers and fortress-like solid stone houses to resist the attacks. While visiting Minya Konka, Rock based himself in the Yulonghsi valley, near the town of Tachienlu (now known as Kangding). However, despite its proximity to the Minya Konka peaks, the mountain was not visible from Yulonghsi. Along with the other peaks in the range, Minya Konka was hidden away behind a high ridge that had to be crossed by the Tsemi pass. 62 “Anyone unfamiliar with the geography of the country could, even with the latest maps in hand, pass up this valley without suspecting the existence of the Minya Konka range, crowned by one of the loftiest peaks of western China... And yet, these majestic snow peaks lie just beyond the high eastern valley slopes of Yulonghsi,” Rock wrote. When I started planning my trip to Gongga Shan I found that, unlike my trip to Muli, there were a few modern maps available for the Minya Konka region. A quick perusal suggested two possible ways of getting to the mountain - from the north, directly out of Kangding, via a valley that starts at a village called Lao Yulin, or from the west, via a settlement called Liuba. This latter approach would entail travelling in huge counter-clockwise arc to reach Yulonghsi - a two-day road trip westwards from Kangding, crossing a high pass called Zheduo La, and then turning south along a minor road for about fifty miles until reaching a turnoff for Liuba. None of the modern maps actually showed a settlement called Yulonghsi, but there was a valley marked on the map in roughly the same the place as where Rock said it should be. And so September 1995 found me landing back in Hong Kong, with a plan to try re-trace Joseph Rocks’ journey in reverse, starting from Kangding and trekking south via Minya Konka, if possible, all the way to Lijiang, via Muli. Rock had spent months making the journey to Minya Konka and had the support of a huge team of porters and mules for transport. I naively believed that I could do the same trip by myself in a couple of weeks as a backpacker, taking only a tent, sleeping bag and a few days worth of food. I didn’t linger for long in what was then still the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Despite it being autumn, the city was still uncomfortably hot, crowded and noisy. To escape the heat, I dropped my passport off to get a China visa at the China Travel Service office in Tsim Sha Tsui, and took off to what I thought would be the relative quiet and cool of the grassy hills of Lantau Island, where I camped out for a night on Sunset Peak. Although I was up at an altitude of almost 1000 metres, it was still hot up in the hills, and thanks to Hong Kong’s smog-laden air, I saw neither sunset nor sunrise, just a soupy gloom. Down below, in the murk, Hong Kong’s new airport was being constructed offshore at Chep Lap Kok. On the bus back to the Mui Wo (Silvermine Bay) ferry terminal I found myself sitting behind a couple of young British labourers, who were working on the new airport construction site. They were young working class lads from the north, bragging loudly about getting pissed and shagging the local birds, and almost every sentence they uttered had the word ‘fuck’ in it. Sat on a bus full of otherwise impassive and demur Chinese passengers, I cringed at the behaviour of my compatriots and felt embarrassed to be British. After a night in one of the eight-bunk rooms at the STB Hostel in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon, I picked up my China visa from the remarkably efficient CTS and was on my way. I flew into Chengdu, where I stayed at the Traffic Hotel by the river, right next door to the long distance bus station. From here it was an arduous two-day road journey to Kangding in an old bus grinding up from the plains of Sichuan over the old road across the Erlang Shan pass. We had to stay overnight in a filthy hotel in the grim lowland town of Ya’an at the foot of the hills. 63 On the second day we really started to gain altitude as the route followed the winding road up to the 4000 metre Erlang Shan pass. This ridge was the traditional physical barrier between China and Tibet. The road went up through precipitous gorges that carried cascading torrents of rivers past hideously ugly and primitive 1960s-era cement factories and hydro-electric dams that had been plonked unsympathetically into this epic and wild landscape. The bus groaned and shuddered up the switchback road, past sections where whole chunks of the hillside had fallen away, causing the bus to detour around massive slabs of rock and mud that lay in the middle of the road. The stop-start progress was excruciatingly slow, and sometimes our bus was halted behind a stationary tailback of scores other trucks and buses as convoys of green PLA trucks were given right of way to pass us. The road, ostensibly one of the main highways linking Sichuan with Tibet, became something resembling a switchback dirt track as it reached its highest point in the mountains. We finally lurched over the summit of the Erlang Shan road in grey mist, and began an equally tortuous descent towards the Dadu river and the famous town of Luding. In the late 1990s, the Chinese were to bore a 4km long tunnel through Erlang Shan, cutting out the worst parts of the summit road, and also cutting the travel time between Chengdu and Sichuan down to a single day. But in 1995 I was still doing it the hard way. Our bus paused briefly in Luding, enough for me to catch a glimpse of the famous old iron chain bridge. According to revolutionary legend, this 18th-century structure had supposedly been captured from the Kuomintang in an audacious, near-suicidal attack by the Communists during the Long March in 1935. Luding was a vital river crossing for the Mao’s Red Army forces because it was their only way of escaping northwards away from the armies of Chiang Kai Shek’s KMT. In the Communist propaganda telling of the story, Luding bridge was captured by a daring squad of Red volunteers who crawled hand over hand along the chains of the bridge (stripped of its planks) above the river into a hail of bullets fired by KMT soldiers on the other side. More recently, historians have found that the Luding bridge crossing may have been much less dramatic. Rather than being heavily fought over, witnesses say the bridge was defended by just a small group of local men armed with muskets, who were in the pay of the local warlord, Liu Wenhui. Liu had been paid off by the Communist envoys, and he had agreed to put up only token resistance to the Red Army. Whatever the truth, the bridge has been preserved as a monument to history, and now sits in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable collection of ugly modern buildings. From Luding, the road to Tibet resumed its upwards trajectory and ran up an increasingly narrow canyon that also contained a narrow but turbulent river whose waters surged over huge boulders. At one point there was a Tibetan stupa by the river - the first sign of Tibetan cultural influence. And then, in the late afternoon I finally arrived at my jumping off point of Kangding. In his writings, Rock has very little to say about the town then known as Tachienlu (a sincised version of the town’s Tibetan name, Dartsendo). Rock barely mentions Kangding in his article about Minya Konka, except to say that he sojourned there for nearly two weeks, 64 overcoming his disdain of western ‘holy roller’ missionaries to stay at the China Inland Mission. In Kangding, Rock replenished supplies, developed his colour negatives and gave his mules a rest. One of the photographs accompanying his article shows the town clustered along the banks of the river, looking little different in layout from the modern Kangding - although all the buildings appear to be single story traditional Chinese houses with upturned tiled roofs. Standing out from them all is the imposing structure of a Christian church, built in the European style with large arched windows and an ornate Gothic façade complete with spires and towers. It is certainly as Rock outs it: “one of the most imposing Christian churches in this part of the world”. The church was one of several built in the region by French Catholic missionaries such as Père Jean- Baptiste Ouvrard in the late 19th century. This particular one was the Church of the Sacred Heart, completed in 1912 by Ouvrard, who we shall meet again later in connection to his activities in the Salween and Mekong valleys further west. The mission stations were usually built one day’s riding distance from each other, and missionaries penetrated as far as remote Tibetan towns such as Batang, hoping to convert the heathen Buddhists to Christianity. At the time of Rock’s visit there were several missionaries in Tatsienlu, as well a handful of western traders. The missionaries ran schools, hospitals and orphanages, but they failed to win over many Tibetan converts. They must have had some success because there is still a Catholic church in Kangding, a gaudy rebuilt edifice by the riverbank, said to be host to 200 practising Christians. I visited the church on one of my later trips through Kangding, and was given a tour of the place by a friendly caretaker. In contrast to the tackily painted exterior, the interior was a restrained and serene place, where I found wooden pews stacked with hymnals illustrated in an ornate pre-Vatican II style. At 2600 metres in altitude, Kangding reminded me of Arthurs Pass in New Zealand. A small town squeezed into a narrow, steep-sided valley between two sets of high mountains, Kangding was still the cultural border between Han China and Tibet. While most of the town’s population was Han Chinese, in 1995 there were still enough Tibetans in town to make it feel like I had finally arrived at the gateway to Tibet. Founded on the confluence of two rivers, Kangding has for centuries been an important trading centre, where tea and tobacco were brought up from China, and where Tibetan herdsmen brought their leather, furs and woolen wares down from the highlands to trade. In 1908 the American consul described ‘Tatsienlu’ as a small town of 9000 people, mostly Tibetans. “A large trade is done here in rhubarb and musk, the latter taken from the small hornless deer plentiful in this part of China. Of the exports of this district, musk is the most valuable ... next in importance of exports is wool. This trade of late has diminished, owing to the disturbances on the border. The coarse sack-like wool cloth ‘mu-tsz’ is worn by all Chinese coolies, while a fine grade dyed red called ‘pulu’ is the clothing of the higher class of the Tibetans. The lower classes, such as yak and pony drivers, wear entirely undressed sheepskins. About 45,000 pounds of wool is received annually in Tatsienlu.” 65 Gold was also traded in Tatsienlu, but as the consul noted: “The Tibetan confines mining to washing the alluvial sand in the river beds. He is averse to outsiders mining in his country, his antipathy to them being very great. The Tibetan wishes to be let alone and strongly resents foreign intrusion.” Kangding was also a key link of the ‘tea horse road’. Tea was a much sought-after commodity by the Tibetans, and bricks of tea were brought up to Kangding by coolies from the tea plantations of the Sichuan plain: “The tea packages are made up in rolls about 3 feet long. Each carrier will take on his back from five to thirteen, according to his age and strength,” the US consul noted. Kangding is now part of the Ganze district of Sichuan, but at the time of Rock’s visit it was at the outer edge of the Chinese world. Tibet itself was an independent state, and its borderlands were a turbulent area of power struggles between Chinese-backed warlords and the then considerable power of the lamas, backed by Lhasa. In the 1930s, ‘Tatsienlu’ was part of a now-defunct province known as Sikang, which comprised the Tibetan borderlands adjacent to Sichuan. These had come under Chinese jurisdiction several decades prior to the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1951. Kangding was and still is - one of the most important centres for Kham Tibetans. Of the many different tribes of Tibet, the Khampas are renowned for their aggressive, freewheeling cowboy-like spirit. Elsewhere in Tibet they have long been feared as violent bandits, or admired as tough warriors. And when I arrived in Kangding in 1995, Khampa men could be seen swaggering through town in their Tibetan chubas, exposing one shoulder to the cold mountain air. They wore their hair long and shaggy, and many had the traditional threads of red wool tied in their hair. All the Khampa men carried traditional Tibetan daggers at their waists in ornately decorated silver sheaths. Some wore them ostentatiously on their belt, while others - even those wearing western style suits, would occasionally give an unintended flash of their knives while bending over or when opening their jackets. In 1995 I stayed at the only place in Kangding open to foreigners - the gloomy and bureaucratic Kangding Hotel, located at the top of the town, right next door to the Anjue Si monastery. I spent a day pottering about the old town, poking my nose into the many little shops and restaurants. Walking by the river, I bumped into a friendly group of monks who had just returned from living in India. They were escorted by a young English-speaking woman from Sikkim, who invited me to join their group in a trip out to the hot springs at Er Dao Qiao. Later in the day I visited the other big monastery, Nanwu Si, on the outer edge of town. In Rock’s article he calls it the ‘Thunderbolt Monastery’, and it appears to be set in open countryside. In 1995, however, the monastery was hemmed in by four-storey apartment blocks, an army barracks and a messy truck repair workshop. The monks there were friendly, though, and reacted eagerly when they saw my pictures from the 1920s - jabbing their fingers at the old images of the Konka Gompa and reassuring me that it was still there, and still worth a visit. Trek Day 1: Kangding to Djesi La 66 My initial plan was to take a bus around the western side of Gongga Shan to the turnoff for Liuba, and then walk up the Yulonghsi valley that runs parallel to the Minya Konka range. But I chickened out. Stood in the cold, dark and clamorous Kangding bus station at 6.30am among a horde of jostling Tibetans and Chinese piling on the rickety bus, I lost my nerve, and decided I simply could not face another day on a cramped Chinese bus. Instead, I trudged miserably back up through dark and deserted streets of Kangding and decided that I would take a walk out to the west of town to see if I could find a way to approach the mountains from the east, via Lao Yulin. As I walked and through the town at daybreak, Chinese kids were setting off for school, and they laughed at me, the foreigner, and taunted me with the usual cries of “Allo! Laowai!” It was an uphill hike out of town along the main Sichuan-Tibet highway, until I branched off on a side road that took me along the left hand side of a small river and up along a valley dotted with a few decrepit buildings and shacks. Soon I was walking on my own and got my first glimpse ahead of me of a row of rounded snow peaks, to the southwest. At last, I was in mountain country! After an hour or so I arrived at what I presumed was Lao Yulin village. It was a depressing sight: just a concrete shell of an abandoned woollen mill, some slum apartment blocks and a few stone shacks dotted about the riverside. There was also a grim brick bath-house built around some hot springs, and the woman attendant there added to my pessimistic mood when she informed me that it was impossible to get through to Gongga Shan because of the heavy snows at this time of year. I nevertheless continued up a rough gravel road towards a higher village of stone Tibetan houses. Struggling under the weight of my backpack and gasping because of the altitude, it quickly became apparent to me that despite my ambitious hopes, there was no way I could trek by myself to Gongga Shan. I stopped for a breather outside one stone house that had some mules grazing in the backyard. When a Tibetan man appeared, I asked him out of interest how long it would take to get to Gongga Shan on foot. He sneered at the idea. “On foot? Ha! Nobody goes all the way on foot. It’s too far. You have to take a horse!” So I asked him how much it would cost to hire horses to go to the mountain. The answer that came straight back was 15 yuan a day for a horse for me, and 20 yuan a day for his services as a guide, plus 20 yuan for his horse. Did I want to go? I was taken aback by his sudden offer and asked how long it would take to get to the mountain. And was it possible to get to the monastery? Yes, he knew the Konka Gompa monastery - he called it ‘Gongga Si’. “Three days to get to the monastery from here, so six days there and back. Including a horse for me it would be around 400 yuan in total,” he said. “Well? Going or not?” I liked the look of his horses and so I agreed on the spot for him to act as my guide. The Tibetan man’s name was Gerler. He was short and stocky, with wild hair, deeply tanned brown skin and stained yellow teeth. Gerler invited me into his house to wait in his spartan living room while he got the horses ready. There was little in the room - just some solid wooden chairs and tables, and a few family portraits of his Tibetan relatives in a picture frame. Some of the older black and white photos looked like they were from the sixties or seventies, and showed what I presumed was Gerler’s family dressed in Mao suits and caps, posing in a group with formal, unsmiling expressions. 67 Outside, a small crowd of kids and other youths gathered to watch as Gerler selected two ponies and started to hammer horse shoes onto their hooves. He then brought out two Tibetan saddles, which were wooden A-frames covered with thick rugs. My horse riding experience was limited to donkey rides along the beach at Bridlington and Scarborough. What was I letting myself in for? I wondered. Before I had time to ponder too much on this, Gerler was strapping my backpack onto one of the saddles and urging me to get on the horse. “Zou ba!” (“Let’s go”). He held out the stirrup and I inserted my boot and swung myself gingerly into the saddle. What an odd feeling, to have what seemed to be a huge, lurching and unpredictable living and breathing beast beneath you as your mode of transport. I grasped the reins nervously, and Gerler told me that if I wanted to stop the horse I should pull the reins in, thus pulling the horses head back and upwards. And if I wanted to make the horse go? He lifted up the end of the rope, which had a red tip, and flicked the horse’s rump with it. “Cho!” And the horse seemed to shoot out from under me, lurching forwards along the dirt track, dragging me along, bobbing and leaning over, trying to keep my balance on top. It was not a pleasant experience, and I didn’t feel like a natural rider in the saddle. Gerler climbed in the saddle and followed after me, soon catching up and passing me as he spurred his small horse to a canter by digging in his heels and waving the red tipped rope. My horse started to speed up as well and I groaned in fear as I held on for grim life. “Don’t let the horse see the red rope,” hollered Gerler as we cantered crazily up the rocky trail. “When he see the rope he will try to gallop.” I gathered up the rope tether in my hands and concealed the end in my clenched fist. Eventually our horses settled into a steady walking pace, but I still felt that my tenure in the saddle was extremely precarious. As we headed up the lane, past the houses of Gerler’s neighbours, he called out a greeting of “Gadoh!” to the people in the yards, and told them where he was going. “Taking the foreigner up to the Gongga Si - back in a few days!” One guy asked how much he was getting paid. “Four hundred!” said Gerler proudly. The reply was a rising and falling “Ooh-ah-oh” that I was to hear used many times by the local Tibetans, and which seemed to be a way of saying “Yes, I hear you.” The first section of the dirt track was in quite good condition, and was part of a motorable road being constructed to go over to the Hailuoguo glacier on the eastern face of Gongga Shan. After some ascent, however, we left the village behind us and forked off onto a smaller mud track to the left and over a bridge. We were getting out into the open hills. It was spitting rain as we continued up a gloomy and barren valley. The treeless landscape resembled the moorlands of Yorkshire, but on a much grander scale. Occasionally we passed some black yak-hair woven tents belonging to herders, but there seemed to be no people about. We plodded on for a few hours and I gradually became a little more confident in the saddle but also a lot more uncomfortable - the stirrups were too short for my long legs, which were bent back on themselves, making my knees and calves increasingly cramped and painful. With the low cloud, there was little else to see except the walls of the valley and the occasional black dots of yaks or dzo (a yak-bull cross) grazing high on the hillsides. 68 Gerler led the way, wearing his stetson and with plimsolls on his feet. He would turn around in the saddle and give me a smile from time to time, asking if I was alright. I wasn’t, but didn’t say so. My horse seemed very skittish and uncooperative. It would stop from time to time to munch at grass or take a drink of water, and when I tried to spur the beast on again it would bolt off again at the first sign of the red rope, with me tugging grimly on the reins until Gerler caught up to rein in the recalcitrant beast. And so it was in this manner that I spent much of the afternoon of the first day. By the late afternoon I was worrying about where we were going to stay for the night. The bare hills showed no sign of any habitation, and I wondered whether I would be pitching my tent somewhere out here in the wild. Then, as we reached what seemed to be the top of the valley, Gerler started whistling, and I saw a black dot on the distant landscape ahead of us, which proved to be a yak herder’s tent as we rode closer. The occupants - two young men and a woman - came out and stared at us, and Gerler called out to them with a kind of Tibetan yodel. Around the tent there were stacks of cut branches for firewood, and also a large mound of yak dung - presumably to be used as fuel for the fire. There was also a pair of very vicious barking dogs - Tibetan mastiffs - tethered up to a wooden bar outside the door of the tent. The dogs were working themselves up into a rabid frenzy at the sight of us, and I fervently hoped the chains tethering them up would hold. “This is my brother’s tent,” said Gerler. “We will stay here for tonight.” It was a blessed relief to dismount from the horse and to be able to walk around and stretch my numb and aching legs - I hadn’t realised how saddle sore I’d been until I got off the horse. I stepped warily around the barking dogs and we were ushered in through the doorway of the dirty black yurt-like tent. Inside, when my eyes adjusted to the dark and smoky interior, I saw that the tent had an earthen floor, pressed smooth and dry by constant pressure from the tent’s inhabitants. The layout was centred around a fire, on top of which sat an iron frame holding a large sooty black cauldron. There was a hole in the tent roof immediately above the fire to let the smoke escape, but this was not a very efficient ventilation system. Quite a bit of smoke lingered in the tent, forming a blue-grey layer that sat above waist height. All the more incentive, then, for me to squat down on one of the greasy hard cushions on the floor and suck in some of the clear and clean air. When I raised my head too high it entered the smoke layer, provoking in me an instant bout of coughing and making my eyes go bloodshot. So I squatted on the floor and peered around me. The sides of the tent were packed with sacks of what looked like straw or twigs. There were also some pew-like low wooden benches, on which there were some dirty rolled up mattresses. A few kitchen utensils were hung up around the fire - a ladle, a few metal pots, and a poker. And the five humans inside the tent now shared the interior with several yak calves that had been herded into one corner and kept in place by a rope as they scuffled and peed. I was glad to be near the fire. It was almost nightfall and the temperature had plummeted to below freezing. A faint breeze blew through the loose weave of the yak hair tent material which had gaps in big enough to poke a stick through. Nevertheless, it seemed to stop much of the rain that now seemed to be falling. 69 I started to unpack some bits and pieces from my backpack and soon had an array of billy cans, cups, bowls, knives and forks and packets of food arranged around me, items that proved to be utterly fascinating to the Tibetans. They watched as if mesmerised as I used some boiling water from the cauldron to make up one of my dehydrated sweet and sour chicken-with-rice meals in a bag. It all seemed so much more fussy than their simple fare of potatoes and noodles boiled up in a large pot. The Tibetans spoke in their own Kham dialect, which I did not understand, although I was able to tell Gerler a few things in Chinese about myself and my Auckland home, which he translated for the benefit of the others. They passed around the few pictures I had brought, uttering admiring cooh’s and ahh’s as they fingered pictures of the beaches of New Zealand. Gerler told me that our Tibetan hosts were about to strike camp and move back down the valley to lower altitudes for the winter. This was their summer pasture, he explained, and in the first few days of October the weather was becoming too cold for the yaks. The young female Tibetan woman spoke quickly and melodically to the others, and they told me she said she had been working in the wool factory down at Laoyulin until it shut down. Now she was out of work, and there was little else to do but go back to herding yaks again. It got dark and the Tibetans started to talk quietly among themselves, no doubt catching up on family gossip. One of the young guys produced a cassette player from somewhere, and they played a few wonky tapes of Chinese karaoke music as we sat in the dark. They smoked, took a swig or two of baijiu from a bottle, and we sat around the crackling fire. By 9pm it was time for bed, and I decided it was way too cold to be sleeping outside in my microlight tent. Instead, they arranged a couple of old rugs on the earth floor for me, and watched again in fascination as I unpacked my sleeping bag and Thermarest and prepared for bed. They were gobsmacked when they saw me taking out my contact lenses, and asked me what part of my eye I had just removed. I settled down in my corner of the tent, with a puppy tethered near my feet and the yak calves huddled just a couple of feet away, still peeing, and giving off a very distinct bovine aroma. And thus I fell asleep, despite my thirst caused by the smoky atmosphere of the tent. Trek Day 2: Djesi Pass -Yulongxi It snowed overnight, but I slept surprisingly well on the floor the yak herder’s tent, thanks to my Thermarest. When I went out of the tent the next morning I was amazed to find myself in a snowy landscape, with clear sky revealing many icy peaks that I hadn’t been able to see with the low mist the day before. The early morning sun lit up the tips of the peaks with orange rays, and as I stamped my feet and pounded my arms by my sides I pitied the horses and yaks for having to have stayed outside overnight in such icy conditions. I made some porridge for breakfast in the tent, and my hosts made butter tea and rice porridge. Then we saddled up and were on our way up the gentle incline of the valley again. Ahead of us there was a neat pyramidal peak, which Gerler told me was called Jiazi Feng Rock took a picture of the same peak and called it Chiburongi. We plodded through the brilliant white landscape of the valley and saw more snowy peaks both ahead and behind us. We were approaching the Djesi La pass, but first the valley assumed a Y-shape, and our horses took us up a trail to the right hand fork. I was glad to have a guide with me, as I would have become hopelessly lost at this point. 70 At the top of the ‘pass’ we entered another Y-shaped valley, and I saw the left arm headed into the midst of the snowy peaks and looked like a very lonely and desolate place to be. This must have been the Riuchi valley, which had been explored by Rock almost as an afterthought to his visit to Minya Konka. He described it as running almost parallel to the lower inhabited valley, and running directly into the mountain peaks. How I admired Rock’s daring at this point. I couldn’t imagine anyone venturing into that wilderness by themselves, especially at a time when there were no maps of the area. Interestingly, Rock also notes that these lower snow peaks of around 20,000 feet can be seen from near Kangding - not Minya Konka itself, as many people mistakenly believe. As we ascended it became colder and the biting wind blew harder. I had to put on my jacket and pull down the earflaps of my cap. There was a bit of snow underfoot, but not enough to prevent us crossing the pass. And there was still wildlife up at these high altitudes - I saw a flock of grey doves, a black flycatcher-like bird, and there were a few bluebell-like flowers poking out of the snow. We shifted over to the left in this plateau valley, and soon the tip of what must have been Gongga Shan came into sight above the hills - a most impressive and daunting vista. Behind us now, all we could see was range after range of snowy peaks. We were well and truly into the Minya Konka massif, and approaching the crest of the pass. With Gongga Shan passing in and out of view, our horses jigged up to the flattish summit of the Djesi La, marked by the usual array of cairns, Mani stones and prayer flags. I wanted to stop and take photos but Gerler hurried me on, saying that we had a huge distance to travel today. At the top of the pass we dismounted and led the horses down out of the snowfields and into a long, curving valley, which seemed very green but was absolutely deserted. In 1929, Rock had encountered deep snow on his first, northbound, traverse of the Djesi Pass. “Our mules and horses suffered terribly as they floundered belly deep in drifts,” he wrote. “On the north-eastern side of the pass the snow lay still deeper. Our yaks, however, seemed to enjoy the situation greatly: although fully laden, they would lie down in the snow as if it were the most comfortable place in the world! These yaks and their owners seem to be kindred spirits. They behold the same dreary landscape, bare hills, and grassy valleys; endure long winters and short summers, with no spring or autumn to speak of. Ignorant of the outside world, these people seem entirely contented with their hard lot. They are born, live and die, not only in the same skin, but, one might almost say, in the same clothes, with those insect associates from which the Tibetan is never free. The minute a nomad enters a room, the air smells of yak butter, sour milk and yak dung smoke, to say nothing of the fragrance peculiar to an unwashed Tibetan himself.” Heading downhill beyond the pass, I felt a sense of exhilaration - the green landscape, surrounded by white peaks and topped by the blue sky was utterly beautiful and other worldly. And there was something mesmeric about the tinkle of the horse bells. As we walked on for a few more hours I began to imagine that I could hear voices in the distance. I looked around but we were still all alone in this desolate valley. Then I heard faint music or singing coming from somewhere - but again it seemed to be an auditory hallucination. When I stopped and listened carefully the only sounds I could hear were the beating of the wind and the clanking of horse bells. 71 Gerler set a relentless pace, and it wasn’t until the middle of the day when we reached lower down in the valley that he relented and allowed us a brief stop. We halted near a small stone wall shelter, in the lee of which I tried to get my hexy stove lit to boil some water for a cup of tea. While I was still faffing around with my lighter, Gerler gathered together a few twigs and sticks of wood, and soon had a vigorous fire burning that put my weedy flame to shame. Within a few minutes he had water boiling in his blackened pot and threw in a few lumps of brick tea to make ‘Da-Cha’ - a surprisingly thick and pungent form of green tea. He also gave the horses a break, taking off their bridles and saddles, after which they harrumphed and rolled about on their backs in the grass, as if to rub their itchy manes. Then they wandered off to graze the fresh and untouched grass nearby. When it came time to set off again they were reluctant to leave and we had to chase them up the hillside, gasping for breath in the thin high altitude air as we pursued them. It was near this spot that Rock had also paused at a large cairn to take photographs of Minya Konka. He had climbed the sides of the valley up to a spur at 16,500 feet, from where Minya Konka appeared as a triangular peak, “not unlike one of the pyramids of Egypt.” As we continued on down, the weather ahead of us didn’t look too good. We could see sheets of cloud dumping grey curtains of rain in the lower valley, and shortly after we set off, these clouds reached us and it started to snow lightly. The weather made the horses unsettled and mine started playing up as soon as I got back in the saddle. Gerler was in a hurry and started flicking his mount with the rope and trotting off ahead at speed. Mine followed, but in a wild gallop that threatened to unseat me. I reined in the horse but Gerler urged me to keep up, and gestured at me to whip it with my rope. When I did so, the horse went berserk, galloping off with me at hair-raising speed, and before I knew what was happening I’d been thrown off to the ground and landed on my elbow in a pile of yak poo. I was badly winded, but fortunately nothing was broken except my camera strap. I wiped myself down and quickly remounted the horse, thanking my lucky stars that the fall had occurred in a turfy area and not on one of the rocky patches of ground. I wouldn’t want to break an arm here, two days from the nearest hospital. We carried on down the dark and increasingly boggy valley, past a few stone cairns and some prayer flags. Up ahead I saw some small animals hopping about and thought they were rabbits. Then as we got closer I saw they were vultures - scraggy creatures that were flapping around and squabbling with each other over the carcass of a crow. They didn’t seem at all afraid of us humans as we passed them. As if this was an omen of bad luck, I was soon thrown from my horse again after it bolted once more in response to Gerler’s cries to speed up. As before, I was shaken, but lucky not to break anything. However, this time I refused to remount, and walked alongside the recalcitrant horse for a while, which made me realise what a fast pace the horses were making compared to human walking speed. It wasn’t long, though, before Gerler urged me back into the saddle. Behind us, a menacing mass of dark grey cloud loomed over the pass, its wisps of vapour spilling over and curling towards us like tentacles, as dramatic as anything in a Steven Spielberg film. I remounted and we hurried along, but we could not outrun the scudding clouds. Soon we were completely enveloped in a grey-out and could barely see more than a few feet around us. It started to snow heavily, with tiny hard pellets of snow stinging my eyes, so I 72 dismounted and started to walk. Gerler started to hitch the two horses together to lead them through the blizzard, but my horse took fright as he was adjusting the straps, jerked away violently and snapped its tether. The horse went beserk, bucking like a bronco and trying to shake off its load of saddle and my backpacks, and then ran off into the mist and was soon swallowed up in the grey murk. Oh great, I thought. My horse has just bolted and taken my gear with it. And now here we were, stuck in the middle of oblivion in a snowstorm, and I had nothing but what I was stood up in. Fortunately, the blizzard-cloud soon blew over, and the mist lifted as abruptly as it had enveloped us. The errant horse came into view, cantering in a circle around us, still spooked, but now a little less hysterical. It galloped towards me as if intent on running me down, and Gerler leapt out and grabbed the reins as it passed and soon had it under control. Crisis over, we continued on foot down the valley into clearer skies, but the little storm episode had left me exhausted and uneasy. We aimed for a spur, around which we descended in a narrow defile down into wider valley. And yet there was still no sign of any other people. As we plodded on through the relatively milder climes of the lower valley, Gerler became more talkative. He asked me about the costs of cattle and sheep in New Zealand. He told me he had 60 head of yak. Did we all have guns in New Zealand? You needed to have a gun if you were a yak herder, he told me, because there was so much cattle theft. He knew a lot about this because one of his brothers was a policeman. Another was a driver who plied the route between Kangding to Lhasa. His other brothers and sisters were yak herders in Lao Yulin. Gerler told me all this as he kept up a brisk walking pace, insisting that I had to crack on as it was imperative we reach the village of Yulongxi by nightfall. By now it was already mid-afternoon and we still hadn’t seen any signs of other people or any buildings. The only evidence of human activity was a roofless stone ‘sheep pen’, where Gerler said he had once camped on a previous guiding trip on which he’d accompanied a group of nine Americans with twenty horses. As we reached more level ground he urged me to remount, but almost straight away the skittish horse bolted again, bucking wildly and throwing me onto a patch of stony ground. Third time unlicky – this time I was left with a badly grazed and bruised right hand. Then Gerler did what he should have done right at the start, and let me ride his horse, which was much more placid, to the point of being dull. I bumped along, nursing my sore hand while grasping the reins with the other. Gerler struggled and fought with my rebellious horse and we continued on round another spur, and saw our first signs of human life this side of the Djesi pass - a dirt track and a stone house. Although it was a plain and simple building, what a pleasant sight it seemed after a whole day of desolate valley. There were yaks and sheep grazing on the grassy slopes of nearby hills, and the dry stone walls and grey stone buildings reminded me of the wilder corners of the Yorkshire Dales. Soon we saw another such house, and Gerler told me we had reached the upper reaches of Yulongxi, where we would be staying for the night before crossing the ridge over to the valley containing the Gongga monastery. I was by now exhausted and tired after a day spent walking and in the saddle, but to my frustration by early evening we still weren’t there. 73 Finally, just after 7pm, Gerler pursed his lips and gestured with his chin towards a fast flowing river. I didn’t fancy fording this on horseback, so he led us to a place where a couple of logs had been thrown over the rushing water, and I was able to wobble across them to the other side. Gerler stayed in the saddle and led both horses across the river, the waters coming up the horse’s flanks to his knees. Soon we were stood outside the walls of a large Tibetan house, and Gerler was calling out, shouting to the occupants to let us in. When the wooden door-gate was dragged open and we entered the courtyard I almost collapsed with fatigue on the steps of the house doorway. We were welcomed by a cousin of Gerler, who helped him take off the saddles of the horses and remove my pack, allowing the horses to bray and roll around on the grass and mud of the courtyard after their long haul of the day. When Joseph Rock first arrived in Yulonghsi - as he called it - from the south, he stayed at a house that had once been the home of the former ‘king’ of the Chiala region. In 1929 it was occupied by a local chief, a ‘good natured Tibetan’ called Drombo, who welcomed Rock and acted as his guide for the brief period of his first visit. The house we stayed at was no palace. It was built in the style most Tibetan dwellings, with the ground floor used to house the animals - some young yaks and a pig sty located beneath the long drop toilet, from which the pigs greedily and noisily devoured the human droppings. From the dry mud surrounds of these animal rooms we climbed up a notched timber log to the first floor, which housed the extended family. There was one huge room, which was very dark inside, and everything was wooden. The livng area was centred around the open fireplace, where everyone squatted around on dirty hard cushions or small ankle-high wooden stools. The few windows were shuttered or blocked up with thick sheets of almost opaque polythene, and there were just a couple of candles for light. The house was supported by thick wooden beams, but the Tibetans’ woodwork skills did not seem to extend beyond the walls and floors to creating furniture. Apart from the tiny stools there were no other items of furniture, apart from some crude low tables on which to rest food. As I sat by the fire, the other family members seemed oblivious to my presence. There were two younger Tibetan women, both in traditional Tibetan skirts and with tanned, hard-working faces. They looked poor, and I puzzled over how land similar to this in the Yorkshire Dales would support a farmer in relative affluence whereas here the residents were literally dirt poor. Gerler’s cousins got the ladle out and poured some of the smoke-flavoured water into my bowl so I could make some dehydrated lamb and vegetable rice dish. As he slurped his boiled noodles and the obligatory tsampa and butter tea, Gerler warned me that we’d have to be prepared for some serious exertion and climbing the next day. We were going over the steep Tsemi Pass to reach the Gongga monastery. I started to have second thoughts. I was already worn out from the first day’s efforts, and I suggested to Gerler that I might have a rest day tomorrow, or even just stay in this valley and continue down to Liuba instead. Gerler, however, insisted that we had to press on. He wanted to get in and out from the Gompa as soon as possible, so that he could get back home. 74 After dinner I felt a little better and passed around some of the photographs I’d brought of the Minya Konka area taken by Joseph Rock. One of them was a portrait of the local chief ‘Drombo’. The old lady of the house got quite excited when she saw this and told me “This is what my father looked like when he was young. He worse the same clothes …” Anticipating another strenuous day, I had an early night. Unlike the tent, this time I had the relative luxury of a flea-ridden yak hair blanket on which to lie on, and I was able to settle in a dark corner with my water bottle handy to quench the seemingly ever-present thirst, dry mouth and lips that plagued me every night at this altitude. Trek Day 3: Yulongxi valley - Tsemi village When I woke up in the Tibetan house in Yulongxi on Monday 25th September, 1995, I was puffy eyed and stiff, but as soon as I looked outside I was raring to go. The sight of blue skies and white snowy peaks dispelled my previous day’s impulse to ‘bug-out’ to the nearest road. Now I definitely wanted to go to Gongga Si. I had Coco Pops and Earl Grey tea for breakfast but then had to wait around impatiently for Gerler until mid morning. He wouldn’t leave without getting a re-supply of cigarettes. At 10-ish we saddled up and started initially to continue down the valley, southwest, in the direction of Mudju. I was still feeling uncomfortable in the saddle and had to shift around constantly until I could find the least uncomfortable position. After about an hour’s ride, we forded another shallow river, passed a few yak herder’s tents (one of which had a large pile of yak dung beside it) and started to head up a side valley leading up to the ridge. As we went up the hill, we entered a realm of sweet-smelling flowers and singing birds. The weather remained pleasant and I was feeling more confident in the saddle. The horse slowed down to a slow plod as the gradient increased, but even at a plod it was certainly better than walking. It was a long, slow trek up to the pass, and I still had a niggling fear in the back of my mind about the track ahead, as Gerler had said we would have to climb very high and cross the ‘Da Xue Shan’ (Big Snow Mountain) to get to Tsemi. I needn’t have worried. The going was easier than I thought - well, at least on horseback. We stopped for morning tea just before we reached the pass and I lay on the grass enjoying the sun on my face after brewing up some water to make a cup of instant vegetable soup with croutons. My face was sunburnt, my lips were dry and cracked and the backs of my hands were also very red and burnt. But I was happy. When Rock first came through Yulongxi, he’d followed a similar route up to the top of the ridge in the hope of seeing Minya Konka. He was guided by the local headman Drombo up this hillside, but the Tibetan was worried about the deep snow and ‘kept up whining laments’, according to Rock. We resumed our climb up through rockier terrain, towards the snow line. My poor horse was really struggling now, and I felt guilty for getting a free ride. Gerler lit up a cigarette and started singing yodel-like Tibetan folk songs, his ululating voice echoing off the rocky walls around us. And in no time we came to the snowy flat section that was the Tsemi Pass. As we crested the last bit of track, Gongga Shan came into view - and what a magnificent sight it was. 75 We were fortunate to have great weather and an almost completely clear sky, giving us a perfect view of the massive peak rising up across the other side of the valley, and the large glacier that swept down into the side valley. Joseph Rock’s first impression on seeing Minya Konka was ecstatic: “And then suddenly, like a white promontory of clouds, we beheld the long hidden Minya Konka, rising 25,600 feet in sublime majesty. I could not help jumping for joy. I marvelled at the scenery which I, the first white man ever to stand here, was privileged to see.” We stopped and dismounted and, like Rock, I was so impressed I wanted to jump for joy and shout “La Rgellah!” - so I did. There was an amazing view of the array of peaks that made up the Minya Konka range, and the views down into the valley were also quite dizzying. The valley was called ‘Buchu’ by Rock, who also detailed the many other smaller peaks surrounding Minya Konka. Most were around 20-22,000 feet, with names such as Nyambo Konka, Longemain and Daddomain. “The scenery was superb. In fact, words fail to describe this marvellous panorama,” Rock wrote. But he did not cross the pass on his first reconnaissance visit up from Yulongxi. He believed it was still too cold in early spring, so he went back down and continued on his way to Kangding for the time being, to wait for milder conditions. It was only on his return from a two-week sojourn in Kangding that Rock made the crossing of this pass, accompanied again by Drombo and another local Tibetan from Yulongxi, called Jumeh. We, however, did not have weeks to spare, and so left the pass and headed down the track into the Buchu valley. I was in an elated frame of mind as we followed the zig-zagging track and entered a sanctuary of natural beauty. There were rhododendron bushes and spruce trees further down. Birds flitted in the undergrowth and the warm sun warmed our faces. It really was an idyllic place, so different from th bleak Yulongxi valley. As we descended we gradually lost sight of Gongga Shan, and it was only when we reached the Tsemi valley that I realised exactly how high up we’d been on the pass. And as we tramped down the steep track I had to be very careful where I put my feet. At one point, Gerler pointed at the steep slope from the track and told me this was where one of the Americans he’d previously guided had fallen down. “He broke his leg and was in such great pain he cried like a baby,” said Gerler. “We had to strap him on a horse just like he was a sack and take him back to Yulongxi and out to Liuba to get him to on a truck to hospital in Kangding,” he grinned. We eventually reached the bottom of the valley, where we found a beautiful meadow and a fairytale village of sturdy stone Tibetan houses. They had the characteristic T-shaped window frames finished in pretty bright colours. It was all set amid pine-clad slopes and next to a gushing river, with the snow peaks in the background. This was Tsemi, and it seemed too good to be true. We stopped for the night there, but the gloomy interiors of the Tsemi houses proved to be a stark contrast to the beautiful and airy environs outside. The house we stayed in was dark and filthy. I was again ushered upstairs onto the first floor to sit by the fire, while they stir fried some potato slices in a black wok to make chips. I ate a few of these in the local fashion, with some chilli powder, but started to feel sick. Then, as I became more 76 accustomed to the dim interior surroundings, I saw that the eating bowls were crawling with flies and weevils, and there was a piglet snuffling around, sticking its little snout into all the plates and bowls as well. The floor was gritty and sooty, and the water they gave me to drink also tasted smoky and had small bits of grass and specks of dirt in it. The local people of Tsemi were a curious bunch in all respects. They crowded around the windows and doorways to get a peep at the foreigner. They were friendly and smiled at me, and ooh-ed in aah-ed to each other in their own strange form of speech that sounded sometimes more like yodelling than talking. It was a very secluded place and they still had busts and pictures of Chairman Mao on the display and old muzzle-loading musket hung up on the wall - and not as a relic, but as a working rifle for hunting. Rock says little about Tsemi village in his article. He passed through here, but only notes that it lies in the Buchu valley, near the junction of a side valley that contains the glacier running down from Minya Konka - and the mountain’s monastery, or “Konka Gompa” as it was known to Rock. “For six months in the year this monastery is shut off even from that remote world represented by the yak herders of Yulongshi, for the Tsemi Pass is snow bound and impassable,” he notes. I didn’t sleep well in Tsemi, partly because of my stomach worries, but also because of an almost sub-conscious overwhelming dread of being trapped in this valley. Gerler had repeated the concern that Rock had expressed in his article - if we stayed too long we risked being trapped by imminent heavy snows that could block the pass. I slept in my sleeping bag on a hairy mat on the sooty floor, and rose the next morning feeling terrible. I hadn’t had much sleep and felt listless and jittery. I went through the motions of making breakfast, but had to repeat the whole tea-making process when I found a fly in the water I was boiling. I was already extremely weak and tired and just didn’t feel up to the journey to the monastery ahead. When I climbed into the saddle at 9am, I felt like I was going to faint. We’d gone only a few hundred yards when I asked Gerler to stop, and told him that I wanted to go back. I just didn’t have the energy to go on. He said nothing but took me back inside the hose and plied me with some butter tea. I wanted to retch when I first put the bowl up to my lips, but at Gerler’s insistence I continued to sip and swallow the salty lukewarm muddy liquid until I’d finished the bowl. When I told him that I was worried about my health and wanted to go back over the pass to Yulongxi, he refused. “It is my duty to take you to the monastery and that is what I will do,” he said solemnly. And after another bowl of butter tea I started to feel a lot better - it was almost like a miracle cure. The Tibetan high energy drink. “When you go on a journey like this you must drink lots of this tea,” said Gerler. “You need lots of energy. I don’t think this western food is any good,” he added, gesturing with his chin to my packet soups and dehydrated meals. I had to agree with him. “Come on, try again,” he said. “It’s only about two more hours to the monastery.” And so, still feeling a little queasy, I agreed, and this time I walked alongside the horses for a while instead of riding. 77 We passed through the meadow in the sunshine and then crossed a large creek over a wooden bridge, following a track up through a magical forest of beech. The track wended its way up, passing lots of Mani stones and cairns, and the whole place had a very spooky atmosphere about it. There was an almost physical presence in the woods, and I could feel we were nearing a special place. Even the horses seemed to be possessed by a new spirit, and raced each other up the track. Birds were singing, a stream tinkled below us and there were fresh mushrooms and fungi growing along the track. After an hour or so we reached a fork in the rack, with the left hand pathway going back towards Kangding, according to Gerler. This track would go down to a place called Riwuqie, he said, the other branch of the Y-shaped valley we had gone through on the way up to the Jezi La. We did not travel along this route because it was higher and more snowbound than the longer but passable Yulongxi route. A short way ahead our horses stopped to drink from a water trough, and as we rounded the corner and emerged from the forest I saw some small stone outhouses and realised that we were finally there - we had reached the Gongga Si monastery. The monastery’s whitewashed walls appeared above the bushes, and I was thrilled to see that it looked just like the building in Rock’s old photographs. Trek Day 4: The Konka Gompa There was nobody at home at the Konka Gompa monastery when we arrived. The wooden door in the side of the wall was bolted shut and when we peeped through a gap, all we could see was a dog chained up against a wooden banister. No sounds could be heard, except the flap of prayer flags in the wind and the trickle of water along a primitive timber guttering channel that diverted a ribbon of water from a small mountain stream. Gerler called out in Tibetan and after a few moments there was a faint, distant reply from somewhere beyond the monastery. We turned around and saw a tiny red and yellow-clad figure ambling down the hillside towards us. It was a dwarfish lama and he was carrying a sizeable bunch of sticks tied onto his back. When he arrived, he dumped his load of firewood at our feet and nodded at me in recognition, as if he had been expecting us and as if foreign visitors to this remote monastery were an everyday occurrence. The little shaven-headed lama bade us welcome and unlocked the padlock on the door with a key he summoned up from the folds of his garmet, gesturing for us to go into the courtyard. He wasn’t one to stand on ceremony - he helped us unstrap our bags from the horses and take off the saddles, and then he led us into his smoky, soot-stained scullery. There, he immediately got some boiling water from the cauldron and started making butter tea. He did this by pouring the steaming water into a long wooden tube, followed by some yak butter and tea leaves, and then he pushed a wooden plunger in and out with great sucking and squelching noises, to mix it all up. It’s a familiar routine in any Tibetan household. I just felt so elated to actually be in this place at long last. I thought back to the first time I’d read about this tiny monastery in one of Rock’s articles, several years previously back in Auckland, and now here I was, in the very spot. And even more surprisingly, the place seemed to have barely changed from how Rock had described it: 78 “We were escorted into a square house, having a courtyard filled with mud, and up over an old sagging stairway to a balcony which led to a chanting hall and a narrow room with a chapel on one side. A small window overlooking the glacier valley permitted a perfect view of Minya Konka under favourable weather conditions.” It was still just like that. As we sat around the fire, I showed the lama some of Rock’s photographs of the gompa and its surroundings, and he recognised the old building, which had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The present monastery had been rebuilt in the same style during the 1980s, he told me. The lama, whose name was Ding Ri Zhu, also recognised Rock’s photo portrait of the headman of Yulongxi, Drombo, and he pointed to a picture Rock had taken of a wall painting of the mountain god, Dordjelutru, and said that the painting was still here. After he finished his tea, the lama took me on a tour of the monastery. He didn’t speak Chinese, so I couldn’t understand what he was mumbling about when he showed me the various draughty guest rooms and dusty storage rooms. The lama told me that on special occasions they had 20-30 monks come up from the lower monasteries in places like Liuba to put on special ceremonies for the mountain gods. I asked him if it was true, as Rock had claimed, that the monastery was cut off by snow on the passes from November through to April, but he said this was only the case during very heavy snowfalls. It was still possible to get over the pass during the winter months, he said, and it was also possible to walk out in the opposite direction, down the valley to Hailouoguo and Moxi on the eastern side of Gongga Shan. So much for Rock’s claims of a monastery cut off for half a year in its “isolated mountain fastness”! The lama showed me the gompa’s small chanting hall, with its golden statues and the bright murals of fierce-looking Tibetan Buddhist deities that were portrayed as surrounded by skulls and bolts of lightning. He then took me into a small, gloomy back room and lifted up the edge of a cloth hanging on the wall, to reveal a picture of the mountain god Dordjelutru, similar to the one photographed by Rock. This was obviously one of the most sacred relics in the monastery, and the monk seemed to expect me to be very impressed by it. However, I found it hard to be very reverent because the picture was much smaller than I’d thought it would be. In a Spinal Tap moment, the tapestry I thought would cover a whole wall was actually the size of a teatowel. Rock described an inscription that accompanied the portrayal of Dordjelutru: “On the gate to the chapel in my room hung a long strip of hempcloth with a Tibetan inscription. It declared that there is no more beautiful spot on earth than Minya Konka, and that one night spent on the mountain is equivalent to sitting ten years in meditation in one’s house and praying constantly; that one offering of burning juniper boughs [here] is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of prayers.” The inscription also said that the Indian founder of the red hat (Karmapa) branch of Buddhism had pronounced that this god, Dordjelutru, was the equal of the prime deity Shenrezig, and that all the deities of Tibetan Buddhism dwelled within this scared mountain “and anyone gazing upon the peak will have all his past sins wiped off the slate so he may begin life anew!” 79 After lunch of chicken broth taken in the dirty scullery, I wandered around and snapped away with my camera, trying to take pictures from the same places that Rock had taken his from. Unfortunately, the low cloud had really closed in around the gompa, and there was little to see of Minya Konka, whose summit and ice ridges remained hidden in the mist just above us. All we could see was the foot of the glacier moraine. Meanwhile, the little lama scurried off into one of the back rooms and before long we could hear him chanting away continuously in the background, occasionally banging on a drum a few times, or ringing a discordant little bell. In contrast to these displays of piety, I busied myself with more mundane housekeeping chores. To the accompaniment of chants and gongs I washed my smoke and soot-laden hair using the little sachets of Head and Shoulders that are sold in strips in rural Chinese stores. Then I set about scrubbing my socks and undies in the trickle of water from the mountain stream, hanging them up next to the prayer flags to flap in the breeze sending who-knowswhat message skywards to the gods. In the middle of the afternoon the lama re-appeared at the doorway of the gompa and gestured up at the glacier, from which some of the cloud and mist had dissipated slightly. He told me, using Gerler to translate, that there was a special shrine located a little higher up the mountain, and he pointed his bony brown finger at it. I couldn’t see anything, until Gerler also gestured at a small red dot among the snow and rocks. They both said it was a very special place where all the prayers could be said directly to the mountain god. It didn’t look far, and having nothing better to do, I decided to go and have a closer look. Taking just a small pack with my camera in, I set off down the slope into the massive gully that held the glacier, following a faint track that took me down to the glacier moraine. I kept looking up at where the shrine was supposed to be, but it was difficult to keep track of it because of the tree branches obscuring the view, and also because I lost sight of many of the reference points as I headed further down into the glacier valley. The shrine had looked quite close to the gompa, but I was to learn how distances can be deceptive at high altitudes - perhaps due to the thin clear air making everything look so vivid and almost close enough to touch. I struggled for a couple of hours up the glacier moraine and got nowhere near the upper shrine. I was floundering about among the large rocks, still unaccustomed to moving at high altitude, and I was constantly having to stop to get my breath back. I didn’t seem to be making any progress towards the shrine, and I began to wonder at what time I should turn back. This little problem was solved for me when I stupidly tried to cross a small glacial river. It was just slightly too deep to get away without swamping my boots, so I took them off and tried wading over in bare feet with my trousers rolled up to the knees. The icy cold water, fresh from the glacier, was shockingly, painfully cold - colder than anything I had very experienced before. The water was so extremely chilling that it felt like it was scalding my exposed skin wherever it came into contact with it. I skipped through the little river with just ten painful steps, but had to stop on the other side and sit down on a boulder, to rub some feeling back into my deeply-frozen feet and toes. Now I suddenly understood just how easily it would be to die of exposure and hypothermia in waters such as this. My little excursion up the glacier had left me tired, thirsty and disoriented, and so I turned back, disconsolate, to the return to the gompa. 80 It was late in the afternoon by the time I got back, and I had to really struggle to climb back out of the gully of the glacier valley and to get back up to the monastery perched on the side of the ridge. When I looked back at how far I’d travelled, my four hour return trip looked like a 10 minute walk. Back inside the gompa, I felt absolutely famished, and slurped down a quick cup of tomato instant soup. It tasted better than anything I could remember for a long time. I passed the remainder of the day and the early evening sat in the smoky but warm little room that the lama used as a kitchen and living space. The lama showed me a collection of notes and postcards left by earlier international visitors - Americans, Germans, Japanese mostly mountaineers, who had used the monastery as a base camp during their attempts on the peak. One such Japanese expedition had lost seven members killed in an avalanche near the summit. The lama brought out a plastic watch that had been given to him by one of the Japanese climbing team. He said the watch had been very useful, but now it had broken, and could I please fix it for him? I took a cursory look and it seemed that the watch battery must have run out. Regretfully, I handed the watch back to the lama and told him that he’d have to try get a new battery from a place like Kangding - if he or any of his fellow monks ever made it as far as the ‘big smoke’. After stir-frying up some more potato sliver chips, the lama showed me to a bare wooden room that was to be my bedroom for the night. I got myself settled in, but something about the room unsettled me. I felt cold and claustrophobic - and just plain lonely. Outside, it had started to rain heavily and when I turned off my torch I found myself feeling terrified of the dark, like a child. After just a few minutes lying in the creepy blackness, I fled the room, picking up all my gear and moving back into the dirty smoky scullery where the lama and Gerler were still squatting around the fire. I dossed down in a dark corner and tried to sleep there, but without much luck. I would find myself dropping off to sleep, only to wake up with a start after just a few minutes because I’d stopped breathing. Then I’d start hyperventilating and salivating so much that I was drooling. It was all very weird and worrying. I later learned this was “Cheyne Stokes syndrome” where the lack of oxygen in high altitude air upsets the body’s automatic regulation of respiration. I didn’t know this at the time, however, and believed I was simply unable to breathe properly, and would die in my sleep if I stopped breathing and didn’t wake up. And so it was that I spent much of the night gazing at the ceiling, thinking about home, and how far I was away from everything. Joseph Rock also spent an unsettled night at the Konka Gompa. He was given the chapel room to sleep in, which contained a golden chorten (shrine) encrusted with jewels. This sarcophagus contained the remains of a previous living Buddha of the monastery. Under the heading of ‘A weird night with a mummy for companion’, Rock’s article paints a dramatic picture of how he lay shivering in his cot as thunder crashed all around the mountain. He says that rain lashed the monastery and lightning flashed as: “Dordjelutru staged an electrical display in this weird canyon”. 81 “Here, all alone, in the presence of a sacred mummy in a hoary lamasery, I listened to the tempest breaking over the icy peak of Minya Konka. Was this the year 1929 or had time been set back a thousand years?” he wrote. He may have been exaggerating, but I could now understand what inspired his feverish imaginings. Trek Day 5: Returning via Liuba The mountain gods were eventually kind to Joseph Rock. After his stormy night in the Gompa, the weather had cleared the next morning, and he was able to set out and explore higher up the ridge. He hiked up to 17,200 feet, from where he was able to take a panoramic photograph looking back down into the valley, with the monastery visible as just a tiny patch on the side of the ridge. He was also able to take some excellent close up views of Minya Konka and its glacier. Being a botanist, Rock also spent time collecting samples of the rhododendrons and other alpine plants around the Gompa, as well as documenting the area with his camera and its novel colour plates. Almost sixty years later, in 1995, we had no such luck. We woke to find that while the skies had cleared somewhat during the night, Minya Konka was still stubbornly hiding herself, shrouded in clouds. In the cold light of dawn we also found that the valley below us had also filled up with cloud, obscuring the hamlet of Tsemi far below. Gerler was up early and he was impatient to leave. After a quick breakfast of rice gruel porridge, he had been chasing around the hillside, trying to locate our two horses. They had wandered off in the night after being put out to graze. It was only after much searching around and panting up and down the hillside that we were able to locate the horses, by the sound of their bells. Back at the monastery the lama had taken up his interminable chanting again, but he broke off to come and see us off. After taking a last few pictures of him and the mountain (and assuring the monk that I’d try help him get a replacement watch battery), he waved us off, and we led our horses back downhill on the track to Tsemi. The sun was still only just coming up over the ridges and its yellow rays were just touching the tops of some of the surrounding peaks. As we descended the track I cast a final look back towards the Gompa and saw the monk walking back to his lonely routine of chanting, and I felt a twinge of regret at leaving this isolated place. We re-traced our steps back down the trail dotted by Mani stones, to Tsemi, with me hobbling along behind the horses because of the many blisters on my feet. I was also smarting from sunburn on my nose and the tips of my ears, while my lips were dry, cracked and I was constantly thirsty. Back down into the ‘Buchu valley’ we went, into the trees and crossing the small river by a log bridge. We passed through Tsemi again, but this time with only a brief pause, as Gerler was anxious to get back to Yulongxi as early as possible. On the other side of the hamlet we mounted our horses and set off to ride the trail up the hill to cross back over the Tsemi La pass. It was hard going for the horses, with mine pausing for breath every twenty steps or so, and sweating profusely through its coat of hair. I felt so sorry for the old nag that I got off and tried walking for a bit, but found myself tired out after just a few steps. Gerler urged me 82 to get back into the saddle, and thus we continued on up, making good time and reaching the pass by 11.30am. There were no awesome views this time - the great mountain was still hidden by cloud, and we did not linger. From the pass we dismounted and plodded back on down to Yulongxi. Gerler started singing again, his wailing notes seeming to reach right across the valley. It took us a couple of hours to reach the bottom of the valley, where we had to ford the river on horseback again. This time the river seemed to be even deeper, and both my feet and the bottom of my pack got a soaking. But by now I didn’t really care. Then we were back amid the scattered settlements of the Yulongxi valley, and this was where I would part with Gerler. Rather than repeat the two day slog retracing our footsteps back over the Djesi la, I decided to walk out in the opposite direction, west, to Liuba and the roadhead, from where I hoped to be able to get a bus back to Kangding. As we sat down for a late lunch of soup and what remained of my Toblerone, I handed over 450 kuai in crumpled renminbi notes to Gerler for his services over the last five days. I felt quite sad to be leaving my trusty guide. He’d been honest and reliable, and had gone the extra mile, pushing me to continue when I was wavering and feeling sick in Tsemi. My appreciation waned a little, though, when he started nagging me to donate him several items of my kit that I “wouldn’t be needing any more”. Gerler was particular taken with my waterproof trousers, but I refused to hand them over, telling him that I’d bring some for him on my next visit. He wasn’t impressed. At 1.30pm we parted ways and I headed of down the flat grassy valley towards Mudju and Liuba. After only a short time walking by myself, I soon realised how lonely and vulnerable I felt when travelling solo. I’d become used to the reassuring presence of Gerler, and his automatic introductions to people and places to stay along the way. Now I was on my own and I became the subject of curious stares from the Tibetans I encountered in the small hamlets that I trudged through. Some of the stares were mute and uncomprehending, but some of the young Tibetan guys I passed fired questions me in a tone that was both mocking and aggressive. “Where are you going?” they would ask. When I said Liuba, they sniggered. “You alone?” I would nod, walk on, and pick up my pace. After being asked the same questions several times, I started bluffing that I was part of a group and saying my ‘three friends’ were not far behind, with our ‘guide’. The hamlets were all composed of the now-familiar fortress-like solid stone Tibetan houses. Tibetan women worked the land around them, and there were lots of kids with unwiped snotty noses. The houses looked grand but their surroundings were squalid – the backyards were churned up mud with patches of stinking cow and pig shit. Futher along the valley the scenery gradually changed from open grassland to a steeper-sided valley covered with pines. The footpath became a rough track, which was obviously passable as evidenced by a ‘Jiefang’ truck parked outside a house. I tramped for hour upon hour, but there was no sign of Mudju or Liuba. Walking alongside the river, I passed a rough logging camp, with makeshift tents made from tarpaulins, and with young Tibetan guys loafing around a battered pool table, some carrying rifles slung on straps over their shoulders. I started getting jittery and prayed inwardly that I would soon reach the civilisation of Liuba. 83 When I eventually did reach Liuba in the late afternoon, it was to be a huge disappointment. Although marked on the map as a village, Liuba was little different to the many other rough and ready hamlets that I had passed through - it just had a few more houses. As I trudged along the muddy main ‘street’ of Liuba it appeared to be a dismal, muddy dump, with an end-of the line feel to it. There was a pathetic little hole-in-the wall store and a noodle shack but little else to make it stand out from the other villages in the valley. I’d been hoping to make it to the main road that day, but it was already 5.30pm and starting to get dark. A Tibetan woman in Liuba told me I had another 12 km to go before I got to the main road, and I began to feel quite downhearted and desperate. There didn’t seem to be anything like a guesthouse in this primitive place. I ended up cadging a place to stay after striking up conversation with a ragged Tibetan kid who was walking along the road. As I trudged along in a mood of growing despair, I told him I was looking for a place to stay. “Why don’t you stay with us? he said, without a moment’s hesitation, and he led me to his family’s house, on the outskirts of the village, further down the road. It was real Tibetan hillbilly place. They had barking dogs on chains outside the door, and the interior of the house was really basic - just a plain pressed-earth floor, a gloomy interior and a few of the now-familiar hard greasy cushions placed around a smoky fire. I could barely understand the thickly-accented Chinese spoken by the old man in the house but I had no choice but to stay. There was nowhere else to go. I sat round the fire and used some boiling water from the cauldron to make up one of my dehydrated meals, while the old man asked me lots of questions about myself. As they ate sickly-sweet smelling maize porridge, they asked me about New Zealand and whether it was allowed to be an independent country. Could we elect our president? My positive replies were met with approving nods. The old man was very pleased when I answered his question about the Dalai Lama, saying he was very famous around the world. That seemed to satisfy him, and I was able to turn in and get an early night. Once again it meant dossing on the floor using my Thermarest and my now grubby sleeping bag, but I slept better at this low altitude. I was up and off very early the next morning, before most people in the house had got up, and it took me only two hours to walk out down the wooded valley along the river to the ‘main road’. Here, more disappointment awaited me. Unfortunately, there was no ‘main road’ at the T-junction, just set of wheel ruts in the dirt running north to south. There were no signs of any traffic. I stuck my head into one of the log cabins near the junction, and a surly woman who came out told me there was no bus service to Kangding, nor any other traffic. I sat and waited around for what seemed like an hour, and she was right - not a single vehicle went by, just a few Tibetans ambled past from time to time, eyeing me with a definite air of seedy menace. There was a bad vibe about this place. I began to despair of ever getting away, and heartily wished I’d stayed with Gerler and gone back to Lao Yulin with him. I paced up and down, weighing up what to do next. I considered re-tracing my steps back up the valley and returning to Kangding over the high pass. But as I worried through the various options, a truck came rattling down the track. It looked like a 1950s vintage and was literally falling apart, with its headlamps and mudguards either smashed or missing. A few rough-looking Tibetans stood on the back and as it stopped I asked the unfriendly and dismissive Tibetan driver whether he could give me a lift to Kangding. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing in thick Chinese, it became clear he was only 84 going as far as the next small town, called Sha-de. That would do. The driver demanded 30 kuai for the 20km trip, and I paid up and climbed up hurriedly on to the open back of the truck, glad for any chance to escape this godforsaken place. It was a rough ride, with a rough crowd. Some of the Tibetan labourers riding on the back wore balaclavas pulled down over their faces, leaving only their eyes showing and making them look like mercenaries. As we bounced and jerked along the pothole track we passed a couple of chugging tuolaji tractors, and the Tibetans standing on them yelped and jeered at me when they saw me. I was glad to be on the truck and not walking alone. After a cold ride along the bumpy road for an hour or so, we got to Sha-de, where I clambered down off the truck. There were a couple of decrepit small vans parked about, and with a bit of looking around and waiting I was able to negotiate myself into a minivan that I was told was making the trip over the pass to Kangding. My visit to Minya Konka was almost over. It took just one more freezing cold ride northwards through a wide valley dotted with of ancient stone watchtowers, before we finally emerged on to the tarmac of the Sichuan-Tibet highway. This had some traffic on it, and we turned eastwards, with the road taking us up and over the Zheduo La pass, some 4500 metres in altitude. Looking down at the looping road on the other side, I could see long convoys of PLA trucks straining up in the opposite direction, heading towards Litang and Lhasa. We started down the switchbacks and by late afternoon I’d made it safely back to Kangding. Disgorged from the cramped van on to the street, I stretched my aching limbs in the raucous bustle of what now seemed like a major metropolis, and then headed off to re-enact the famous final scene from Ice Cold in Alex scenario, downing a nice beer at the Kangding Hotel. Worth waiting for. Gongga Shan: Postscript In one of the most embarrassing episodes of his career, shortly after his visit to Minya Konka, Joseph Rock cabled the National Geographic Society in Washington to tell them he’d calculated the height of the mountain to be over 30,000 feet - higher than Mount Everest! Rock may have been a meticulous botanist and a fastidious recorder of local flora and fauna, but he was a terrible surveyor. The National Geographic staff were already aware that Rock had a poor track record of miscalculating heights of the mountains that he had seen on his travels. He’d previously overestimated the height of Amnye Machen in Qinghai and had also been wrong in his estimates of the heights of the Konkaling peaks in Sichuan. Despite these earlier errors, Rock rebuffed suggestions from National Geographic Society staff that he undertake a course in the technical aspects of surveying. The result was yet another humiliating gaffe with his height estimate for Minya Konka, which was far in excess of any previous figure for the mountain. Minya Konka was shown in the Chinese Imperial Atlas as being 24,900 feet high (accurate to within ten feet, as it turned out) and it was also shown on the maps of the China Inland Mission with a similar height. Perhaps fearing that news of his sensational discovery would be leaked out in advance, Joseph Rock waited until he had left China to inform the National Geographic Society of his findings. Not surprisingly, the National Geographic Society were very sceptical when they 85 received Rock’s telegram sent from Indo-China, claiming that Minya Konka was 30,000 feet high. They made no public announcement, but waited until Rock was back in the US later in the year to check his figures. When staff members reviewed Rock’s calculations and surveying techniques they quickly corrected his estimate of Minya Konka’s height, revising it down to around 25,000 feet. This was almost a mile lower than Rock had calculated. Rock was extremely embarrassed by the whole incident, and never talked again about his “higherthan-Everest” claim for Minya Konka. In the meantime, Minya Konka didn’t stay “wholly unknown” for much longer after Rock’s visit. In the following year, a Swiss surveying team led by the artist and topographer Eduard Imhof spent several weeks at the Konka Gompa taking measurements and making a much more reliable estimate of the height of the peak, of 24,900 feet (7590 metres). Two years after that, in 1932, the peak was climbed for the first time as part of an extraordinary lightweight mountaineering expedition mounted by four young Harvard climbers. The group, led by Terris Moore and Richard Burdsall, recount their experiences including their epic voyage through China from Shanghai to western Sichuan - in the classic book “Men Against The Clouds”. I wish I’d read it before making my own visit to Minya Konka, because they followed exactly the same route as I did and they gave many practical tips about travel in the region - advice that is lacking in Rock’s more florid descriptions. The climbers give an interesting account of their voyage in from Chengdu, via Ya’an (then known as Yachow) and Tatsienlu (Kangding). In those days it was a 10 day journey from the lowlands of Sichuan to Tatsienlu, and the ‘road’ was actually a path, suitable only for mules and the coolies who carried huge loads of brick tea up to Tatsienlu. In modern times the Sichuan tourism authorities have coined the label “Old Tea Horse Road” (Lao Chamalu) to glamourise the trails in the west of the province. In reality, they were not roads and the tea was portered by humans. In their book, the US climbers give some idea what Tatsienlu/Kangding was like around the time of Rock’s visit. They describe the same small town hemmed in by mountains, but with a notable missionary presence, in the form of the China Inland Mission, whose staff helped supply the climbers and even sent them cakes they had baked. The Americans spent several months around the Minya Konka massif. They travelled from Tatsienlu/Kangding via the Djesi Pass, to Yulonghsi where they were helped by the same headman, Jumeh, mentioned in Rock’s account. Two of the climbers spent almost the whole of August at a ‘Camp Alpine’, above Yulonghsi, from where they surveyed the heights of many of the other peaks in the Minya Konka range. Interestingly, in an offhand comment they remark how they found little of value in Joseph Rock’s article on the area, though they did admire his photographs. And while Rock portrayed the Yulonghsi area as a very remote location, the US climbers relate how they were visited there by American missionaries from Tachienlu, including a certain Mrs Peterson, who made them pancakes and accompanied them over to the Konka Gompa for a picnic! When the other two members of the American team finally arrived from Shanghai, the climbing group moved over the Tsemi Pass into the Buchu valley and set up their base camp above the monastery. The Americans were assisted by a Chinese-speaking Tibetan from Yulongshi called Gaomo. In their book they have little to say about the Konka Gompa except to note the devotion and superstition of the resident monks (they say the Living 86 Buddha was away on an extended visit to Lhasa) and the filthy conditions within. After an epic ascent up the north-west ridge, Moore and Burdsall reached the summit of Minya Konka on 28th October 1932 - the highest point ever climbed by Americans at that time. Another interesting account of a visit to Minya Konka during this this period comes from the Australian war correspondent George Johnston (who later went on to write the classic Australian novel My Brother Jack). In his book “Journey Through Tomorrow”, Johnston describes how in 1944 he hitched a ride in a US transport plane flying from Burma into western Sichuan. The plane brought in a US Army supply team to try acquire Tibetan horses for use in the US-Chinese campaign in Yunnan and Burma against the Japanese. Seeking some distraction after reporting on the Burma campaign, Johnston travelled by road up to Kangding, looking for some Tibetan ‘colour’. He’d heard that the Konka Gompa was the original inspiration for the Shangri La valley of “Lost Horizon” fame and he decided to pay a visit. Using a Tibetan guide, Johnston travelled to Minya Konka on horseback accompanied by another journalist. He was most impressed with the mountain scenery, but Johnston found the Minya Konka gompa to be a huge anticlimax. He thought it was a squalid place, quite unlike the ‘Shangri-La’ idyll he had been led to expect. In print, his laconic Australian cynicism stands in contrast to Joseph Rock’s rapturous and dramatic prose that tries to engender a sense of wonder and mystery around Minya Konka. Although he was impressed with its dramatic setting, to Johnston the Konka Gompa was a drab architectural monstrosity (“looks like someone started to build a small weekend shack as cheaply as possible ... jerry built and completely devoid of all beauty ...”). In his book, Johnston says the Gompa housed about forty monks, as well as a ‘village idiot’ and an old nun. Johnston describes the Buddhist’s rituals in detail, but he judges them to be superstitious and ignorant rather than enchanting. He reserves his greatest scorn for the two head monks, who he says were conmen - putting on elaborate ‘Potemkin village’ displays of ceremony to impress visiting Tibetan pilgrims and elicit large donations from them. Observing the monks when ‘off duty’ Johnston found them to be idle, boastful and rapaciously acquisitive. Despite their claims to be seeking enlightenment and paying homage to the mountain gods, Johnston noted cynically that the monks abandoned all pretences of piety when he expressed an interest in buying some trinkets for souvenirs. The Buddhist lamas quickly transformed into astute businessmen with a remarkable ability to bargain in Mandarin and a large hidden stash of US dollars. On his last day at the monastery, Johnston came across an enigmatic female Chinese Buddhist disciple who had taken up in residence in the only clean room at the Gompa. The woman told Johnston she had lived in the monastery continually for three years without leaving, and she claimed the mountain air kept her looking younger than her 47 years. Johnston says he was initially reluctant to write about this Chinese woman because she was too much of a cliché. In his eyes, she conformed too closely to the apocryphal tales of mysterious and ageless residents of Shangri-La. The woman told Johnston she was originally from Peking, but had fled to Chengdu because of the Japanese occupation and had then come to the monastery in search of peace. She said she was now bored at the monastery because the lamas were “not well educated”, and she said she was planning to move to Lhasa to continue her meditation and study of Buddhism. 87 Whether she made it, we never find out. Within four years of Johnston’s visit, the Minya Konka area would once again become a closed land, falling behind the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ in 1949 and remaining off limits for more than 30 years, as Kangding and Tibet became subject to the ‘peaceful liberation’ by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. We know from another former western resident of the area, George Patterson, that the Khampa Tibetans put up strong local resistance to the Chinese, but it was all in vain. Some Khampas fled to Nepal. Those who remained became citizens of ‘New China’ with all the dubious benefits of socialism with Han Chinese characteristics. Dissent and any challenge to the Party was systematically obliterated. The Tibetan monasteries were stripped of all their power and influence. In the 1960s, Mao’s Cultural Revolution saw all the ‘old’ things smashed - culture, superstition, relics, books and buildings. Despite its isolation, the Minya Konka area was not spared the ravages of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. The Konka Gompa monastery was razed to the ground and the few monks still remaining at the monastery were ‘struggled against’, harassed and dispersed, some forced to marry. One of them told me that he had to ‘become a farmer’ for twenty years. It was only when Deng Xiaoping came to power in the 1980s that foreigners began to return to the Minya Konka area, now known in Chinese as Gongga Shan. At first the only visitors were mountaineers, and the mountain took a terrible toll on those who tried to reach the summit. A large Chinese expedition got to the top in the 1950s but lost one climber. A Japanese team had a disastrous time on Minya Konka in 1981, losing eight members to falls and avalanches. Since then, several other climbing groups have attempted Minya Konka and its neighbouring peaks. Although 22 climbers have reached the summit, at least 16 have died in attempts to climb the mountain. In the 1990s, the monastery at Minya Konka was still a remote spot, visited by just a handful of westerners and a few Tibetan pilgrims. To get there required an arduous and often much delayed two-day bus journey from Chengdu over the Erlang Shan road just to get to Kangding. Private cars and vans were rare. In the late 1990s, however, the construction of the Erlang Shan tunnel slashed the journey time to Kangding to just one day. This coincided with the increasing popularity of outdoor activities among the newly prosperous and more independently minded young Chinese. Nowadays large numbers of Chinese trekkers make the journey every year from Kangding to the Konka Gompa - known as ‘Gongga Si’ in Chinese. A visit to the monastery is now on the itinerary of many outdoor adventure travel operators based in Chengdu. But trekking in the Minya Konka area can still be a dangerous activity, especially for solo travellers. In 2009 the Lonely Plant guidebook author Clem Lindenmayer went missing while trekking around Gongga Shan. His body was later found off the track to Riwuqie. It seems that Clem went off the trail and was caught out in the cold and died of exposure. Clem was a highly experienced and well-equipped trekker, and his death highlights the risks of trekking alone in the remote terrain and fickle weather of Gongga Shan. In 2009, I paid another visit to Lao Yulin while passing through Kangding. The old dirt track road that used to lead up to the village had been turned into a smooth highway, connecting Kangding to Moxi and Hailuoguo. The road was lined with several brand new high-rise condominiums (Heavenly views! Only 3000 Yuan a square metre!) And the decrepit wool 88 mill had been demolished and replaced with a series of ostentatious civic buildings such as the new Ganze District Law Courts and the Tax Department head office. The old hot springs building was still there - but it now looked forlorn and lost amid the brand new structures surrounding it. On the other side of the mountain, the muddy log cabin village of Liuba has been spruced up, with a fancy new archway that proclaims it to be the official gateway to ‘Gongga Shan Nature Park’. A ticket office has been set up and charges visitors an entrance fee of 68 Yuan. The road up the Yulongxi valley is now smooth tarmac, and there is even a track suitable for bikes and tractors that goes all the way to the summit of the Tsemi La (Zimei Yakou), where a large shack has been erected. Kangding is also undergoing relentless and rapid change. The traditional old wooden buildings around the Anjue Si were being demolished when I last visited in May, 2010. The monastery’s entrance gate and the monk’s wooden dormitories had been torn down. The town has a shiny new bus station on the eastern outskirts, replacing the gloomy and echoing old shed next to the markets. There is even an airport, somewhere out of town, one of the highest in the world. Kangding has outdoor gear shops, bakeries, and five star hotels. It has plastic palm trees lining the icy cold waters of the river. Dartsendo became Tachienlu and then it became Kangding. What will it be like in another 50 years? 89 CHAPTER 6: SEEKING THE ‘LOST’ MOUNTAIN OF MUTI KONKA If you read Joseph Rock’s article about the “Glories of the Minya Konka”, you will notice much of it is actually devoted to his getting there - and in particular to the arduous journey he made from Lijiang across the remote canyon of the Yalong river, which he describes as being comparable to the Grand Canyon of Colorado. Crossing the enormous 9,000-foot deep gorge of the Yalong river took him “five terrible days”. After descending and then climbing out of this enormous gorge, he eventually reached a mountain pass on the eastern bank called Wadzanran, where the mountain scenery left him awestruck: “The scenery hereabouts is overwhelming grand. Probably its like cannot be found elsewhere in the world. Where Muti Konka rears its eternally snow-capped crown 19,000 feet into the sky, the Yalung flows 12,000 feet below...” he wrote. The pictures accompanying the article seemed to back up his claims, showing a narrow ribbon of river enclosed deep within a wooded canyon, and a maze of mountain ridges receding to the horizon. “A scenic wonder of the world, this region is 45 days from the nearest railhead. For centuries it may remain a closed land, save to such privileged few as care to crawl like ants through its canyons of tropical heat and up its glaciers and passes in blinding snowstorms, carrying their food with them...” I was intrigued by these claims of sublime scenery and wanted to be one of the ‘privileged few’ to make the journey to the Yalong canyon. However, as with Muli, I could find no mention of “Muti Konka” or the canyon on any modern maps or in any guidebooks. Joseph Rock seemed to have been right. It had become a closed land. One of the main reasons why the canyon had remained unvisited was that the areas around Jiulong and Muli had become officially ‘closed areas’ following the Communist revolution in 1949, and they remained off limits to foreigners right into the 1990s. To visit them required a special permit usually only granted to official groups escorted by a Chinese government minder. Another reason for the dearth of visitors was that there simply wasn’t a decent map to be had of the area. So, while I remained curious about the mountain called Muti Konka through the 1990s, it remained in the back of my mind as I explored the more easily accessible areas of south west China that I’d read about in Joseph Rock’s other articles. Then in 1997, on a visit to London, I popped into the Royal Geographic Society library near the Albert Hall to see what they had in the way of maps of Yunnan and Sichuan. To my delight, I found they had the original sets of the large, hand-drawn maps that Rock had made to record the routes he had his travelled. These gave much more detail than the miniature sketches of his maps that were reproduced in the National Geographic. Armed with a photocopy of Rock’s map - which was as big as a dining table, I started making plans to retrace the botanist’s footsteps across the Yalong. I had already been deterred by the massive scale and the sheer gradients of the trackless landscape around Muli, so I decided to make an attempt to reach the Yalong from the north instead, starting from Kangding. A modern Chinese map showed that there was now a road 90 running to the Yalong from the town of Jiulong, a day’s drive south of Kangding. And intriguingly, this road corresponded with the route taken by Joseph Rock in 1929, through a valley called Yangwe Kong. I wanted to visit this valley because Rock had described the Yangwe Kong valley as being completely isolated, even by the already remote standards of the Tibetan borderlands of the 1920s. “No outlook in any direction! Here people live and die without the slightest knowledge of the outside world. How oppressive to be buried alive in these vast canyon systems! Or are they happier for it?” This sounded like it could have been the inspiration for the Shangri-La legend. After reading this, I was curious to know - would the modern inhabitants of the Yangwe Kong valley still be as isolated? Comparing maps, I noticed that the names of many villages mentioned by Rock in the valley were similar to those marked on the modern road maps: could the place marked ‘Sedjuron’ on Rock’s map be the ‘Sanyanlong’ on the modern Chinese map? Modern ‘Diwan’ was in roughly the same place as Rock’s ‘Deon’. And the riverside hamlet of ‘Mutirong’, where Rock crossed the Yalong by dugout canoe, tallied with the modern Chinese settlement of Maidilong. The best option to get to Jiulong seemed to be via Kangding in the north. However, my first tentative attempt to get there in the spring of 1998 - after a trip to Gongga Shan - was thwarted by the impassable condition of the Kangding to Jiulong road. Floods and landslides had washed out the dirt road, leaving it strewn with a mixture of silt, boulders and the twisted branches of uprooted trees and bushes. In October 2004 I made my next attempt. Kangding was now easily reached from the Sichuan capital of Chengdu (and its international airport) in a day, thanks to a tunnel that had recently been bored directly through the 4500 metre high mountain of Erlang Shan. Theis ease of access had transformed Kangding into the something of an alpine resort. By 2004 Kangding had developed into a bizarre mixture of Tibetan market town and hive of Chinese consumerism. Its high street straddled the raging torrent of the Dardo river, flowing fast and cold right down out of the mountains. The river was flanked by colourful modern retail outlets selling everything from Nike sports gear to cream cakes. Khampa nomads and Tibetan pilgrims were still in evidence in town, rubbing shoulders with Han Chinese girls sporting the latest Nokia mobile phones and Hello Kitty accessories. On the main town square teenage Tibetan monks leapt around in their crimson robes to slam basketballs though hoops, without attracting a second look from the well groomed staff in the marble lobby of the four star hotel. In a Body Shop-style beauty store I saw a tough-looking Khampa Tibetan man with red thread woven into his hair dutifully following his wife around to peruse jojoba oil and facial scrubbing sponges. There was an internet bar where a dozen teenagers played online war games, completely absorbed in their headphone-cocooned virtual battlefield as electronic American accents clamoured “Fire in the hole!”. But Kangding still had some of its old streets. There were still rickety old wooden houses in the centre of town, and still the old market for raw yak meat and a wide array of vegetables and fruit. I spent a lonely night at the Black Tent Hotel, attached to the Anjue Si Buddhist monastery. 91 I re-read Rock’s article from 1929, when he had travelled up in the opposite direction, towards Tatsienlu (Kangding) from his home ‘base’ at Nguluko near Lijiang. With his usual large entourage of Naxi assistants, cooks and Tibetan bodyguards, he made his way north, first to Muli, where he had previously befriended the fat ruler of the ‘kingdom’ of Muli on his travels to this “Land of the Yellow Lama”, and where he had also rested while on his expedition to the Konkaling mountains. On this occasion, he found that the Muli king was in residence at Kulu monastery - a lesser one of the trio of Muli monasteries. Joseph Rock had stayed for a week at Kulu, waiting for better weather, and in his article he recounts some of the strange ways of the Tibetan potentate. They shared a meal of fried eggs, bits of mutton, Chinese noodles and a bowl of sour yak cream “of which the king is inordinately fond”. Rock spoke to the king in Chinese, which was translated into Tibetan by the king’s secretary. Rock was bemused by the hapless assistant, who would have to wait by the king’s side for hours with his head bowed in deference. When Rock took pity on him, the king swept some food scraps off his plate and gave them to his servant “as if he were feeding his favourite dog”. Joseph Rock also makes a coy reference to the king’s weird practice of having his stools moulded into pills, and these Royal dropping then being given to the Muli peasants as medicine! The Muli king also had the mummified remains of his uncle [who had died 60 years previously] kept in a shrine in the dining room. “Thus royalty in Muli is never lonely, but always has company, although not of a very talkative type!” quips Rock. By April 1929 the weather had improved, and Rock set off on his trip northwards from Muli accompanied by a bodyguard of 10 Pumi [Hsifan] soldiers from Muli, and a Muli lama. His long journey to the Minya Konka peaks and Kangding took several weeks, starting with an arduous trek of several days through alpine meadows and fir forests to the edge of the Yalong canyon. The river marked the eastern boundary of Muli territory, and here the trail descended 6000 feet in steep zig-zags to the Yalong river, which flowed at an altitude of 7300 feet. It was at this spot that Rock first caught sight of the isolated mountain peak of Muti Konka, rising to a height of about 19,000 behind the village of Mutirong on the far side of the river. But first, he had to cross the canyon. After descending into its depths, he and his caravan were ferried across the river by locals in a pair of dugout canoes. The villagers would not have helped him had it not been for the presence of the Muli lama whom Rock had brought along as a guide. The local peasants obviously feared this representative of the Muli ruler, as they cringed and bowed their heads in his presence. Across the Yalong river, Rock rested in a flea-ridden chapel before setting off to climb out of the gorge and cross the Wadzanran pass en route to Chiulung (modern day Jiulong). It was inhospitable country. In some parts, the trail was too steep even for loaded mules, and the loads had to be carried by Tibetan villagers for three days. There was neither water nor grass for the animals to feed on. Everything had to be portered up from the bottom of the gorge. It took him five gruelling days to get across the Yalong canyon, and when he reached the top on the far side Rock marvelled at how much effort was needed to travel such a short way: 92 “Where Muti Konka rears its eternally snow-capped crown 19,000 feet into the sky, the Yalung flows 12,000 feet below. From the Wadzanran Pass I looked back to Reddo, only a few miles as the crow flies and yet the drop and climb had required five terrible days!” Oddly, however, Rock provides no photograph of the Muti Konka peak he describes in such dramatic terms. After crossing the Yalong river and ascending through mountainous terrain on the eastern bank, Rock rested at the small town of Jiulong. He then had to cross another high pass, the Chiprin, [now known as the Jizu Shan pass] to the north, to reach Kangding and the Minya Konka range. Seventy five years later, in 2004, I was about to take the 7am bus in the opposite direction, from Kangding to Jiulong and into the unknown. In the early morning chill of October 13th, our bus climbed out of the damp mist of the Kangding river valley and burst out into sunlight at the Zheduo pass, at 4280 metres. The pass was marked with a cairn festooned with red, green, yellow and blue prayer flags, white Tibetan scarves and hundreds of printed sheets bearing the Tibetan script Om Man Padme Hum. We had entered the cultural realm of Tibet. This potholed road was the main Sichuan-Tibet highway, and most of the traffic was heading to the next town of Litang and perhaps beyond to Barkham and eventually Lhasa. After a brief mid morning stop near Xinduqiao, we branched off southwards. The scenery was immediately very different. The road ran beside a foaming turquoise river through a valley of golden brown hills that reminded me of Otago in New Zealand’s South Island. In place of the utilitarian and often shoddily built Chinese buildings, there were now very solid H-shaped Tibetan farmhouses with flat roofs. These two storey structures with their whiteedged, T-shaped window frames and flags flying from the roof looked like forts. Further south, the valley deepened and the steep hills were forested with pines, oak and birch trees, giving a pleasing variety of autumnal colours, from green, to yellow to red. At one point we passed a lamasery that had high stone watch towers, similar to those portrayed in Joseph Rock’s article. The few people we saw by the wayside were all Minya Tibetans, dressed in traditional chubas or capes with coloured threads woven into their hair. As we bowled along under the mid morning sun the sublime scenery contrasted with ridiculous onboard entertainment. The TV at the front of the bus played video clips from Indian MTV, on which Bollywood-inspired dance productions were accompanied lyrics such as “I’m so lonely in my life/ I want to have you as my wife”. To reach Jiulong, the bus had to cross what Rock described as the Chiprin La, one of the highest passes he tackled on his journey. I anticipated this section with some trepidation: on Rock’s journey [when there was no road] he had crossed the pass with great difficulty during a blizzard with his 20-strong mule caravan on his way to Kangding. “As we ascended, the snow increased in depth and the blizzard in fury, for we were now above the timber line. We could see nothing but a purplish white wall and I seemed lost in a whirling mass of white. Up and up we climbed until finally I saw through a haze of snowflakes a few sticks which denoted an obo or cairn and hence the summit. Never did I exclaim more heartily with my Tibetans “Lha Rgellah ! Lha Rgellah!” (“The Gods are victorious”, the accustomed shout of every Tibetan on a pass.” On the modern map the Chiprin pass was described as the Chizu Pass, and it proved to be something of an anticlimax: a barren gap in the bare hills, ascended by a snaking road over a 93 treeless landscape. We paused at the top for a minute to allow a young Chinese mountain biker to get out and prepare for his freewheeling descent to Jiulong. Rock wrote: “The Chiprin pass proved to be 16,000 feet in elevation. Our descent was very difficult. Men and beasts and loads were many times catapulted into the snow, some of us sliding in a snow bank up to our necks ...” After crossing to the southern side of the Chizu pass the scenery appeared greener, and the climate somewhat milder. Instead of the blockhouse-like Tibetan houses of the Minyak Tibetans, the Tibetans of Jiulong county had more conventional stone-built dwellings with Chinese-style tiled roofs. As we neared Jiulong town the building took on a grim appearance due to their construction with sooty-coloured local stone. They reminded me of the pollution-blackened buildings of northern English industrial towns. By mid afternoon our bus had rolled into what had been the town of ‘Chiulong’ where Rock had rested for several days after his arduous crossing of the Yalong and its canyons. He had described it as a ‘scattered hamlet’ with a friendly Chinese magistrate in residence “who could endure his post only by sleeping from one inebrious state to the next carousal”. At Jiulong, Rock made speacial mention of a collection of stone watchtowers called Taputzu, balanced precariously on the hillside and rendered unstable by earthquakes. He wrote in exasperated terms about how the local population lived at the base of the towers, apparently unconcerned by the threat of being buried alive should they collapse. The modern day Jiulong seemed a typical small Chinese town of concrete apartment buildings mostly built in the ubiquitous style of white tile and blue glass. As a nod towards local sensibilities, some of the newer buildings were built in a faux-Tibetan style, with imitation wooden window frames and Tibetan-style roofs rendered in concrete. Jiulong was basically a one street town nestled in a steep grassy valley, with a large hotel, the Longhai Dajiudian, at the top end of town overlooking what passed for a town square. The main street thronged with Tibetan and Yi people, many dressed in their traditional capes and headwear. My plan was to make a low-key approach to visiting the Yangwe Kong valley, perhaps hiring a jeep or horses to get there. But a young Chinese guy I’d got talking to on the bus, a Chongqing TV reporter called Yang Shi, had other ideas. After a late lunch of greasy noodles, he led me straight to the five-storey Communist Party office and took us up to the fifth floor to seek out the local party leaders to seek “permissions”. The interior of the building reminded me of the East German Stasi HQ that I’d recently visited on a trip to Berlin. We passed committee rooms where within I glimpsed groups of people smoking and drinking tea. With my backpack and hiking boots I expected to be challenged and thrown out at any moment. Instead, we were greeted with bemused respect. “What does the foreign friend want?” everyone asked. On the fifth floor we were welcomed into the office of Mr Gao Linzhong, the head of the Jiulong county propaganda department. A man of small stature, he looked a little like Kim Jong Il, but his manner was acerbic and down to earth. He ushered me into his executive leather chair where I sat awkwardly, feeling like I was in the headmaster’s office, looking at the picture of Mao Tse Tung sellotaped to the wall alongside maps of China and the world. Otherwise the furniture consisted of a large pine desk, a water cooler and a pot plant. 94 After serving us green tea in paper cups, he perched on a stool and perused some of the old photographs I’d brought along with me - taken by Rock of their local area and people. I told Mr Gao about Rock’s visit to the Jiulong area, and his description of it as a “scenic wonder of the world”. That seemed to get his attention. As he flicked though the pictures, his interest grew, and he started to comment on them: “The local Yi people still wear this kind of jacket ... hey, you can only find that kind of old gun round these parts ... and that looks like Deon ...” He suddenly stopped and went to the open window, from where he shouted someone’s name. “Wang Qi! Wang Qi! Come and see this!” A short time later, a burly Tibetan man in Chinese clothing ambled into the room, and joined Mr Gao in perusing Rock’s old photographs. He paused at one picture taken of a group of Tibetans stood in front of some old wooden shacks. The big Tibetan scrutinised at it more closely and said to me: “This is Mundon. And that man on the right is my grandfather.” Our conversation continued over a lavish dinner at a local restaurant. Wang Qi told me his Tibetan name was Zago Tsering, and that he was now the director of education for Jiulong county. Zago been brought up in the Yangwe Kong valley and remembered the tales his grandfather had told of a foreigner passing though. But he had never known who “Luoke” was. After several toasts to our friendship and health, Zago announced that he personally would take me to Mundon and combine a “fact finding tour” with a visit to his relatives. We would also try to see if we could get to Muti Konka, which he said was the sacred mountain visible from a point high above his home village. The next few days, however, proved to be a frustrating “hurry up and wait” period of inactivity and occasional bursts of enthusiasm and announcements of our imminent departure. I was invited to numerous banquets hosted by local officials at which our venture was toasted with beer, baijiu (white spirits) and tea. These banquets also meant I had to try numerous strange dishes containing bits of what appeared to be beaks, claws and tentacles. During this waiting period it rained and Jiulong felt grim. I seemed to meet all the local dignitaries, and also many visiting officials from the Sichuan capital of Chengdu. At each one the Propaganda department head Mr Gao would say: “Let our foreign friend tell us what Mr Rock wrote about this area”. And he would repeat Rock’s phrases about the Muti Konka area being a scenic wonder of the world, and there being nowhere else in the world with scenery quite like it. “That’s our new tourism slogan!” he would enthuse. “Look at Shimian county down the road - they get thousands of tourists and what have they got? A few waterfalls and some rare alpine frogs! According to this foreign friend we’ve got ‘the best scenery in the world ...” “And our frogs are bigger than theirs!” added the Assistant Party Secretary, sat next to him. I drank endless cups of tea with officials who I presumed were having have some input to our forthcoming trip. But whenever I asked about setting off, the answer was always: “take it easy - probably tomorrow”. Feeling frustrated wuth my enforced inactivity in Jiulong, I made some side trips to nearby local attractions. Up a dirt road some 25km to the north west of Jiulong was Wuxu Hai 95 (lake), situated at the foot of some grey limestone peaks known as the 12 Beautiful Daughters. Joseph Rock had passed through this area, but despite his reputation for meticulous recording of every peak and minor geographical feature, he makes no mention in his article or maps of the picturesque lake. Wuxu Hai was an idyllic spot, a mile-long expanse of water surrounded by peaks and wooded hillside. I spent spend a pleasant day there by the lakeside watching the weather changing around the peaks higher up the valley. The local Tibetans lived in log cabins around the shore and I got one of them to guide me on a walk up to a waterfall further up the alpine valley, beyond which there was said to be hot springs and a sacred lake, Tian Chi, six hours further into the mountains. In the evening, I stayed in one of these local log cabins, squatting around the kitchen fire, talking to Mr Xu, the village leader, and his blind son who was surprised to find he was talking to a foreigner. As he expertly stoked the wood-fired cooker, I wondered how the blind kid managed to avoid injury from the many hazards within the cramped interior of the cabin. And as we talked, Mr Xu’s wife busied herself making butter tea and converting yak’s milk into butter using some strange manual separator with a crank handle. Life in this rural part of the China- Tibet borderlands was still very basic and close to nature. There was no electricity or running water. Everything was done by hand, and it brought to mind our old nursery rhymes about sitting in corners eating curds and whey. After returning to Jiulong and facing more delays, I made a visit to the Yeren Miao or “Wild Man Temple” a few kilometres to the south east of the town, along another rough farm track. This temple was located in a cave half way up a cliff. However, despite its name the temple had no connection to the mythicalYeti. The local legend had it that some statues and temple structures had mysteriously appeared at the cave in the middle of the night, and these had been placed there by a “Wild Man”. The small temple contained relics that purported to bear footprints and handprints of the Wild Man. I stayed a few hours at this lonely spot, browsing around the wooden temple and talking to the caretaker. Interestingly, I noticed the temple had on display a copy of a one of Joseph Rock’s photographs, a portrait of a monk. In his caption for the photo, Rock said the monk was the young abbot of a monastery at Zuosuo, near Yongning. However, the Yeren Miao caption claimed him as a local Living Buddha. Into the Yangwe Kong valley “Zou Ba!” (Let’s Go!) were the words of Zago on a bright Monday morning. True to his word, there was a Toyota Land Cruiser parked outside the hotel, loaded with supplies for a family visit. In the back was a food mixer - the modern Tibetan’s way to prepare butter tea packs of dried noodles, and two large leaky containers of very volatile smelling liquor. Also crammed inside the car were his wife Pema and their 20-year-old daughter Namu, a medical student back from her studies in Chengdu. She had dyed bronze hair, and a face like a serene Tibetan Buddha, which only made her relentless teasing of her father seem all the more incongruous. As we set off up the road to the Yangwe Kong valley she giggled conspiratorially with her mother. “A-ba - will they have a horse big enough to carry you up the hill?” she mocked. 96 Later on she hummed songs and practised counting up to a hundred in the local Tibetan dialect: “Dali, Nali, Songli ...” It didn’t seem like we were setting off on an expedition to find a lost mountain. “Have you got my handbag? asked Pema in the back. “I’ve got something special for Aunty Mera in it” The road initially followed the familiar dirt track north west towards Wuxu Hai, but after a few kilometres we branched off westward, up a much rougher track. Above us towerred a great rocky peak that was marked on Rock’s map as “Black Limestone Peak” - so he had been this way. The side road was much worse. Almost immediately we were being tossed around inside the car - I clung on tightly to the handles on the doorframe, but still could not avoid being bumped and bruised as the Land Cruiser rocked and bounced over potholes, ruts and boulders. In this way we ascended a pine-forested valley up to what Joseph Rock called the Druderon Pass. It was a lonely place - fir trees and some old water races diverted to turn water wheels in little shacks, presumably for grinding corn. But no sign of human habitation. After a tortuous twisting ascent on the switchback dirt road we neared the pass and rose above the tree line. The landscape might have been in Scotland - brown moorland and an alpine tarn - and the imposing shouldered wedge of a grey limestone peak, which Zago told me, was Kangwo Shan. This was another mountain pass that Rock had crossed with great difficulty: “We had already been informed at Deon Gomba, a tiny monastery recently looted by the Konkaling bandits, that the Druderon although not high, was snowed in and hence impassable. With an exhausted caravan it seemed hopeless ...” he wrote. “The following morning when I looked out of my tent and beheld our camp almost buried and our animals shivering in the cold, I really feared for the shelterless men who had stayed behind with the exhausted mules. I also feared for the two of our soldiers who had braved the pass the evening before. They were to go to [Jiulong] to bring us yaks, which could plough a trail through the deep snow and help us across. The snowstorm continued for a short time; then the sun appeared. This was the last day of April, 1929.” Again, we were lucky to have clear weather and a good driver for our crossing of the Druderon Pass. Over the other side of the pass we halted briefly and the view was of wave after wave of receding hills. Somewhere on the distant horizon, Zago pointed out a hill that’s Mongdong, where we are going today, he said. We descended into the Yangwe Kong valley and the condition of the zigzag road became deteriorated even further. On some sections landslips meant we had to get out of the car to allow our driver Puntsog to negotiate them alone. Some way down there was a cluster of stone buildings called Diwan, but there was no longer a monastery called Deon Gomba, said Puntsog. When I mentioned that Rock had said the pass also formed an ethnic divide between the Tibetans and the Hsifan tribe, Zago visibly winced. “Hsifan is a derogatory term. Actually the people on this side of the pass are Pumi. We are similar to the Tibetans but our language is different to Lhasa Tibetan dialect,” he explained. 97 I was curious to see this valley that Rock had claimed to be so oppressive, whose inhabitants he believed to be “buried alive inside vast canyon systems”. Yet as we bumped and rocked down the Yangwe Kong it did not seem particularly oppressive. In fact it had rather a pleasant climate and outlook. Under sunny skies we passed small settlements called Shigen and Bongbongchong where the yards and fields were planted with maize. There were apple, orange and peach trees, while pigs and goats roamed freely and a river flowed green and clear beside us. It could almost have been an isolated valley in Europe. The local houses were of simple Tibetan style, made of stone but with practical sloped roofs of Chinese curved tiles - and almost every one had a satellite dish to pick up TV. The local Pumi people wore Chinese style clothing - army jackets, plain trousers and gumboots, and carried wicker baskets strapped to their backs. We saw a hunter carrying an old rifle who was happy to pose for a portrait. “The climate here is too warm for people to wear traditional Tibetan clothes” said Zago. The only item of clothing Joseph Rock would have recognised were the homespun yak hair cloaks with wide red seams that some men still wore. Further down the valley, we were suddenly brought up short by huge boulders blocking the road ahead. As we slowed to tackle this obstruction another large chunk of rock bowled across the road ahead of us. I looked up to see about twenty Tibetan faces peering down at us over the rim of a cliff a hundred feet above the road. I had visions of being attacked by tufei (bandits) - but Zago assured us this was just the local way of quarrying for building materials. Not expecting any traffic along this rough trail, the locals had been dislodging large boulders to roll down across it, without giving thought to what lay below. After a few minutes of grunting work to shift the boulders under the curious stares of the locals, we were on our way again. A few more miles further on we paused at the large village of Sanyanlong - a veritable metropolis - where there were a couple of stores, a clinic and a sizeable, neat Chinese-style school. The students flocked out to see us, and Zago, being director of education, went in to make a quick visit. I popped my head into the clinic, a simple treatment room where a demur female doctor in a white coat was inserting an IV drip into a woman’s arm. “Conditions here are very poor,” she said apologetically. I recalled Rock’s 1929 comments: “Whenever we came to a village the peasants would gather about us and with folded hands would beseech me to dispense medicine to sick relatives. Often I could help. Sometimes I had to refuse”. At least now they had a clinic. By mid-afternoon we had reached the end of the road Shantien. This was Zago’s home village and there were many happy shouts as we parked the Land Cruiser and aunts, uncles and cousins emerged to be reunited with their relatives from town. From the courtyard where cows and pigs grunted, we climbed up steps hewn out of a log up to the first floor of balcony of his ancestral timber-framed home. Inside the roomy interior we had a late lunch of fatty bacon and some bitter courgette type vegetable. On the walls were the usual gallery of framed family pictures, but also an old hand-coloured photograph of a meeting of the Dalai Lama and Chairman Mao. And of course, everyone slurped bowls of suyou cha - butter tea. “My dad’s brother is a well known 98 huofo (living Buddha)” said Zago, pointing to a picture of another maroon-clad benignlooking monk. It seemed quite normal to have a Communist official and a leading member of the Buddhist clergy in the same household. During the meal a toothless local man brought in an old flintlock rifle similar to one portrayed in one of Rock’s photographs. I was also shown other historical artefacts - an old chest containing bricks of tea - once this was a stopping point of the tea and salt caravans between Yunnan, Tibet and India. There was also a huge rounded coffin, prepared in advance by Zago’s uncle. It was a Han-style coffin, he told me, without any trace of morbid feeling. Tibetans are buried in a sitting position, Zago told me. He took me up to the roof of the house, strewn with dried out maize stalks, a sweet pink form of barley called mocheng mian and flat wicker trays of red peppers to point out where we would be going. At the bottom of the valley was a large pointed peak called Sazanran, to the right of which flowed the Yangwe Kong river down a cleft towards the Yalong river. “We’re going over that” he said. It looked impossibly steep. Later on, the Joseph Rock photographs came out again, and everyone crowded around to see their old villages. Zago’s uncle looked at the one of Mundon and asked: “How does the foreigner have pictures of our old village when even we don’t have them?” The big ascent to Mundon The sounds of clanking horse bells heralded the arrival of our horses for the next part of our trip. The four horse handlers strapped on our bags, adjusted the stirrups and straps and we were soon setting off up a steep rocky trail behind the houses through the bushy hillside. Almost at once the handlers were urging me “Qi ma , qi ma!” (Ride the horse). At first, I tried to walk but as the altitude took a toll I soon conceded and let the horse sweat its way more surely up the narrow and zig-zagging trail. As we ascended, an impressive view of the lower half of the Yangwe Kong emerged, along with a bird’s eye view of the narrow cleft of a gorge that lead down to the Yalong river, far below. “Why did Rock take the trouble to climb all this way over the hills when he could have just gone down to the river there? I asked Zago. The simple answer was there was no place to cross the Yalong at that point and no settlements on the steep sides of the canyon there. “This is the only way to cross to Muli and Yunnan,” he said flatly. Our track eventually crested and crossed over a cleft in a razorback ridge of Sazanran, to descend equally steeply to some more settlements in a beautiful steep sided valley on the other side. I marvelled at the deep green tones of the precipitous slopes, and the surrounding ridges that hung like crenulated brocade. But what an isolated place it was! With its steep enclosing valley walls, this was surely the place that Joseph Rock described as having “no outlook in any direction”, and where he thought it was so oppressive “to be buried alive in these vast canyon systems!” We dismounted, drank the clear water from mountain streams and we went down, passing a few isolated farm houses on our rollercoaster descent only to begin another weary ascent as the day drew to a close. 99 For hour upon hour, up and up the poor horses strained, by now needing constant urging from the handlers as they paused every twenty steps, panting and sweating. “Cho! Ra-cho!” After numerous false summits, it took what seemed like hours before we were able to “fang shan” (reach the top of the mountain). When we did, it was dark. We were on top of a rounded ridge overlooking the Yalong river canyon. Even in the fading light, it was very impressive. Down there far below, somewhere in the gloom, I could just make out a few faint pinpoints of orangish light far below, presumably houses along the river bank in Muli county across the river. Above, a crescent moon cast a little illumination to guide us further up the ridge. The horses stumbled on up the ridge track. By now, I could barely make out the track and I wondered how the horses could see where to put their feet. I was glad I could not see the steep drop that I would face should the horse stray off the ridge. It was a surreal and marvellous experience to be riding under the faint moonlight, with the canyons far below and the long jagged ridge of the Muli mountains opposite marking the divide between earth and the night sky. An inverted carpet of stars and the Milky Way lay above our heads. Saddle sore and worn out from the day’s ascent from the remote Yangwe Kong valley, I strained my eyes to look for any sign of a settlement. The only lights were those faint pinpoints far below, across the Yalong river canyon, in distant Muli county. The only sound was of the horse bells clanking and the occasional “Cho!” to stir them on from the handlers, shadowy figures who could only be seen by the orange glow of their cigarette tips. Some time around 8pm we finally saw a faint pinpoint of light ahead. Mongdong! We came upon a cluster of shadows - buildings? In the darkness we gathered outside the locked wooden gate of a Tibetan house on the hillside, and an incredulous old man’s voice from within eventually replied to shouts from Zago and the handlers. A dog barked, a faint light went on inside and a torch shone out in our faces. The old man mumbled the Tibetan acknowledgement of “Oh-ah-uh” and let us in. Hauling our weary saddle-sore limbs up another notched log from the muddy courtyard, the handlers took care of the horses. Within the smoky dark scullery we huddled around a wood fired stove as Pema’s uncle cooked us a late dinner of fatty yak meat, boiled potatoes and sour yoghurt. This was the house of Pema’s father and uncle and they had a lot of news to catch up on. Recognising that the foreigner could not stomach much of the tough yak meat, they made me some roast potatoes by burying them in the ashes of the fire. I sat in the dark by the fire, peeling the potatoes with my fingernails and eating the insides with a sprinkling of chilli flakes. The villagers pored over the old photographs that I had brought with me. Zago’s grandfather told us he well remembered the visit by Joseph Rock to their village. He recounted the story of how as a five year old he had been intrigued by the silent foreign visitor, and had been very curious to hear how he spoke. So when Rock had bedded down for the night, the young kid and his older brother dropped a few dried leaves near his bed and set fire to them to see what the visitor’s reaction would be. Unfortunately, their ruse worked better than expected, because the flames from the burning leaves set fire to Rock’s sleeping bag. The westerner (Rock) jumped up and started yelling at them, as they scarpered outside to hide behind a nearby bush. Rock spent much of the next morning in angry silence, sewing up his sleeping bag. 100 Grandfather had another Rock anecdote. Later on during Rock’s visit to Mundon, when the young lad was acting as a guide to the botanist, grandfather claimed he had tricked Joseph Rock out of his camera. He said he had spied the strange equipment hanging up unattended on a tree branch, and he hid the camera in some bushes. Joseph Rock became distraught when he could not find his precious camera and paid a handsome reward it was “found” by the young uncle. Grandfather remembered that Rock was so relieved to get his camera back that he actually kissed it when he had it back in his hands. However, the unworldly young Tibetan kid was not to profit from his trickery. Unaware of the high value of the silver dollars he had received from the foreigner as a finder’s fee, he said he was later tricked into exchanging them for just a few pieces of working clothes by a trader in Muli. Perhaps it was the altitude, but I felt dozy and dizzy and lay down on some yak hair blankets on the floor, pulling my sleeping bag around me. The walls of the room were covered in posters of “Distinguished Animals and Birds of Ganze Prefecture” and an official notice with a Tibetan monk on that pronounced “This is a Safe and Civilised Household”. The others soon joined me to bed down on the wooden floor. “If it wasn’t for me you’d still be here digging up spuds,” Zago teased Pema in the dark. “If it wasn’t for you we’d have been here half a day earlier. You’re so fat your horse needs a rest after every five steps,” Namu teased her father. Muti Konka: the mountain with a monster legend The following morning I rose before the sun came up, from among a pile of snoring bodies in the wooden room. Our party of eight had quite taken over the Mongdong uncle’s house. Tottering round in the cold, with my legs and thighs still aching from the previous day’s long hours in the saddle, I somehow managed to find a flask of hot water (kaishui) to wash with and put my contact lenses in. At the time of Rock’s visit there had been no water here at all. It had to be “carried by the women from a thousand feet below”. This time there was a little, thanks to a diverted mountain creek, enough to make a weak cup of Nescafe to warm me up as I stood on the balcony and watched the sky lighten and reveal the Muli mountain ridges. To my surprise the string of lights I had seen the night before were not houses along the river, but belonged to a settlement only half way down the canyon. This really was a massively deep gorge! As the others began to rise, Pema’s cousin, a rugged but cheerful looking Tibetan, climbed up from the cow yard clutching a flapping chicken by its legs. “Morning!” he hailed, and pulled himself out a stool to sit on. Before I could react he had slit the bird’s throat and was directing a stream of steaming dark blood into a bowl as casually as if he was pouring red wine from a casket. I moved away as he efficiently started to pluck and wash the now lifeless carcass, which was a very unappetising greyish white colour. Joseph Rock described Mongdong (Mundon) as a “dreary Hsifan hamlet”. But as the morning sun rose over the peaks it seemed to me anything but dreary. The views across the gorge were superb and this collection of four family houses seemed to be a cheerful little community. Drawn by the sound of chanting and the throbbing of a drum, I visited the small Black Hat Buddhist temple next door, outside which in a stone shrine some burning juniper branches sent up a trail of smoke into the blue sky. Within the dark and dusty interior a couple of old men in ordinary clothes were conducting a morning blessing, impervious to a young boy and 101 girl toddlers who gamboled around them. The bumpy surface of the whitewashed interior wall was covered with colourful Buddhists frescoes. On an exterior wall at the entrance there were more beautiful pictures of Buddhists figures in delicate faded sky blues, yellows and pinks. All their faces had been scratched off during the Cultural Revolution. “Tai yihan” (What a pity) said Zago, by my side. Back in the house there was a shout of “Breakfast!” and the whole household and visitors were soon slurping bowls of fresh chicken stew with potatoes, bones and all. We were farewelled from Mundon/Mongdong mid morning by all the four families of the hamlet, many of them dressed up especially in their finest Tibetan clothes. We posed for a few portraits, and then it was time to depart. Again I tried walking up the trail, but even a short stroll up the relatively easy slope left me breathless. I remembered we were close to 4500 metres high. “Qi ma!” urged the horse handlers, and I quickly complied. “Without horses you’d have no chance of getting to here,” said Zago. And as Rock had noted: “Merely walking or climbing over a steep trail at heights of 16,000 feet is difficult enough, without carrying 80-100 pounds on one’s back. This feat was performed by the Hsifan peasants through fear of our lama, who represented the Muli king ...” This time it was our horse handlers who bounded up the hill in frayed plimsolls. Their singing of Tibetan songs seeming to grow louder and more enthusiastic as we climbed higher. Perhaps it was to do with the amount of Ara - spirits distilled from maize - that they consumed. By the afternoon they reeked of it. We ascended up the ridge, gaining fine views of Mundon from above, through fir forest that was regenerating from a 1984. In parts, whole swathes of the mountainside had been denuded of trees, while others seemed untouched. Ahead we could see the high ridge of the Wadzanran pass, and Pema warned that if it rained we would likely see many wenxue (leeches) emerging. “As big as fish some of them are,” she commented. But the weather stayed fine and clear. We reached a plateau and clearing, ideal for camping, where the horses rolled on the grass and we had fine views in three directions: to our right the serrated ridges falling gradually to the Yalong river and rising again in Muli county. To our left were the ridges that trailed off into the Yangwe Kong. And ahead was the Wadzanran pass. “That’s where the bandits used to lie in wait for the mule caravans that came up from Yunnan,” said Zago. “They were bad guys - you wouldn’t want to meet them!” By now, peeping above the crest of the brown grassy hill ahead was the tip of a snow peak. “That’s Muti Konka!” exclaimed Zago. It was frustratingly near but I could see little of it. After our break we continued, skirting around the left hand side off the rounded ridge we were ascending, seemingly away from the Wadzanran pass. When I expressed my doubts, Zago told me: “We aren’t going up to the pass - I’ve got something better to show you. Something Rock missed.” And as we rounded the ridge, suddenly the whole length of the Muti Konka ridge came into view. And what a sight its snow covered heights were. As well as the majestic main peak, there was a second snowy dome and in front of it a rocky knob, not covered by snow. “Muti Konka is the yak spirit mountain,” Zago told me. “The peak there is its horns, this ridge is one leg and the Wadzanran ridge is another leg. The pass is its knee,” he said. The rounded 102 second peak, Jachong, was Muti Konka’s wife and the rocky knob, named Yandron Zemu, was its little sister, he explained. There was even better to come. As we continued around the hill, suddenly the lower reaches of the mountain slopes came into view. And there, far below us lay the most perfect alpine lake, kidney shaped, with much of its length hidden from view behind the forested arm of a descending ridge. On its near shore was a grassy plain where several tiny houses could be made out. It was like a scene from old Switzerland. According to Zago, the alpine lake beneath Muti Konka was known as Zuni Ho to the Puma, or Chang Haizi [Long Lake] in Chinese. We sat down to have a rest and one of the horse handlers, a gentle older man, told us of the legend of a monster in the lake’s depths. He recounted how he himself had seen something splashing around under the surface of the lake some twenty years ago, and the large waves it had created on the shore. It was hairy, with the head of a horse, he said, matter of fatly, sucking on his cigarette. No one doubted him. Lonely life at Chang Haizi We descended steeply though forest to the grassy clearing in front of the lake, and were welcomed by one of the two yak herding families who made a living there. As his dog barked at us, Mr Champei invited us into his primitive house made of grey boulders. Inside the timbered interior it was surprisingly light and airy - quite a contrast to the mucky darkness of Mendon’s dwellings. As we settled down for ‘suyou cha’, I looked around and wondered, like Rock, how these people coped with the isolation. But even here, two days hard horse rise from the nearest dirt track, they had electricity from a distant hydro power station. There were light bulbs and a dusty old hi-fi player. And as with all Tibetan houses, they had a picture frame on the wall, filled with family photographs. Some of the older ones were of the family in quilted PLA-style uniforms - from the 1970s. The more recent ones showed them on excursions to the Big Buddha at Leshan, down in the Han-dominated Sichuan lowlands. These were not people cut off from the outside world any more. We settled down around the central fire, above which was suspended a wicker basket from which hung black entrails of condensed grease and soot. Inside the basket were mounds of cheese. A yak’s skull decorated with motifs like tattoos took pride of place on the mantle piece and the lady of the house was soon preparing butter tea in the usual way using a plunger to squish a mixture of tea and liquid butter up and down inside an elongated wooden bucket. For our dinner she first prepared Yumi Momo (maize bread) by cooking the maize dough in the ashes of the fire. While that was baking she took out a black old kettle that appeared to have noodles inside. It was actually yak cheese, congealed on lengths of tree twigs that had been put inside the kettle. She unwound some of the stringy cheese and mixed it with green peppers to make a kind of macaroni they called gyedon, or xiulai, in Chinese. This was complemented by more fatty yak beef and thin strips of fried potato stir fried with chillies. Namu, the big city student, surprised me by her quick adaptation to our primitive surroundings. I had been misled by my initial impressions of her pouting mannerisms and constant fiddling with her mobile phone. I had expected her to be squeamish in this environment, but she was obviously born to it. Looking incongruous in her trendy city 103 clothes, she expertly built up the fire, served up the tea and bantered with one of the young Tibetan horsehands, Tsemi. He seemed to be a bit of a jack the lad, but his ribald conversation and jokes kept everyone enthralled throughout the evening. A bottle of ara (maize) spirit was passed around, and Tsemi was a good mimic: there was some joke about mispronouncing jiujiu (uncle) that had everyone in fits. Pema laughed until she choked, and I reflected it was a long time since I had heard such unrestrained laughter. I felt a bit left out. The toilet arrangements were simple - you just went outside somewhere, not too near the house or the lake. In the darkness I wandered some way off and turned off the torch. It was almost completely black except for the overarching white presence of the mountain, like two arms of a ghostly cloak around the lake. I couldn’t see the house at all, and I panicked. Without a torch, I felt that even from a few yards away I would not have been able to find the house again. Back inside, I settled down in a dusty corner and fell into a fatigued sleep to have strange and vivid dreams. Was it the altitude or something else at work? Visiting the relatives at Roni There was frost on the ground as I emerged from the boulder shack and saw Mrs Champei milking a yak with a bright green plastic bucket. Above reared Muti Konka, still in shadow as the sun had not yet reached over the ridgeline. We were meant to have an early start but the horses could not be found. While the others breakfasted on suyou cha and tsampa, I walked down to the lakeside. The water was crystal clear, showing the blue-grey stones on the bottom, receding into pale sandy depths. The surface of the lake was absolutely still, and appeared to be covered with a fine coating of dust. I witnessed an unusual and startling visual effect. When the sun’s rays first appeared over the ridge, the surface of the lake became a perfect mirror reflecting the snowy mountain and autumnal forest colours of greens, yellows and reds and browns. However, as soon as the sun’s rays directly touched the lake, the mirror reflection was instantly and dramatically transformed into a window, revealing the sparkling perception of its depths. I threw in a small pebble and watched the concentric rings of its ripples swimming and expanding as shadows on the bottom of the lake. If there was a monster down there it must be keeping very still, I thought. I went for a short stroll along a trail up the hill behind the boulder shack. In the early morning sun the unfolding panorama of Muti Konka - or Maidi Gangga in Chinese - was magnificent. I was soon out of breath and paused after a few hundred metres to look down over the lake to survey the beautiful scenery. It was a sublime spot, and I wondered how many other outsiders had visited this place since Rock’s time. And why had Rock not taken any photographs of this stunning peak? My silent thoughts were interrupted by the distant clanking of bells. The horses had been located and when I returned they were chomping at their nosebags of maize and being readied for the days exertions. Bags were strapped on, the wooden saddle frames covered with itchy yak hair covers, straps were tightened and then it was “Zou ba!” - let’s go! It was another perfect clear sunny day as we farewelled the Champei family to return to Sanyanlong by a different route, via the village of Roni (Lawaling in Chinese). We first headed downhill into forest of firs and yellow leaved Qinggan shu whose branches were 104 festooned with a hanging lichen known as old mans whiskers or muliusiu. Birds flitted around in the undergrowth and bell-like blue flowers – qiuhua - paved the occasional clearings. “You should come here in June when the azaleas and rhododendrons are in bloom,” Zago told me. Later on, down the trail, he suddenly urged us to be quiet and we dismounted. Creeping forward he pointed to a flock of large grey quails, which suddenly darted off into the bushes with much clucking and flapping. Ye-ji (wild chickens), he laughed. And as we ascended a ridge opposite the Wadzanran pass he pointed out the songron mushrooms growing by the wayside. “Good for cancer. Japanese pay a lot of money for them - but we don’t have time to stop and look for them,” he sniggered. It was a leisurely day’s ride up through sunlit forest until we eventually crested the hill at lunchtime, and stopped to admire the view back to the Wadzanran pass, and away over to Muli. “It looks so close but it would take you half a month to climb down into the gorge and back out again,” said Zago. “They used to do it in the old times, but why bother now? You can drive there in a day from Jiulong ...” Zago and the handlers spent a half hour searching for and eventually spotting a pusa (religious image) of Kuanyin painted on the summit rocks high above us. Then we descended through the forest until we suddenly emerged above a neat village, situated on a flat platform of land at the end of the ridge, high above the Yangwe Kong valley. “This is Roni,” said Zago. “They are all family here.” In the afternoon sun a couple of men were ploughing a furrow through a potato field with a unruly yak. An old man in a tattered grey cowboy hat waved us over. It was Zago’s uncle. There was much to talk about, he hadn’t seen his relatives here for five years. Down in the village proper, among the stone and dark brown timbered buildings, we were ushered as guests of honour into the comfy chairs of the main room. We sat amid an odd mixture of farming implements and DVD players as the head of the house – Zago’s cousin - rounded up the older relatives to drink tea with us. He wore a red silk Chinese waistcoat decorated with circular celestial motifs and an upturned Desert Stormstyle bush hat on his head. Zago had to restrain him from killing a goat for us, so the cousin compromised by have his son to chase two unfortunate chickens over the walls and roofs of the cow shed, to be consigned to the pot. While Zago caught up with the family gossip, everyone wanted to have their photograph taken with me, and have their formal portraits taken. I was taken on a tour through the old village to meet an old lama and see his corner of a house where he made pious supplications to Buddha while a vicious dog in the yard outside lunged and barked at me in seemingly rabid intensity, threatening to snap the home-made chain. Over another chicken and potato stew the 83-year old grandma, Yanzhong Lamma, told me how she remembered the visit of Rock and his strange entourage. He brought strange accoutrements like photographic plates and binoculars they had never seen before, and her father had the honour of guiding him over the hills to Jiulong. In an echo of this, the younger people of the village marvelled at my LED torch and cooed as they stroked the plastic Australian dollars they asked to see. 105 Before leaving, Zago pressed a 100-yuan note into the protesting hands of his aunts and uncles and we headed off, past old timber-framed buildings with iron tridents protruding from the rooftops and the yellow painted stone swastika motifs embedded in the walls. We passed a stand of old ash trees with a sweeping view of the Yangwe Kong valley, and began the last descent back to Shantian. It was soon pitch dark and what little of the moon there was remained hidden by the ridge. I was glad of my torch because its little beam lit the way for us, down a steep track alongside a roaring but invisible series of waterfalls. As we paused in the dark, on a narrow terrace above the valley, I asked Tsemi about what Rock had written. “This place is cut off from the outside world - do you feel happy here? Would you rather be somewhere else?” In his nasal Sichuan accented Chinese he confidently and matter of factly dismissed the idea. “We’ve got everything here - good food, nice people, good weather and all this beauty - and plenty to drink. Why would I want to live anywhere else?” he said. There was silence for a while as the others contemplated what he said. The tips of their cigarettes glowed in the dark. “Do you think you will you come back here?” asked Tsemi. “I hope so,” I replied. The next day after we had rested at Zago’s house I received a rapturous reception at every place we stooped on our bumpy journey back up the Yangwe Long. The local Pumi people greeted me as if I had just returned from the moon. “Xinku! Xinku!”(hard going, well done!) they said, smiling from ear to ear. At unscheduled stops I was plied with Qingke Jiu (barley spirits) and toasted endlessly. I was taken on a tour of the local school, and treated as the guest of honour. One of the local female teachers ushered me into a room where most of the staff had been hastily assembled. With trembling hands she held a glass of Qinke Jiu up in front of me and sang a high pitched, ululating Pumi song of welcome, then draped a traditional white kata scarf around my neck. “Welcome to come back here, please tell everyone about our little place,” she said. CHAPTER 7: THE GREAT RIVER TRENCHES OF ASIA: THE MEKONG “Where in the world is to be found scenery comparable to that which awaits the explorer and photographer in north-western Yunnan?” 106 So wrote Joseph Rock in 1925 when he returned from an epic three month winter expedition to what he termed “the great river trenches of Asia”. This is a unique area of northwest Yunnan, where four of Asia’s major rivers run in parallel for a few hundred kilometres, creating huge canyons that are separated by high ridge lines of mountains. In this corner of south-west China bordering Burma and Tibet, the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Irrawaddy flow close together from north to south, before diverging to follow their own paths across different countries and to empty into different oceans. The easternmost river is the Yangtze - known as the Changjiang (Long River) in China. After flowing south from its Tibetan headwaters, the river hits a mountain barrier and makes an abrupt turn northwards at Shigu, where it enters the Tiger Leaping Gorge. The Yangzte then almost immediately loops back down south, around Lijiang, before turning permanently eastwards to flow through the heart of China and ultimately to empty into the Pacific Ocean near Shanghai. The Mekong - known in China as the Lancang Jiang - flows continuously south into Laos, Thailand then through Vietnam, where it finally enters the South China sea near Saigon. The Salween, known in this region of China as the Nu River, or Nujiang, flows along the border between Yunnan and Burma for much of its length. The watershed to the west of the river marks the actual border between China and Burma, until the river eventually kinks westward into Burma and reaches the Indian Ocean at Moulmein. For a short section in the north of Burma the Irrawaddy river also flows in parallel with these three major rivers. The juxtaposition of these major rivers and canyons creates a dramatic transition from the tropical Burmese jungle to the temperate uplands of Yunnan and the alpine peaks and plateaus of Tibet. The sequence of three canyons and five high ridges acts as a barrier to the monsoon rains coming from the Indian subcontinent, and thus creates a series of unique micro-climatic areas, starting with the moist leech-infested jungles to the west of the Salween, and eventually reaching the arid highland areas to the east of the Yangtze, in the rain shadow of these huge peaks. As well as having a wide variety of local climates, the region is also host to numerous different ethnic groups. To the north are the Tibetans, while to the west are the upland tribes of Burma, many of whom such as the Jingpaw and Lisu go under the umbrella term of ‘Kachin’ in Burma itself. Each of the river valleys has its own mix of minorities: the Naxi and Pumi in the Yangtze valley, the Lisu in the Mekong valley, and the Nu and the Drung in the Salween valley. Rock’s description of these river canyons as ‘river trenches’ is apt, for here are deep cuttings and gorges, separated by towering peaks of up to 25,000 feet high. These river-mountain divides of the Hengduan and Gaoligong mountains also form what became known as ‘The Hump’ in world war two, the great barrier that was surmounted by transport planes trying to deliver supplies to China from India after the Burma road was captured by Japanese forces. In his article in the August 1926 issue of National Geographic, Joseph Rock once again opens by making dubious claims of being the first to really explore the region. “Few have been privileged to climb the towering ranges separating the mightiest streams of Asia ...,” he begins. 107 “No white man had previously had a glimpse of many of the scenes here photographed, for the few explorers who have penetrated these terrifying fastnesses have done so when the snow-crowned peaks were hidden from view by the enveloping monsoon clouds of summer.” What Rock fails to mention is that the region had already been visited and explored quite extensively by botanists such as Frank Kingdon Ward. Kingdon Ward had tramped all over upper Burma, Yunnan and Tibet from 1910 onwards, and had chronicled his journeys in books such as Land of the Blue Poppy and Mystery Rivers of Tibet. Rock makes a brief mention of other explorers and botanists, such as Jacques Bacot and Heinrich Handel Mazetti, and describes how they had reached the Tiger Leaping Gorge (then known simply as the Yangtze canyons). However, at the time of Rock’s expedition to the ‘Three Rivers’ region there were also several Catholic churches in existence in the upper reaches of the Mekong and Salween rivers. These churches had been set up by French and Swiss priests in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the priests travelled extensively in the region and even built the first proper paths over the high divide between the Mekong and the Salween canyons. So Joseph Rock was not the first to visit this region, but he says he aimed to be the first to photograph it and its people. “Lured by the magnificence of the mountain rages and the weird and little known chasms in which these mighty rivers flow, as well as by the strange tribes living on the slopes of their gorges and in their valleys, early one October I left my headquarters in the little Nashi hamlet of Nguluko on the Likiang snow range, to explore and photograph.” In October 1924, with the monsoon rains not yet over, Joseph Rock set out for his autumn and winter visit to the north west corner of Yunnan. As usual, he had a large retinue of Naxi servants, helpers and bodyguards, 15 men in all, plus numerous mules to carry his threemonth’s worth of supplies. When Joseph Rock set off from Lijiang, his aim was to walk up the Mekong (Lancang Jiang) river towards the French missionary post at Cizhong (then known as Tsechung) near Atuntze (now known as Deqin), and then cross the ridge over to the Salween by means of the Doker La pass, a traditional Tibetan pilgrimage route. But first, he had to first work his way around the Yangtze, which envelopes Lijiang in its first bend. Rock did this by passing through the village of Shigu, situated at the tip of the first bend of the Yangtze. If you want to read more about this town and its history, I suggest you read Simon Winchester’s book Yangtze, which tell you more than you need to know about why the river makes such a weird deviation at this point rather than continuing to flow south. Shigu was later a historic stopping off point for Mao’s Long March. But back to Joseph Rock - he describes his journey with the usual woes about flea-ridden rooms and ne’er-dowell opium-smoking Chinese. These grumbles are offset by his effusive words about the magnificent countryside he is passing though. I love his description of the scene from his balcony in the market town of Shigu, as his caravan seeks to settle in for the night. Rock describes it so well, you can imagine yourself right there. He is watching the scene as it rains and while “cats, dogs and dirty children add to the confusion.” “The lead mule with his large bell steps into the muddy courtyard, followed by his hungry cosufferers. Without waiting to have their loads removed they fight their way to the troughs 108 and try to eat through the baskets tied over their mouths. Dogs are stepped upon, pigs squeal, mules bray, while long dead ancestors are conjured up unprintable language by the exasperated muleteers. Everywhere mud, dung, cornstalks and odours which it would be difficult to analyse! Poor cook! In such surroundings he has to produce a palatable meal!” On his way to cross the Yangtze-Mekong watershed, Rock passes the scene of a Nashi funeral, where grey-cloaked mourners prepared paper replicas of servants and furniture to be burned to accompany the deceased into the next world. He then passed along a narrow track where spiders’ webs were so thick as to need a stick to be held up in front of your face. “Unless one held up a to separate the yellow threads and make a passageway through this labyrinth, one’s head would soon have resembled a yellow ball of twine or fuzzy silk.” In this way, he plodded in five days up to Chutien, on the banks of a tributary of the Yangtze. This is the same route now followed by the road that carries bus and truck traffic from Lijiang (adjacent to the Yangtze) to Weixi (near the Mekong). I made my own attempt to follow in Rock’s footsteps along the Mekong in the early spring of 2002. It was to be a disappointing trip, marred by bad weather that prevented me from making the crossing of the Doker La from the Mekong to the Salween (Nujiang). Even in late March much of the Mekong valley was still gripped by dismal, winterish weather - rain in the valleys and snow higher up. With the high passes blocked, there was no chance of making the crossing, although I did not know this at the time I set off. Initially, I tried to reach Deqin directly by bus from Lijiang. This meant stopping over in Zhongdian, the town that would later appropriate the name Shangri-La and re-invent itself as a tourist centre. In 2002, however, it was still a primitive and rather grim one street town, and the weather in March was bitterly cold, in contrast to the relatively mild climate in Lijiang. The cold weather and snow meant that the road from Zhongdian to Deqin via the high pass near Baima Shan mountain was closed. I would have to go back to Lijiang. Ensconced in the friendly Tibetan Family Hotel, I pored over my maps in the cosy wooden common room and plotted an alternative route to the Mekong, via a smaller road from Lijiang that travelled a more direct route due east via a town called Weixi. This was closer to the route that Rock had followed from Lijiang. My maps attracted the attention of another traveller in the common room - a young woman from London called Shanti. When I explained my intentions to head up to the Mekong, she said it sounded interesting and asked if she could come along. So now I had a travelling companion. Back in Lijiang we bought bus tickets to Weixi. Our bus left in the dark of early morning, and by midday had followed the route of the Yangzte to a town called Judian. It was at ‘Chutien’, Rock encountered the first signs of Tibetan culture, a Buddhist temple in the town - the first or last outpost of Lamaism. He stayed in a loft from which opium smokers had been evicted and he marvelled at the clear country air at 9,000 feet, the stars overhead (there were holes in the ceiling) and the strange bunches of beans and white blocks of yeast stored in the room. From here Rock crossed over to the Mekong via a pass called Litiping, which he described as undulating alpine meadows with hemlock, canebrake and rhododendrons growing in profusion, and birds singing. I must say that when we passed over the same spot on a bus from Lijiang, I found it to be not quite so enchanting - 80 years after Rock’s visit, Litiping was a barren stunted grassland interspersed with sheep herders’ rock shelters. From this high point, Joseph Rock descended 109 to Weixi, a small but substantial town where he paused to rest and restock his supplies, as well as develop some pictures. He said the town boasted a wall of mud, with a few dilapidated gates, and a post office where he was able - despite a lack of sufficient stamps to post a letter to Washington DC. In Weixi, Rock also spent a considerable amount of time providing medical care to the locals. However, he was dismissive of their blind faith in western medicine, and their expectation that just one dose of his pills would cure even end-stage tuberculosis. He also notes that the local cure for bleeding was cow dung. My own experience of Weixi was of a very pleasant and rustic market town in the hills. Its cobbled streets and wooden houses gave it something of the atmosphere of the old Lijiang, without the throngs of tourists. Its hilly streets were given over to stalls selling all kinds of wares, especially herbal remedies. I saw a few brown-skinned Burmese traders selling oddments like Vietnamese toothpaste and some Indian-made joss sticks. It reminded me that the Burmese border was not so far away. The other big thing on display in Weixi was orchids. Literally hundreds of them. In late spring when we visited, there were scores of people trading plant pots containing these strange flower plants. Apparently the more aesthetic samples were changing hands for hundreds of dollars in the belief that they confer good luck. The main thing about modern Weixi is that its character is predominantly Lisu. The Lisu we saw appeared to be very cheerful, industrious if a bit rough and ready, and in the higher reaches of the Mekong valley we found that many were Christian. Quite a few of the local villages had small churches, looking for all purposes like any other traditional Chinese building with the curved roof, but with a cross prominently displayed on the front. Funnily, Rock did not seem to remark on this during his visit - perhaps at that time the work of the missionaries in the Mekong had yet to bear fruit. The great British proselytiser, J.O. Fraser, (‘Fraser of Lisuland’) was responsible for converting many of the Lisu to Christianity in the early 20th century, but his work only started around the Great War of 1914-18 and may not have had much impact on the Weixi area by the late 1920s. Weixi is situated some way above the Mekong, and from here Rock descended to the village of Kakatang, where he observed that goitre was a major problem. One local man had such a large goitre that it weighed down his chin to the extent that he could not close his mouth. Needless to say, I saw no such evidence of iodine deficiency on my 21st century visit. Rock continued on to the village of Petsinhsun - now know as Beixincun - where the headman wanted to have his photograph taken. Rock was amused to see him throwing on silk garments over his dirty clothes and then posing “as if he was the emperor of China”. Now Rock had finally reached the Mekong, but the route up the valley was primitive in the extreme. “The trail was appalling and often the loads had to be removed from the packs and carried one at a time by the mulemen over the treacherously narrow spots high above the stream,” he writes. 110 In 2002 there was a reasonably good road leading up the eastern side of the Lancang Jiang. Our bus was crammed with boisterous and diminuitive Lisu people and stopped every ten minutes or so at minor settlements, where they would load and offload their unusual cargoes. Many carried bushels of plants or twigs, while others hefted large plastic barrels filled with water in which swam live fish. It took Rock seven days to travel up the Mekong as far as Cizhong, while we did it in a single day. As he progressed further up the river valley, Rock noted that there were fewer Lisu and Naxi people and more Tibetans in evidence. And the Naxi who did live in the Mekong valley had adopted Tibetan ways and followed a Tibetan form of Buddhism. Up through Kangpu to Yetche, Rock met a Naxi ‘king’ who he found to be friendly and dignified. Back in 1905, this local dignitary had saved the life a British botanist, George Forrest, who had been on the run from Tibetan lamas intent on killing him. At that time, the Tibetans had greatly resented the presence of western missionaries in the Mekong valley, seeing their mission stations and churches as a springboard to convert all of Tibet to Christianity. The Tibetans’ anger culminated in the murder of all the western missionaries in the area around Atuntze [now known as Deqin], and their severed heads were put on display at the monastery there. After this, pressure was exerted by western colonial powers on the Qing authorities in Yunnanfu (Kunming), and the western missionaries in north-west Yunnan were given tacit support by the Han Chinese government, who wanted to destabilise and undermine the political power of the Tibetan lamas. As he continued up the Mekong to the north, Rock noted that the scenery became grander as they proceeded northwards from the village of Yetche. He was now hemmed in by steep hills on both sides. And it is this narrowness of the valleys that has given the Mekong and Nu canyons their unique mode of transport - the cable crossings of rivers, like the flying fox. In other broader valleys these cable crossings would not be feasible. But Rock describes in great detail how he and the whole of his entourage - 15 men with all their horses and mules and supplies - were conveyed across the roaring river on rope slides. He was intending to do this at Cizhong, but was persuaded to try a few miles further north as the Cizhong rope was past its use by date of three months! The flying foxes are still in use along the Mekong, although these days they consist of steel cables, not twisted bamboo rope greased with butter. Once across the river, Rock backtracked south to the mission station at Cizhong, where he met the French priest, Pere Jean-Baptiste Ouvrard, who had been working in this area for 14 years. Again, it is odd that Rock says almost nothing about Cizhong and its distinctive and remarkable Catholic church. Perhaps he wanted to be the centre of the narrative and did not want to draw attention to the fact that others had been here well before him. Or perhaps it had something to do with his aversion to the Catholic church after his unhappy childhood experiences in Vienna of having the faith rammed down his throat by an overbearing and obsessively religious father. Rock only mentions that the priest helped him recruit a further 13 Naxi, Lutzu and Tibetans to help on the next stage of his journey - the crossing of the Mekong-Salween divide. When we arrived at Cizhong after a pleasant if somewhat erratic bus ride up the Mekong valley, we were dropped off at a small suspension bridge over the river. We crossed this and 111 headed up over the crest of a hill to find the village of Cizhong clustered around a village square that doubled as a basketball court and outdoor waiting room for a primitive medical clinic operating out of a shack. A few of the local Tibetan old folk were having glucose drips in their arm [to ‘restore energy’] or undergoing acupuncture with massive needles embedded in their knees. After a drink at the shack we were taken up the road by an old gent who turned out to be the caretaker for the Catholic church. I told him I was a Catholic as well, and he seemed delighted with this. I tried a few words of French on him, having read that some of the older villagers still spoke it, but he didn’t respond to it. Instead, he took us up to the church at the top of the village and opened up the doors for us to have a look around. It was quite a strange feeling to walk past a Buddhist stupa into the forecourt of a Gothicstyle Catholic church in the middle of a mixed Tibetan and Naxi village in Yunnan. The church seemed old but well maintained - a bit like the caretaker himself. We padded round the silent interior, peering at the statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, trying to translate the Chinese language Christian posters on the wall, and looking for the original decorations. On the ceiling were a beautiful arrangement of symbols that combined Eastern tradition with Christian meaning. Lotus flowers and swirly ying/yang symbols interspersed with stylised Roman crosses. The altar was richly decorated with a pink floral cover, augmented by hangings of yellow silk and vases of local pink and red flowers. Above it, a statue of Jesus and the Latin inscription “Ecce Agnus Dei’. The small bell tower was reached by some creaky wooden stairs, and gave views over the collection of several hundred houses that made up Cizhong. The traditional Chinese/Tibetan-style of the village houses was offset by the satellite TV dishes that most of the houses had on their flat roofs. We spent an awkwardly reverential half hour padding around the dark interior, gazing at the decorations and I made what I thought was a generous contribution to the collection box. But my deferential sense of awe was punctured slightly when immediately after this the caretaker demanded an additional 20 kuai each for letting us have a look round! We stayed the night at Cizhong in the house of a local teacher, Mr Lee, who lived right next to the church and looked after its vineyard. The vines had been planted by the last French priests to live in Cizhong, and still produced a drinkable sort of red wine, which he served us that evening from a plastic petrol can. The type of grape was now unique to Yunnan, he told us, as it was an old and unproductive strain no longer used by the French wine industry. Still, it was enough to produce 100 litres of wine a year in Cizhong. Over a dinner of gristly chicken in a globby yellow soup, Teacher Lee told us a bit about the village. It was half Tibetan and half Naxi, he said. A bit like his own family - he was Naxi and his wife a Tibetan. And despite being an overseer of the Catholic church he himself was a Buddhist, as witnessed by the large mural of the Potala palace and the pictures of the Dalai lama over his fireplace. A collage of family photographs on his wall also showed his own travels to Tibet. Mr Lee told us that the village was a harmonious place, where Christians and Buddhists had lived together peacefully for centuries. He said about 80% of the villagers were nominally Christian, but there was no longer a priest in the village - only a visiting cleric who tended to many of the small churches in the Mekong valley. Mr Lee said the younger people in the 112 village were not so interested in Christianity - they were more interested in going to the bigger cities for karaoke, to buy clothes and mobile phones. Materialism rather than Marxism was the biggest threat to the church, it seemed. We saw his own house was neat and pleasant - with sturdy wood fittings common to most Tibetan houses in the region. Downstairs in the yard there were pigs, cows and chickens. Upstairs on the flat roof where corn was stored, there were more rooms where we stayed the night - in his son’s study room, complete with a desktop computer. It was only later that I learned a little more about the history of Cizhong and its unique Christian faith. It seems that French missionaries established a church here in the late 19th century after their initial efforts further north in Tibet were thwarted by aggressive opposition from then powerful Tibetan lamas. Their first churches were burnt down and many of the missionaries were killed by local outlaws with the blessing of the Tibetan lamas. Cizhong was then chosen as a spot to build a church because despite its predominantly Tibetan populace it lay outside the border of Tibet - and the influence of the lamas. Under haphazard Chinese authority, the missionaries built their church and tried to set an example in the ways of the Lord to their Tibetan flock. It obviously worked, and many local Tibetans and Naxi were converted. However, under the unstable Chinese warlord regimes the north west of Yunnan was never a safe place - and the missionaries were still plagued by bandits and lawlessness. In 1905 the Tibetan lamas tried to drive them all out of the Mekong valley and after killing two priests, succeeded in doing so, for while. Swiss missionaries from the Order of St Bernard took over from the French. The last western priest at Cizhong was Father Alphonse Savioz, who was there from 1948 to 1951 when he was driven out by the newly installed Communist authorities. He now lives in Taiwan. One of his colleagues, Fr Maurice Tornay was not so fortunate. As parish priest at the Tibetan village of Yakarlo to the north, he was in conflict with the Tibetan lamas even into the 1940s. He made arrangements to go to Lhasa to negotiate a ‘truce’, but was murdered by his Tibetan enemies soon after he set off. He was declared a saint by Pope John Paul several years ago. And so, despite it appearance as a tranquil ‘Shangri La’ of Christianity in the wilds of Yunnan, Cizhong has a turbulent and unhappy past and an uncertain future. It is slowly becoming known as a tourist spot, and it may not be long before coach loads of tourists clog up the dusty lanes of this village. Already a Kunming company has started to develop a ‘Cizhong wine’, allegedly based on the grape variety originally introduced by the French priests. From Cizhong, Joseph Rock crossed over the 15,000 foot high mountains to the Salween (Nujiang) in the west via the (Sila) Se La pass, and spent two weeks exploring its settlements and monasteries.I will describe my own travels to the Salween (Nujiang) in a later chapter. Leaving most of his supplies behind at Cizhong, Rock ascended first from the Mekong river up a steep zig-zagging track through oak and pine forests to a ridge about 11,000 feet up. From here he had great views of the Baimashan mountains south of Deqin. Continuing up to the bleak pass, Rock passed through deciduous forests of maples, with wild cherries and rhododendrons growing in the bush. On our March visit, however, we were told quite categorically by Teacher Lee in Cizhong that the pass over the Se La was closed by deep snow. We attempted a recce and spent half a 113 day ascending high above the river behind Cizhong, gaining great views up the Mekong valley and of the mountain to the north. There were no other houses or settlements higher up in the mountains, but some of the herders we encountered up there also emphatic that the mountain crossing over to the Salween were closed. Reluctantly, we headed back down to Cizhong. The next day we continued our journey up the Mekong, but this time on foot. We walked up the dusty road alongside the river to Yanmen (Swallow’s Gate), where we stayed for a night. The Tibetan and Naxi people we met along the way were friendly - almost everyone urging us to rest and to come into their homes to have something to eat. Maize seemed to be the local crop and the corn was spread out on the road to remove the husks. In one small settlement we heard a strange thumping and groaning noise. When we went into the house to investigate we found three young Tibetan monks sat upstairs performing a house blessing ceremony. They banged on drums, blew on horns, rang bells and chanted unceasingly, unfazed by the appearance of two foreigners as spectators. Tired from our day of walking, we rested in the house for a while and shared some noodles with the friendly hospitable Tibetan residents. In some ways, they looked very similar to the Mekong Tibetans photographed by Joseph Rock. They passed the time printing prayer colourful flags and making butter sculptures, which they put up around their house temple. Beyond Yanmen we passed a narrow gap in the steep sided gorge, from which a mountain river emerged. I presumed this to be the outlet of the notorious Londjre gorge that Joseph Rock climbed down on his return to the Mekong from the Salween. “Of all the trails along which we had passed thus far, none could compare with that which leads from Londjre gorge out into the Mekong. It is a veritable corkscrew up a weird black chasm, at the bottom of which roars the stream coming from the sacred Dokerla. The trail is built against a rocky wall of sandstone in short, steep zigzags, a most appalling structure of tree trunks suspended over the deep, narrow, yawning black canyon with overhanging cliffs. A gale was blowing in addition, which meant that at every turn one had to brace oneself against the wind, holding tightly to the cliff.” As we continued up the river the valley narrowed - in some sections the river ran swiftly between dramatic high walls of rock. We wanted to have another try at crossing over to the Salween, and we thought the Doker La pass might be open even when the Se La was closed by snow. The Doker La is a major pilgrimage route for Tibetans. It marks the official cultural border between China and Tibet, and according to Rock, it saw thousands of Tibetan pilgrims crossing it every year. “A constant stream of pilgrims treads the narrow trail with the sacred prayer Om Mane Padme Hum ever on their lips as they whirl prayer wheels in teir right hands. Thus they acquire merit. Many commit suicide by throwing themselves down the Dokerla, for to die on that sacred spot means emancipation and deliverance from re-birth. Some there are, especially nuns and monks, who do nothing all the year long but cross the Dokerla in penance.” To reach the Doker La we no longer needed to use the rope bridge that was the only way of crossing the Mekong when Rock visited. Now there was a primitive bridge, across which mules were plodding, and which seemed to sway in the strong wind blowing up the Mekong 114 gorge. We ascended for hour after hour along a simple trail, but it became increasingly evident that the Doker La was closed. The weather worsened as we got higher, and everyone we met along the way told us there was no way across. In this part of the Mekong there were quite a few small Tibetan houses dotted on the higher slopes, and it was to one of these that we turned for accommodation in the late afternoon. The mountain ridge ahead of us was socked in with cloud, and it was starting to rain more heavily. When a rough looking Tibetan farmer herding some goats asked us where we were going, we told him about our abortive plan to cross the Doker La. He shook his head and said the trail was not usually open until late May - sometimes June. He was then kind enough to invite us to spend the night at his place. And so it was that we spent the night sleeping on the floor of his threadbare wooden house house, at an altitude of around 12,000 feet above the Tibetan hamlet of Yongjiu on the Mekong. In the gloomy interior we juggled with walnuts and watched a Hong Kong kung fu movie on his dated TV. The farmer was only in his 40s but was already a grandfather - his teenage daughter was nursing a baby, breastfeeding the little mite while piglets and kittens and puppies played underfoot. The next morning we woke up stiff and cold, but our decision not to continue on to the Doker la was vindicated - it was pouring with rain. We said a big thank you to the farmer and headed back down to the river. The route that had taken us several hours to climb up now took only an hour in descent. At the windy bridge we managed to find a shack to eat noodles, and we took a minibus along the last part of the route up to Deqin. It was a scary ride, along a narrow road that rose higher and higher above the river, and which had precipitous drop offs and some very scary tight corners. Deqin was a scrappy town of ugly Chinese concrete buildings, wedged in the mountains. In Rock’s time it was known as Atuntze, and it comprised just a few stone and mud buildings and a small market place (“where people from the northern steppes bartered merchandise with the Chinese”). Rock says little about it in his article except that it was still “essentially a Tibetan town”, despite being annexed by the Chinese into Yunnan in 1703. It was at the Fei Lai Si monastery just outside Deqin that we got a glimpse of the “peerless peak” of Miyetzimu (Meili) that Rock described so rapturously as “the most glorious peak my eyes were ever privileged to see. No wonder Tibetans stand in awe and worship it. It is like a castle of a dream, an ice palace of a fairy tale, or an enormous mausoleum with gigantic steps and buttresses all crowned by a majestic dome of ice tapering into an ethereal spire merging into a pale blue sky.” By 2002 the viewing area for the mountain had become a tourist trap, with hawkers selling joss sticks and other offerings to be made at one of the many shrines. The tourist route also included a visit to the Minyong glacier that lies beneath Meili Xue Shan. Instead, we opted to travel the same route back down into the depths of the Mekong canyon, but turned left at the river to visit the hamlet of Yubeng. At the junction of the road near the Mekongwas we stopped at a small Buddhist chapel, called the ‘Jungle Temple’. Inside, there were effigies of Buddhist deities, but also evidence to confirm Rock’s observation that the local people also worship the mountain itself as a deity. The route to Yubeng then branched off south along the western side of the Mekong. Once again the road was a nightmare for the squeamish and those with a fear of heights, as it ran 115 along the sides of a precipitous sided canyon, high above the river. Mekong, 1924 We stayed at some hot springs near Xidang before walking over to this Tibetan mountain village of lower Yubeng, where we spent a frustrating three days waiting in vain for the weather to clear. It rained almost constantly and there was nothing to do except site inside and wait. On the rare occasions when the rain stopped, we played the locals at snooker on a wonky outdoor table. Huddled round a fire in a bucket that gave off almost no heat, we had plenty of time to reflect on what we had seen so far - and what we were missing. We tried hiking through the deep snow to see the sacred waterfall and the ‘magic lake’ but it was hard going, and after hours and hours of walking we saw very little. The permanent fog also meant we could see almost nothing of the mountains from Yubeng. This was no Shangri La. We spent a final night in Xidang at the Tibetan ‘disco’ being held in the main hall, just under our guesthouse room. Young Tibetan lads vied with each other to show who was the most macho on the sidelines of the dance floor. A few fights broke out and the music blared on until well past 3am. Unable to sleep, I made the foolish mistake of walking out of the guesthouse at 3.30am, thinking I could walk down the road and start hitch hiking early when I reached the main road by the river. I had forgotten that Tibetans turn their dogs out at night to guard their properties, and spent the rest of the night huddled in the remains of a wooden shack, clutching my backpack in front of me and trying not to attract the attention of roaming dogs. It was an inauspicious end to my trip, one that was quite at odds with the Joseph Rock hyperbole. CHAPTER 8: THE GREAT RIVER TRENCHES OF ASIA: THE SALWEEN It didn’t feel like we were starting out on an epic adventure. The night before our departure from Dali, in December 2007, we tucked into beef curry and rice while watching Braveheart 116 at some pretentious café that would in normal times I’m sure be full of westerners. But this being just a few days before Christmas we had the place to ourselves, and the mother of the young female owner was solicitous in the extreme, urging us upstairs to relax and watch TV. And even the next morning when we set out before daybreak to take the local commuter bus into Dali New Town (ie Xiaguan), it didn’t feel like we were going anywhere remote. As we stepped somewhat nervously on to the “Business Class” coach at Xiaguan bus station I was surprised to see the next two passengers were a couple of young American kids. One of them, a teenage girl, looked like she was the model for the gawky babysitter in The Incredibles – right down to the braces on her teeth. Given that the Nujiang valley is a Christian part of China, I presumed they were the kids of missionaries operating in the area. We settled into our seats as the bus left Xiaguan and seemed to descend forever down the long and curving motorway that has now been built along the path of the old Burma Road. I didn’t realise how high Dali was in altitude until we continued this descent for what seemed like hour after hour. Some of the views over epic green hills stretching to the horizon, dotted with picturesque Yunnan farms was breathtaking. Paul kept himself busy reading his newly acquired Harry Potter book while I tried to avoid watching the abysmal Jackie Chan bank heist movie playing on the bus TV. This was followed by a surreal Chinese movie about wizards from the underworld – dating from the 80s judging by the hairstyles and filmed in Nepal. It featured a twee Chinese woman and her ET-like friend ‘Bigui’ and their various celestial friends who manage to overcome the dark empress of evil and her green snot curse. Just as I was beginning to sit back and enjoy the trip we drove past a service station (yes, on the Burma Road – complete with the same motorway signs for snacks, petrol and toilets you would see at Watford Junction) … but with a mile long queue of trucks waiting to get petrol. Thank goodness we aren’t in that queue, I thought. Whoops, spoke too soon. About 30km further on, in the middle of nowhere we hit a long tailback of trucks and cars. We stopped and everyone got out. As I walked up the line of stationary vehicles my heart sank when it became clear that this was a long, long tailback. Truck drivers were sitting on the road, cleaning their air filters while others had started taking their engines to bits. We were obviously in for a long wait. I presumed it was because of the province-wide fuels shortages, and I continued on up the road for more than a kilometre, despairing that we would get anywhere this day. Passengers from other coaches were sat out by the road, playing cards or cracking sunflower seeds and sipping from their flasks of green tea. I wondered whether there was any chance of us hitching a ride with a passing truck going back to Dali along the invitingly clear highway running the other way. Then, just as I reached the start of the jam at a tunnel entrance, the police car blocking the road pulled away and waved the first trucks onwards and through. I raced [staggered more like] back to our coach, wondering if I could remember where it was, and had visions of my son being carried off without me, to arrive in the middle of nowhere in China by himself and with no money. I made it back, absolutely knackered, just in time as our coach was setting off, with the driver urging me to “Shang Che!” – and the traffic block cleared remarkably quickly. 117 And then it was on again, down through the mid morning sun, watching the massive hills of Yunnan slide by as we crossed first the Mekong river, and then on to the motorway exit for Liuku. From the two-lane highway we switched to a twisting cobbled road that took us back up on to a dusty plateau, through some very dry and dusty country until we corkscrewed down again towards the Nujiang. The scenery was greener and there were waterfalls and larger rock formations lining the road. I overheard the American kid talking to what I presumed was his father on a mobile, saying that we were approaching the checkpoint and he hoped to be back in time for “supper in town”. Sure enough, we soon pulled up at an official military checkpoint for the Nujiang valley, where armed soldiers boarded (wearing flak jackets) and took away our passports for a while. Fortunately, they were soon returned and we continued the last few km into Liuku. It seemed a chaotic, scrappy sort of city and as we disembarked I grabbed Paul and got us into a taxi to take us to the west bus station, across the Nu river, from where we were told the buses up the valley departed. At this smaller bus station a friendly woman pointed us to the ticket office, where lo and behold our American colleagues were already buying their tickets. Thanks for showing us the way, I thought. So much for Christian charity! But once we boarded the bus and got chatting to these wary kids, I learned that they were not missionaries, but the daughter of a UN agricultural advisor based in the valley, and her older tutor. Still, they remained rather wary of us and didn’t chat after that. The next part of the journey, up the lower stretches of the Nujiang, was interesting and scenic, but seemed to go on forever. The road followed the western (left hand side) of this turquoise-green river for mile after mile. The further north we went, the higher and steeper the hills became – and it was amazing to see tiny farmhouses clinging to the side of the hills, often thousands of feet up, just for the sake of tilling a few terraces of rice. I also noticed the first Protestant Christian churches. These stood out from the other scrappy buildings, being painted in clean white paint and having a plain red cross mounted over the black roof. It was odd to see a village with a red crucifix on a smart building at one end and the red flag of China flapping over the school at the other. But aside from the odd church, there was no sudden feeling that you were in a ‘Christian’ part of the world – the Nujiang still had the same Chinese blend of messy construction and exploitation of natural resources as you see anywhere else. There were tractors, and road workers doing the usual backbreaking ork. A few Lisu women wore traditional brightly-coloured headscarves and those ethnic hilltribestyle shoulderbags, many hauling loads of bushes using the headband to take the weight. Some of the younger ones looked quite attractive in an almost Burmese kind of way – reminding me of that singer Tanita Tikaram. The other Lisu passengers on the bus appeared cheerful but backward - two mothers of indeterminate age, with a brood of snotty nosed urchins who spent most of the journey puking into plastic bags. The nice coach lady tried to get them not to spit on the floor, but they didn’t seem to understand her Chinese. As the light started to fade we said goodbye to the US kids and continued on to Fugong, which expected to be a pleasant ethnic mountain town. Instead, when we arrived, it was dark 118 and the town appeared rough around the edges and not particularly clean or attractive. Lots of shonky concrete shopfronts and dim lights in obscure doorways. Feeling lost and in a bit of a panic, I followed the advice of the driver and checked us into the first hotel we saw, opposite the bus station. This was a grim concrete corridor place, feeling more like a prison. The room overlooked the main street with all its traffic noise, but I thought it better than nothing, better than that great dark threatening unknown of the streets. But when we recovered and went for a walk to have dinner (I managed to persuade them to cook us up some fried rice with egg and another with pork - the restaurants hereabouts don’t have menus, they just open up the fridge and ask which bits of meat and veggies you want cooked) I felt better and we explored what little more there was of this dismal dark town. After stumbling blindly down a few dark alleys we even managed to find an internet café, where I was able to google Fugong and learn that it had a nice hotel called the Dianli Binguan (‘Electric Company Guesthouse’). And this place turned out to be right opposite our fleapit, and I quickly booked a room there when I saw how palatial they were compared to our concrete bunker. I didn’t mind losing the deposit on the old room, I was so relieved. And so, after this long first day we both went to settle down to sleep, whilst watching the Beijing Symphony Orchestra play a Dvorak concerto on the hotel room TV. Fugong northwards Friday the 21st of December saw use rising at eight in the morning in our anonymous hotel room in Fugong. I couldn’t tell if it was light or not as we had no outside window, and when I first woke up in the early hours I couldn’t remember where I was for a few moments until suddenly I realised – “Blimey, I’m in the Nujiang Valley!” We didn’t muck around – straight up, get dressed, and out on to the chilly street to grab the standard Chinese breakfast of doujiang (warm soy milk), youtiao (fried dough sticks) and mantou (steamed bread rolls) from a grotty place on the main road. A minivan with a sign showing he was off to Gongshan was already waiting on the street so we piled in and set off for the next leg up the Nujiang valley. From Fugong, the scenery just got better and better. The river twisted and turned, but was essentially placid, sometimes looking more like a long thin aquamarine lake than a great river. The valley sides became steeper and there were huge crags and mountains rising beyond – Burma was only a few km away over the crest of these green hills. We past the famous Stone Moon Hill (Shi Yueliang) – a massive ridge with a circle-shaped hole in the rock. And at one point I looked down in to the river to see canoeists paddling away – but they were too far away to see if they were westerners or Chinese. Our fellow passengers were an outgoing young couple who talked and talked – sometimes to us, sometimes to each other. He told us we’d arrived just in time to see the Christmas celebrations among all the Christians in the valley – he called it something like Kerfoo Jie instead of the standard Chinese name of Shendang Jie. He also went on at length about how he’d been around a bit – to Malaysia etc, but “When I have the money I haven’t the time, and vice versa”. 119 The driver was fairly whizzing along and I noticed he had Christmas glitter decorating his rear view mirror. And when his mobile went off the ringtone was the tune of the Christmas carol: “The First Noel …” All very surreal. Noticed quite a few timber logging yards along the way, presumably processing what’s left of the forests of Burma a few km away – and had to admire the engineers who installed the ugly power pylons way up high in the valley – how did they ever get access to those high ridges, never mind string high tension power lines over such huge distances and heights? We eventually arrived at Gongshan just after lunchtime, and the first thing I noticed was how cold it was after the almost subtropical mildness of Liuku. The other notable thing about this ugly place was how small and inconsequential it seemed - but at least the people seemed quite friendly. A vivacious Lisu girl in the street front restaurant served us up with beef noodles as we sat shivering, and fired curious questions about us as we slurped. Feeling slightly disappointed at this hopeless-looking end of the line town, I decided to press on to Bingzhongluo, where my Chinese guidebook said there was another “fine hotel” – can’t be any worse than Gongshan, I thought. I’d envisaged Bingzhongluo to be a hillside community of log cabins, after reading a 1980s book on the Lisu and Nu people. But as we rounded the last corner of the road above the epic and sweeping “First Bend of the Nujiang” (itself a notable sight), I saw that BZL, as we shall call it from now on, was just yet another ugly Chinese frontier town. To be precise, it was a single street eyesore in a spectacular location. At first, I felt a bit let down after paying the 50 kuai “Scenic Area Entrance Fee”, but the scenery really did change my mind. So we had made it to the end of the road, literally. Bingzhongluo is where the south-north road up the Nu river valley ends. And it ends in spectacularly ignominious style by just petering out into a bit of gravel and muck at the end of the high street. The town itself is not much to write home about. There isn’t much to it. A few rickety wooden stores selling the usual basic bits and pieces of Chinese rural life – packets of noodles, cooking oil, cigarette lighters, rice wine … then there is a crude outdoor market with flyblown slabs of mutilated pigs and cows for sale – more fat and gristle than red meat. There was a small hospital, where outside there were a couple of patients hooked up to IV drips. There was a large primary school rising two stories up, and opposite, in the centre of town there was the Yudong Hotel. We decamped from the minibus and entered the lobby of this almost new establishment to find it completely deserted. We could have made off with the contents of the display cases – the crossbows and other ethnic knick-knacks on display. Instead we asked around and eventually a woman arrived and checked us in so we could go up to the relatively posh room and get rid of all our gear. Exploring the town didn’t take long. There were a couple of other smaller guesthouses, some stores and one mini-supermarket in which the bored girl was watching China’s version of Idol. Across the road by the school was what looked like a bar or café called the “Bingzhongluo Travel Information Centre” with some English signs in the window offering yak butter tea and meals. 120 Inside were some ornate wooden tables and sat around a brazier I found Mr Ma Huang, one of the new breed of Chinese adventure travel guides. I don’t know why but they always seem to have megalomaniac, overbearing personalities. Ma Huang wore a military style baseball cap and fatigues. I was admiring his gallery of photographs when he slapped me on the back and announced that he could take me to many of these places in one of his Jeeps – in particular to forbidden areas such as Chawolung, across the border in the Tibet TAR or over to the Dulong river valley “because I have friends in the army and they will give me face,” he said. He sat us down and invited us to chat with some other Chinese outdoorsy types, all geared up in the usual spanking new North Face kit. His wife, a homely, no-nonsense woman gave us a bowl of walnuts and Paul got stuck in, shattering many of them with the metal nutcrackers. I tried to make conversation and to ask about how to get to the Catholic mission station of Baihanluo, but Ma Huang dismissed this place as not worth visiting, and again gave me the hard sell on why I should go in one of his hired Jeeps to Chawalong. Getting tired of this assertive attitude, I got up to go off for a wander. He invited me to come back for dinner and one of the other trekker types asked if we wanted to go to the village of Qiunatong the next day. I said I’d think about it. In the meantime Paul had managed to find the local internet café, where he joined the other local kids playing Counterstrike. With him busy I wandered off down the road to walk the 23km back along the narrow hillside road, snapping pics of the “First Bend of the Nujiang” (not really the first bend at all and while picturesque, not to be compared with the dramatic first bend of the Yangtze). I also noted that they were already tarting up the roadside and constructing a special viewing platform, complete with landscaped plants and ochre-painted chains. There was even a tent selling souvenirs such as crossbows and Lisu costumes – though I was the only potential customer. Looking back to Bingzhongluo, it looked like a picturesque alpine resort from a distance, with the snowy peaks in the background – how different from the reality close up! There were a few Lisu or Nu men and women working to fix up the road, but they didn’t look especially interesting or different – they said a friendly “hello” and ignored us. Back in the village it felt weird to be uploading digital pictures straight up onto Facebook and Flickr just a few moments after I took them. I also bumped into some westerners just getting off a minibus. Eager to strike p conversation, I asked if they would be interested in visiting Dimaluo over the next day or two, only to be told that since they were Jewish they would be resting the next day (the Sabbath) and anyway, they could not go to a Christian church because of heir religion (so why come to one of the few areas of China noted for its Christianity then? I wondered to myself). I narrowly avoided a dinner party with the big ego of Ma Huang, the other Chinese trekkers and a local army guy by making an excuse about Paul, and instead we went off to get some simple fried rice instead. We slept soundly that night, after sitting in bed watching an Eric Clapton concert on Chinese TV. 121 Bingzhongluo The next day, Saturday 22nd Dec, I woke early while it was still dark, wondering why the local kids were chanting songs and slogans in the schoolrooms opposite at 7am in the morning. Made the mistake of having jiaozi for breakfast at the hole in the wall eatery opposite where we’d had fried rice the night before. Not long afterwards I was gripping my stomach and experiencing the worst cramps and bellyache I could imagine – periods of calm and thoughts of “Oh, I’m over it now” only to be hit even harder with sudden waves of cramp and spasms. At least it provided me with an excuse for not going with the Chinese trekkers to Bingzhongluo. Instead I spent much of the morning back at the hotel, sipping tea and eating only a couple of wafer biscuits for lunch, while Paul played in the internet café. I took him down to see the Catholic church down a side road by the river way below, passing the filthy wooden houses of the local Lisu people. In the village of Chongding we found the church compound locked while a group of workmen were fixing up the road with a noisy roller and lots of gravel. No rural idyll here. We got a local woman, Ding Da Ma, who runs a trekkers dorm, to come and open the place up for use. It was a beautiful white washed church with delicate and ornate painted features. Inside it was just a regular church with microphone, stations of the cross, and a rope to pull and ring the bell in the tower. In the yard, with the mountain peaks as a backdrop was the single lonely grave, the final resting place of Swiss missionary, Pere Annet Genestier. I only had time for a cursory look around as Madame Ding started getting impatient. By the time I had taken a few snaps of the lonely grave of Pere Annet Genestier in the yard she was ushering us out. When I asked her when the Christmas celebration was she just snapped “Midnight on the 24th!”, and booted us out. Later in the afternoon I bumped into an irate Ma Huang, who said he was not happy the way I had piked out over dinner the night before and had pulled out of the Qiunatong trip. I told him I had to keep an eye on Paul and that I’d been sick, and he relented somewhat and invited us for dinner. This comprised a lot of local vegetables, fatty pork and beans and lots of maotai toasts. I tried to avoid as many of these rocket fuel sips as possible, but eventually ended up quite merry, and maybe this was something to do with me assenting to go on the trip to Chawolong in Tibet the next day. Why not? It would be the highlight of the trip so far, and at the asking price of about 1200 kuai seemed good value. I dragged the Israelis over from their Sabbath seclusion after sundown and tried to persuade them to come along too. Spent the rest of the evening facing multiple questions, during which I acted as translator from Chinese to English while the woman translated into Hebrew for her partner. It all came to naught. They basically wanted to do some trekking and no more riding in the car. They had visions of walking north up into Tibet and then cutting over to the east to get to Litang and eventually down to Litang, Zhongdian and Lijiang/Dali. Despite getting this far, they didn’t seem to have much idea of where they were or the kind of terrain they faced. 122 And they kept making excuses like her partner having a bad back from being in the Israeli Army as reasons not to go on the Jeep.I gave up in disgust and let them go off. I’d rather travel alone than put up with all that kvetching. And so to bed, to get ready for our big trip to Tibet. Bingzhongluo-Chawalong I found it hard to sleep in Bingzhongluo on the night before we set off to Tibet. Partly the excitement/worry and partly the lingering stomach cramps from those dodgy jiaozi dumplings from the day before. I woke up at 3.30am and got up to make a cuppa and read a bit of my last remaining bit of English literature – The Power and the Glory. Managed to get a bit more kip and then stirred a chatty Paul out of bed at 7.30-ish, while still dark outside, to get him washed and dressed before we went over to the Tibetan café over the road. Our driver “Tony” from Kunming was waiting for us and we had breakfast of mantou (steamed bread) with pickles, plus some hard boiled eggs before we set off. As it got light I did a bit of last minute shopping for biscuits and water while they filled up the Jeep with petrol. And then at about 8.30am on this sunny December 23rd, we were off, driving down the side road all the way down to Chongding first, and past the Catholic church we’d visited the day before. It was slow going at first because there were quite a few road crews upgrading the gravel track into something suitable for ordinary cars. They are obviously grooming this place for an influx of tourists. Soon we were past the tipper trucks duping concrete and muck on the road, and the first stop was right down by the riverside at a place called Shi Men Guan (Stone Gate Pass). At this point the high walls of the cliffs closed in around the turquoise slow-running Nu river and at this early hour much of the river was in shade and with mist over the water. Further on up the river we crossed a new bridge and passed a few Lisu hamlets of log cabins on flats by the river. The vegetation here was still lush and green, and the climate quite mild – but beyond Shi Men Guan there were few people and no traffic about. We continued on the road up to the turn off for Qiunatong, some 18km up the road, admiring the spectacular scenery along the way. Stopping at an encampment for more road workers, we then pressed on along a dirt track as the smooth road gave way to a bumpier, unmaintained track. The Jeep bumped and jolted its way along the right hand (eastern) side of the river – occasionally turning a hairpin bend or following the road a little higher above the river – but nothing too scary – yet.We got glimpses of snow-covered peaks around corners and hiding behind the main range towards what appeared to be Burma. The scenery really was breathtaking, especially in the winter sun and under blue skies, and we seemed to have it all to ourselves. By mid morning we came to a pale blue sign that announced were leaving Yunnan and entering Tibet. Paul amused himself by jumping from one side to the other and chanting “Now I’m breaking the law, now I’m not.” We didn’t have Tibet entry permits. 123 Some way up the road we came across our first Tibetan village of Longpu, where the style of houses was typically robust Tibetan, like small stone forts. Quite a contrast to the dark wooden log cabins of the Nu and Lisu a few km to the south. We noticed the landscape was becoming more arid, the hills apparently steeper and bare of vegetation, and the sky even bluer than before. After a short break where we ate more mantou and hard boiled eggs by the roadside, we pressed on along an increasingly dangerous road. I had not expected this and it came as a rude shock to find that our route now lay along a precipitous ledge carved out of the sides of the steep cliffs. The road was barely wide enough for one car and the drop off at the side was all too frequently a sheer drop straight down into the river. The surface of the road was very bumpy and uneven, so each lurch saw me gripping the interior handles and grimacing at the prospect of a sudden slip off the road. To my alarm I found the doors were locked, so even my panicking plan to shoot out of the door should we come off the road would not be possible. I was terrified. The road just got worse and worse, and one of the bad things about it was that I could see the scary sections coming up in advance – in fact many of them looked much worse and more precarious from a distance than they really were in reality. Paul was enjoying my discomfort and didn’t seem bothered by the risky nature of the road at all. As I sat there quaking and muttering “Oh God” or “Aiyah!” He just laughed and taunted me with: “Daaad – we’re going to fall off!” The worst sections involved the road jutting out on a sharp spur over the river and then turning a tight corner to ascend or descend. I gripped the seat tightly and just closed my eyes and dare not to look or breathe. I didn’t even dare think what would happen if a car or truck came the other way and we had to stop or worse, reverse. I was not happy with the state of the road – in some parts the road appeared to be little more than a load of gravel tamped together tightly and shored up against falling into the river way below with just a few planks of rotting wood. And just when I though we were over the worst an even more precarious section would come up. Needless to say I didn’t have much inclination to appreciate the fine views or the changing scenery. Before I knew it we were in a very different arid landscape of fine white and grey dusty rock, massive steep slopes on either side, ending in jagged ridges. Cactuses grew along the roadside and the air appeared dry and thin. We passed a few Tibetan style cabins, some Mani stones and prayer flags, but for mile after mile the landscape was just barren of almost all forms of life – including vegetation. As Tony said, in these parts it may only rain two or three days in a year. Paul had by now nodded off and I cradled him on my lap as we crossed more ridiculously dangerous sections of ledge-road, until we eventually pulled up below a large white chalky landslip. 124 Until now Tony had not appeared to be fazed by the state of the road, but here he got out and paced up and down, squinting up at the landslip and wondering whether it would be safe to cross below the buttressed wall that held back the huge mass of small stones. It took him a while to make up his mind that it was safe, and we go back in the car to edge rather quickly along this much-swept route. And then a few minutes later we were finally at Chawalong. The town appeared to comprise a picturesque cluster of traditional stone Tibetan buildings clinging to the hillside, and a more modern Chinese-style one street strip of sleazy and run down concrete building, tatty shopfronts and a few official buildings. Tony asked the Tibetan guy who we had given a lift to for the last 5km where his friend lived, and was pointed to the far end of the traditional village. And it was here that we pulled up, along an old cattle track, with instructions for me and Paul to keep out of sight until we knew which building we were staying in. There were a few ragged looking girls herding goats and cows along these tracks, while others laboured along with large piles of sticks and branches lashed to their backs. We finally got the all-clear and emerged stiff and reeking of nervous sweat from the Jeep, to walk up the grey gravel track to the house where Ma Huang’s local mate lived. A few local kids saw us and gawped at us before we reached the doorway and entered the dark interior of the Tibetan household. We had arrived in Chawalong – Rock’s “Tsarung”. Inside the dark house, we climbed up the rough wooden steps past a nasty looking German shepherd dog that was tethered in the rank-smelling straw of the ground floor. Upstairs we entered the black, barely lit large living room and joined the Tibetan family around a table. Some of the family, including a grandad with Buddhist prayer beads, were squatting round the big fire/stove in the middle of the room. But we were ushered to the table where we were given sunflower seeds and cups of warm Qingke barley wine, which our host assured us was their equivalent of water and was OK for kids to drink. On the big TV they were watching some kind of Chinese male beauty pageant – in which bronzed sculpted gay-looking young Chinese men strolled across stage in just their boxer shorts, holding a couple of pink balloons. It was surreal. And this is pretty much how we spent the evening – watching crap Chinese TV (a program about a Chongqing-based cop drama) while the hosts chatted to Tony. I asked one guy what dialect of Tibetan they spoke, and he assured me they all spoke mandarin. I later learned he was just a lodger from Sichuan, and out-of-work guy who had moved to Chawalong because he preferred the easy life and relations with the Tibetans compared to the rate race of lowland Sichuan. I asked a smart looking local Tibetan guy about the road, expecting some reassurance, but to my dismay he agreed that it was extremely dangerous because it was not an official road and therefore the local government did not maintain. The whole road was unstable, he said because the maintenance was done by local people on a voluntary basis. Only last month a group of Taiwanese and HK visitors had been killed when their vehicle came off the road, he told me. 125 Paul mooched round the house and made me nervous with his mischief – taunting the big dog, herding chickens, and throwing bits of waste maize to the pigs and chooks below form high up on the unfenced open roof. We had dinner of chicken (the one we brought was beheaded, but Paul did not seem fazed by this at all), and I gobbled up much of the pork and chillies dish. I had presumed we would be staying there that night, but at about 9.30-ish Tony suddenly announced were off, and we all traipsed over in the dark to a rickety wooden guesthouse on the main street, made form planks of what seemed like plywood. On the way I broached the subject of my being nervous about the road trip back tomorrow, and Tony seemed surprised and hurt when I suggested there were some sections I might prefer to walk. He made some cold comment about being careful walking near the edge, and asked if it was his driving or the road that I didn’t have confidence in. I assured him it was the latter. Walking down the main “street” of Chawalong felt like walking through the set of a western movie – as Paul remarked, all they needed was a Saloon Bar. On route we passed a couple of ‘nightclubs’ playing Tibetan and Eurotrash music, and within I glimpsed a group of Tibetan girls doing something that looked a line dance in a lounge with scenic pictures drawn on the wall. A few locals shouted a friendly hello from the dark street sides – how could they see I was a foreigner in the dark? Later on when I went back and peeped inside the other upstairs disco I found it to be full of rough looking Tibetan guys doing the same kind of arm over shoulder dancing, while others sat around at low tables strewn with hundreds of empty beer bottles, looking absolutely smashed. I didn’t linger to chat. Instead I returned to get Paul settled down for the night, and to try sleep myself in the big dorm room we had all to ourselves. I didn’t sleep well. I woke up at 3am again, my knees knocking and shivering with terror at the thought of those precipitous roads I would have to face one more time. I picked up my Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory, and quite appropriately reached the bit where the whiskey priest tries to prepare himself for death on the eve of his execution. “He woke full of hope, which immediately drained away …”. I felt just the same and couldn’t rid myself of the mental image of those narrow ledges above the river. In my fevered imagination I even thought them likely to be too scary even to contemplate walking along, let alone driving. Would it be possible to walk back all the way in maybe three or four days? Or could I even get back by going north, further into Tibet and then doing a dog-leg to Litang? That’s how petrified I was. I managed to snatch a little more sleep until 7-ish, when I woke up and got dressed with false bravado on Christmas Eve, singing Christmas carols such as Hark the Herald Angels Sing to myself in an effort to maintain morale. Who was I trying to kid? The return trip: Chawalong-Bingzhongluo 126 We didn’t hang around long in Chawalong on the morning of Christmas Eve. (If you want to see some excellent pictures of Chawalong, and portraits of the local Tibetan people by other photographers click here or here). In the early morning light Chawalong looked even more grim than it had in the dark of the previous evening. Our guesthouse backed on to the edge of the river, and the slope down to the river seemed to serve as the local rubbish tip as well as outdoor toilet. A few curious locals came and gawked at us as we brushed our teeth, and I really just wanted to get out of there and get the scary road journey over with. Once I was in the car I wasn’t too worried – it was all out of my control. We said our farewells and re-traced our route back along the bumpy road through the arid valley, past the landslip and then onto the scary sections of ledge road, way above the Nu river.It was bad, but not as bad as I’d expected. I made it easier for myself by sitting on the cliff side of the car, so I couldn’t see down the huge drop offs. And on the scary bits I stuck my eye in the viewfinder of the video camera and found that I wasn’t half so scared when I was seeing it as it was filmed – it was only when I looked at the real thing that I got the collywobbles again. And so we progressed back in stately fashion in the early morning sun. I was too preoccupied with taking pictures to get too nervous, and in fact I was almost enjoying it, especially when I thought we were over the worst. “There, that wasn’t so bad after all …” I reassured myself. Then round the next corner came one of the worst bits – a sharp turn round a section of road with a sheer drop off down to the river. I could have stayed in the car and managed it (honest) but I asked to get out and filmed the Jeep going over that section, and they waited a few hundred metres beyond to pick me up. In fact, Tony insisted that I tell him when I wanted to make more photos and he would stop the Jeep – so much so that we were making very slow progress because there were just so many scenic bits. We passed bridges and cables over the rivers and even saw a couple of other vehicles on the road this time – a Jeep overtook us and a truck went past in a cloud of dust going up the valley. I wouldn’t want to be riding in that. But there were no other people. We stopped for lunch above the village of Longpu again and enjoyed the warm sun as we ate more boiled eggs and mantou by the car. By early afternoon we were underway again and I had almost had too much of the scenery. Places where yesterday I would have gone into a frenzy of snapping I now ignored – I simply had too many picturesque views already. I hunkered down in the back seat of the Jeep and swayed along as we entered what I thought would be the final strait of the voyage back to Bingzhongluo. We were approaching the border between Tibet and Yunnan, and with only about 50 or 60km to go, I expected to be back in town within the hour and soaking the dust and grime away in a hot bath. I was already thinking ahead to the evening, where we would spend Christmas Eve going down to the local Catholic church to see the Lisu people celebrate midnight mass. 127 But then the engine of the Jeep died and we rolled to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Tony tried starting the car and at first I thought it was just a simple stall. But when the car engine would not turn over and was dead he stated flatly that we had run out of petrol. All of a sudden our plans were in turmoil. What did this mean – where were we and how were we going to get out of here? Tony was quite calm and simply said that he would walk to the nearest settlement and phone down to Bingzhongluo to get the boss man, Ma Huang to come and bring us some petrol. He set off to walk up the hill as we took stock of our position. We were on the lower reaches of the river, where the vegetation was lush and there were streams running down from the steep sided hills. Large dramatic snow peaks towered over us. A short stroll down the road ahead of the car revealed some buildings ahead – so I rushed down to tell Tony, and he reversed course and headed off to try phone from there. As we waited, me and Paul clambered down the 50m from the road to the edge of the Nu river – the first time we had actually been within touching distance of this mighty river. At this point it was slow and deep, but the currents looked strong – and eddies grew faster as the river soon narrowed into a section of rapids. After half an hour of mucking about, throwing stones in the river, Tony returned with bad news. There was no phone down at the shack he had found, and the woman he’d met there said there were no other phones in other nearby settlements within walking distance. We would just have to wait until a passing car came through which could lend us the few litres of petrol to complete our journey, said Tony. That, or get them to pass on a message to Mr Ma Huang. But not to worry, he said, Ma Huang would act swiftly when we weren’t back by the expected time of 4pm, and so be up here to pick us up. I believed his confident assurances and just settled in to watch over Paul, who was playing by the river bank making sandcastles on a sandbar. An hour past, it was now 4.30pm, and I still believed we would be back in Bingzhongluo before it got dark. I mooched down to the shack a few hundred metres down the road and got chased by the woman’s vicious dog. I checked the story about the phone and asked her what the likelihood was of passing traffic – she just shrugged her shoulders. Then I had a scare when Paul was doing his usual daredevil climbing/exploring – Shortly after I heard those dreaded words: “Dad - Look at me!” he slipped while climbing down from a tree hanging over the river, and banged his knee badly on a rock. He was ominously quiet and I was all worry and anger with him, trying to explain that if he broke a leg here we would be absolutely stuffed, being two days walk from even the most basic first aid facilities. He sat, chastened, in the car and kept out of trouble for a while after that. Another hour went by and I began to have my doubts about getting out of there in a hurry. It would be dark soon after 6pm and we had seen no other traffic. Tony suggested we move our stuff down to the shack from the car, and as we did a truck came up from Bingzhongluo. But of course he had only diesel, not petrol, and was of little use to us. I thought Tony might ask him to call Ma Huang, but he didn’t. 128 We settled in to the tiny shack where the lady lived, invited in by her to sit around the smoky fire on tiny stools. Normally I might be quite angry or frustrated by such a last minute foul up and avoidable delay to my journey, but I just didn’t care right then. I was in such high spirits for having “survived” that dangerous road earlier in the day that I was euphoric and it just felt great to be alive – I just didn’t care! And this is where we spent our Christmas Eve. As it got dark I began to lose hope of getting out of this remote place, and settled in around the fire, trying to put a brave face on it. Paul seemed happy – flicking ash and sparks from the fire, poking the chickens that roamed around and prodding the cat, dog and the little piglet that shared our places around the fire. The woman was all hospitality. She boiled up a big cauldron of water on the fire and cooked us some noodles to which Tony and our Beijing woman companion added spam and a bit of green leafy veggies. What a Christmas Eve this was turning out to be! Here we were in the middle of nowhere with absolutely nothing to do. No Christmas cheer in this little shack. The only diversions were a vicious fight between the resident guard dog and another dog that accompanied tow young lads who suddenly appeared from the night. They were the woman’s sons and seemed like really country yokels. Between them they beat the two snarling dogs violently with large sticks until one limped off whining to sit on top of the pig sty roof. After that me and Paul settled into a game of cards round the fire, playing blackjack, Uno and even snap – in the course of which Paul won about 80 kuai off me, much to his delight. When it was finally time to turn in the host offered us the use of her ‘spare room’, which turned out to be a cold shed that contained just an iron bedstead on which had been lain three rough planks, a blanket and a dirty duvet. That was all the bedding for four of us. Tony and the Beijing woman graciously offered the room to us, and they said they would sit up and try doze by the fire. So I ended up pulling out the few other items of clothing from my bag and using them as extra mattress material, and settling down with Paul on the plans, huddling together to keep warm. I had to be careful to avoid two other hazards – a live electrical socket connected with bare wires and no plug – and the vicious guard dog which was tethered just outside our door – so I had to skip smartly away from its snapping jaws every time I entered or left the room. Surprisingly I did manage to grab a few hours of sleep, but it wasn’t easy or comfortable, what with the hard planks digging in my back and Paul rolling over off the planks and taking the duvet with him. I must have been asleep for two or three hours when in the middle of the night I suddenly heard the startling sound of a vehicle sounding its horn over and over, somewhere nearby. I dragged myself out of bed, and feeling vulnerable and scared, emerged from the shed into the freezing night air (remembering with a start to dodge the dog) and had a muddled conversation with a Tibetan guy asking where the boss was. I wasn’t sure if he was specifically looking for Tony or whether he was just a passing driver looking for a bed for the night. Tony soon emerged, looking absolutely worn out from his smoky fireside stool vigil, and had a chat with the guy. He then explained that he would go with the driver in his truck down to Bingzhongluo and bring a recovery vehicle the next morning. Given the late hour and the 129 danger of the truck travel on the road at night we would be better off going back to bed and waiting a few more hours, he said. And so that’s what I did, thinking that help would be arriving soon after breakfast. Wrong again. And thus it was we awoke on Christmas morning, “Away in a Manger” – literally. No crib for a bed – just a few planks. And no room at the inn for these travellers, so we had had to stay amid the beasts, if not in the stable well at least in the tool shed. No wise men, just three very tired and weary travellers, eating instant noodles for breakfast. No gold, frankincense or myrrh. Just some leftover pickles, chilli sauce and a dusty bottle of past its sell-by date Pepsi from the woman’s meagre store. As we waited for help to arrive she told us that she helped look after the local river monitoring station – it was only a very small affair, measuring river levels. She ran a little store selling noodles and cigs to make a few cents from the occasional passing truck or itinerant workmen passing through. She grew her own vegetables and her kids foraged and hunted in the surrounding forests – picking herbs and medicinal mushrooms when they were in season. The two young lads played with Paul that morning – sharing their catapult (which they later donated to him when they saw how much fun he was having with it, and wouldn’t accept any money for it). They also demonstrated their crossbow. The morning dragged on and what little sense of adventure I felt over our “stranded in Tibet” escapade was now rapidly running out. Ten o clock and even the ever-patient Chinese woman was beginning to sigh. I began to have hallucinations. I would think I could hear the shifting gears of a truck and rush out on to the road only to realise it was the grunting of the pigs in the sty next door. I walked up and down the road in both directions for a mile or more, with nothing to see except some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. I walked down to the rapids of the river, bushwhacking my way through brambles to get a good view, and then rock hopping to get as close as I safely could to the madly rushing torrent. And while I was down there I again imagined I could hear the roar of engines – hurrying back to the road once more, only to find deserted disappointment. Lunchtime came and went – and our Christmas lunch was – surprise, surprise – more instant noodles with hunks of spam from a tin. This was getting seriously annoying and I was beginning to curse under my breath. What the **** was Tony doing? Was he just going to leave us here another day? Had he given up on his hope of 1000 kuai fee? Had he had an accident in the truck? I was full of doubts by now and set 2pm as the deadline for action. I f nobody had arrived by then I would take Paul and set off to walk the 18km down to the nearest little settlement of Didadang. There, the woman told us, there was a basic guesthouse. I could do it in about four or five hours, she reckoned – but she had never walked with a dawdling eight year old. I took another walk down to the river to take some more photos of nearby peaks, now that the sun was high in he sky and the valley was no longer in shade. Then I would pack all my kit and walk out of there. 130 On my return to the shed I was delighted to see a minivan – and then another jeep – help had arrived at last – almost 24 hours after we had first run out of petrol. We were saved. Our actual departure form this isolated and beautiful spot was a bit of an anticlimax. First we had to wait more than another hour while they tried to refuel the Jeep and get it going. When this didn’t proceed too smoothly, they decided to evacuate us in the tinny little minivan. So we all crammed in and rattled off down the road after saying a final heartfelt thank you and farewell to the wonderful Ms Liu, who had welcomed us to her humble shack and shown the true spirit of Christmas in sharing all her meagre supplies and accommodation with us, the complete strangers. The minivan was rude shock after the spacious, tough and well-suspensioned Jeep. It jolted us around and swerved dangerously near the edge of the track as its puny engine screamed and whined to drag us metre by metre back down the Nu river valley towards Bingzhongluo. I couldn’t complain though – it was getting us out of there, wasn’t it? And so it was we finally hauled ourselves up out of the river valley at Bingzhongluo, back past the Catholic church where Lisu villagers were sitting about in the churchyard in their vivid Sunday best coloured costumes of pink, sky blue and yellow. I could have got out there and taken some great pictures and they finished off their celebrations, but I was just too physically and mentally exhausted. I stayed in the van, rode the extra 1km back up the hill into town and on arriving went straight up to our hotel room to soak all the smoke and dust off myself in the bath and shout: “I’m alive! I’m alive!” in a silly voice to no-one in particular. It did feel good to be alive... Return to the Nu river, 2008 The following year I made a return trip to the Nujiang to try take more pictures of the tantalising places that I’d seen only in passing form the window of our Jeep. On Saturday 20th of December I left Dali to take the bus to the Nujiang. Being in Dali doesn’t feel like China. It’s anyplace. They have nice cafes that serve good coffee (Cafe de Jack) and bars where you can watch movies, surf the internet or bakeries where you can indulge in cheesecake. There weren’t many tourists about when I was there, but the weather was sunny and mild. I think I had the same suicidal driver to Liuku as I had last year. I caught the bus from Xiaguan bus station, which entailed an early start from Dali old town and a morning bus ride 131 with a team of cleaners down to the big town as we watched the bus advertorial TV. As usual I had stocked up on the usual snacks to get me through the bus journey - peanuts, chocolate, biscuits, drinks ... and I munched my way through these all too quickly as we freewheeled down the motorway towards Baoshan, watching Terminator 3. This time we did a slightly different route, turning off early for Liuku and skirting the Mekong on a rather dusty road that was under construction, and passing through a town called Qujing that had a huge, newly built mosque. We arrived in Liuku just after lunch, and instantly the people seemed friendlier than elsewhere. Even the stern soldier who checked my passport turned friendly when he realised I spoke Chinese. There was some kind of minority dress festival going on in the Nujiang and there were buses and Jeeps lined up in preparation for the VIPs they were expecting. I decamped off the bus and managed to grab some friend rice before taking a minibus up to Fugong. It was arranged by a women tout who grabbed me as soon as I got off the bus. She led me to believe there was a direct bus from that bus station, but as I soon discovered as her son led me across the footbridge over the Nujiang, it was the same old bus service from the western bank bus station. The scenery on the way north was the usual spectacular array of peaks, crags and river scenes. A few locals fished using bamboo rods and makeshift reels cobbled together from thick metal wire. I saw a few dug out type canoes, and as usual marvelled at the huddles of Lisu houses in villages perched high up on the hillside. Many of them had their own whitewashed churches. Closer up, the settlements along the river looked dirty and ramshackle. It often surprised me to see a cheerful and well dressed, modern looking Lisu women get off at one of these scungy looking collections of wooden shacks and breeze block slums. Fugong was much as I remembered it - the same scrappy collection of shops and noodle places tucked in the valley. This time I arrived before dark, and had time to find myself a place at the Dianli Binguan again before having a little wander round. Not much to see. In a dusty ramshackle schoolyard they were preparing for a craptacular concert - perhaps to celebrate the Lisu kousi jie - whatever festival that is. I settled for a bath and a quiet night watching Nujiang TV - which featured a tourist style presentation of the Nujiang, making out they were all one big happy family - “Nujiang Huanying Nin!” (Nu River Welcomes You) and it even featured Ding Dama (the grumpy old caretaker woman of the Chongding/Bingzhongluo church and what looked like her very flash guesthouse, complete with internet) .. it didn’t feel like I was going to a remote area at all. A trip to some remote place like the Nujiang always sounds like a great adventure when you’re sat at home reading a book or blog about the place. The writer, of course, always leaves out the dull bits or glosses over them. But one of the biggest problems I found on my trip was the sheer boredom and loneliness of being on my own in a small one street town like Bingzhongluo. I had ridden up during the morning of the 21st of December on a minibus from Fugong to Gongshan. I was glad I’d brought my jacket because in contrast to balmy Liuku it was quite chilly in the northern end of the valley. 132 At Gongshan I saw a bus for Bingzhongluo about to depart, and with no firm plan in mind (try for the Dulong?) I decided to go the last 40km up to Bingzhongluo, where I knew my bearings from my previous visit last Christmas. The scenery was as spectacular as I’d remembered. Unlike the closed and rather gloomy valley around Fugong, the more open canyon and the turquoise green ribbon of river looked marvellous. Getting off the bus, I checked in again to the deserted Yudong Hotel. Dumped my ridiculously large pack (why did I bring a sleeping bag and all that crap?) and had a wander up and down the one street. Nothing had changed, the same old fleapit market and stool-seat restaurants housed in shacks. The bar run by tour guide Ma Huang (The socalled National Park Information Centre) was still there, but I avoided the place because I thought he might have taken umbrage at my description of him in last year’s blog as an overbearing megalomaniac, or words to that effect. I traipsed up and down the street to stretch my legs and then strapped on the Leica and Rolleicord and had a wander a few km down the road to the ‘first bend’ of the Nujiang. Not much happening - even the tourists’ trinket shacks were closed up. I returned to Bingzhongluo, where a big gathering was taking place for somebody’s funeral. A local told me I could join in and have an all-you-can-eat-and-drink if I paid 50 kuai. I opted instead for a cheap feed in one of the shops-cum-restaurants before heading down the hill to see the Chongding Catholic church again. I don’t know what it is about that place, but it’s never peaceful. This time they were hammering away with the pneumatic drills at some solid rock in the church grounds. The whole place looked tired and worn and midwinter dead. I had a quick look around Ding Dama’s guesthouse, expecting to find cosy internet parlours, as seen on TV, but all I got was a curt what-do-you-want attitude as they were doing renovations, and the bits of the guesthouse I did see looked draughty and spartan. No cosy rooms and hot showers to be had here, it seems. And so I felt somewhat disillusioned and sorry for myself as I climbed back up the hill past the pigs and chickens, to find a new internet cafe just off the main road. This was supposed to be ‘it’, the end of the road, the base camp for some great treks and adventures, but I just felt miserable as I sat in the net cafe, reading up what my mates were doing back in sunny Sydney on Facebook, and then watching the latest episode of the IT Crowd. Not so far from the madding crowd, anymore. After a rather dull day in Bingzhongluo, I set off down the track to the Nu river in good spirits, whistling Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye. It was good to be walking at last, rather than sitting on planes, buses and trains. I had spent the previous evening sat in the one and only bar in Bingzhongluo, chatting to a sound recordist called Jez from Durham, who said he had come to the Nujiang to try record the sounds of silence. He wasn’t having much luck, as the truck horns and chainsaws in the Nujiang were interrupting his silences. I advised him to try New Zealand instead - very good for silence there, I can tell you. With no one else to talk to in town it was good to have a bit of company. The next morning I rose early-ish and I walked down to the level of the Nu river, past the Chongding Catholic church and towards the huge granite or limestone gorge now known as Shimenguan (Stone Portal). The weather wasn’t as good as last year, and I didn’t bother 133 taking many pictures under the gloomy overcast skies, but just plodded on though the gorge, with the road to myself. Passed by a couple of small hamlets and had a scary encounter with an aggressive dog at the bridge over the river. But otherwise I had a fairly uneventful day as I walked along the river - passing through one village (Nidadang) which had its own small Catholic church and a nice friendly old woman caretaker. It was midday when I had stopped to eat my lunch of crackers, pistachios and an apple by the river, and then a long haul up a gravel track to the right of the main road up to the wooden log cabins of Qiunatong. Joseph Rock makes only a passing mention of Qiunatong in his account of his travels to the ‘Salwin’ in the August 1926 issue of the National Geographic journal (‘Through the great river trenches of Asia’). After crossing over the Sela pass from the Mekong valley and spending time at the ‘last outpost of Christianity’ - the French Catholic mission station/church at Bahang (Baihanluo) - he describes his encounters with the French missionaries there. He mentions ‘the intrepid Father Genestier’ who lived at Tjonatong (Qiunatong) and who had been driven out of the village on two occasions by murderous Tibetan lamas, angry about the incursion of westerners - and especially missionaries into the forbidden Buddhist/Lama-ist country. (Bear in mind that Tibet had just been invaded by a BritishIndian force lead by Colonel Younghusband in 1904 and hundreds of Tibetans had been slaughtered by British Maxim guns). Genestier had managed to avoid the fate of other priests in the Nujiang and Mekong valleys, who had been captured and decapitated in 1905 and had their heads displayed on sticks of the town walls at Atuntze (Deqin). Genestier had fled south into Lisu land and into sovereign Chinese territory. The location of Qiunatong is one of the key reasons why it became a focus for Catholic missionary activity. Located just a few km south of the border with Tibet, Qiunatong was the nearest place to Tibet that the missionaries could set up shop under the protection of the then Qing Dynasty Chinese government. In response to the murders of the priests by the Tibetans in 1905, Genestier headed south and eventually arrived in Kunming - then known as Yunnan-fu, where he saw the French consul. The French consul made loud complaints and demanded action from the Chinese authorities, who obliged by sending a force of Chinese soldiers to modern day Bingzhongluo (then known as Champutong), where they razed the Tibetan Buddhist monastery to the ground and granted the Catholics some land further south at Baihanluo to build another church. So a kind of uneasy truce was made between Tibetan Lamaists and French Catholics in the Tibetan-Yunnan border area. And this is where Genestier spent the rest of his life - among the Nu and Lisu people of the Salween (Nu) river canyon. Interestingly, Qiunatong is a completely Nu community - there still are few if any Tibetan converts to Christianity. Despite his much repeated claims to be ‘the first white man’ in the area, Joseph Rock was following in the footsteps of other westerners - missionaries and plant hunters - in the Nujiang/Salween canyon. Here’s what the German botanist Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti said of the Nu people he encountered around the mission stations of Baihanluo in 1917: 134 “The Nu do not practice alpine cattle farming: hence the well preserved state of their forests and the tracklessness of their mountains. They are a Burmese people and according to their handed-down traditions they migrated from the Drong Jiang. Most of them are short and somewhat unprepossessing in appearance, but absolutely honest. They are at a very low level of civilisation. They have no writing and their language is extremely poor in its vocabulary, being without any means of expressing abstract ideas; for example, they had no word for “colour”. They do not lock up their houses when they go out, they leave their few cattle unattended on die pastures, they wash as seldom as the other peoples living in these parts, and they are very easily converted to Christianity.” My own excursion into Qiunatong began when I turned north off the main ‘road’ about 10km north of Bingzhongluo, and walked up the rough track towards the collection of log cabins. I followed behind a tractor that was carrying three guys who had been collecting firewood, as it was put-putting at the same speed as I was walking up the long incline. I passed a few houses and got barked at by a few dogs, but didn’t see any sign of the small village wth a guesthouse and shops that I had been expecting. Then suddenly I emerged into a small concrete square amid the houses, and there in front of me was the Qiunatong Catholic church. Not much to look at: mostly constructed of wood - it had a small cross on top and looked rather dark and grim. There were a couple of locals loafing around on the steps in front of the church, but nobody paid me much notice. I took my heavy pack off my shoulders and found that an old lady hanging round by the door was the keeper of the church key - and she opened the place up to me. I was granted a few minutes to survey the dark red painted wooden interior and the simple kneeling pews and religious icons, then asked for a 10 kuai fee by the old lady before she shut up shop. As I was leaving I read the various official notices posted on the front door. One was asking the parishioners to respect and support the 2008 Olympics, and another listing the contributions made by various visitors to the church restoration fund. It seems that visitors from places like Spain, Hong Kong, Sweden and Beijing have provided huge amounts of money to the church - 3000 yuan here, 20,000 yuan there. In contrast, another sign noted the contributions from Qiunatong villagers for the relief of the sick fund - 5 kuai here, 8 kuai there. Most of the activity in the village was centred around the building of a new floor on one of the buildings. About 20 villagers - seemingly more women than men - were hard at work, digging up gravel and using it to mix concrete and spread it on the floor. They carried their loads using their foreheads to support a large band. They seemed cheerful enough and invited me to have a go. But I was exhausted from my long haul up the hill and was also frustrated that there was no store open in the village - the xiaomaibu pointed out to me remained fimrly boarded up despite my polite requests to buy some water or drink. I eventually found my way to the village ‘lodge’ - which was a house like any of the others. A young girl took me over the vegetable patch and I found the interior was similar to all other Tibetan houses I’ve ever stayed in - the spacious dark room with little furniture and with life centred around the fire. I was offered butter tea and was introduced to another guest from the outside world - a Chinese guy from Hunan province. He almost immediately started quizzing me about my travels and knowledge about China, and then started talking politics, asking why America wanted to change China and other nationalist-themed questions. I just ignored him as much as I could after that. It wasn’t difficult because other toursists started 135 to arrive - the new breed of Chinese backpacker types - all kitted out with the latest outdoor gear, walking poles etc, and all very noisy. I went out for a wander around the village - climbing up a track to take some pictures with the Rolleicord from above, then crossing over to the other side of the valley, leaping over a stream and boulders, to climb up to the village graveyard. There were some simple Chinesestyle graves but topped off with crosses. There were also a few very primitive graves, some basically just a heap of stones, and the ones where a child had been buried next to adults were very poignant. I came across a man who was carrying a large slab of thin slate on his back, walking down the hill from god knows where ... and I returned to the lodge. By late evening there were quite a number of Chinese trekkers in residence. The local family cooked me a dinner of egg fried rice and, thankfully, some decent tasting and very filling momo bread, which was rather like a chapati. I was sat near the window, next to the head of the house - an older feller in his late fifties or early sisxties. He sat by the fire all evening, drinking corn liquor (shuijiu) slurring his words and telling us about the place. I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, but then neither could the Chinese from Beijing. At one point he was sounding off about the logging activity in the area - but whether he was angry about the logging by outsiders or the recent logging bans, it wasn’t clear. He told about how he had been in the army and had been involved in the liberation of the area. And yet at the same time he said that outsiders didn’t understand the Nu and their ways. This became apparent when some arrogant Beijingers poured into the house in their high tech trekking gear, looked around, sniffed and announced they were going to the village head’s house to find somewhere to stay. The old man exploded with a diatribe against them, cursing them for being so insensitive and for their assuming that the village head (Cunzhang) would be better than him. He said that the Nu all considered themselves equals, shared everything and helped each other. Later he talked about how they had weathered the Cultural Revolution, how he had told the people who came to close down the Qiunatong church that Christianity was in the hearts of all the Nu in the village and that they could not bear the closing of the church. The guy kept offering me some of the snot-coloured liquid and I drank a few sips but it tasted of nothing much and seemed to have no alcoholic effect on me. Which was a pity as I could have used some Dutch courage to get me through the obligatory sing song - when it was my turn I did something Christmassy: “O Come All Ye Faithful”, I think. The Chinese talked among themselves - a continual game of stating-the-bleeding-obvious and also a lot of one-upmanship/bragging about where they had all been - mostly based around trips up to Chawalong. At around nine we all went over to see the dancing and singing in the village hall. Quite good fun - Tibetan-style dancing in a ring, a bit like the hokey-cokey, but with Tibetan lyrics - and the men and women staying in their own single sex groups to sing set pieces/challenges to each other. Some Nu girls hovered about the place with kettle full of shuijiu to op up the dirty cups of all the drinkers. I was also accosted by one the the local guys who informed me that the Nu considered themselves different - “we like to enjoy ourselves’ he told me. We are Nu. We are honest. We like to have fun ...” 136 Dimaluo and Baihanluo Joseph Rock makes only a passing mention of Dimaluo (“Doyonglongba”) in his articles on the Three Rivers region, when he passed through on his way from the nearby Baihanluo (or Peihanluo as he called it) mission station. Nevertheless, it was one of the highlights of my most recent trip to the Nujiang, mainly because of the amazing hospitality of the gentle Aluo - an ethnic Tibetan Catholic who lives in the village and runs a kind of eco-trekking lodge. I’d heard about him from tourist guidebooks and wasn’t expecting much, to be honest (having endured other ego-tistical and slightly dodgy tour guides in this area) - but I was pleasantly surprised. It’s only a short journey of about 20km down from Bingzhongluo to the bridge over the Nujiang at Pengdang. On Christmas Eve, Wednesday the 24th of December 2008, we decamped from the bus and had a wonderful lunch at a roadside restaurant where a few locals were sat out in the weak winter sun, playing cards and shooting the breeze. One thing I love about travelling in this area is the simplicity of the eating places - you simply go in and point to whatever vegetables and meat they have on the shelves or in the fridge and tell them what you want and how you’d like it cooked. In this case we ordered some fresh stir-fried peas, egg and courgettes, all washed down with tea. Crossing over the metal suspension bridge to the eastern side of the river there was a white church perched on a small hill, but I bypassed that ‘for later’ and took a right turn [downstream] along a dirt road and followed this for a kilometre or so as it curved off up a side valley that pointed north. After fording a small side river, things got ugly. Instead of the expected tranquil valley, the road was in the process of being upgraded by some serious machinery and manual labour diggers and dynamite. There were regular crumps and thuds, and we worried about being blasted to smithereens by the invisible work gangs. We had to climb up and around huge mounds of clay and awkward fields of massive boulders that had been dislodged by the blasting. So it wasn’t much of an idyllic walk for the couple of hours or so that it took us to walk up the somewhat gloomy wooded valley - eventually culminating in the track petering out and being blocked by a sheer wall of a stone dam. Luckily there were some steps cut into the steep face and after a bit of wobbling and faffing around getting over the windswept wall at the top, we topped off and found ourselves looking over into the unfilled lake of the dam catchment - and beyond it, the picturesque village of Dimaluo. Just a few more minutes up the road and we left the squalid work camps behind and entered the village to be welcomed by the ubiquitous barking dogs. As everywhere else in the Nujiang, the local people we met were all super friendly. The people of Dimaluo are a mix of Nu and Tibetan, as far as I could tell, with the Tibetans being fairly recent migrants into the area (ie about 100 years ago), on account of their more advanced animal husbandry and farming techniques. After the rustic charms of Qiunatong, Dimaluo was a big metropolis. It had a concrete square, a couple of shops, and several brick and concrete buildings, in addition to the usual wooden log cabins. We were pointed in the direction of Aluo‘s guesthouse, where we met the man himself outside, doing a bit of carpentry on some new window frames he was trying 137 to fit. It was a slow pace of life and he answered our first few questions in a gentle, slow voice as he pencilled in some marks on the wood and started sawing. We dumped our bags in the big hall of his downstairs area, filled with the ketonic aroma of fermenting corn, and plastered with posters explaining the stages of the trek over to the Mekong (Lancang) at Cizhong. But we weren’t planning to do that, so we mooched around the village, chatted to some cute local kids (I sang them a song and made jokes about my big nose) and snapped a few pictures until our room was ready. It was just the wooden floor of a clean upstairs room, and I was glad for the airmat and sleeping bag I’d brought - even though duvets were supplied. We had dinner with Aluo and his delightful family downstairs in the dark and gloomy living area. If I remember rightly it was hotpot with large amounts of cauliflower in it. What took me by surprise was the sudden declaration by Aluo that we say grace before meals - Bless Us O Lord for What We Are About To Receive etc ... something I hadn’t done since my [Catholic] school days. The other surprise was meeting our two fellow guests - a couple of American Chinese girls, with the accent being very much on the American. One of them was from the US west coast, working in Shanghai in public relations and was taking a Christmas break. When I mentioned I was a medical journalist she started off discussing in how plants could feel pain. I thought she was doing a parody of a Californian, but apparently not. When I mentioned what I did she said I sounded like the “go-to” guy for medical matters. The other girl had previously spent a few weeks in the region, and was doing some kind of academic research into water usage in the area. She told me that the dams on the Nujiang had officially been put on hold by the central government in Beijing, but the provincial government was going ahead with them anyway on the sly. And it wasn’t for the locals’ benefit: the power was streamed into the national grid, to be sold on to the energy hungry eastern Chinese coastal provinces. Aluo told us that the road building work wasn’t just for the dam - there were plans to push it right over the Gaoligong mountain divide to connect to the Mekong and thus end the Nujiang valley’s dead end status. After dinner we sat around for a while, trying to drink the alcoholic oatmeal that is shuijiu, and seeing some more of Aluo’s extended family, friends and neighbour dropping by for a singsong, a chat or to strum the guitar or surf the net on his computer. Even here you can’t escape the web! Later on, I took off up to the church, where Alou told us there would be a midnight mass. And sure enough, even at 10pm the place was full, with women kneeling on the left hand ‘pews’ and men on the left. The service seemed to be conducted by a lay preacher, and under the yellow light of a few weak light bulbs the congregation sang hymns and chanted prayers in a Tibetan style. It sounded very similar to the kind of religious chanting I had heard in numerous Buddhist monasteries - only this time it was peppered with words such as Yesu and finished with Amen. It was a very dark night and the stars came out overhead and it all felt very enchanting and Christmassy. As we returned, by torchlight, down the steep path that crossed the gully containing the stream, we passed Alou and his family clambering up on their way to the 138 service - all dressed in his Sunday best - a beautifully coloured Tibetan-style pink cloak trimmed with fur. The next morning, Christmas Day, I woke early, at sunrise and found myself alone in the house. I went downstairs to the sooty kitchen, where I sat by the fire trying to stoke it up with a few sticks and blowing the embers frantically to warm up some water for my Nescafe sachet. After about half an hour Alou’s kids suddenly appeared and showed me how it was really done. They brought in a huge pile of sticks and rammed them into the stove. Soon there was a roaring fire going, with plenty of water for my coffee. They then were joined by Aluo and his beautiful wife, and as we sat around the kids stripped some corn off the cob and fried this up to make popcorn. Then Mrs Aluo mixed flour with milk and water to bake some delicious momo bread by the fire. And of course there was butter tea - prepared by Aluo’s son. By 10am we were completely stuffed - and ready for the next stage of the trip - to go up to Baihanluo. Bahang – the loveliest mission station Joseph Rock came to Bahang by traversing over the 15,000 foot high Sila pass from Cizhong on the Mekong to the Salwin river [Nujiang 怒江], via a yrack built by Catholic missionaries. Leaving most of his supplies behind he says he ascended first from the Mekong river up a steep zig-zagging track through oak and pine forests to a ridge about 11,000 feet up. From here he had great views of the Baimashan mountains south of Deqin. Continuing up to the bleak Sila pass, he passed through deciduous forests of maples, with wild cherries and rhododendrons growing in the bush. And again there was that beard-like lichen covering the trees as is seen throughout much of Kham. The next day he crossed the Sila pass (in a snow storm, yet again) but not before seeing a triangular overhanging peak to the north. From here they descended into the Salwin valley and to an even more remote Christian missionary outpost known as Bahang, or Peihanlo in Chinese. A well-made trail had been constructed under the instruction of the French missionaries who manned “this most lonely and remote spot”. First, though Rock had to cross some subsidiary ridges and tributaries that flowed into the Salwin - the Sewalangba and Doyonlangba rivers, where they stayed in a mountain hut which may well be the one that trekkers still use when crossing this route. On a bluff above the Doyonlongba (Dimaluo) river, Rock finally reached what he described as "the loveliest mission station of which I know" - Bahang. There, a young priest, Pere Andre, a veteran of the carnage of the First World War, lived in isolation, cut off from the outside world from November to May. Bahang was a collection of 18 huts and is still there today, complete with its beautiful Catholic church, above Dimaluo (迪麻洛) in the Nu valley. According to Rock the mission had twice been burnt to the ground by the Tibetan lamas of 139 nearby Champutong (Bingzhongluo) monastery. The priest, Pere Genestier, was the only survivor of the Tibetan massacre, fleeing for his life down the valley and seek shelter among the non Tibetan Lisu people. His colleague Father Dubernard, was not so lucky. He was killed and his head displayed on the gate of Atuntze (Deqin) lamasery. In retaliation for this massacre of western missionaries and their converts, the Chinese burnt down the Tibetan monastery at Bingzhongluo. Sectarian strife was common in this little corner of Yunnan in the early 20th century. On Christmas morning we set out from Dimaluo and walked up the river for a few kilometres before ascending the steep side of the valley. After a couple of hours of climbing we reached a scruffy village populated by rather ragged looking Nu and Tibetan people. The views over the valley were stupendous, and we could see other similar wooden hamlets dotted on the hillsides, each with a small white wooden church. With the blue sky and pleasant alpine backdrop it rather reminded me of Switzerland. A young tyke who spoke good Chinese led us up the path to the Baihanluo church, where the locals were already enjoying a bit of Christmas cheer. In fact they were enjoying a lot of alcohol, in the form of a weak corn liquor that was dispensed from a large plastic barrel. Everyone seemed to be drinking – male and female, young and old. The villagers were sat in groups around the basketball court in from the striking white church, chatting and laughing. We were welcomed and offered a drink, but we had no cups. Someone found us some dirty mugs and we held our drinks self-consciously as we ‘mingled’, chatting and taking photos. It felt odd to be celebrating Christmas in the sun in a remote Christian corner of the Nujiang river valley, but it certainy felt like Christmas. The locals were friendly and unassuming, but also rather simple if not primitive. We had a brief look around the church, which was under renovation. It seemed that the beautiful old murals and decorations were being touched up or even painted over, which seemed a shame. From a distance, the white church looked quaint and graceful. Once inside, however, it was rickety and draughty. Built almost entirely from wood, it was spartan, dusty and the ill-fitting planks meant there were many gaps letting daylight in through the walls. There were just a few rows of simple planking seats and no other fancy trimmings. The altar, however, was decorated with all the trapping of Catholicism familiar to me from Christ the King church in Leeds. The stations of the cross, a tabernacle, the staues of Mary and Joseph, and even a home made nativity display, complete with little figures of the baby Jesus being visted by the Three Wise Men. It was all oddly reassuring and homely in this otherwise remote spot. There was no priest in evidence, and the Baihanluo people said their service – like the one in Dimaluo – had been held the previous evening. We tried to find out more about the place but most people seemed out of it and more interested in getting sozzled and having a dance. Their love of a drink was something that Rock had also noticed. The "Lutzu" people he encountered in the Salwin (Nujiang) valley he described as a poor lot who subsisted on corn, even using it to make liquor "of which they drink a great deal". 140 We hung around for most of the day, enjoyed the holiday atmosphere and only reluctantly headed back down to the relative sophistication of Dimaluo. Before I left I climbed a bit higher above the village and managed to find the spot where Rock had taken his panoramic picture of Bahng and its church, with the hills in the background. It looked as if almost nothing had changed. From Bahang, Rock continued down to the river, where the inebriated locals ferried him and his helpers across the Salwin in dugout canoes. Continuing north, he arrived at the burntout monastery of Champutong [the present day Bingzhongluo 丙中洛], where only four monks remained to take care of what had once been a major temple. The scenery here was now tropical, Rock noted, in contrast to the cool uplands of the Mekong valley he had left a few days ago. The Salwin river had carved out a "marble gorge" with walls that rose vertically for several thousand feet. The trails was a perilous shelf in places only as wide a man's hand, which meant tip toeing sideways along the canyon, facing the wall, while the river roared below. The next day Rock climbed up to the western watershed between the Salwin and the Irrawady (presumably he means the Drung or Dulong river) to photograph the 20,000 foot high Mt Kenyichunpo, which he claimed was only visible in October and November. It stood on the ridge that now border between China and Burma. Here Rock also encountered outposts of Lisu hunters, young boys who used arrows tipped with poison from the aconite root. Across the divide he heard stories of a strange tribe, the Kjutzu, "a primitive harmless jungle people who the Chinese say live in trees like monkeys." This is presumably a reference to the Drung or Dulong [独龙] people, who are short in stature, had facial tattoos and who live in houses raised off the ground. They were for many years a kind of lost tribe, until a road was put in over the divide to connect the Drung river [独龙江] and Nu valleys. With winter encroaching, Rock then headed back towards the Mekong valley before the passes became snowed in. He returned down the narrow canyon to what is now the large town of Gongshan [贡山]. Back then he had to fire his pistol to attract attention to the locals across the river to bring their dugout canoes over to ferry him to the eastern bank. On the return journey, instead of crossing via the Sila pass, he branched off after ascending though walnut and rhododendron forests to the Salwin-Mekong dividing range. He headed into a deep valley funnelling into a narrow gorge and village called Londjre. His guides refused to go there, saying there had been an outbreak of the plague. Rock did indeed find this hamlet deserted, but on account of a plague of lice that harboured relapsing fever. This tiny settlement, deep within a dark gorge and full of disease, must have been a chilling place. Back on the banks of the Mekong, he was amazed to see large numbers of Tibetans crossing by way of the rope wires sliders. They were coming to make a pilgrimage to the Doker La [ 多克拉] pass. He noted that some Tibetan nuns and monks did nothing else than continually cross the Dokerla in pilgrimage, prostrating themselves on the ground and then 141 drawing themselves up again. "It seems that the Tibetans alone of all the religious people of the world heed St Paul's admonition 'Pray without ceasing'," he noted. Rock made his way along the bleak Mekong gorge at this point, where high winds threatened to blow travellers off the narrow trail and into the river. He was greeted by Tibetan pilgrims with the traditional open palm and tongue gesture. His description of the area around Londjre deserves repeating in full: "Of all the trails along which we had passed so far, none could compare with that which leads from Londjre gorge out into the Mekong. It is a veritable corkscrew up a weird black chasm, at the bottom of which roars the stream coming from the sacred Dokerla. The trail is built against a rocky wall of sandstone in short rocky zig-zags, a most appalling structure of tree trunks suspended over the deep narrow yawning black canyon with overhanging cliffs. A gale was blowing in addition, which meant that one had to brace oneself against the wind, holding on tightly to the cliff." From the Mekong valley Rock gained even better views of the southern most peak of the Kawakarpo range, known as Miyetzimu [面茨姆], a 6055 metre peak which he described as: "The most glorious peak my eyes were very privileged to see; no wonder the Tibetans stand in awe and worship it. It is like a castle of a dream, an ice palace of a fairy tale, or an enormous mausoleum with gigantic steps and buttresses all crowned by a majestic dome of ice tapering into an ethereal spire merging into the pale blue sky. Next to it is a huge crest of ice resembling a giant cockscomb, then comes Kaakerpu, from which the range derives its name." And with that, Rock returned to his Lijiang base, via the small town of Atuntze [Deqin], then an collection of flat-roofed Tibetan houses. Footnote: The Salween and Frank Kingdon Ward With all the current troubles in Tibet it is interesting to read an account of a previous traveller to the Nujiang region, Frank Kingdon Ward. When he visited there in 1911-1913, Tibet was an independent country and the Chinese representatives had just been kicked out of Lhasa. There was a stand-off between Chinese soldiers and Tibetan soldiers around the Salween and in places like Chamdo. Kingdon Ward made a lengthy sojourn down the Nujiang from north to south, visiting places that I passed through this last Christmas like Chawalong (‘Trana’), Longpu (Laungpa) Songta (Saungta), Qiunatong (Kiunatong), Bingzhongluo (Tramutang or Chamutong) and Gongshan (Sukin). 142 Like Joseph Rock, Kingdon Ward was a plant collector-turned explorer, and in 1913 he was in Deqin (Atuntze) and hoping to make a trip over the Salween to what we now call the Dulong or Drung valley. Kingdon Ward had been plant collecting in Burma before, and he believed the Kiutzu or Nung, as the Drung were then known, were related to people he’s seen in upper Burma. His account of his expedition to the Salween is published as the Mystery Rivers of Tibet. In November 1913 he crossed over the Mekong (Lancang) from Deqin and then climbed over the big divide to the Salween (Nujiang) north of Kawakarpo via two passes, the first of which was called the Shu La. He followed the twisting Wichu tributary through the small villages of Pitu, Wabu and Kabu, aiming to get to the Tibetan gateway village on the Salween known as Menkung. His first encounter with “Tibet” was a drunken lama who was village head in Pitu, who advised him that he could not proceed to Menkung in Tibet because of the fighting going on between Tibetans and Chinese. Kingdon Ward noted that Tibetans were filthy, many had goitre and they practised polyandry. Refused entry to Tibet, he headed downstream to try reach the Dulong (Taron valley) from around Bingzhongluo (Tramutang). He speculated on the origins of the Nu and Nung/Kiutzu (ie modern day Drung) people he saw along the Salween. He believed the Nu (Lutzu), who appeared almost Tibetan hereabouts were a product of intermarriage of Tibetans and Nung. He travelled through the same Nujiang granite gorge whose roads scared the hell out of me in 2007. Back in 1913, there was no road along the riverside, but a decent walking track along the adjacent hills above the river, at least according to Kingdon Ward. On arriving at the first Nu villages of Longpu (see below) and Songta, Kingdon Ward described them as being barely distinguishable from those of the Tibetans. He noted the locals had canoes and that he was now leaving the arid zone, as greenery and animals such as centipedes became more common. The local “black” Lutzu he found friendly but primitive, living on little but maize (buckwheat) biscuits they baked over their fires. At Songta he saw the same impressive peak (above) to the west that I saw, which he described as Gompa La – the same peak that can be seen above Bingzhongluo. Progressing further downriver, he noted other differences – the Lutzu smoked whereas the Tibetans didn’t. The Tibetans traded salt for grain, which they could not grow much of in the arid Tsarong region. Kingdon Ward stopped off at the French mission church at Qiunatong, where he met Pere Genestier, the priest now buried at the church below Bingzhongluo. He then carried on south, through a “limestone gorge”, which I presume is the modern day Shimenguan: He eventually arrived in Tramutang, which sounds like Bingzhongluo (see below) – a settlement of 40 families bisected by a deep gully. Here there was a Chinese yamen (administrator) and some Chinese traders and a handful of soldiers. The local Lutzus lived on buckwheat but also tried to catch fish from the river in traps and nets. Strangely, Kingdon Ward makes no mention of the imposing white Catholic church at Bingzhongluo, nor the prominent loops in the river here that are now promoted to tourists as the “First Bend of the Nujiang”. 143 Unable to get permission or porters to cross to the Taron (Dulong) valley to the west, Kingdon Ward continued on south, into Lisu land. He noted their different clothing – how the men resembled Burmese in carrying a ‘dah’ machete and the hemp shoulder bags, still used by Lisu today. Their homes differed from the wooden shacks of the Lutzu by being on stilts and using bamboo as well as wood. Beyond Bingzhongluo, he was firmly in what he described as ‘jungle’ territory compared to the arid Tibetan areas upstream. Kingdon Ward did not have a happy time among the Lisu. He described their love of liquor and pipe smoking, and how they use crossbows. Trying to cross to the Taron (Dulong) valley from Gongshan (Sukin) he was exasperated by his Lisu porters, who he described as lazy and argumentative, stopping every twenty minutes to sit down and smoke their pipes. Kingdon Ward had major problems with his newly hired Lisu interpreter and head porter, who he later found to be an army deserter and ne’er do well. He also used some Nung (Dulong) porters who he described as ‘uncouth, almost ape-like’ looking weak and malnourished and yet having remarkable endurance. Kingdon Ward had several disputes with porters along the way, in one case sorting them out by ‘tapping’ the offender on the nose so that it started bleeding! Interestingly, he describes this borderland as being close to British influence from Burma, with locals reporting British troops arriving in force in the next valley. Kingdon Ward made several attempts to cross over to the Taron valley, but was defeated by bad weather – rain and snow higher up, plus the truculence of his porters. He eventually gave up and visited the Chinese fort at a place Latse, which he found to be a flimsy and unimpressive stockade [‘sufficient to deter the Lisu’] manned by 40 poor quality soldiers. (‘They loaf and learn the local language’). He makes no mention of the Moon-Stone Mountain - a part of the western ridge in this part of the Nujiang that has a hole in it and which is now a famed tourist attraction. Suffering from malaria and rheumatism, Kingdon Ward turned back to head north again after being refused permission to continue to Tengyueh, from where he might gain access to Burma. His scoundrel of a porter absconded with some money and was condemned to death by the local Chinese sergeant, and Kingdon Ward headed back up river. He spent a miserable Christmas stuck in Bingzhongluo in the drizzle, and after being given an escort of two poorly equipped Chinese soldiers by the local yamen (‘a real gentleman’), he headed back up through the limestone gorge to Qiunatong. He had his first decent meal for days back with Pere Genestier, who told him that travel over to the Taron was now impossible because the winters snow had set in. So Kingdon Ward retraced his steps upriver, this time travelling along precarious trails that required balancing on log planks stretched between ledges of cliff high above the river. Kingdon Ward was ferried part of the way upriver on canoes paddled by Lutzu woman around Songta, and noted that the river would be 15 feet higher in summer. Pleased to be back in Tsarong, he was now faced with the problem of having two Chinese soldiers as escorts, in an area that was ‘at war’ with China. He therefore hung around in Songta for a few days until his ramshackle escort had run out of food and returned to Tramutang/Bingzhongluo. 144 Back in Trange (Chawolung?) he was again told that there was no chance of proceeding any further upriver into Tibet. The fighting made it a sensitive area, and Kingdon Ward expounds in his book how the Nujiang/Salween was a key barrier preventing Chinese entry into Tibet. He very much admired the Tibetans of the area, for their robustness, independence and general level of ‘civilisation’. He praises their fine food, houses, clothing and buildings, and contrasts them with the Chinese, whom he says are “slaves to convention” and who try bend everyone else to their way of doing things. Kingdon Ward went east over the dividing range, back the way he came to return to the Mekong. He noted that the whole countryside was up in arms against the Chinese and that one male from every household had been conscripted against the Chinese soldiers. He eventually arrived back in Deqin to find it a dismal grey place, closed down for Chinese New Year. CHAPTER 9: YADING, HOLY MOUNTAINS OF THE OUTLAWS On his first trip to Muli in 1924, Joseph Rock caught a tantalising glimpse of a distant trio of mountain peaks to the west, known as Konkaling or the Konka Risumgongba peaks. This trio of mountains of around 6000 m in height, are now part of the Yading Nature Park. Rock had seen the peaks from a vantage point at Muli and he asked his new friend, the Muli king, to help him travel to the mountain range. He needed to use the Muli king’s influence to win over the hostile bandits who lived in the area around the Konkaling peaks. 145 The mountains were located in remote territory that was controlled by a large gang of intractable Tibetan brigands (‘the scum of the outlaws’ as Rock put it), and off limits on pain of death not just to Chinese but even to their close Tibetan neighbours in Muli and Yongning. It was said that any outsider who encroached on the Konkaling bandits’ territory would be shot on sight. The irony was that these bandits were led by a former monk, Drashetsonpen (‘Trashi’), who when not out murdering and looting, maintained his devotions at a small monastery nestled within the three peaks. The peaks were a sacred place for Tibetans, and hence Rock gave them the more romantic label of the ‘Holy Mountain of the Outlaws’. The outlaws in question - the Konkaling Tibetans - were notorious for their raids on neighbouring villages, where they would plunder and kill without mercy. The Muli king had come to an arrangement with Trashi and his gang of pillagers, paying them off and allowing them free passage across his lands in return for not molesting his subjects. Thus the Konkaling bandits would leave the Muli king’s subject’s in peace while slaughtering those in unlucky villages nearby that lay just outside his territory. Here is an excerpt from Peter Goullart’s book, Forgotten Kingdom, on the subject: “North-west of Likiang and to the west of the Muli Kingdom there is an isolated mountain range called Konkaling. It consists of three peaks, about 23,000 feet high. It had been discovered and photographed by Dr Joseph Rock, who used to make expeditions to Muli where the king was a great friend of his. These mountains are a veritable breeding place of the most ruthless brigands the world has ever known. To the west of these mountains there are two vast territories known as Hsiangchen and Tongwa. They are peopled with two Tibetan tribes whose members are professional robbers and cut-throats. So wild, untamable and treacherous are they that not even other Tibetans dare to venture into these areas. Although of an enormous size, rivalling some of the large European states, none of these areas has ever been visited by a European and probably will not be for a long time to come. There is no doubt that much of interest to explorers and scientists is concealed in these inaccessible and unmapped regions. There is, for instance, a great snow peak in the bend of the Yalung River in Hsiangchen, called Neito Cavalori. Those few privileged explorers who have been lucky enough to contemplate it from a distance, compute its height at something like 28,000 feet, and it may yet prove a rival to Mount Everest. It was these Tongwa and Hsiangchen brigands who always lay in wait for the rich caravans coming from Lhasa. Of course all Tibetan caravan men were heavily armed, and when the caravan was big enough these rascals did not dare to attack them. It was when the caravan was small or poorly armed that their chance came. Madame Alexandra David Neel nevertheless describes the Tibetan bandits as ‘Les BrigandsGentilhommes’ in her book. I have known this great lady since 1939, when I met her in Tachienlu, and have a profound respect for her. She is certainly one of the greatest travellers the world has known, and I am glad she received such fortunate mercy from these robbers, who even showed a certain gallantry towards her because she was a helpless woman and a detsuma (Reverend Abbess) to boot. Personally I would rather deal with a Chinese or a Nakhi robber than a Tibetan one. A Chinese or a Nakhi robber seldom kills his victim. He robs you but he does it with a degree of finesse and delicacy, and at least leaves you your 146 underwear to enable you to reach the nearest village with a modicum of decency. He usually forbears to search a lady, and may even listen to her protests about taking away certain items of her toilette. Not so with the Tibetan robbers. Their motto is ‘Dead men tell no tales’. They shoot first and then look for anything of value on the dead man’s person or in his baggage. I once heard an interesting story of how one of these Tongwa shot a man walking in the distance, only to discover afterwards that it was his own father. I am prepared to admit that the Tibetan brigands of some other tribes may be ‘gentlemen’ to some degree but, from what I heard from reliable Tibetan and Nakhi friends, the Tongwa and Hsiangchen cannot be idealized by any stretch of imagination. They are so avaricious and unprincipled that even the bonds of friendship mean nothing to them, and there have been cases when a man has killed a bosom friend for the sake of a couple of rupees in his belt. Everybody in Tongwa and Hsiangchen robs, steals and kills: lamas and trapas, merchants and serfs, men and women: even children learn the trade at a tender age. It is not a question of whether this Tongwa or that Hsiangchen is a robber, but whether the man is a Tongwa or Hsiangchen. When the caravan has been plundered and witnesses eliminated or scattered, the goods, arms and animals are taken to the robbers’ lair. There the merchandise is carefully repacked and reloaded and, lo and behold, the robber chief, resplendently dressed, enters Likiang as a peaceful and affluent merchant, at the head of a sizable caravan. No questions are asked and no explanations are vouchsafed. Of course rumours do travel, and travel fast; but rumours are rumours and proofs are proofs. The bogus merchant knows that the people know and the people know that he knows what they know, but everything proceeds according to form. The merchant sells his goods, gives generous parties right and left and acquires merit by rich donations to the local lamaseries.’ Rock was supplied with a ‘safe conduct’ pass and a guide by the Muli king, and in March 1928 he set off to visit the three sacred Konkaling mountains (Shenrezig, Jambeyang and Chanadorje) of the Konka Risumgongba range He started his journey in Kunming [then known as Yunnan-fu] from where he left with his Naxi “boy” assistants, making his way first to Muli via Dali and Lijiang. Though he fails to mention it in his article, Rock was also accompanied by a young American assistant, William Hagen, a lawyer who had been working at the US consulate in Kunming. Rock took him along as insurance, after being warned that bandit activity was especially bad in the upcountry areas of Yunnan. Hagen was also meant to act as an assistant to Rock, doing much of the donkey work, such as sorting and preparing botanic samples for shipping back to the US. Rock was intrigued by the “blank on the map” where the Konkaling peaks were, so he persuaded the Muli king to vouch for him and provide a ‘laisser passez’ with the Konkaling bandits. He smoothed the way by presenting the Muli king with a gold American $20 coin, and more importantly, copies of the National Geographic magazine, in which the king’s portraits featured prominently. While talking with the Muli king, he was asked to explain a little more about world events. He became apprehensive when told that the Tsar and Germany’s Kaiser had been dethroned, wondering if he would meet the same fate [he would, by an assassin’s bullet, within ten years]. Rock then tried to keep a straight face when the king asked him about a picture of Puss in Boots, and where this strange animal kingdom might be. But perhaps he was not so 147 stupid. When Rock told him about aeroplanes, he asked why Americans did not fly to the moon! Leaving with the Muli king’s blessing in late from the monastery of Kopati, Rock ascended up through the pine forests to the peaks of Mt Mitzuga, heading for the Shuiluo river that marked the border between Muli and Konkaling territory. His party included 36 mules and horses, 21 Nashi assistants, and the head lama of Muli monastery to act as a guide. Rock describes the trip in an article in the July 1931 issue of the National Geographic, in which he claims to be ‘the first white man to visit the Konkaling peaks’. He says other explorers and plant hunters such as Kingdon Ward had been in the area but had never got close enough to see the peaks in good weather. Rock approached from the eastern (Muli) side, dipping down into the stifling heat of the cavernous Shouchu river valley and then climbing out on the western side up to the village of Garu (now known as Galuo), whose tough Apache-like Tibetan inhabitants he compared favourably to the snivelling and servile subjects of the Muli king. Even these ‘proud and virile’ men were reluctant to escort Rock around the peaks because of the bandit threat, until Rock mocked them by suggesting he take some Garu women instead. From Garu, Rock ascended through virgin spruce and fir forest and at higher altitudes rhododendron forest then crossed over a high pass to reach the mountains, and to make a circuit of the three peaks in the usual Tibetan Buddhist clockwise fashion. His first camp was at 15,300 feet below the scree slopes and glaciers of Chanadorje (‘huge moraines resembling a vast amphitheatre’), where he says he got a great view when the clouds finally parted ‘revealing The Holder of the Thunderbolt - a truncated pyramid flanked by broad buttresses like the wings of a stupendous bat’. This place the locals called Konka Djra-nse, or Sea Dragon’s Snout. This is where we joined up with Rocks circuit, although we had come from the western side. We also got great views of the whole face of Chanadorje at this spot, and it is odd that Rock does not include any photos of this impressive view of the mountain in his article. He only includes a picture of the glacier moraines at the foot of Chanadorje, and by the look of things there is much cloud about. From the natural campground below Chanadorje called Shingara, Rock ascended a pass and followed a valley called the Saiyo Katso, which culminated in two smaller peaks known as Dzambala. We also followed this valley, which gave great views of the side of Chanadorje, and also gave glimpses of the sliver-like side profile of Jambeyang further to the southwest. This valley also had a small hanging valley within it, with a beautiful small lake. At this point Rock’s party were commanded to try collect some local wildlife (he says he shot some snow pigeons), but they objected to the taking of life. Rock found this amusing, as the locals seemed to have no qualms about taking human lives. They also came across a few Konkaling Tibetans skulking among the trees. They had been scared by his rifle shots, assuming that humans were being shot (‘since no one hereabouts wastes shot and powder on useless pigeons as we had done’). The head of the valley was blocked by an imposing black vertical wall of rock below two minor peaks. I presume this is the Yaka Pass that Rock refers to. We just called it The Wall, and it looked like a very steep ascent to a knife-edge ridge. 148 For someone who regularly used plenty of florid prose, Rock is quite restrained in his description of the rigours of the journey around the peaks, saying only that ‘our journey proved very arduous’. He describes the crossing of the Yaka Pass under a torrential downpour, with no trail to follow, and the mules and humans unable to find a good footing on the slabs of schists covered in rainwater and slippery grey mud. We had exactly the same experience, summed up by this paragraph: ‘Climbing at such altitudes is difficult enough in good weather, but in a terrific hail and rain storm, with a howling gale driving the icy pellets into one’s face and making one gasp for breath in this rarefied atmosphere, it is doubly disagreeable.’ After crossing the Yaka Pass, Rock says he camped at the foot of hanging glaciers of moraines on the southern slopes of Mt Jambeyang. We also camped here, although it was far from an ideal camping spot. Rock says his entourage sought shelter in a cave-like space under an overhanging cliff, where pilgrims had erected chortens. We also saw this sacred site, which was pretty much unchanged from the photograph published by Rock. There was still a makeshift wall and a couple of chortens in disrepair. And like Rock, we also spent the night listening to the thundering noise of falling blocks of ice, tumbling down from the heights of Jambeyang’s glaciers. It was near here that Rock says he encountered the dreaded bandit chief himself, Drashetsonpen, who was also making a circuit of the peaks (perhaps in expiation of his heinous crimes). His gang had sullen faces, hinting at looting and murder. Rock sat down in the pouring rain with this bandit leader and his thirty followers, and shared some rancid yak butter and cheese. They made little conversation except for a reassurance that Rock would not be molested. The next section, a difficult walk along scree and snow under steep cliffs, is given little mention by Rock, except to say that his party shot a wapiti, but they were unable to bag it because the body rolled down the steep slope into the Lawatong valley far below. The trail then makes a sudden turn northwards around the cliff shoulder, and Rock describes this new valley as Yetchesura. We found it quite easy going after the steep scree, but Rock complains that that “the enormous slabs as smooth as a billiard table, covered with large patches of ice and snow made travelling most disagreeable.” His next camp, like ours, was by one of the larger lakes in the area, a long thin lake he calls Russo Tso (‘where dwell the worst of all the Konkaling outlaws’). Before we reached this we had to cross two further but relatively easy passes. After the first we came down to a fertile flat area of grass, in the middle of which was a large slab of rock as big as a house, which has become know as ‘Rock’s rock’. He includes a picture of his entourage sitting around this huge slab of schist, which he says must have fallen from the lower slopes of Mt Jambeyang. While camping next to the lake, Rock says his guides were nervous, pointing up at the high slopes above them where Tibetans (presumably bandits) could be seen in the rocky ramparts, watching them. From this lake, Rocks party climbed up to another pass with several exits (we called it the three-way pass), which divides Jambeyang from Shenrezig. This pass connects with the 149 Konka Den valley, which is now part of the main tourist trail of Yading, giving views of all three peaks. Rock descended with his party, and his visit to and stay at the Chonggu Monastery. In 1928 when Joseph Rock reached the Chonggu Si monastery he had traversed the ‘final’ pass round the back of Shenrezig in torrential rain. He was disappointed to find that the monastery was much further beyond the pass than he had expected, lying at the bottom of what he called the Bonquende valley in larch forest. He reached this ‘small and dilapidated monastery’ after passing the lake beneath Shenrezig he referred to as Dutsu Kwa or Shenrezig’s cup. In a section of his article entitled ‘Taking Shelter in a Bandit Monastery’, Rock describes how his party were “ushered into one of the stone buildings, black and dingy, word having been sent by [bandit chief] Drashetsongpen to take us in and extend such hospitality as the place afforded.” “The caravan unloaded in the tiny courtyard in pouring rain while we entered the old building through a dark narrow corridor. On both sides opened small dingy smoke-filled rooms in which Tibetans were cooking over damp wood fires.” “Since no white man had ever visited this weird spot, or any foreigner ever circumambulated these scared peaks these sacred peaks, a crowd of Tibetan bandit pilgrims, queer-looking men and women, had come to watch our arrival. They had climbed over the wall and stared at me, while others filled the courtyard to see this strange spectacle - the arrival of the first white man the roof of this monastery had ever sheltered. Their curiosity satisfied, the continued their pilgrimage, continually walking around the old monastery from left to right, chanting in unison.” “I felt buried in these mountain fastnesses, icebound on all sides. The monastery was the rendezvous of all the outlaws and bandits, and perhaps some occasional genuine pilgrim of the surrounding no-man’s land. My lama guide tried to persuade me not to stay longer than a day and wanted to move on the next morning, but I demurred. Had I not come to photograph and map the sacred peaks, to collect the flora and fauna of this unknown region?” Rock describes how the weather turned better during his three-day stay at Chonggu Si, and he went out in the sunshine the next day to try take some photographs of Shenrezig. However, he didn’t get very far up the hill before his Tibetan bodyguards caught up with him and surrounded him, brandishing their loaded rifles. They told him he had had a lucky escape as he would surely have been murdered if caught outside by himself. They took him back to the safety of the monastery and warned him not to go out alone again. Joseph Rock pottered about in the monastery, but the monks in residence there could not tell him how old it was - at least over 100 years old was the best they could say. He noticed that one temple room contained an “obscene” many armed statue, and outside the pilgrims had left items of clothing and jewellery (“bracelets, rings, beads, feathers, bells - even hair”) as offerings. “There was nothing beautiful whatever, only filth and evil smells. The few praying lamas were dressed in rags shiny with yak butter, for their robes serve as towels as well as handkerchiefs.” 150 Another building at the monastery contained a prayer wheel, and a fresco portraying the trinity of deities (Jambeyang: ‘The God of Learning’, Chanadorje: ‘The Holder of the Thunderbolt’ and Shenrezig: the Dalai Lama) said to be represented by the scared peaks. “An ever moving stream of pilgrims entered the little house, gave the prayer cylinder a complete turn, and then moved on, continuously circumambulating the sacred buildings.” Joseph Rock also notes that there were some nuns in residence at the Chonggu Monastery, although he says that these “lean, lanky toothless old creatures” had the same shaven heads and the same filthy clothes as the monks, and it was impossible to tell the nuns from the monks until they spoke. As can be seen from his writings, Joseph Rock found the Chonggu Si monastery to be a disagreeable place - the smoky rooms and the stink form the stables sent him on his way earlier than he planned. He made a second visit to the peaks in August of the same year, but this was the middle of the rainy season, and he saw little in the way of mountain scenery. He had been planning to make a third visit, but was told by the Muli king that this would be suicide. There had been an unseasonal hail storm after his most recent visit that had ruined the local barley crops. This the bandits and outlaws had attributed to the mountain gods being angry at the visit by an outsider, and they had vowed to kill him on his return. Rock never went back to the Konkaling, “and thus the land of the Konkaling outlaws is again closed, and their mountains remain guarded as of yore.” In the 21st century, the Chonggu Si monastery is no longer the haven for outlaws, although some might say that the amounts charged for entrance fees and the horse rides amount to robbery. In the ten years since my last visit the monastery grounds have been tidied up and the unsightly shacks and filthy marquees used as makeshift accommodation have been removed. It is now all signposted and landscaped, and the monastery again plays host to a steady stream of visitors, but these days of tourists rather than pilgrims. Also since my last visit a large new temple has been rebuilt on the site of the ruin of the former temple. The previous chanting hall has been closed, but it bore some resemblance to the one described by Rock: “I was led over a steep stairway to the left into a fairly good room - for that part of the world. It was the best the monastery could afford and was evidently the quarters of Living Buddha. The ceilings and walls were painted, and at the head of the room was a throne and a bed, above which hung some Tibetan scrolls, representing Tsongkapa, the founder of the yellow sect. To my left, a door led into a tiny private chapel, wherein reposed the tutelary demon of the Buddha. From below, juniper incense seeped into my glassless and paperless window and through every crack and crevice in the floor.” I paid another visit to Chonggu Si, and found the monks to be friendly, if a little bored of all the tourists trotting through their courtyard. They did not seem very other worldly. During my visit the abbot of the monastery was doing his laundry outside in the yard using a cheap modern Chinese-made washing machine that was connected up to a generator, and which he filled with water by hand. I had a look around at the freshly painted interior of the rebuilt temple, whose colours seemed so vivid compared to the faded and desecrated murals I found in the old prayer wheel room. These could have been the same ones seen and described by Rock. 151 Yading: Getting ready to go My first attempt to walk to the Yading peaks from Muli, in 1996, was a shambles. I’d hooked up with three Kiwi ‘trampers’ who had read about my ambition to re-trace Rock’s journey from Muli to Yading, and we set off from Lugu Lake in mid March, to do a replay of my trek to Muli of two years before. It soon became clear that we didn’t get on with each other, and things gradually started to fall apart. My trekking companions were very experienced in New Zealand trekking but had not done much, if any, walking overseas, and it showed. Two of them insisted on walking in the ‘short shorts’ they were used to wearing in New Zealand. In the more conservative society of China, it just made them look like two old men who had lost their pants. A day after we set off from Lugu Lake, one of them let slip that he had not changed many New Zealand dollars into Chinese renminbi, and he only 300 yuan left. When we pooled or money, we found that we would probably have just enough to get back to Chengdu at the end of our trek, but not enough money to hire horses or a jeep if the need arose. I could have kicked him. We retraced my earlier trek over the hills from Yongning to Muli, via Wujiao. It was still early spring and there was a bit of snow on top of the pass, where we camped. As before, we saw very few local people on this little travelled route. On the way down to Muli, however, we did stop off at a Forestry Station, which was just a decrepit concrete shell of a building around which a few saplings were planted in rows. I told the manager that I had travelled along this same route a couple of years earlier and he smiled. “Ha! Old Mr Li the caretaker told us he had seen a foreigner walking past here two years ago and we never believed him! We though he was bulshitting us!” At Muli we stayed at the monastery this time, in guest rooms where mice ran here and there over our sleeping bags while we slept. There was a visiting monk who had spent several years in Switzerland and could speak German but no English. With no money to hire a jeep over the start point of Shuiluo, we tried hiking there. We followed a ridge up along a track that headed west towards Eyatong and crossed two high passes after spending two nights out up in the hills, while it snowed. It took us two days to reach a remote village called Qunying, which was still two days walk from Shuiluo. By now we were exhausted, cold and fractious. The final straw was on the third day when we crossed another pass and found ourselves having to negotiate a sea of fallen tree trunks created by a large landslide. It was exhausting work trying to climb over one tree trunk after another, and by midday, with no end in sight, we gave up. We worked our way back downhill to a logging camp called Baiyangping, where we were able to hitch a lift on a supply truck that took us over the ridge and back into the Litang river valley. On the way over we caught tantalising glimpses of the Konkaling peaks in the distance, in all set in a grim and grey snow-laden landscape. Our attempt had failed due to poor preparation, lack of decent maps, and because we had gone too early in the year when the snows were still thick on the passes. I was plagued again by snow on my second visit to Yading in 2002, even though this trip was made in the late spring season of mid-May. By this time, Yading had opened up and there were tour buses running to Daocheng from Chengdu via Kangding and Litang. I travelled 152 this time with an older Aussie ‘bushwalker’, who proved to be just as inept as my previous Kiwi companion. In Daocheng we joined up with some Chinese trekkers we met on the bus to hire a minivan to take us into the ‘national park’. At that time, the Yading National Park was still in its infancy and there were few facilities at Yading or at the park entrance near Chonggu monastery. To cater for the increasing numbers of visitors, the monks at the monastery had erected a grubby old marquee tent and knocked up a couple of makeshift shacks from planks of pine, which contained a few camp beds and dirty mattresses. Another couple of ragged-looking marquees and wooden shacks had been put in further up the valley at Luorong. Like most of the visitors at that time I did the standard ‘tourist’ trekker route, which comprised the inner kora (circuit) of Shenrezig. This was essentially a very long day walk over a couple of passes, starting from Luorong, going up past the two lakes (Wuse Hai and Niunai Hai) below Shenrezig to the first ‘three-way’ pass and then turning left to complete the circuit by going behind Shenrezig and returning to Chonggu Si monastery via another rather arduous pass. I had travelled in May and was very fortunate in that I had a clear day for my walk, and got great views of all three mountains: Jambeyang, Chanadorje and Shenrezig, from the lakes area. As is usual in these parts, the cloud increased by mid afternoon, and the crossing of the second pass was done in cold and overcast weather. Towards the end of the afternoon we faced the final pass, which entailed a long slog up a zig-zag track under increasingly grey ad inhospitable conditions. We made it, to descend back down to Chonggu Si, where we found ourselves snow-bound by another overnight big fall of snow. Even worse, my Aussie trekking partner had developed snow blindness from failing to wear sunglasses on the snow the day before. We spent a dull and frustrating day at Chonggu Si camp before deciding to walk out back down the valley to Riwa, since the road over the mountains to Chonggu Si was impassable due to the snow. From Riwa were able to hire a jeep to get us back to Daocheng, and from there we were able to get back to Chengdu. Yading: third time lucky I had experienced a taste of Yading, but there was still a lot of Joseph Rocks visit that I had not covered. So what made me go back? Well, I never got to see the other more remote parts of this mountain range that Joseph Rock described in his article The Holy Mountains of the Outlaws. He came in from the western side and did a full circuit of the three peaks, stopping finally at Chonggu Si before returning to Muli. I had really only seen the final part of his trek, that bit which lay in the (admittedly very scenic) Duron Valley. I’d always wanted to explore a little more and fill in the blanks. Around Christmas 2009 I was thinking about making a return trip to south-western China. After ten years of on-again, off-again interest in the areas visited by Joseph Rock I had come to feel that I had ‘been there, done that’. I had done Minya Konka, Muli, the Mekong and Kawakarpo areas and most recently I had been to the Salween. The only place I hadn’t been to was the more northerly destination of Choni, in Gansu province, where Rock had spent a 153 winter at the Buddhist monastery, preparing for an interesting but abortive attempt to reach Amnye Machen by following the Yellow River. This was my ‘missing link’, the last piece of the jigsaw in terms of ‘collecting’ Rock trips, but I wasn’t very keen. I really wanted to see some mountains, and Choni area was relatively gentle in terms of hills. During one of my weekend saunters down Oxford St in Sydney I had popped into one of the many second hand bookshops (Berkelouw’s, I think) and found myself leafing through an old book from the 1940s by the mountain climber and photographer FS Smythe. I was instantly transported into another alpine world of peaks, footprints in the snow, gnarled trees and glacier moraines. This is where I want to be, I thought. I wanted to be up high, in the clouds again. In fact I really wanted to do a long-ish alpine walk, and really get away from it all - but where to go? At first I thought about doing the ‘big’ kora around Mt Kawakarpo (Meili Xueshan) in NW Yunnan near Deqin. This would involve crossing over from the Mekong to the Salween and then back again, and would mean traversing several high passes in a trip of about eight to ten days. A guy called Richard Scotford has guided trips on this kora and describes them here. It sounds great. But I had only recently been in the Salween (Nujiang) region and this would mean a return to almost the same place. So my thoughts turned to Yading. Surfing the web I found an account of a ‘big’ or outer kora of all three of the three peaks, written as part of a travel diary by a young American traveller and photographer called Lloyd Raleigh. He gave a vague but amusing account of this arduous trip, which involved crossing six or seven passes over a seven day period. He made it sound like fun, and the few photos he included on his web travel diary looked stunning - mountain peaks, alpine lakes, forest of spruce and fir trees and rhododendrons and some pretty rugged country. I decided to go. The only problem was that I had no decent map of the area other than Lloyd’s artistic sketch map, which was not to scale (and he had got lost and went off the proper route during his trek - hardly reassuring). Also, his track notes were not very specific, and were hard to follow because he referred to the mountains using the English translations of their Tibetan names ‘Wisdom’ for Shenrezig, ‘Power’ for Chanadorje, and ‘Compassion’ for Chanadorje. Or was it the other way around? Whatever ... I had made my mind up to do the trip and pencilled it in for mid to late May. In theory, this was one of the best times to go. Joseph Rock says in his articles that late spring (May-June) and autumn (September-October) are the seasons most likely to provide the ideal conditions for travelling in western Sichuan and northern Yunnan. During winter the passes are closed by snow, and I knew from bitter experience that the conditions can be frigidly cold and bleak. In summer it is the rainy season, when the remnants of the monsoon rains sweep over from Burma and create drizzly and overcast conditions from late June to early September. So May it was. I posted a message on this blog to announce my intentions, and said that I was looking for a trekking partner. Past experience has shown me that it’s best not to travel alone in these parts, for safety reasons if nothing else. Within a few days I had a few tentative inquiries from around the world. An American guy doing postgrad research into tourism in China said he would be in the area and would be interested in coming along. Closer to home, I had an email from an old internet contact, Peter, with whom I had previously corresponded about treks in the Kham area. Peter was from Geelong in Victoria, and with a group of friends who were also keen bushwalkers he had already done some 154 interesting treks in the Gongga Shan and Ganze areas of Tibetan Sichuan. From their photos they looked like real trekkers, with all the right gear, quite unlike my own makeshift attempts at being an outdoorsy person. Peter said he was also tempted by the prospect doing the ‘big’ kora at Yading, and was hopeful he could get some time off work. By a stroke of luck, he lived just around the corner from my auntie in Geelong, and a couple of weeks later while paying a visit to her I was able to drop by at his house to talk things over with him. It’s funny meeting someone else who shares an interest in a fairly obscure area. I’m normally used to the glazed expressions and bizarre, off-the-mark questions that emanate from people when I try and explain the attraction of trekking in western China in the footsteps of the plant collectors and explorers of the early 20th century. Peter, however, ‘spoke the same language’, and he had an impressive - perhaps even intimidating- aura of competence about him, quite unlike my own ‘seat of the pants’ approach to meandering in the mountains. We were soon discussing the finer points of how we’d go about the trek - he’d already looked up the route on Google Maps, and pulled up a great 3-D display of the whole route, complete with GPS points, courtesy of a Chinese guy who claimed on his website to have taken a mountain bike around the kora! I shared a few of my dog-eared old paper documents about various aspects of the trip. Another interesting question he posed was why so few people were interested in trekking in this area of China. Modern-day would-be adventurers complain that it’s hard to really get away from it all these days - the Annapurna Circuit is now all tea houses and paved roads. And yet the Kham area of China/Tibet is still unfrequented by westerners - why is that? Is it the language barrier? Or just a perception that China is overcrowded and polluted and too difficult because of red tape and regulations? Who knows the answer? Well, we didn’t - but we parted with an agreement to meet up in early May in Chengdu. Now, I’m 47 years old and not exactly a fitness fanatic. I don’t go to the gym or do any regular exercise or sport, so I decided I needed to get into slightly better physical shape to do this trek. For the six weeks before I embarked on the walk I started going for a run every day, eight laps around the local park football field, taking about twenty minutes - just long enough to break into a serious sweat. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t pretty. I expected that after going through an initial ‘pain barrier’ period I would start to feel better and fitter, but that never happened. Every evening after work I dragged myself around the park, and every day it was just another tiring drag. If anything, I started to feel even more tired and worn out after several weeks of this. I just hoped it would be ‘alright on the night’. For my tickets, I went to my usual travel agent - China Travel Service near Sydney’s Central Station - and I was pleasantly surprised to find this time that I could get a return from Sydney to Chengdu, via Guangzhou, for a little over $1000. That was about $500 cheaper than my last trip. I put in my passport with them as well, to apply for a China visa, being careful to avoid listing my occupation on the application form as ‘journalist’ and instead putting something vague about working in publishing. With my tickets booked, I then started thinking about what gear to take. After all my previous trips I have always vowed to travel with as little as possible next time, but how can you ‘travel light’ when you are expecting to camp out in the mountains for up to seven nights? I went out to the garden shed and dug out my hiking gear, much of it now 15 or so years old. My rain jacket had seen better days - when I hung it up readying it for a re 155 waterproofing I found that it had large tears under the arms, and the zips didn’t work. My faithful and comfortable boots were in a similar sorry state of disrepair, with the soles looking like they were about to part company with the uppers. It was time for a visit to the canyon of Kent St, home to Sydney’s outdoor gear shops. The next Saturday morning I trawled my way through Paddy Pallin, Kathmandu, Mountain Equipment, Macpac and the many other gear shops offering a plethora of equipment - much of which I had never even seen before. Water bottles, I discovered, were now an archaic tool from the past - the done thing in the 21st century is to take a camelback-style ‘hydration system’. The one I was persuaded to purchase was allegedly designed for the Israeli Army and guaranteed not to become smelly because it repelled germs. The gear shops of Kent St stocked an intimidating array of gadgets and appliances that I felt guilty for not bringing with me. Most of these items were exorbitantly priced compared to what you would pay for their ‘civilian’ equivalents. Carbon fibre knives and forks for $50. Titanium cooking pots, $100 each. Walking poles. ‘Second skin’ dressings for treating blisters. And the clothing! Gone are the days when you can set off into the hills wearing a manly thick jumper, a lumberjack shirt and a tough pair of trousers - tweed or corduroy, probably (and not forgetting to tuck your trouser bottoms into your thick hiking socks). Now it’s all about shells and layers, made of fibres that have the word ‘poly’ in them. And in pastel or dayglo colours. I fingered numerous examples of Gore Tex and other waterproof fabrics as I searched out a replacement rain jacket. One of the best was a sturdy-feeling coat I found in the Macpac shop, but it was only available in a shade of pinky-orange. Not wanting to look like a lump of bubblegum on legs, I instead opted for a jacket from Mountain Designs, mainly because it was the same reassuringly subdued blue colour as the one it was replacing. As well as buying a new jacket, I also walked away with a new pair of Kathmandu hiking boots (one size too big as it turned out), a pair of those gossamer thin hiking trousers with zips that convert them into shorts, a new pair of high-tech socks and seven packets of Gordon Ramsay restaurant-priced freeze-dried meals, that promised to transform into delicious-sounding treats such as Mexican Chicken once water was added. (By the way, later on, when emptying out an old backpack, I found I still had a couple of these left over from a previous trip some years ago. The expiry date was 2006 -four years ago - but I tried one anyway and it tasted just like new - ie crap. I’m sure they’re all made from the same ingredients, just with different flavourings added.) New boots have to be broken in, of course, so the next day saw me on my run pounding round the park in my new outsize hiking boots, eliciting some very strange looks from the mums and dads supervising their kids at soccer practice. The other essential items of kit for any Woodhead hike are books. I can’t spend several weeks on the road in China without something to read, but at the same time I am loathe to spend large amounts of money on books that I will end up discarding or giving away. So it was off to the Op Shop (charity store) to see what kind of $1 wonders I could rustle up. After passing on several copies of The Da Vinci Code, for this trip the best I could find on the shelves was the autobiography of yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester, a collection of Jeremy Clarkson articles from the Sunday Times and pseudo-travelogue by a London writer Jenny Diski on her quest for silence and solitude in New Zealand and Finland. 156 Then it was time to think about food. On previous trips I had relied on those freeze dried meals for dinner and a combination of Vitawheat crackers and cheese for lunch. Not very tasty, but it worked. I should have stuck with the successful formula. Instead, I found some small tins of ‘ready to eat’ meals at the local Woolworths, which contained tuna or chicken mixed with pasta and vegetables (well, carrots and beans). They looked quite tasty and handy, so I bought six, thinking they would suffice for lunch. I also allowed myself six Snickers bars for energy. For breakfast I bought a big bag of my favourite muesli and got some milk powder in a ziplock bag. The other major item to fill my backpack was camera gear. Being one of the last people in the world to still prefer using film over digital, this meant bringing a large bag of film canisters, as well as three different film cameras. With a collection of more than ten film cameras - all of which I am passionately attached to - it was hard to choose which ones to bring. In the end I settled for my big Rolleicord medium format camera, the Leica M2 as the mainstay, and a small Nikon 35Ti ‘point and shoot’ for slide film. Altogether I packed about 70 rolls of 35mm film (Kodak 400 print film and Kodak E100 G Ektachrome) and 12 rolls of Ektachrome 120 film. When I put all this plus my spare clothes, sleeping bag (a Mont 3-season), Thermarest and tent (a Walrus one-man lightweight job) in the pack it clocked up almost 20kg on the bathroom scales. Oh dear. I decided it would be a good idea to have a trial run to see if I could manage such a heavy load, and also to check out all this new gear to make sure it all worked. A couple of weeks later I took my 10-year old son Paul on a practice walk - a gentle overnight trip to the camping ground at North Era beach, in the Royal National Park south of Sydney. After a lovely apple pie and cream to start us off at the café near Otford, we set off along the clifftop track and down through the ‘Palm Jungle’ to Burning Palms beach and beyond. As well as being a pleasant interlude, the trip taught me a few valuable lessons - I discovered that the rain jacket was very sweaty and very fiddly to zip up, my boots were too big (more thick socks needed) and my backpack sat uncomfortably low on my back and I kept trying to hitch it up. My food choices seemed OK, but the trip also reinforced the fact that I would need to be carrying a lot of water - we consumed two litres in just a few hours of relatively easy walking. Back at home, after a few last minute purchases and adjustments, I was now ready to go. All I had to do now was wait those last few weeks and days. And oh, how slowly they seemed to tick over. “Big trip coming up - are you excited??!” people would ask me at work. Well, no, not really. More worried about what might go wrong. And as I was to discover, plenty of things would go wrong. Yading – Getting there I flew out to Guangzhou from Sydney on the morning of Friday 7th May on a China Southern Airlines flight. I took the train from Strathfield to the airport via the city. It felt so funny to be on my usual morning train, squeezed in among all the commuters with my heavy backpack. ‘You’re going to work and I’m going to China,’ I thought, gleefully. 157 At the airport, once I’d checked in my bag, I had that feeling of elated anticipation. It’s all on now. But what is it about air travel that makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do? Spending large sums of money on things like magazines you wouldn’t normally read, just because you’re going on a long trip? The flight itself wasn’t too bad, though once I arrived in Guangzhou, things started to go wrong. The plane was delayed and my bag went AWOL. They’d checked my backpack right through to Chengdu, and I felt uncomfortable leaving it circling round on the luggage carousel at Guangzhou, as staff assured me that it would be sent through on my connecting flight. Then I found that my connecting flight would be five hours late, so we wouldn’t arrive into Chengdu until after midnight, local time (about 2am my time). And of course I ended up being the last person in the arrivals lounge at Chengdu before it shut down for the night, maintaining a lonely vigil for my bag at the carousel, which eventually stopped. I was ushered into a back room and given lots of forms to fill out, and told that my bag had been held up by customs in Guangzhou. It might arrive in a few days time. Disconsolate and very tired, I took a dodgy taxi into the city and checked into my old standby, the Traffic Hotel. I had to wake up the receptionist in the early hours, but she didn’t seem too bothered, and soon had me sorted out with a dorm room for 40 kuai. Things looked a little better in the morning. The hotel still had an archaic dining room where I ate alone, hovered over by three young waitresses, delivering my special 10 kuai ‘western breakfast’ - a fried egg on top of a slice of sickly cardboard white bread, and a glass of orange juice. At least they did something resembling coffee. I took a walk around Chengdu and it was pleasant shirtsleeves weather. More skyscrapers, including a whole new development designed by some Italian architect I’d never heard of, that promised to be a major outlet for Prada and Louis Vuitton. I took a walk up to the Bank of China and was told they could not change Australian dollars until Monday. Just as well I’d changed a few hundred kuai before I arrived. Peter was due to fly in that afternoon, so I went out to the airport to meet him, and also to ask about my missing bag. The good news was that the backpack had turned up on a later flight from Guangzhou, and my ‘worst case scenario’ fears about having to buy a load more new camping gear were never realised. I went to the bus station next door to the Traffic Hotel and secured us tickets to go right through to Daocheng for 240 kuai, leaving on Monday. Sunday would be a day of rest and ‘cultural acclimatisation’ in Chengdu. We went out for a curry that night at an excellent and very popular Chinese-run Indian restaurant further along the riverbank. It was good being back in China. People in Chengdu seemed friendly, things worked efficiently, and it was a buzzing, modern city. I spent much of Sunday traipsing round the outdoor gear shops down the road from our hotel. It was interesting and mildly annoying to see that had much the same gear as I had seen in Sydney, but for about one third of the cost. Much of it was Chinese made, but none the worse for that - it looked to be just as good quality as much of the stuff on sale back home. After getting soaked in a Chengdu downpour, I found that my rain jacket worked fine (and no longer seemed so clammy), but my trekking trousers were very quickly sopping wet. I opted to buy a pair of lightweight waterproof hiking trousers and a new pack cover. That night we went out to a Chinese Muslim restaurant in a distant district. It was a wonderfully 158 chaotic place, running by a big matriarchal boss woman who barked out orders to her young male helpers as they brought us the house speciality - chicken with potatoes (dapanji) - to our table. The place was really popular with Chinese diners and despite being Muslim sold Snow Beer. The bus strip to Daocheng took two days, with an overnight stop in Kangding. After the usual rigmarole of getting everyone in their assigned seats, we set off at 10am with much signing of forms, and then immediately stopped on the next street down from the Chengdu bus station to pick up a few unofficial passengers, who sprawled wherever they could find somewhere to sit - in the door well and on top of the gear box. The bus covered what was now well-travelled territory for me - the motorway to Ya’an, a brief stop for lunch at the usual scruffy restaurant with filthy looking kitchen (but delicious food), and then the start of the big grind up through the canyons and over Erlang Shan to the Dadu river and Luding. Yet again, more evidence of construction on a massive scale. A new road now bypasses the centre of historic Luding and its famous metal chain bridge, and instead skirts the town and passes what looks like will be a major hydro dam, complete with massive tunnels through the side of the mountains. I passed the journey reading a dull autobiography of Kate Hepburn and swigging on my newfound favourite drink - bottles of lemon tea. We arrived in a very dark and rainy Kangding in the late afternoon and were told by the driver to prepare for a 6am start the next day. The new bus station was at the very far end of town and we didn’t fancy a long early morning journey back from our intended hotel - the Black Tent Hotel, so we managed to wangle a room at the ‘foreigners not allowed’ bus station hotel. It was just as well that we did, because when we did walk all the way up through the town we found that all the old wooden houses and buildings at the top end of town were in the process of being demolished - including the Black Tent Hotel and even the forecourt of the next door Anjue Si Buddhist monastery. I thought of the many times I’d spent in the cold bedrooms of the Black Tent Hotel, and of the interesting characters I’d encountered there. All gone now. Next door at the Anjue Si, as we surveyed the wreckage a monk came out and asked us where we were from. When we said Australia, he said “Australia good, Beijing bad,” and started complaining about how they had no idea what would happen to the remains of the temple. The actual temple itself was still intact, but the monks’ living quarters were already gone. A young monk sauntered through the demolished area, blowing a conch shell and it all felt very disconsolate. We walked up the hill to check out a new hostel we had heard about - the Zhilam Hostel, supposedly run by an American couple in an effort to encourage hospitality industry skills among the local Tibetans. After a short but steep climb up the paths behind the Kangding Hotel we found the hostel, un-signposted and locked up. A note on the door said the American couple had returned home for medical treatment and the local manager was also sick - so the place was temporarily closed (‘perhaps due to the stress of running a hostel in China’). We spent the rest of the evening in a new cosy bar that we found outside the Kangding Hotel. It had funky furniture and a charming if slightly incompetent waitress who tried to sell us Budweiser according to the volume rather than by the bottle. She later came over and apologised, saying it was only her first week in the job - and in town - and she was still unfamiliar with everything. 159 We thought we’d be the only ones making an early start on Tuesday morning, but at 6am the still-dark bus station forecourt was chock full of coaches with engines running and passengers boarding for places such as Ganze, Danba, Litang and Chengdu. It was just getting light as we pulled out and headed up the road west, to traverse the first of several passes we would cross that day. The Zheduo Pass was snowbound, although the road was clear, and beyond it we had really entered the Tibetan world. The houses were Tibetan and we saw yaks dotting the moorland-like landscape, which also had regular arrangement of prayer flags fluttering in the strong highland breeze. This was the Tibetan plateau, with Chinese characteristics. The first was a huge American-style advertising billboard at the top of the pass, promoting the tourism potential of the area. We were to see many more such billboards, promoting concepts such as the ‘green corridor’ of Kham, and the unity between the army and people of the district. Another noticeable new development was the number of backpacker lodges being advertised en route. Almost every Tibetan settlement we saw had a sign outside that included the Chinese characters for beibao (backpack) and guesthouse (kezhan). We soon saw why. Every few minutes, strung along the main highway we saw groups of Chinese cyclists pedalling the punishing miles along this main Sichuan-Tibet route. They all looked well equipped and serious, with rain gear, panniers and spare tyres festooned over themselves. It was a long way to Lhasa and I admired their tenacity - but I’m not sure I’d want to emulate their ride, along such a busy road along which they would have to contend with big trucks, coaches and badly-driven Range Rovers. Beyond Xinduqiao and Yajiang the road became a switchback over another pass - or was it two - and we shared the road with a large convoy of slow-moving tuolaji tractors that seemed to be ferrying Tibetan families and large amounts of their luggage on a pilgrimage, either spiritual or economic. On we went to Litang, at around 4000 metres, where we made the briefest of stops at the bus station and saw a couple of English guys who had been stuck their for two days trying to get a ride down south to our destination of Daocheng, and beyond. We wished them luck and continued on our way, heading south now, over the rocky plateau towards Daocheng. The last time I visited Daocheng it was something of a backwater, a one-street town with just one decrepit official hotel for foreigners and a couple of colourful Tibetan guesthouses. Now the whole main street was lined with guesthouses and we were besieged by touts as soon as we got off the bus, offering to take us to the ‘official’ YHA youth hostel, or one of several other trekker’s hostels. Other Tibetans crowded in on us and offered private transport to Yading. At least it looked like we’d have no problems getting there! Ignoring the touts, we walked across the road and discovered a wonderful and cosy cafecum-guesthouse, the ‘Here Cafe’ (Gaoyuan Kezhan, or Plateau Youth Hostel), set up by a delightful young Chinese couple in a converted Tibetan house. The couple, Yang Na and Xiong Ke, had moved from Chongqing and created a very homely and relaxing trekker’s lodge in this otherwise austere little town. We looked longingly at the comfy sofas and were disappointed to hear that their dorm rooms were already full, but they quickly arranged a room for us in the ‘overflow’ next door, run by a lovely friendly Tibetan woman who ran the adjacent little wooden kiosk shop. When we mentioned that we were planning to spend a whole week or more at Yading, Yang Na gasped and said - “Oh, are you 160 Michael? Doing the kora? An American guy called Travis has been hanging around here waiting for you ...” Small world indeed. She told us that ‘Travis’ had moved on to Yading, and we would no doubt run in to him at the guesthouse there the following day. After shedding our big packs, we had a quick look around town and dived into a small restaurant for something to eat. The great thing about restaurants in small Chinese towns is that you can just walk in and ask the owner to prepare whatever you fancy. No need for menus. They invariably have the raw ingredients such as bean shoots, vegetables and mushrooms on display on the shelves, and the meat is in the fridge. In this case, we asked the lady to stir fry us some pork and peppers and also some mushrooms and tomatoes. “No. Better the other way round,” she replied. “Pork with tomato, mushroom with peppers.” And so that was that. One day someone will open a DIY restaurant in Sydney like this, and it will be a huge success. After the shirt-sleeves weather of Chengdu, Daocheng was cold. Very cold. I had been banking on buying some kind of thermals in China, but the Daocheng shops had little on offer. There were several selling all manner of Tibetan paraphernalia such as beads and incense from India (‘Export Quality’), but when it came to warm clothing the best I could manage was padded waistcoat trimmed with imitation fur. It would have to do. Here Cafe, Daocheng Back at the Here Cafe we settled into the cosy chairs and sipped our Snow Beers. Xiong Ke, the slightly boho co-owner, told us that he had done the kora a couple of years ago and we shouldn’t have any problems finding the way. We wouldn’t even need tents, he said, because there were yak herders huts along the way. His beautiful partner said it would be a nice alternative to the now over-developed main valley. “They have golf buggies running up and down the valley now to carry tourists,” she said, in American accented English. Golf buggies? Well, electric powered carts. Aiyah! There were only two problems with our proposed kora trip, said Xiong Ke. Firstly, it was the wrong season for doing the kora - most Tibetans did it in October, when the weather was milder and clear, not in May when it could still be cold and icy or cloudy. The more pressing problem was that it was now the ‘congcao’ (pronounced Chongtsao) season. The congcao or awato - is a strange kind of fungus that develops inside the carcass of a caterpillar buried just under the surface of the soil, and it is greatly prized for its medicinal and rejuvenating properties. A single congcao can sell for hundreds of kuai in the big cities like Shanghai, and Tibetans sold them for about 25-30 yuan locally. They were only in season in the last few weeks of May, and during this time Tibetans emigrate en masse into the hills, where they can be seen rummaging through the topsoil with small metal hoes, digging up the fungus. During this time few Tibetans would be interested in breaking off this lucrative activity to earn 100yuan a day for guiding western trekkers, said Xiong Ke. The next morning, after an amazing Yunnan coffee, Yang Na and Xiong Ke set us up with a reliable driver, and he was given instructions to take us to the same guesthouse where Travis, our mysterious would-be co-trekker was staying. After a breakfast of xiaolong bao (small steamed bread buns with meaty fillings) we embarked in a tiny minivan driven by the portly gruff Tibetan, who wore the typical off-the-shoulder Tibetan cape and even kept his cowboy 161 hat on throughout the drive. Aside from offering to take us on the kora himself, he said little on the two hour journey over the hills to Yading. We passed through what had once been Riwa township, but which has now been confusingly re-named ‘Shangri-La’, in the same way as the much bigger town of Zhongdian in Yunnan has adopted this tourist-friendly moniker (Xiangelila in Chinese. Then we reached the entrance to the Yading National Park, where we had to pull in to a major gatehouse complex and car park to purchase our Y150 park entrance tickets. It was here that we ran into Travis, who was travelling as a passenger in a beat-up Landcruiser, accompanied by a rather slick young Chinese woman wearing a purple coat and knee-high boots. He was a tall, rugged blond-haired guy who looked like he’d just hiked out of the mountains of his native Colorado. Travis introduced himself to me and said that he had been hoping to accompany us on the trek, but he had developed a really bad chest infection in the last week and it was refusing to go away despite being blasted with every antibiotic the local hospital clinic could throw at it. So, regretfully, he was going to have to pass on the chance of doing the kora this time around. He would however, be basing himself in Yading for a while as he was working on a PhD thesis on how Chinese tourism was developing. We drove on together and soon arrived at Yading, where our driver deposited us at a very un-promising looking building site around an old Tibetan house that had a sign outside proclaiming it to be the Dengba Guesthouse. The owner, a rather diffident young Chinese guy from Anhui, apologised for the mess, and said the rooms would be ready by that evening but were still being fitted out with bedclothes and basic furniture. We took his word for it (with Travis’ reassurance that this was the place to stay) and went for a walk around Yading. Almost every building in the tiny settlement of about ten houses had been turned into a guesthouse of some sort (even one called [Joseph] ‘Rock’s Rooms’), but we appeared to be the only tourists in town. The only other people about were groups of friendly old Tibetan grannies and granddads, and lots of snotty-nosed Tibetan urchin kids. No shops, and no restaurants. The other major thing we realised about Yading was that the actual entrance to Yading National Park was way down below in the bottom of the valley - about 500 metres lower down and a good mile’s walk away. On this our first day at Yading, we went for a ‘familiarisation’ walk down to the park gate and then an hour’s walk up the valley to Chonggu Si monastery. Going down was a drag, but once we got past the gatehouse and the many Tibetans offering houses for hire, I realised that I was seriously unprepared for the high altitude. Even the gentle incline of the gravel track up to the monastery soon had me rasping for air and stopping for regular rests to get my breath back. We had come up almost directly from sea level to 4000 metres and it’s no wonder that we were left floundering like fish out of water. Along the trail we encountered quite a few Chinese tourists who were rising horses up to the monastery. Some of them had brought along aerosol bottles of oxygen. I didn’t think I would have to go that far - but it didn’t bode well for our plans to be hiking at much higher altitudes, carrying a 20kg pack. The trail up to Chonggu Si had been upgraded and signposted since my last visit. Past the ‘Dongle Bridge’, a musical toilet block and many mani stone cairns, I found the monastery 162 had changed for good and for bad. On the positive side, the rickety old shacks and dirty marquee tent accommodation blocks had been removed, making the place look neater. A large and ornate new chanting hall had been added to the group of buildings, on the site of an old ruin. However, the area around the monastery had been developed into a dire ‘tourist reception area’ eyesore. Where there had once just been a gravel track leading up the valley to the Luorong pasture, the park authorities had now installed a wooden walkway. Nothing too much wrong with that. But alongside this they had also laid an ugly winding ribbon of concrete road all the way up the valley on which a fleet of ‘golf buggy’ electric cars plied back and forth carrying tourists to Luorong for 80 a head, while playing tinny Chinese and Tibetan tunes from loudspeakers. This ‘bullet train’ as we termed it, had a terminus area complete with ticket office, ‘police station’ (a bare room with a heater in it), ‘clinic’ (a bare room with a bed in it), concrete assembly area, garage and even a few rows of modern toilet cubicles. We peered into a few of these toilets and they were all blocked and disgustingly fouled up - one even had a pair of men’s underpants left behind on the floor. Why does China - which boasts of having a 5000 year old civilisation and has put an astronaut in space - have such problems maintaining even the most basic toilet facilities? Walking back down the hill to the entrance, I asked around among the horse-for-hire Tibetans about the prospect of hiring someone to guide us around the mountain. Some said it could not be done, some just shrugged or laughed, but one big young guy pushed himself forward and said he had done the kora and he would be willing to take us round ... but it would take ten days and would cost a lot of money. I decided he was bullshitting, and said thanks, but we were no longer interested. He became more persistent, however, and pushed his case quite aggressively, as he followed us further down the hill. He was to prove difficult to shake off. When he did eventually break off, he said he would come and find us that evening to discuss the trip further and he warned us - “if you come back to hire a guide, make sure you ask for me first!” Eek! From the gatehouse, the walk back up the hill to our guesthouse nearly wiped me out. It was only a gentle gradient on the road, but the long slog had me panting for air and experiencing heart palpitations. Peter took a couple of steep short cuts that avoided the long switchbacks of the road, but I failed miserably when I tried these. By the time I had reached the guesthouse higher up an hour later, my confidence was seriously dented. How could I even contemplate hiking in the hills if I couldn’t even manage a gentle road walk without a pack on? Maybe I needed a few more days to acclimatise to the altitude. Back at the guesthouse I realised I would also need some time - and more clothes - to acclimatise to just how cold it was. As soon as it got dark the temperatures plummeted and even with five layers of clothing on I was still shivering around the table in the communal ‘dining room’ of our guesthouse. The guesthouse owner arranged for everyone to eat together. He had recruited a volunteer helper - a young kid from Guangzhou - who received free board and lodging in return for helping about the hostel and coking dinner for everyone. He produced a wide variety of dishes - tofu, pork, pepper, and scrambled eggs with tomato, mushrooms - all delicious. We shared this with a group of female trekker types from Guangdong and one from Hainan Island who buzzed around chattering away as if on speed. Travis told us about his academic studies into tourism and his life divided between Chengdu, Beijing and here ‘in the field’. 163 A former Peace Corps volunteer, he talked with us about books on China, and he revealed he was an old friend of another former Peace Corps worker Peter Hessler, now a famous China-based author and journalist. His companion was not his girlfriend but a female tourist from Shanghai who had also wanted to visit Yading. “Angela’ seemed an unlikely enthusiast for the great outdoors. Her purple jacket was matched by purple-tinted contact lenses, and she had brought along her hairdryer, which she used noisily before we ate dinner. She spoke in staccato matter-of-fact Shanghai English, and seemed determined to enjoy her visit to Yading and to see all the sights. We also shared the guesthouse dining room with a couple of earthy carpenters from near Chengdu. They were just visiting, making a set of tables and doors for the manager, and their accents were near incomprehensible to me, but Travis got along well with them and poked fun at them and their eating habits. With only a small heater to warm the room, we soon retired to the double eiderdowns of the bedroom. I didn’t sleep well. The high altitude had me waking suddenly, gasping for air, and the dryness of the alpine air also resulted in me waking up at regular intervals with a terribly parched dry mouth and cracked lips. Yading village We were to spend two dull and frustrating days at Yading like this, waiting for the weather to clear. Each morning we would wake early, at about 6.30 am and rush to the window to look and see if the view of the mountains had improved. On each day we were greeted by the heart-sinking sight of mountains shrouded by low cloud. We made further trips up the valley, to visit Luorong on the ‘bullet train’, and again the weather was overcast and the peaks were hidden by low cloud. We ventured higher up to the two lakes, paying an extortionate 300 kuai to hire horses to take us up there. The journey took only an hour or so, and we were only allowed to ride the horses on the flatter sections - the rules stipulated that we had to dismount on strenuous steeper stretches of tracks. Up at the lakes it was blowing a gale and small but hard pellets of snow were falling - more like hail really. On the way back we looked for the start of the trek. According to Google Earth, it should have been easy to spot the large gully that leads up to the north between Chonggu Si and Luorong. In reality, the thick covering of trees at ground level made it less obvious. There was a gully, but no obvious track up it. The GPS said this was the right place to start, but it did not look promising. We really needed a guide to show us the way. We went back down and tried negotiating for guides and horses again, and each time we got wildly different answers. “You can’t do the kora, the snow is too deep on the passes … It’s too windy.” “The route is impassable for horses … It will take you two weeks … We will only do it for 400 kuai per day ...” We asked at the guesthouse, but a local man who was deemed reliable and trustworthy by the owner told us that the kora was too difficult for horses and that nobody would be willing to act as route guides (xiangdao) during the congcao season. With no serious takers for our kora guiding proposal, we switched tack. We had met some Chinese trekkers who had come over from Muli, and they said there wasn’t too much snow up on the high pass. So we asked some local Tibetans if they would take us just over the first pass and on to Garu, a village on the other side, en route to Muli. Only two days instead of seven. 164 Down at the park entrance, the ‘horse hiring’ manager called us into his office and sat us down. Dorje, as he was called, had the air of a big boss in a multinational corporation. “Look” he said conspiratorially.” I have heard about what you want, and it can all be arranged. Horses, guides, everything. You leave it all to me, OK?” We told him we wanted to leave the next day. “No problem. I will come to your hotel tonight to finalise the arrangements. From now on, you don’t talk to anyone else about these arrangements. Clear? Don’t talk to these young local punks, they will promise you anything, but they haven’t a clue. Alright?” We agreed, and returned to our guesthouse full of hope for the next day. But Manager Dorje never showed up. On the fourth morning at Yading we woke up and saw the weather was again looking grim. Whatever. We were getting cabin fever. It was time to do something, even if it just meant tackling the first pass by ourselves. We packed our bags, said farewell to Travis and hitched a lift in the beat-up old Landcruiser belonging to the guesthouse manager from Anhui, and we went down the hill to start our trek. Yading Big Kora, Day 1: Chonggu Si – Garu Pass It was a relief to get away from the Yading guesthouse after four days, especially as the pipes had frozen and cut off the water supply to the toilets, which now stank to high heaven. We went down the hill at 8am and found the usual crowd of Tibetan horse handlers sitting around the gatehouse area. We went into manager Dorje’s office and asked if he was still able to help us out with guides. “No problem, no problem, just wait outside,” he said, waving us away. Ten minutes later he came out and said he had arranged two guides for us, at a cost of 200 kuai per day each, to take us over to Garu and on to Lugu Lake, if we wished. “What about horses?” I asked “Ha! Horses can’t make it! The track is too steep,” he snorted. “You can only take - they will carry your bags for you.” And the two guides he had selected were already familiar to us. One of them, an older guy wearing a cowboy hat, had been clowning around with us the day before as I took his picture. He had asked me to send him a camera, as he didn’t have one. His name was Wangdu. The other guide was the pushy and sullen guy who had been pestering us to hire him two days earlier. It didn’t look like we had any choice but to hire him. His name was Dorje. Before we set off I sat down with both of them and thrashed out the deal. I didn’t want any unpleasant extra charges or changes of plan later in the trek. “OK, you will take us over the pass to Garu, and we will pay you 200 yuan a day for the two day trip and also two days for you to make the return trip. Understood?” The sullen one agreed, but the older guy spoke up. “Actually, it will only take us one day to return, so you only need to pay us for three days,” he said, in an amazing and reassuring display of honesty. And so that was agreed. They went off ‘to get some supplies’ for the trip and we waited in an almost festive atmosphere as the other Tibetans sitting around chatted about us and our trip. 165 Wangdu and Dorje returned with a small sack about the size of a shopping bag. That was the sum total of their supplies. “Won’t you need sleeping bags and food?” I asked. “No need. There will be places to stay on the way. There will be people living up there,” said Wangdu, pointing with his chin and lips in the Tibetan way up at the hills. And without further ado they shouldered our packs and we set off, up the tourist track on the first stage of our trek. There were a few farewells to the assembled crowd, ad we were on our way. After only ten minutes of walking, however, there was a lot of commotion and Wangdu turned around and put down his bag, to walk back down the hill. “Just a moment, won’t be long ... he said. He returned about ten minutes later accompanied by a young Tibetan woman with striking features, who I had noticed yesterday. It was his daughter, and she had insisted on relieving her father’s load and carrying one of the bags at least as far as the monastery. Once again, we were on our way, but we didn’t feel very adventurous. Here we were walking up a signposted tourist trail, which we shared with Chinese day trippers who sauntered past on horseback, bidding us good day with a “How Are You?” or “Ni Hao!” greetings. My bag was being carried by a young woman and I was already sweating and struggling for breath. Not an auspicious start. On reaching the ‘bullet train’ terminus Wangdu took the backpack from his daughter and said a cursory farewell. We set off along the concrete track and I expected that we would hike the mile or so up to the gully before heading up hill, so it was a surprise when we almost immediately left the concrete road and followed a small footpath that meandered up into the thick forest that surrounded the trail. It was only a few hundred metres on the left from the Chonggu Si terminal, and if you are looking for it, then be advised that it forks off well before a set of picnic tables. The track led up through the forest, which was a mixture of spruce and fir lower down, and rhododendron (with pink flowers) higher up. Within minutes I was floundering. Every step upwards left me gasping for breath. It was as if I had just run a 100 yard sprint and was trying to get my breath back after reaching the finish line, bent over, hands on hips to try get more air into my lungs. I tried all my old high altitude trekking techniques. Counting breaths, 1-2-3-4, counting steps, stopping every ten paces, and setting myself little goals such as reaching a rock a few yards ahead ... none of it seemed to offer any relief from the unrelenting ‘instant exhaustion’ that befell me as soon as I put one foot in front of the other. The constant hyperventilating and the rapid beating of my heart left me worried for the strain it was all putting on my body, not to mention the nausea and faint headedness I was feeling. After an hour, I was considering packing it all in. I felt like death and I was falling further behind the others as I took more and more rest stops to regain some kind of control of my breath. Somehow, I managed to carry on, taking baby steps and bending over like an old man, crawling at snail’s pace up the trail until we reached the end of the tree line and emerged from the forest into open hillside. Here the track levelled out and we could see how our little path had been a short cut that connected up with the large gully. We were on the right track. 166 As the trail contoured around the side of the hill into the massive gully, we gained sweeping views of the Luorong valley below us, and in particular the unsightly white line of the ‘bullet train’ track. As we continued up the valley - we reached a basin beneath some prominent red rock turrets. On the flat grassy area were a couple of stone hut shelters. This was presumably the camping site that Joseph Rock referred to as Bayu in his account of his trip, situated in the Shindze Valley - the gully we were travelling up. Whereas for us this was the first leg of the trip, for Rock, this was part of the final leg of his journey around the mountains, after he had spent three “most disagreeable nights” at the Chonggu Si monastery, plagued as he was by smoke, filth and ammonia-like fumes from the adjacent tables. This is what he wrote: “We left on the final lap for a pass up the Shindze Valley. There we camped at 15,800 feet, where we could view both Jambeyang and Shenrezig to the best advantage should weather conditions permit. We spent two nights at this high camp, called Bayu. The second morning, with a temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit on June 26, my lama [guide] awakened me at 4.30am, calling into my tent: ‘Behold the glory of Jambeyang and Shenrezig - your luck indeed was great!’ I rose and stepped into the cold grey morn. In a cloudless sky before me rose the peerless pyramid of Jambeyang, the finest mountain my eyes ever beheld. The sky was greenish black. The snowy pyramid was grey, but the apexes of both it and Shenrezig suddenly turned a golden yellow as the sun’s rays kissed them.” Our luck was not so great and weather conditions did not permit such a rapturous vision. Instead, opposite us across the valley we could see the huge grey limestone razorback ridge, which I recognised from Joseph Rock’s photograph of the site. In his picture, taken on a clear day, both Jambeyang and Shenrezig were visible from this point, but we could see little of this because the low cloud. Nevertheless, it was a nice place to take a break, and we ducked into one of the stone shelters to have lunch. Inside it was cold and dark, but at least we got some shelter from the wind. And at last I was lightening my load by consuming some of the supplies I had brought all the way from Australia. I had the first of my tuna and past ready-to-eat meals from a tin, and it didn’t taste too bad, if a little oily. Then it was onwards and upwards, and the going didn’t seem as bad as it had in the morning. The landscape was bleak - brownish moorland and rocky outcrops, as we ascended towards a plateau surrounded by dark rocky ridges. I had been worried about this first pass because at over 16,000 feet it was the highest we would have to tackle. So far, however, it didn’t seem to be too hard. We ascended from one plateau to another, and the weather deteriorated as we got higher. The wind blew very hard, but fortunately it was blowing from behind us, and we were bombarded by small particle of snow, almost like polystyrene balls. As we ascended a further false ridge we heard faint whoops and cries, and came across two Tibetans out gathering for congcao. They hailed us over and we sat down together for a longer rest as the fungus gatherers conferred with our two guides over a cigarette. The pass now appeared to be quite close, and we had reached a final plateau surrounded by sinister black ridges of rock. The track was marked by a series of small cairns and as we continued on p we saw what looked like the pass at the head of a shallow incline. We had made it to our first objective! When we reached it, the pass was marked by the usual cairns 167 and strings of prayer flags, many of which were in a very ragged condition because of being battered by the high winds and rain at this altitude. The pass was relatively level, and nestled beneath a large outcrop of flat slate-like schist. We didn’t hang around for long because the bitter cold wind was blowing hard, urging us on, to start the descent in the direction of Garu. Over the ridge we were confronted by a grim and empty landscape of more rocky ridges, black peaks jutting into the most and grey rock buttresses running into the distance. The track wound through the open tussock grass and made a relatively gentle descent. So much easier going down! We plodded on down, with a massive high grey ridge emerging above us on our left hand side. On top of the ridge a few boulders perched precariously - one in particular looked like it had been placed there by a giant and would need only a slight push to set it rolling down the precipitous slope. We were in a good mood on the way down and Peter and I noted that there had been none of the snow on the passes or steep slopes that we had been warned about so much by the naysayers back in Yading. If the highest pass was free of snow, we reasoned, the remaining lower altitude passes on the kora should also be open. So why don’t we try for the kora instead of Garu and Lugu lake? On our next rest stop we put this proposal to our guides, and offered to pay them the same rate per day for taking us around the mountains instead of down to Garu. For a six-day trip, this means they would get 1200 RMB instead of the 600 RMB they were expecting for the trip to Garu. They agreed without demur, but said they would have to ‘stock up on supplies’ at a settlement further down the valley. They said there were ‘people living up here’ collecting congcao, but we could see no sign of anyone for the next hour or so. All we saw were a series of ridges extending to the horizon, in the direction of Muli. However, in late afternoon as we rounded another corner in the hills, we were suddenly confronted with a veritable mini-metropolis of makeshift stone huts sited in a natural basin. There must have been about twenty such huts, many emanating signs of smoke from cooking fires. Some had slate roofing, others were covered with heavy plastic sheeting held in place with heavy stones. As we approached closer we heard the sounds of smashing glass, and spied three young kids playing on a large pyramid of empty green beer bottles, which they were smashing by throwing rocks at them. “This is where people come up from the valley in May to dig for congcao,” explained Wangdu. He seemed wary about approaching the huts, as they were populated by Garu people, a different tribe to his Yading brethren. I could understand his wariness - there had been a long series of local disputes over grazing rights and gold panning rights between the various peoples of the Konkaling. Dogs were tethered on chains outside some of the huts, barking at us, and one or two people wandered about this temporary township city in the hills, but paid no attention to us. A few yak grazed on a flat section of turf and there was even a little store, complete with a snooker table. How had anyone hauled a snooker table up into these mountains? After seeing its shopping and cultural potential I dubbed the settlement Hammersmith. Like its London namesake it had a Palais [of sorts], and now there were white men in it. Wangdu introduced himself to the tough-looking and rather bossy young woman who ran the Hammersmith ‘store’ and soon we were settled inside around the fire, sipping butter tea 168 along with a few other young men who popped in to see who the foreign visitors were. No one seemed surprised to see us, and we were welcomed to join them around the fire as if this kind of thing happened all the time. A few young kids came over to stare in at us, and we delighted them by offering them some balloons that were soon blowing about the windy environs of the camp. Wangdu and Dorje sat with us and said they would get some more supplies here for our trip, including borrowing some coats and blankets. Before it got dark we pitched our tent between two of the stone huts and settled in for the night. There were no toilets in the settlement, just squatting sites further up the hill behind the bushes. I hoped this wasn’t where they drew their water from. And so it was here in Hammersmith that we spent our first night of the trek. After dark there were few lights about the settlement, except for the store, which had cranked up a petrol-powered little generator to run a lightbulb. I settled own for what would prove to be a very cold and long night, for which my sleeping bag alone did not provide enough warmth. I had to get up and don all my extra clothes before I could get back to sleep, wondering what the next day would bring. Yading Big Kora, Day 2: Garu Pass – Yaka Pass The morning of Sunday 17th May dawned bright and cold in the valley in which our ‘Hammersmith’ hut township was situated. The massive crags that has looked so grim and foreboding in the grey overcast weather the day before, now shone with an almost golden glow as the rays from the early morning sun lit them up. We had been woken up at 6am by Wangdu, who came over from the hut they had taken shelter in to tell us that we must make an early start. Today’s walk around the mountain would be a long one, he said; because we had to make it over a pass before sun down to reach another settlement where they could stay. Despite their claims of the night before, they still did not appear to have any extra coats or blankets for our planned multi-day trip around the mountains. We would have to stay with other people in settlements and huts such as the ones we had sought shelter with the night before, they told me. Their sack of belongings and supplies still looked pitifully small. We quickly struck the tent in the nippy morning air, and stood around as the gas stove hissed away to boil some water for a Nescafe. The cold encouraged us to pack up quickly, and there were few other people round at that early hour to witness our departure from this isolated encampment. Dressed in all the layers of clothing we could muster, including gloves and warm hats, we set off down the valley to work our way around the large escarpment and back towards the rear (western) side of Chanadorje. When I had planned this trip on Google Earth, my ‘fly through’ at ground level made it appear as if we simply dropped down to the right, off this ridge, into a deeper valley that ran in a perpendicular direction. On the ground of the real Earth, it wasn’t quite so straightforward. Wangdu and Dorje took us almost immediately off the track that led down to Garu, and instead took us into the creek bed, where we hopped and hobbled over the many sharp rocks and boulders underfoot. We followed the dry creek bed downwards, and it was hard going - there was no obvious track. Dorje claimed to know where he was going - he said he had done the kora once before, but I began to have my doubts when the creek suddenly disappeared over a steep cliff. The cliffs dropped down into the forest of fir below, and the valley continued down, 169 presumably in the direction of Garu and beyond that to the Shuiluo river canyon bordering Muli. We worked our way back round to the left, back to regain what seemed to be the track, which we then followed down in a steep descent into the valley, aiming for a makeshift bridge made of a couple of logs over the creek much lower down. I wasn’t happy about losing so much altitude - on the principle that what goes down has to come up. But as we crossed the bridge there was a clear track rising up from the other side, and we found ourselves following this through the forest, contouring around the side of the hillside, now heading more to the south, and presumably back in the direction of the peaks. It was marvellous country, and tough gaps in the trees we occasionally caught sight of a huge snow covered peak ahead of us - this had to be Chanadorje. The track crossed a series of gullies and creeks, before rising again slightly and heading towards a more open area, clear of trees. After turning another corner and heading up a rise, we suddenly emerged into a clearing that could have been almost a man-made design for a campsite. And at the far end of the valley, the great flat-topped white triangle of Chanadorje rose directly up into the sky ahead of us - it was a magnificent sight. I whooped in delight, and my camera clicked incessantly as we pressed on ahead. At first, the mountain was framed by fir trees and sloping hills on either side, but as we got closer to the mountain, these vista fell away, granting us an almost unhindered view of the west face of the mountain, where the sheer vertical snow and ice slopes plummeted into glacier moraines. These were familiar to me from a well know picture of Joseph Rock’s, taken in 1928. He had snapped a picture of the moraines, with a tiny horse and rider included in the distance to give a sense of scale. Rock’s picture had omitted the much more impressive higher sections of the mountain, perhaps because this was obscured by cloud - some wisps of which were visible in the top of his picture. But in his account he says he gained a superb view of the mountain from this site that he said the local Tibetans called Shingara. This site was where Joseph Rock first reached the Konkaling area from Muli via Garu, and he started his circumambulation of the mountains fro this spot. He wrote: “We were now on unknown ground, never before trodden by the foot of white man. My Nashi assistants and lama guide and magic provider, as well as I, were eager to penetrate to the mysterious peaks guarded by the Konkaling outlaws ... Here we crossed a pass where our lama and Tibetans yelled “Lha rgellah! Lha rgellah!” (The gods are victorious!). Then they hastened to burn juniper twigs as an offering to the scared mountain Chanadorje, which we were then facing, but clouds enshrouded its hoary head. Proceeding up a rocky rail, we halted on more gentle slopes, and then at 15,300 feet decided to pitch camp.... Evening settled over our high camp. I sat in front of my tent, facing the great mountain mass which Konkaling Tibetans called Chanadorje. Presently, the clouds shifted, revealing the glory of the Holder of the Thunderbolt - a truncated pyramid flanked by broad buttresses like the wings of some stupendous bat. Immense masses of hanging ice and snow extend to the very foot of the mountain, where they form huge moraines resembling a vast amphitheatre. This the Konkaling people called Konka Djra-nsre, the Sea Dragon’s Snout. It is the source of the glacier stream, the Konka Chu.” 170 It was mid-morning when we arrived at Shingara, and the sun was shining in a cloudless sky, giving us fantastic panoramic views not just of the magical peak of Chanadorje, but also of the grey rocky peaks and ridges that formed a natural amphitheatre around it. Horses grazed untended on the meadow, and there were a couple of herder’s log cabins that appeared uninhabited. Apart from the sound of the horses’ bells ringing as they foraged for grass, we had this perfect Shangri-La of a place to ourselves. Our guides wanted to press on from this beautiful spot, but we lingered, taking photographs and simply marvelling at its wonderful views ad enjoying the suns rays. It was here that Joseph Rock had encountered some problems with his lama guide from Muli. The lama was petrified at the prospect of meeting the outlaw bandits of the Konkaling, and feared for his life. He tried to divert Rock’s caravan from its circuit round the mountains, to a viewing point where they could see all three peaks. he hoped that the explorer and botanist would be satisfied with this view and then turn for home without continuing into the bandit’s lair. He was to be disappointed. Rock ordered him to run ahead and bring back the diverted train of mules and horses, and return to Shingara, where they would set out on the next stage of the circuit. After what seemed like an hour, we also left this idyllic spot, heading to the left of the river bed flowing from the glacier moraine, and through a small swamp to start ascending a hillside towards the next pass. It was another long grind of a climb, and again I went into ‘treacle mode’, dragging one foot slowly ahead of the other in short sections of ten or twenty metres. We left the forested lower levels of the hills and rose up into a scrub-covered basin and what would be the first of three false crests of the pass. From this first plateau we continued to ascend up to a second and then a third ridge, at which we paused for a breather with a group of three young Tibetan girls and their father, who were out on the hills foraging for congcao. The girls wore ornate silk patterned jackets, offset by the more utilitarian Chinese army caps. The views from this lofty perch continued to be stupendous, but now we had turned around the side of Chanadorje, so fro this vantage point it appeared to be a sharp pyramid, piercing the blue sky. We passed through another moorland basin and turned to the right, skirting the mountain and heading up to the true pass up a relative gradual grassy incline. The pass brought us onto the rim of a whole new narrow valley, one which Joseph Rock called the Saiyo Katso. The floor of the valley was wooded and had some clearings where we could make out several huts or dwellings. Directly opposite us, across on the other side of the valley was a subsidiary hanging valley basin which contained a picturesque small lake. Ahead of us we could see two round peaks on the opposite side of the valley, while far away in the distance we could also see a high icy wedge of an peak jutting into the sky - which may have been the peak described as Dzamabala in Rock’s account of the journey. It was around this spot where Rock stopped for lunch, shot some snow pigeons and then found a group of Tibetans hiding among the trees. “After they had been observed they stepped forth and called; whereupon several women crawled from behind huge boulders in the stream bed. Any shots heard hereabouts are always supposed to have been spent on sending some individual into the spirit world, since no one wastes shot and powder on useless pigeons, as we had done.” 171 We also stopped for lunch just beyond this point, above the middle of the Saiyo Katso valley. We sat down below the huge scree slopes that formed at the base of this face of Chanadorje. I looked up the valley, to see if I could see where the next pass was. In our track notes copied from Lloyd Raleigh’s account, he refers to a steep pass with a switch back track up it, but which he and his companion opt to climb by a more direct route, hand over hand. When I looked down the valley, I was initially puzzled to see there was no pass as such, because a wall-like ridge blocked the end of the valley. Then my heart sank when I realised that this ‘wall’ was the steep pass mentioned by Raleigh. From a distance, the sheer black rock looked too steep to climb, and it was topped with ice and snow, sitting on what looked like a razorback crest. This was presumably the Yaka Pass, which Rock had described in unusually understated terms as “an arduous crossing”. It was now mid afternoon and as we contemplated this dreadful prospect, I assumed that we would be tackling it the next day. The valley had several huts further down, and I thought that this was where Wangdu and Dorje had in mind for somewhere to stay for that night. But no, we must press on, they insisted. We had to get over this pass because it was threatening to snow and it could be blocked tomorrow, they said. And they insisted there was some place to stay ‘on the other side’. I wasn’t having any of this. We had been walking hard since 6am that morning and I was done in after eight hours of almost continuous slog at high altitude. It was time to rest up for the night, and I simply did not have the energy to continue. Wangdu, however, insisted that we absolutely had to get over the pass. He dismissed my complaints about it being too steep, by urging me onwards to see it at closer range, where it wouldn’t appear so bad, he said. It did. It took us another hours or so to reach the base of the Yaka Pass and it looked ugly. Black rock, hard ice and snow loomed overhead, and there appeared to be no sign of the ‘switchback trail’ that supposedly offered an alternative to a straight-up hands and feet scramble. I sat down, feeing utterly exhausted and felt like giving in, telling Wangdu that I simply couldn’t make it. Peter sat down as well, and as I stewed in rebellious silence, he pulled out the stove and started boiling some water for a brew. After a cup of tea and a Snickers bar, I felt slightly better. I would at least attempt a try of the first section of the pass, just to prove to Wangdu how impossible it was. Seeing how all in I was, Peter graciously offered to carry my day bag up the slope for me. So off we went. Passing the last of the rhododendron trees, we reached the first section of snow as the incline increased. It was only a short patch of snow on grass, but I slipped and slithered and cursed. The weather was closing in now, clouds had formed over the pass and the wind was picking up. It was cold and I donned my jacket and gloves. As Wangdu had predicted, the slope was not as vertical as it looked from a distance. It was walkable, mostly without having to resort to handholds, but it was a bastard of a climb. I put my head down and went into a zombie-like walking trance. I retreated into the hood of my jacket and counted out four steps and four breaths at a time. I developed a silent cadence, almost like a Marine drill instructor - Hup 2-3-4 ... Hup 2-3-4 ... and set myself a series of ‘missions’ - the next big rock, the next bush or the next cairn. I was ascending the pass, army-style, by numbers. 172 I don’t know how long it took before I neared the top, but it must have been about an hour, to ascend perhaps 500 or so metres. The higher I got, the worse the weather, so that by the time I reached the continuous snow sections near the top of the pass, I had my hood completely zipped up and needed my scarf wrapped around what little was still showing of my face to keep out the bitter wind. It was snowing and we ascended into a black and white maze of rocks and snow. The last 100 metres was across a steepening snow slope, and I began to feel panicky at the prospect of slipping and shooting down over the many gullies and rock fields below. The others had moved on ahead, over the crest of the pass, and I cursed them for leaving me behind. What if I turned round and went back down? Would they come back to look for me? They had all my gear, I couldn’t survive back in the valley by myself - so onwards I had to go. And besides, when I looked down at the steep snowfield I had crossed, I had no wish to retreat that way. “Why am I doing this?” I asked myself. I crossed the last and steepest section of snow, in almost whiteout conditions. I placed my feet carefully in the footprints of those who had gone ahead of me, and trod nervously as my feet occasionally slipped from under me. With no ice axe or walking stick, I had nothing but my gloved hands to steady myself on the slope. Eventually, the slope eased and I found myself on the top of the pass - and to my surprise it was not the razorback ridge I had been expecting. In the misty and almost blizzard-like conditions on top of the pass I found myself standing amid a labyrinth of black peaks, jutting up into the cloud. The way directly ahead was blocked by walls of black rock, but there appeared to be possible exits via misty corridors that led between the rock towers. There were possibilities to both left and right, and Dorje headed off to the right. Peter, however, had his GPS which showed that left was the way to the exit, even though the immediate prospect was of more ascent. We climbed a short way to another sub-plateau and the corridor appeared to snake around in a zig-zag to the south. This seemed to be a way. The snow was now thick on the ground, and we ‘postholed’ our way through the snow amid this evil-looking jungle of jagged rock, until a final small ridge appeared, topped by what looked like a cairn. This was it - the true pass, and the way out to the world beyond. Sure enough, beyond this small ridge the ground receded and I almost cried with relief when I saw that we would not be faced with a descent as steep as the way we had come up. Ahead, instead was a long and gloomy snow-covered valley festooned with rocks and boulders, leading to where, I had no idea. But down we went. I descended with big strides through the snow, elated at having made it over the pass and for having emerged from that threatening black devil’s lair of snow, cloud and rocks around the summit. Gradually the weather cleared and the snow glare began to dazzle my eyes. Wangdu, however, had taken my sunglasses, claiming that his eyes were painfully sore. I just squinted and continued on down. We descended below the snow line, into a another bleak, rocky and desolate valley, where there appeared to be no signs of human life. Where were the settlements and people that Wangdu had told us about - the place where we were supposed to stay for the night? Looking back over my shoulder, clouds still swirled around the summit, obscuring the higher reaches of the peaks. One of them matched the description given by Rock of a truncated column “like a cenotaph”. 173 Further down we started to pass small cairns, and piles of mani stones, signs that we were still on the pilgrim trail. Eventually we reached a flatter section of rough grassland on the left, in the middle of which was a small and very forlorn looking stone shelter. Was this the great place that Wangdu had dragged us over the pass to stay at? Apparently not. Dorje loped over to take a look at the abandoned hut, and came away, shaking his head. There was nobody in residence, and no firewood, so it would be of little use to them as a shelter for the night. We continued on until we reached another scree slope beneath some grey rocky cliffs. At the base of the cliffs before the scree there was a familiar jumble of rocks. I recognised this as the ‘stupa cave’, mentioned by Joseph Rock. His Tibetan guides had halted here for the night, using the cave for shelter. His photograph of the place from 1928 shows the mouth of the cave surrounded by a primitively assembled rock wall and a Buddhist stupa or chorten. He wrote: “Our escort and lama guide occupied a cave-like shelter under an overhanging cliff, part of the buttresses of mighty Jambeyang. Here pilgrims or lamas had erected chortens, or reliquary shrines, which rose to the rocky vault; a rocky balustrade encircled the long cavern, which serves pilgrims as well as bandits for shelter - and place of attack.” The cave was still there, and appeared almost unchanged from 1928. A rickety stone stupa still stood at the entrance to the cave, and there were one or two faded Buddhists murals drawn on the walls. It felt eerie to be stood in exactly the same spot as where Rock had obviously set p his camera to take the picture. How many other westerners had passed this way in the intervening eighty years? According to Rock’s article, he caped nearby, “on the southern slopes of Mt Jambeyang, at the foot of moraines and hanging glaciers, in an alpine meadow covered with a multitude of flowers.” We could find no such alpine meadow. I kept expecting to see a village or some cosy huts appear as we continued on across a faint trail that ran over one of the massive scree slopes. Beyond was the start of a section of fir trees, clinging to the side of the mountain. The track started to ascend around these trees, but despite my best hopes, there were no settlements to be seen. After ascending some way up this ‘heartbreak hill’, Wangdu conceded that he didn’t know f there was anywhere to stay in the vicinity. He pulled a gormless face and shrugged when I asked him where we were supposed to stay for the night. There wasn’t even any level ground to camp on. I was furious. He had dragged us all the way over the Yaka Pass on the pretext that there was ‘somewhere to stay’ on the other side, and here we were stuck in the middle of nowhere, tired, hungry and with nowhere to set up camp as dusk approached. We retreated a way back down the hill into the forest, and Wangdu suggested a dried up creek bed as a place to spend the night. “But where are you going to stay?” I demanded. “You have no sleeping bags, no shelter, and it may snow tonight.... what are you going to do?” Wangdu again just shrugged. “We can build a fire here and keep warm through the night, don’t worry about us,” he said in an offhand way. I strode up and down the creek bed, which was festooned with rocks and had barely a metre of flat ground where a tent could be pitched. 174 “This is no f----in good, we can’t camp here,” I shouted, kicking a rock as I tried to control my temper. I simply couldn’t believe it. Wangdu and Dorje had already dumped our backpacks and were dragging branches and sticks together to start building a fire. “No problem, no problem. You can put your tent there,” they said, pointing with their chins towards a sloping piece of ground that had marginally fewer rocks sticking out of it than the surrounding bits. I wanted to throttle these two clowns. Or at least walk off and leave them to deal with the consequences of their own incompetence. Here we were, 15,000 feet up a mountain in the evening, and I felt guilty for having persuaded them to bring us to this godforsaken spot with no prospect of shelter. Once again, Peter came to the rescue, pulling out the stove to boil up some water. I calmed down a bit after I sat down and had some of the hot instant soup he made. It was too late to choose another campsite, but we decided to pitch Peter’s two-man tent further up the track, where it was relatively flat. I would pitch my smaller one-man tent down in the creek bed, but not too near to the roaring fire that they had already created. We boiled up more water to make our dinner. I had a reconstituted freeze-dried lamb and vegetables, Peter made himself a curry with noodles. Wangdu and Dorje recycled the disposable instant noodle containers they had used the night before and filled them with a new batch of instant noodles. I was worried about them spending the night out in the open, and they now seemed a bit pathetic, as they gratefully accepted all the items we could spare out of our backpacks. We gave them our woolly hats, our rain jackets and a bagful of teabags. Peter hiked off about half a mile to the nearest water source to get them more water to make tea with through the night. I gave them some Snickers Bars, and then we left them, in the dark, out in the open and in the cold, to turn into our cosy tent. When Joseph Rock camped here he wrote: “The stillness of the cold night at the high elevation of our camp was often disturbed by the thundering noise of falling blocks of ice, dropping and sliding from the heights above.” We had exactly the same conditions, except the stillness of the night was also disturbed by my nagging conscience and doubts. “Would our guides still be alive and in a fit state to travel in the morning?” Yading Kora Day 3, Yaka Pass to Wisdom Lake We were woken at daybreak by Wangdu and Dorje shaking the tent and shouting for u to get up. “Zou! Zou! It’s already 6am - time to go!” We emerged into another freezing and clear morning to see the pair of them looking very rough - bloodshot eyes, gaunt sleepless expressions, but still alive. And not surprisingly, given their night out in the open, very grumpy. They hung around as we got out of the tent and started to pack, up, chivvying us along to get moving. Up above us, the clouds had cleared from around the icefalls and base moraines of Jambeyang, revealing a series of crags and buttresses, and some of the higher ice spurs as 175 well. It was very beautiful but we were too cold, tired and hungry to appreciate it all. We were grumpy too. Being a long walk from the water, we weren’t given time to make a proper brew of tea for breakfast. I had no time for even a sip of water before we were urged onto the track by an impatient Wangdu. I made quick visit to pick up the bits and pieces we had lent them for the night, and to pack up my mini tent and stuff it in my pack - it looked like they hadn’t used it. There had been no snow, and the way back towards the pass looked clear. So much for Wangdu’ excuse to get over the pass in a rush. We set off almost immediately, back up ‘heartbreak hill’, up towards some cliffs, and I was immediately running on empty. I tried eating a bit of a muesli bar as I walked, but I was so out of breath from walking that I was choking and soon gave up. I would walk hungry for the time being. After about an hour the track levelled out and turned a corner around a cliff. We had magnificent views down the Lawatong valley, but the track itself narrowed as it turned around the crags, and we had to negotiate a very exposed section of about ten metres of track cut into the cliffside that left me quaking in my boots. I’m glad I hadn’t tried to tackle it the evening before when we were all exhausted. Even the usual imperturbable Peter remarked, “That was actually quite dangerous!” So it wasn’t just me. As was becoming commonplace on this trip, the overwhelming fear and panic that I had felt was soon replaced by awe, as we entered another natural amphitheatre, this one on a massive scale, as cliffs and an icy peak like an inverted ice cream cornet - was this Jambeyang? formed a semi circle around an expanse of meadow. The idyllic scene gave us a welcome bit of downhill walking - and to top it off there was even a wonderfully clear stream running through the middle of this flat basin, where we were able to rest and replenish our empty water bottles. There were a couple of abandoned stone shelters beyond the stream, and at the base of the cliffs there was some kind of shrine made of stones piled up in a heap, and strewn with the usual strings of prayer flags. A trek headed off to the left, and this seemed the natural exit to track along the upper reaches of the Lawatong valley, so I was surprised when Dorje instead walked over to the shrine beneath the cliffs and started walking up the slope to the left, that led on to higher snow slopes. “What is he doing?” I asked Peter, who had the GPS and also a copy of some screengrabs of the route taken from Google Earth. “He’s going the right way,” replied Peter, to my dismay. That’s where the GPS says the track is.” But I could see no track, only a bulge at the base of the precipitous cliffs that extended as far as I could see to our left, in a southerly direction along the rim of the Lawatong valley. Dorje reached the snowline ad started sidling left, to walk higher, under the lee of the cliffs. “Surely, not,” I said to myself. “Please tell me this isn’t true...” Wangdu and Peter were already following in his footsteps, quite literally as he was now plodding through virgin snow. I followed reluctantly behind, starting up the steep track to the snow, and then edging out into the footprints of the three who had already preceded me. As we edged up the edge of the amphitheatre the views became even more magnificent, but I was in no mood to appreciate them - I was beginning to get worried again as I slid and skidded on the snow. Some parts of the trail were quite safe, with rocks and rhododendron branches protruding from the snow to give an anchor. Other sections, however, were smooth and dropped off to 176 steep rocky slopes. Maybe a fall wouldn’t be fatal, but I didn’t fancy a sudden accelerating slide on the ice-encrusted early morning snow to find out what damage it would do when I hit the rocks below. I cursed myself for not picking up a stick to guide and steady myself with. We were now above the tree line again and there was barely even a twig to use for support. On some of the most exposed sections of snow I took extreme care placing my feet in the deep imprints left by the others, but even this wasn’t enough to assure me that I would avoid slipping. I started to use my right arm as a makeshift ice axe, holding my fingers flat together and thrust my pointed hand down to break the surface of the snow and hold myself on the slope. It was exhausting to do this for every step, not to mention extremely painful after repeated ‘stabbings’ of the snow. By the time I finished the end of the 100 metre snow field, the tips of my fingers were numb with cold, and I had to put my hand down my shirt and hold it against my chest and then against my thighs to thaw it out - a very painful reawakening process. Having conquered this obstacle, I turned the ridge to find I was faced with having to cross another sloping snowfield of similar length. The others had moved on ahead and I was left alone to struggle on, feeling utterly miserable and occasionally extremely panicky on the difficult steep sections. “This is dangerous. I shouldn’t be doing this,” I thought, looking down into the depths of the Lawatong valley far below and wondering if there was an easy escape route down to the valley floor. It was very odd country. The cliffs to my left were almost vertical, followed by the snowcovered steep scree slopes, which eased off into scrub and tree-covered gentler slopes a few hundred metres below our track. This was then followed by a second steep drop off, down into the invisible depths of the valley floor. Were there people down there? Who could tell? Rock also found it strange country. On these slopes he sighted some wapiti (a kind of deer) and his hunter-guide managed to shoot and hit one: “but the animal rolled probably 2,000 feet, down to the bottom of the Lawatong valley.” When I read this passage in the National Geographic I could not envisage how a valley could allow an animal to roll so far from reach, but standing in the upper heights of the edges of the Lawatong valley it was all to clear how something could continue on a long descent and disappear over the wooded lip and into the trench-like abyss further down. The snow track crested another buttress, where the others were waiting for me, and I stopped to take stock. The track seemed to be heading even higher, onto impossibly steep snow slopes that merged into the bottom of the cliffs. I was definitely not going any higher, even if it meant abandoning the trek and heading down into the Lawatong valley to seek an alternative way out. If I remembered the geography of the area at all, the valley headed due south for a couple of days of walking distance, where it eventually led to a small village called Eyatong, which had a rough road track connecting it to Riwa. If I abandoned the circuit and was able to find a safe way down, I would surely be able to find somewhere to stay down there and eventually get out back to ‘the world’. If I couldn’t go forward, I could hardly go back over the Yaka Pass, so down would seem to be the only other option. 177 Fortunately, even Wangdu and Dorje conceded that the slopes above us were too steep and dangerous to proceed on. “The snow is too deep at this time of year,” they said pointing upwards. Can’t get through ...” they said. “Let’s try a bit further down the slope and see if there is another way forward,” I suggested. Peter however, was holding his GPS and pointing upwards “That’s where it says the track is ...” Wangdu and Dorje edged round the rock buttress and started looking for ways down the steep and jagged rocks to the scree slope. below. They eventually found a viable route, and we headed down, losing all the metres gained in the last few hours of painful, laborious and scary plodding up the snow slopes. We went down the scree until we reached the very top edge of the rhododendron tree line. In the snow we could see a set of footprints heading into the trees. We weren’t the only ones to have abandoned the high cliff track. The footprints led to a faint track that we ended up and down through the thick rhododendron forest, but overall it thankfully stayed relatively level so we stayed along the same contour, proceeding down along the edge of the Lawatong valley without losing any more height. It was a track, and it led somewhere. We must have walked maybe a mile or more in this fashion, stopping every so often to rest and admire the view back towards the amphitheatre and its dramatic sky-piercing peak. Peter was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the fast pace at which we were being pushed along by Wangdu and Dorje. The trek was supposed to be taking us five or six days, but at this rate we would be done in four or even three days, he noted. “This is magnificent country. We should be spending more time here, not rushing through,” he complained. It was becoming quite clear that Wangdu and Dorje wanted to get through the kora as quickly as possible and pocket their 1200 yuan. They had dropped very unsubtle hints that this is how much they expected to be paid for taking us and our bags round the mountains, whether it took three days or six. Peter was all for paying them off early and letting them go back at their own fast pace, with us relying on the GPS for directions for the kora now that our guides’ knowledge of the route had been exposed as a sham. However, I knew I just didn’t have the strength and endurance to lug my 20kg pack over steep snow slopes like the one we had just been on. I was dependent on these guides to carry my bag - even if they could not find the route or a decent place to camp. We continued on our way along the cliffs, picking our way in the bright sunshine across the open scree and boulder-strewn slopes below the long line of crags. By midday we seemed to be nearing the ‘shoulder’ where our maps indicated that the cliffs emanating from Jambeyang ended in a peninsular-like feature that we would have to ‘turn’, and switch from our south-westerly progress into a north-facing valley that led towards Shenrezig. By now we had become strung out and separated. Peter had been edging as high as possible, wanting to follow the course of the track as the markers appeared to show it on his GPS. Dorje was also up high, and lagging some way behind. Wangdu was up ahead, also getting higher now, and barely visible except for the bright green-yellow fluorescent colours of my pack cover, bobbing between the rocks. 178 I followed them upward, crossing a deep gully and trying to keep to a faint track on the other side as we hit more snow patches and the scree go steeper and steeper. The trail had now become quite exposed in places and I was getting jittery. The others were now all well above me, near the cliffs and I didn’t seem to be able to find my way along the track. I eyed what seemed to be a fairly direct route that would take me straight up to where the others were now collecting, and started pulling myself up on all fours, up the steep slate slopes. It was a bad mistake. Once off the faint track, I lost my bearings, and the others had disappeared over a crest, out of view. With nothing to aim for, I floundered on the slope, moving from one unstable pitch to another, with the loose slate crumbling away as I tried to grip it, and larger rocks falling towards me as I grabbed onto them for handholds. It seemed a lot steeper than it had looked from below, and when I looked down I almost fainted with terror when I saw the fall I faced, straight down the mountain. In my panicked state I was trying to climb faster than my already stretched lungs would allow me. I grew careless and clumsy, leaping and sliding over the scree, and panting in huge deep breaths, until I had to pause for a while at some stronger feature, trembling on the spot in a kind of animal fear. I was thoroughly fed up and just didn’t want to go on, but I had no choice. After all my previous scary episodes on the exposed cliff track and the snow slopes I felt like all my reserves of courage had been depleted. It was as if my adrenalin batteries were completely empty. I had used up all my ‘fear fright and flight’ responses and I simply could no longer pluck up the courage or energy to keep moving on up from this frightening exposed position. I felt like I was close to a breakdown, close to snapping. But I had nobody to shout or scream to, nobody to help - they had all moved up towards the ‘shoulder’. I was on my own. I continued clawing my way up, feeling futile, like a rat trying to escape out of a bin. Two steps forward, one step sliding back. After about another ten minutes I saw Peter way up above me, sitting down by a cairn. This gave me something to aim for, and I set off, again, shouting myself hoarse in the wind, asking him to hang on and wait for me. He looked down and saw me, and gestured that I should move over to the right Perhaps ten minutes later I managed to drag myself up to the perch where Peter was sitting, along with Wangdu. I flopped down on my back on a patch of turf and lay there, gasping like a fish, feeling utterly spent. My fingers were scratched, my clothes were smeared in slate dust and soil, my legs felt like they had been battered with hammers and my jaw ached with tension from having borne an almost permanent grimace for the last hour. “Having a fun and relaxing time on your holidays?” I asked myself. Five minutes later when I was able to sit up and look around, I saw that we were almost at the shoulder. The great final protrusion or rock from Jambeyang lay above us, and a final, relatively level circuit of a rock corrie would bring us to the upper corner. Who knew what lay beyond? I was certainly hoping it would not be more of the same, in reverse. I followed slowly behind Peter as we continued up through the rock fields and then turned left, across a final bowl. Higher up I could see Dorje with the bright red backpack on edging along a set of tracks along a snow field. This was one of the two unpleasant final surprises the shoulder had in store for us. The snow field was again not too steep in itself, but it certainly held the prospect of a sticky end if you failed to arrest yourself once you started sliding. being higher up, it was almost solid snow, and this time I was unable to ‘punch 179 through’ with my arm to get a satisfactory anchor. I got across, after an interminably crossing, footstep by footstep, at the cost of yet more frayed nerves. As I stepped onto solid rock it was just a walk of a few yards before the final terror, a section of track that skirted a steep drop. So near, and yet so far! As I edged out into the abyss, Dorje started to come back across to offer me a helping hand. This scared me even more than the prospect of a solo attempt, and I waved him away with a hysterical “Bu yao! Bu yao!” and almost loss my balance as a result of my manic gesturing. And then I was there - the Lawatong valley was behind me, I turned to rock corner and I was looking up into the Yechetsura valley - and to my relief it was a completely different proposition. No steep scree slopes, no sudden drop offs - just a relatively modest and manageable drop down across snow-covered rock fields into “a most peculiar valley” that Joseph Rock also found to be a strong contrast to the environment of the Lawatong valley, from which he had just emerged. “Rocks here were of an entirely different nature, being composed of enormous slabs as smooth as a billiard table, the entire valley slope resembling a huge macadam road. Giant blocks the size of a small house, composed of many layers of such slabs, had fallen from the heights and lined the trail, which was still covered in places with large patches of snow and ice.” The valley also looked like a nice smooth road to me as well. Smooth, but covered in a glaring coat of snow. We rested for some time having lunch on the tip of the shoulder, perched high up on the rocks, where we could survey the remaining grandeur of the Lawatong valley and its hidden green depths, then turn and view the prospect of the snowy Yechetsura that lay ahead of us. In the lower reaches of the Yechetsura canyon there was another hanging valley indented into the side of the valley, surrounded by steep cliffs and containing a green lake. The climb up from the Lawatong valley looked to be a most strenuous undertaking. I was glad we hadn’t dropped down too far. After the sweat and terror of my scrambling up the shoulder, the descent into the Yechetsura and the subsequent journey up its snow-bound length to a gentle further pass was like a dream. The only thing that marred my progress was the intensity of the glare from the sun’s UV rays on the snow. Once again, Wangdu and purloined my sunglasses, claiming with complete justification that his eyes were painful because of the lack of sleep the previous night. This left me traversing the snowfields fearing the effects of snow blindness. I had seen this in my trekking partner on my last trip to Yading, nine years before, when he trekked for much of the day on snow without wearing sunglasses. He woke the next day unable to open his eyes, and spent the next two days in bed with painful, swollen eyes. I didn’t want to repeat his experience, and so I took to walking across the snow with my hood up and my scarf wrapped around my eyes like a blindfold. I kept just one eye half open, in an almost permanent wink, peering out through the haze of my eyelashes to see where I should plant my foot in the next footstep left by Wangdu who was walking ahead of me. In this way I walked the several miles up the Yechetsura valley for the rest of the afternoon, until we crested a gentle snow covered pass and saw a fertile patch of green sward below us. 180 After the desolation of the depths of Lawatong and the snowbound Yechetsura, this green haven seemed to be alive with life. Descending across a babbling brook, we saw a few horses grazing on the grass, and a handful of Tibetans were out on their hands and knees, foraging for congcao. These were the first people we had seen since before the Yaka Pass, two days before, but they paid us little attention. They had presumably come up from another valley that seemed to feed in from the right, beyond yet another mighty rock spur. Once we reached the bottom of this round basin, I suddenly spotted a large deformed rock about the size of a truck, sitting in the middle of the grass. I recognised it immediately. It was “Rock’s rock” - a large lump of schist that had been the site of one of Rock’s camps during his circuit of the mountains. He had assembled about fifteen of his escort and guides around the rock and taken a portrait of them,, which he entitled; “Where pilgrims stop for tea flavoured with yak butter and salt ...” We also stopped for tea here, but flavoured with powdered milk. It was a lovely spot, overshadowed by hulking great ridges, and with the tip of Jambeyang’s western face visible in the distance over another pass. A we sat drinking our brew, a group of local Tibetans came over and we showed them a copy of the picture of the rock taken by Rock 80 years earlier. They were curious and bemused, but otherwise kept their council. I took a few photos fro the same spot as Rock, lining up the mountain peaks in the background. This was another location that had remained unexplored and unchanged for the last eighty years. The final part of our day was spent surmounting another relatively gentle pass after climbing out of the basin and up over some brown moorland that reminded me of the Yorkshire Dales. Wangdu told us there was a most beautiful lake on the other side of the pass. I was lulled into a false sense of security by the gentle ascent, for when we reached the pass, partly covered in snow, the immediate drop on the other side was precipitous. While there seemed to be a less steep exit to the left, all the foot tracks led straight down a steep snow slope that terminated in a cliff edge, beyond which there was just a lot of air. It looked to me like a ski ramp at the Winter Olympics. The footprints in the snow showed others had already made it safely down, and they stood around nonchalantly waiting for me to join them, but I lost my bottle. By now I was extremely tired, and I cried out like a petulant child, asking for help to get down - for me at least- this terrifying slope. Wangdu loped back up the snow, and took my bag, while lending me his wooden stick. I used it to steady myself as I shimmied down on my backside, looking and feeling pathetic. When I reached the ‘cliff’ I found the drop beyond was a mere ten or twenty feet, not the hundreds of feet my imagination had conceived. We were now looking down over a great lake and, to the right, the twin peaks of Shenrezig and Jambeyang in all their glory. Jambeyang was the nearer, and the slopes fro its twisted and foreshortened summit descended to the lake shore. Shenrezig was across the other side of the lake, in the distance, but its bulk was if anything even more impressive. We could see what looked like a route from the other side of the lake towards Shenrezig, which passed what looked like a small encampment with a couple of cabins or shelters on the slopes. It was here that we said farewell to Wangdu and Dorje. They were still intent on returning to Chonggu Si that day, even though it was already 5pm and they had yet another summit and another long valley descent ahead of them We decided we would linger around the lake, and so paid them off in a bizarre business transaction on the rock platform high above the lake. We shook hands and I gave them a few surplus items such as my waistcoat and a lunchbox. 181 They did us one final favour, portering our backpacks down the hill and leaving them in a pile at the bottom as we followed at a slower pace, picking our way over the rocks and trying to find a safe and less steep way down. Around the shore of the lake was a thin strip of beach, and we headed down over the rocks towards it, losing our way a couple of times, until we finally got to the water’s edge. We were now on our own, in the wild. We selected a flat area of the grey sand and pebbles that made up the lake shore, and eyed it up as a place to camp for the night. It was the only possible camping site, as the scrub on the hillside was too thick to pitch a tent. The ‘beach’ looked firm, but some sections were distinctly springy and marshy, so we picked areas that appeared more firm and dry. As the sun went down we got our tents up and were soon sitting on the rocks, having waited for the water to boil, and then sipping tea and spooning the reconstituted meals into our hungry and shrunken stomachs. What a day! I wrote in my diary; “It was the hardest thing I have ever done, like heave and hell. Hellish effort, hellish scared, but heavenly views!” Yading Kora Day 4: Wisdom Lake - Luorong Despite the cold night, I slept well in my tent on the shores of Wisdom Lake - or Ziho, as Wangdu had called it. I woke to the sound of ducks quacking and splashing on the lake surface nearby, and the sound of Peter’s stove hissing away. There wasn’t much room to move in my one man tent but I didn’t want to get out of the warm cocoon of my sleeping bag just yet. When I did, I emerged into an icy swamped world, with the dagger like peak of Jambeyang looking down on us. It was bitingly cold, and the dry beach that we had pitched our tents on the night before had transformed into a waterlogged and marshy surface. The flysheet of my tent was rimed with ice, and the inner of the tent had sunk into a miniature puddle, and I had been saved from a complete swamping by the extended high sides of the waterproof groundsheet. All the items I had left under the flysheet and around the entrance vestibule of my tent had become soaked with water, and when I looked back inside the tent I noticed that I had actually slept in a small puddle that had formed under my Thermarest. I moved around slowly in the early morning frost, and slowly tried to pack up my gear and hang out some of the wettest items such as the flysheet and sleeping bag to dry on the rocks. I had a much-needed instant coffee and almost retched on the muesli that I forced myself to eat, made with milk powder and water from the lake. Peter was also packing up, and he laughed out loud when he lifted up his groundsheet and saw that his body heat had melted the icy ground beneath his tent, creating a puddle of water in the shape of a human body. The golden rays of the sun lit up the tops of the nearby ridges, and then our mood improved considerably as the sun came over the top of Jambeyang in he east and started to warm us up. The lakeside was then an idyllic spot, the smooth surface of the water acting like a mirror to reflect the nearby peaks, the image ruffled by the very faint early morning breeze. We had the whole place to ourselves, and the Tibetan encampment we’d seen across the lake the previous evening appeared unoccupied and devoid of life. When Joseph Rock camped by this lake, which he called Russo Tso, in 1928, he described it as “the most dangerous part of the journey” because here “dwelled the worst of all the Konkaling outlaws”: 182 “Our lama guide, who carried one of my rifles, looked anxiously about, then tremblingly handed the gun to my headman. High on the slopes, under a rocky shelter opposite the lake, we espied several Tibetans behind rocky parapets. They commanded the entire lake valley and could have kept us from moving forward. Whether they were bandits or pilgrims we never learned. They remained behind their rocky ramparts and watched as we laboriously climbed to another pass, a level alpine meadow with valleys radiating in various directions.” As we sorted out our camp, Peter and I also saw some Tibetans spying on us. A line of women in the usual visors, colourful scarves and the typical long skirts that Tibetan women wore, approached along on the lakeside path, and suddenly stopped in their tracks when they saw us. They paused for a moment and then started towards us, crossing over the scrub to come and investigate these two strange foreigners and their equipment. When they arrived, they gave cursory nods of greeting and started unashamedly noseying around, ooh-ing and ahh-ing as they looked into our tents, fingering the material, and picked up our bags to see how heavy they were. They all carried the blunt hoe-like tools for digging up congcao. One of them was able to speak a little Mandarin, and she told us that they were heading up the hill to start foraging. And then, with little further ado, they set off, chattering away in high pitched voices, reminding me of the Knights of Ni from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. We took a long time to get ready to move out, leaving things out to dry in the sun, and it wasn’t until 10.30am that I finally had everything packed up in my bag and shouldered it for the first time on this circuit of the mountains. It was punishingly heavy, and I worried whether I would be able to haul it up the next pass. We moved out, moving around the lake towards the two Tibetan huts on the lower slopes of the hillside at the north end of the lake. This seemed the only way with a viable route to get up out of the lake valley and towards Shenrezig. Sure enough, when we reached the log cabins there was a rough track of sorts, and we started to ascend through the scrappy mix of bush and grass. There were a few Tibetan mules about, but no people. As we got higher, the views back over the lake were amazing, and we could see the rocky trail from which we had descended the pass the previous day. After about an hour of this slog we reached a series of cairns and the gradient eased off a little. We now had superb view of the south western face of Jambeyang ahead of us, the whole face covered in a coat of black ice that reflected the sun. I wouldn’t want to try climbing that, I thought. As we continued up, we saw no sign of Tibetans in any ramparts or otherwise. I clicked away on my cameras at the amazing views, pausing frequently to change the film - I had now mastered this finger fumbling art so that at a pinch I could do it while on the move. To my disappointment, I discovered that my Nikon 35Ti point and shoot camera had packed up, presumably because its electronics had been affected by the water soaking the previous night. I would have to rely on my all mechanical, totally analogue cameras, the Leica and the Rolleicord. Another hour or so of relatively easy ascent brought us to a plateau and I sensed the final “Three Way pass” was not far off. A few more strides across the brown grass and scrub, and surely there it was. A large heap of stones, festooned with red yellow blue and green prayer flags lay ahead, at the top of the rise. When we arrived there we had great views of both 183 Shenrezig and Jambeyang, the latter looking almost close enough to reach out and touch. The tip of Chanadorje’s peak could also be seen, peeping over a ridge in the distance, to the north. We still enjoyed clear blue skies, and put down our heavy packs to walk around and explore this great spot, snapping away down the various different valleys. To our left, the pass allowed entrance to a valley that headed round the back (south side) of Shenrezig. I was back on familiar territory because this was the route I had taken on my previous visit nine years earlier. I had climbed up here from Luorong via he two lakes, and then returned to Chonggu Si by this route. This was now part of the most commonly walked trekking route in Yading, and I wondered if and when we would encounter our first person from the outside world. I did not wish to repeat this old route, even though it would mean we would not do a complete circumambulation of all three peaks on this trip. Instead, I wanted to go down the Duron valley that runs between Shenrezig and Jambeyang, because if the clear weather held out this would give us spectacular views of all three peaks at the same time. First, though, we paused for lunch. By now I had become thoroughly fed up with the oily ‘ready to eat’ meals of tuna and chicken that had seemed so appetising and filling when I had packed them in Australia. Just the sight of the labels on the tins made me want to retch. I ate a little of one, but was happy to accept the offer of some of Peter’s salami and Vitawheat crackers, followed by some chocolate almonds. It was one the best meals I have ever enjoyed, mostly because of the location, and because it marked an unofficial finish line for the circuit trek. As this was the seventh and final pass, from here on, it would be downhill all the way, back to Chonggu Si. We lingered for a long time around the Three Way Pass, before reluctantly setting off and heading back into ‘the world’. We tramped over a couple of scree hills, and then emerged onto the ridge overlooking the valley containing Niunai Hai, or Milk Lake. Its translucent deep green waters appeared to be set in a much more attractive setting than when we last saw them on our initial recce visit during the blustery snow of almost a week ago. As we started our descent we saw the first Yading tourists coming up from below - a group of four Han Chinese tourists, some on horseback being escorted by Tibetan guides. The ones who were walking were togged up in an amazing array of shiny mountaineering gear, complete with walking poles and windproof jackets buttoned up to the max, despite the warm and pleasant weather. Walking past them in our shirtsleeves, with unshaven, windburned faces and with our dirty gear hanging off the backs of our packs, we must have looked like tramps. They didn’t say hello or ‘ni hao’. Instead of continuing down the main trail, we diverted off on a smaller but higher level track to the left that looked like it would take us along the ridge above Wuse Hai (Five Colour Lake). As we continued along, approaching the hulking east face of Shenrezig, we also gained better views of Jambeyang’s triangular western face, and also increasingly good views down the valley towards Chanadorje and an interesting conical black peak somewhere in between. The views were amazing, and I was so busy taking pictures, swapping my wide-angle 28mm lens for the 50mm lens on the Leica and then switching to the Rolleicord, that I lost track of Peter, who had continued on further down. When I reached the edge of the lake, the water level was looking much lower than when I had last visited in 2001, and there was also a lot less snow than at that time. 184 By now, I was encountering more groups of Chinese day trippers who were sweating their way up from the Milk Lake terminus of the pony express. Some of them looked at us in amazement, and one group even stopped especially to try take my picture. I had not looked in a mirror for almost a week and wondered what I must look like to them. I had one final look around on the ridge over Wuse Hai lake, which now had signposts describing the views. I saw the cairn where I had taken a spectacular picture on my last visit, but by the time I reached it the clouds were starting to roll in ad I was unable to capture the same fine views of Chanadorje as before. All that remained now was the ‘easy’ descent to Luorong. I plodded wearily down the track, passing more groups of Chinese tourists, and headed off down the gully where we had previously ascended with horses. However, this supposedly ‘easy’ descent proved to be a very long hard slog. I had mentally already reached the finish line, and began to resent the continued need to drag myself over more boulders, and was especially frustrated when I found myself having to do more sections of ‘uphill’ towards the end, as I reached the lower reaches of the valley and the track twisted back up through trees. The pack straps dug into my shoulders and I was terribly thirsty. Once again, my water bottle was dry, and there was no sign of Peter. Was he ahead of me or behind? After what seemed like hours, I passed a few makeshift shelters and the huts of the Luorong ‘horse hire station came into view. I also got my first glimpse of the upper end of the unsightly ‘bullet train’ concrete ribbon, and the ugly hanger-like building that I presumed served as a garage or power station for it. As I took my last few weary steps to the Luorong huts there appeared to be nobody around. I flopped down on the wooden bench outside the main hut, where from within I could hear the sounds of one of the Chinese Liberation-era war movies playing on a TV. The head of a Tibetan man popped out and he looked at me quizzically, wondering why a tourist had arrived so late in the day when most tourists were presumably heading in the opposite direction. I told him I had just completed a complete round-the-mountains circuit but he didn’t seem at all impressed. Perhaps he didn’t believe me. So I asked him for a bowl of their ‘convenience noodles’, just like the last time we had visited. It was about 5pm when I tucked into my plastic bowl of chilli noodles. They were disgusting, but I enjoyed every slurp. I had completed the Yading Big Kora. CHAPTER 10: SEEKING THE MOUNTAINS OF MYSTERY: TRAVELS TO CHONI AND AMNYE MACHEN Of all the places that Joseph Rock visited, I was least enthusiastic about going to Choni monastery and following in his footsteps across Gansu and Qinghai to see the mountain of 185 Amnye Machen. Why? On the face of it, his description of his two-year sojourn in the area from 1925-26 sounds fantastical and is almost unbelievably eventful. The National Geographic article reads like something from a Boys Own adventure. He befriends a local prince and takes up residence in his little principality of Choni. A local war rages in the district between Tibetans and Muslims, with bodies disembowelled and decapitated heads displayed on the town walls. He visits nearby monasteries to see the “Devil Dancers” and falls under the spell of sorcerers to experience a weird and disturbing trance. And ultimately he embarks an epic six-month journey on horseback across unexplored grasslands and lives among the primitive but noble Tibetan nomads clans who have never before seen a white man. He plays them Caruso and La Boheme on the gramophone and shares their wormy food. They warn him about their murderous neighbours, the Ngoloks, who do not permit outsiders to stray into their territory, and yet he presses on regardless and eventually gets a glimpse of the mighty peak, which he believes to be as high as Everest. And on his travels he is the first to see the epic canyons of the upper reaches of the Yellow River, and he stays in remote monasteries where life has barely changed since the time of Marco Polo - the lamas keep scores of clocks ticking away in one room and believe that men in foreign countries have the heads of dogs. So why was I not so keen on exploring this area? Well partly due to the landscape. Unlike his travels in Yunnan and Sichuan, most of the areas he traversed were scenically and botanically dull. Joseph Rock himself was frank about the dreariness of the grasslands and their lack of flora and fauna. Unlike the valleys and forests of Yunnan and Sichuan, the Qinghai plateau was relatively barren - there were few settlements and the only people he encountered were yak herding nomads and traders plying caravans across the high plateau. And even Choni, the place he chose as a base for his two years spent botanising in Gansu and Qinghai, seemed very ordinary. A small town characterised only by its monastery and a few rice terraces. If it was a dull backwater in 1925, what would it be like in the 21st century with the advent of cars and concrete? I imagined it to be just another dismal Chinese small town. But for the sake of completeness, I felt obliged to check out what Choni was now like. In 1925 it had been a thriving monastic community, with hundreds of monks in residence, and a cultural and religious centre for the Tibetans of Gansu province. Rock described the Choni ceremonies and festivals in great detail - and I was curious to see what had become of this once great monastery. But I was really more interested in getting to the smaller and more scenic monastery town of Radja in Qinghai, which he used as a jumping off point for his incursions into Ngolok territory around Amnye Machen. The monastery seemed to be situated in a grand setting, at the base of some high cliffs on the banks of the upper reaches of the Yellow River. And so it was that I flew into Lanzhou in early May of 2012, exactly 86 years after Rock made his visit, and a year later than I had originally planned. I had been all set to go in mid 2011, but just a few days before departure I had a collision with a car while riding my pushbike home from work. I sustained complicated fractures of my leg and ankle that left me on crutches for three months, and after much physiotherapy only still slowly recovering eight months later. I was left with a limp and metal screws in my knee and ankle that set off the metal detectors when passing through the airport security check - I had to roll up the leg of my pants and show the scar to the girl with the metal detector wand. My gammy knee meant I was not fit to do any serious trekking, but I envisaged that most of the trip would involve travel on buses, with perhaps some day walks and overnight stays in remote areas. 186 I flew into Lanzhou via Guangzhou and was unpleasantly surprised by the level of culture shock I experienced. After my many visits to China I had presumed that it would almost be a second home for me by now, and was rather overconfident when I hopped on the airport shuttle bus to travel the 70km into what some have described as one of the most polluted cities in China. Deposited in the crowded and noisy downtown area at dusk, I struggled to get my bearings and to find a taxi to take me to the Friendship Hotel. This was the recommended cheapo hotel in the travel guides, but despite all my homework researching where to stay, I found that it had shut down several months previously. I only discovered this after I had abandoned my fruitless quest for a taxi (I hadn’t realised there was a taxi strike on) and taken a long ride stood up on a crowded bus across town to the western outskirts. Lanzhou was not a tourist city and I felt intimidated and lonely as I stood on the dark street where my hotel should have been. I tried a few other hotels nearby but got the standard response of “bu she wai” - we’re not allowed to accept foreigners. After trudging round five hotels and guesthouses, I eventually got lucky when the old geezer manning the desk of the rather shoddy and empty Electric Company Hotel took pity on me and allowed me stay unofficially, without registering. Cash in hand and be gone in the morning. After dumping my bag and washing my face, I hurried out again to the western bus station to see if I could buy tickets for Labrang the following day. No luck. The bus station proved to be much further away than it appeared on my photocopied LP map, and by the time I arrived it was shuttered and dark, closed for the evening. I would just have to try first thing in the morning. I ambled back along the dark and dusty streets and felt like I had gone back in time to 1990s China. Everything was shoddy and crude, the locals were still in the habit of hoicking and spitting, and they stared. The Lanzhou air was thick with smog and dust, and the cars sounded their horns in an almost continuous cacophany of white noise. Just like the old China. The novel thing about Lanzhou was its highly visible Muslim population. These were ethnic Han “Hui” Muslims rather than the Uighurs or Xinjiang, but they were still distinctly different from Chinese I had seen elsewhere. The man had white skullcaps and the women overed their hair with a loose scarf. Not exactly Taliban country, but this quiet but firm assertion of separate identity was something I had not encountered in Han China before. I went back to the hotel to spend the first of what was to be many lonely nights with only Chinese TV for company. I had forgotten how isolating and solitary feeling it can be in China when you are travelling alone in China. And I also quickly realised that my four paperback books were unlikely to last for the two weeks of travel I had planned. I was reluctant to start reading them - I would have to ration myself to two or three chapters a day! So instead I pulled out all the maps and documents I had assembled for this trip and started to read again about Joseph Rock’s travels in 1925. At that time, Rock had already had some success in plant collecting in China on behalf of the US Department of Agriculture. He had sent back tens of thousands of plant samples for the to the Smithsonian Museum from his travels around Yunnan and in particular from his forays to the kingdom of Muli and had thus made a name for himself as one of the leading international plant collectors of the day. He had obviously made a good impression on the elderly Charles S. Sargent, director of the Harvard’s Arnold Aboretum, who commissioned him to mount a three-year expedition to Qinghai on behalf of the Aboretum. The Boston- 187 based botanical institute had plenty of plant samples from temperate Sichuan and Yunnan, and now they wanted more hardy cooler climate plant specimens from further north that might be more suited to the New England conditions. Rock was given a budget of $14,000 for the first year. To put that in context, it was more than ten times the average US salary of $1200 a year, at a time when a new Ford would cost $300. In today’s terms, he was being paid half a million dollars to explore remote areas of China, where the US dollar could buy an awful lot more than it could in Boston or Washington DC. No wonder he could afford to hire twenty soldiers at a time to act as bodyguards, not to mention his retinue of ten Naxi ‘boy’ assistants to do his cooking, domestic chores and to perform the menial tasks of plant collecting such as sorting, drying and packing specimens. The China that Rock was travelling in was a strange, anarchic place in 1925. The Qing dynasty had been overthrown in 1911 and it was a time of warlords, such as Yuan Shikai who wielded power in Beijing. Chiang Kai Shek had yet to mount his ‘northern expedition’ to exert control of China on behalf of the Kuomintang, and in western China it was the Muslim Ma clan whose armies held sway over Xining and arts of Qinghai. They were in constant conflict with a deposed Beijing warlord, Feng Yuxiang, the so-called “Christian general” whose troops controlled Lanzhou and Gansu. At the same time, the local Tibetans were answerable to none of these warlords. In these borderlands they lived side by side with Hui Muslims and fought bloody battles with Muslim forces and bandits for control of monastery towns such Labrang. As a foreigner, Rock would in theory still enjoy the benefit of “exta-territoriality” by which foreigners were to be protected and not subject to Chinese law. In practice, much of the territory outside the cities was lawless and subject to attacks by bandits, renegade soldiers and armed gangs of local tribesmen. Rock was justified in filling his travel articles with tales of woe about the dangers of roaming bandits. While he escaped unharmed from several encounters with bands of thieves, a one-time American travelling companion and translator was less fortunate. Rock could speak fluent Chinese but not Tibetan. He therefore took along an American missionary, William E. Simspon, who had been trying to spread the word among the Tibetans of Labrang, to act as translator for his Amnye Machen trip. The arrangement did not last long because Rock had little time for missionaries and quickly came to despise Simpson for being too soft and a do-gooder. Simpson returned to his proselytising, but was murdered several years later, in 1932, by renegade Muslim soldiers who hijacked a vehicle he was travelling in to Lanzhou. Nevertheless, Rock was able to mount a well-financed, well-equipped long-term expedition to lawless and virtually unexplored Qinghai in 1925. Eighty six years later, I was sat in a Lanzhou hotel room with 3000 RMB and a small backpack in which I carried little more than a change of clothes and lots of old camera gear. This looked like it was going to be my last trip with film cameras. While the rest of the world had moved on to digital, I was still attached to my film-using Leicas and Rolleiflex. For this trip I had brought along a sturdy Leica R3 SLR and a selection of 28mm, 50mm, 90mm and 135mm lenses. They weighed a ton. But pride of place went to my Rolleiflex 3.5F, the camera that produced gorgeous images with 120 slide film. I had brought along about 40 rolls each of 35mm and 120 Kodak Ektachrome colour slide film. A few days before my 188 departure, Kodak announced that they were discontinuing all slide film. So this would be the end of an era. Labrang monastery I arrived by bus in Labrang on a sunny but cool Saturday morning in May and the local Tibetans and Hui Muslims seemed to be getting along just fine. A bit of an improvement on Rock’s time, when he arrived just after a bloody battle between the local Tibetan nomads and the Sining Muslims for control of the town. The Muslims had won: “Frightful indeed was the aspect of Labrang after the fight. One hundred and fifty four Tibetan heads were strung about the walls of the Moslem garrison like a garland of flowers. Heads of young girls and children decorated posts in front of the barracks. The Moslem riders galloped about town, each with 10 or 15 human heads tied to his saddle...” Rock explained that the Tibetans were fiercesome fighters but disorganised. They had charged the Moslems troops on horseback, impaling many of them with long lances “like men spearing frogs”. But they were outnumbered and defeated by the Moslems, who were more disciplined and better trained. When they caught any Tibetans, they hung them up by their thumbs, disembowelled them alive “and their abdominal cavities were then filled with hot stones.” But in 2012, the former enemies seemed to have forgotten their differences. The Hui were indistinguishable from the Han Chinese, wearing modern clothes with just a skullcap or headscarf to show their faith. They were the proprietors of many of the beef noodle shops that lined the single street of modern day Xiahe. The Tibetans, however, were flamboyantly different. The young men swaggered along the main street, sporting chubas wrapped around their waists and shoulder length hair. Tibetan women wore long skirts and cowboy hats. Both males and females wore scarves around their mouths and noses, presumably to ward off the ever-present dust, not to mention the chill wind. In some parts of town it was if you had stepped into a live fancy dress competition, with almost everyone living up to the cliched ethnic stereotypes for the cameras - Tibetan cowboys and kids with shiny red cheeks alongside austere Muslim old men in Mao suits and old fashioned ground glass round spectacles. I had not been sure whether I would be able to visit Xiahe. As one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in China, I had worried that it might be caught up in the recent waves of Tibetan protests and self immolations. But I was able to buy a ticket for the four hour bus ride from Lanzhou with no problems, and there didn’t seem to be any obvious tension on the streets or signs of any additional police presence presence. And so after checking in to the Baoma Hotel, I walked to the end of the road and entered the massive monastery complex to have a look around. When Rock got to take a closer look at Labrang during more settled times, he was awed by its size and the sheer number of monks in residence. He took photos in the 30 large buildings that served as chanting halls for the 5000 monks, and he marvelled at the huge kitchens with their five large iron kettles designed to make butter and and rice gruel to feed thousands at one sitting. He was less impressed by the dirtiness and squalid living conditions of the monastery and what he perceived as ignorance of the Tibetan monks. 189 He noted that the floors were caked in spilled rice gruel and butter tramped hard underfoot and now “many inches thick.” And while the Abbott who welcomed him appeared wealthy, he was almost child-like in his ignorance of the outside world. The head lama told Rock how he knew there were people with the heads of dogs and cattle living in foreign countries “Our books tell of such people ...” He also told Rock that of course the world was flat, and the sun disappeared behind a big mountain that was situated at the centre of the earth. In modern times, the abbot no longer lived at Labrang, but was said to have an official residence in nearby Lanzhou, some four hours drive distant. And despite its size and hundreds of monks, the monastery seemed to be a little subdued. Perhaps it was because many of the “Tibetan’ monks were not Tibetans, but ethnic Chinese. I overheard a few monks talking and had been surprised by their fluent colloquial mandarin. At first I presumed this was because they lived in close proximity to a modern city like Lanzhou. Then when I looked at them more closely, I realised they were Han Chinese. As I toured the monastery complex I recognised a few of the larger buildings from Rock’s pictures. Many of the smaller buildings were more recent additions or renovations, and the extensive living quarters for the monks now had satellite TV dishes ad a similar mirror-tiled satellite dish contraption that appeared to be used for making boiling water. And like the rest of China, much of Labrang appeared to be a work in progress, with older buildings being torn down and newer ones being built. The sound of modern Labrang was not the conch shell or trumpet, but the hammering of wood and iron, and the put put of the tractor carrying bricks and cement. I was later to read that the Chinese government has just approved a massive new re-building program for Labrang, which would provide for renovation of many of the temples. This was, according to an Indian journalist writing in The Hindu, part of the PRC government’s carrot and stick approach to preserving harmony and stability on the Qing-Zang (QinghaiTibet) plateau and winning the hearts and minds of the Tibetan Buddhists. It wasn’t entirely successful. In a local cafe, I was accosted by a very laid back monk ‘with attitude’ who spoke halting English. He had learned the language, he told me, during the couple of years he had spent in India, where he had gone to study Tibetan Buddhism and pay a visit to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. I hadn’t wanted to broach the subject of Tibetan politics with the locals I met on this trip, and I kept my answers neutral and to the minimum as the young Tibetan posed question after question about how Australia was independent and how he knew many Tibetan exiles who had moved on to places in Canada, Switzerland and Australia. I took a clockwise walk around the circular kora circuit of the monastery, walking alongside many Tibetan pilgrims. Some were obviously just there for the day - mums and dads with their kids who had come by car or motorbike. But others were more devout - old grannies who shuffled along and young hardcore pilgrims who were prostrating themselves on the ground every two or three steps, which would seem to take them more than a day to complete the 3km circuit. The path climbed into the hills to the north of the monastery and I got spectacular views over the whole complex - and of the more mundane concrete sprawl of Xiahe beyond. Across the valley and over the Sang Chu river there was the hillside covered with trees - “a forest of fir and spruce. It is of miraculous origin, say tradition. Long ago a famous monk, 190 the founder of Labrang, got a haircut. His hair, scattered over the hillside, took root and produced this fine forest,” according to Rock. This appeared to be the vantage point from where Rock had taken his panoramic photographs of the monastery, but I found it was now difficult to get there. The next day, after the usual fitful high altitude sleep, constantly waking up with a dry mouth (Labrang is 8,600 feet above sea level) I tramped out in the early morning to try ascend the hillside. However, a the new road running through the valley had been carved out of the hillside, which left a steep cutting that was impossible to climb up. There was a new condominium block that was being constructed on the hillside with no doubt idyllic views over the monastery, but I was waved away by the construction workers. So I ended up at the big square thanka display area further down the road, the tourist viewing point overlooking the big golden pagoda. While most people took in the view and turned back here, I carried on up a dirt track to try climb the much higher ridge to the south of the monastery. At first, it was a pleasant stroll through rolling grassland. I was soon allalone and I spotted a couple of marmots, whistling and rushing to their burrows. Rock had seen marmots during his trek over the grasslands and recounted how his dog ran itself ragged chased them, sometimes catching them, and sometimes getting a nasty nip from their sharp teeth. As I ascended the grassy ridge the incline got steeper and steeper, but I seemed to be no nearer getting an unobstructed view of the monastery. It was only when I reached the summit ridge that I realised why nobody came up here - the view was blocked by the trees of the sacred forest! What a waste of a morning! And then I also had to face a much more scary descent down a steep gradient, which hadn’t seemed half as steep on the way up. I was glad to get down in one piece. I spent another lazy afternoon in sunny Xiahe, idling in the Nomad Cafe and watching the street life. Tibetans seemed to like to sit in cafes too - sipping butter tea and chatting away. I chatted to the owner of the Overseas Tibetan Hotel and asked about how to get to Choni. No direct buses, she told me - but get an early bus to Hezuo (Gannan) and you can get a Choni bus from there, she said. And so on to the next part of my quest. Life among the lamas of Choni After a decade of pondering and a year of planning to go to Choni monastery in Gansu, I was only able to spend about an hour walking round the place when I eventually got there in May 2012. This was because I was detained by the local police almost as soon as I got off the bus in Choni. Fortunately I’d gone straight to the Chanding monastery on my arrival in ‘Zhuoni’ as it is now known, and was able to spend a short time walking round the various monastery temples snapping a few pictures before I was nabbed by the Public Security Bureau. There wasn’t much to see - the monastery complex was like a ghost town, with few monks in evidence and all the temples locked up. Back in the 1920s, Joseph Rock had received a slightly warmer reception in Choni and had struck up a more cordial relationship with the local authorities. He befriended the local prince – the tusi – an ethnic Tibetan but Chinese-accultured herditary ruler who was the latest to succeed to the post that had been passed on for 22 generations since the 1400s. Even into the 20th century, the potentate ruled by grace of the Qing dynasty and its 191 successors in the new post-1911 Chinese Republican movement. Prince Wang Chi-Ching, as he was known in Chinese, was a suave character who liked dressing up in Chinese silks and stylish Tibetan boots. He was both temporal and spiritual head of the small Tibetan enclave of Choni, acting as both prince and head lama. However, he was not an independent prince. He had to pay tribute, obeisance - and taxes - to the Chinese authorities and warlords who held sway in Lanzhou. At that time, Choni was the cultural and political centre of this ethnic Tibetan corner of south western Gansu. Unlike most of the arid and flat province of Gansu, Choni was mountainous and fertile, with the river Tao river helping to irrigate rice crops and support a mixed population of Tibetans (known locally as Tebbus), Muslims and Han Chinese. Joseph Rock’s pictures show a busy and active monastery of about five ornate temple buildings, and scores of resident monks involved in all kinds of strange ceremonies and rituals. Rock was so impressed with Choni that he selected it as his base for exploring the Qinghai grasslands - and it became the springboard for his ultimate visit to Amnye Machen. He was to stay at the Prince’s Choni yamen (compound) almost two years from 1925-26, thanks in part to being on friendly terms with the local prince. He describes the place briefly in his National Geographic article about his Amnye Machen expedition (“Seeking the Mountains of Mystery”), but writes a lot more about Choni in a separate article entitled “Life Among The Lamas of Choni”. In this latter article he describes the lifestyle and many of the customs and clothing of the local Tibetans in Choni. He spends most of the article describing the intricate and lengthy ceremonies of the local lamas, and also something of one of their major festivals. Accompanied by many early colour Autochrome pictures of the Tibetan “devil dancers” at the monastery and their costumes, Rock’s article gives a lengthy description of the annual Mystery Plays and Butter Festival ceremonies held at Choni. Some of the ‘devil’ dancers are dressed to look like skeletons, animals such as deer, as well as some traditional Buddhist deities and demons. One of the most interesting performers was a monk wearing a papier mache mask that looked something like the head of one of the ‘jolly Buddha’ icons. This performer was meant to represent a oafish Han Chinese monk, Nantain, who was bested in debates by Tibetan monks, a figure of fun for the Tibetans who was the butt of many physical and verbal jokes and mockery during the comedic ceremony. It is all rather reminiscent of one of the modern day “cross talk sketches” as shown on Chinese TV, a kind of music hall act in which the characters exchange banter and mix this in with slapstick comedy and double takes. According to Rock, the public mockery of the Chinese went down well with the Tibetan spectators, as there was little love lost between the Tibetans and Han Chinese at the time. The Han Chinese were heartily despised and the Tibetans loved to make fun of them. However, there was also a darker side to the devil dances, with the Tibetan sorcerers supposedly summing up and exorcising demons. The scholarly Joseph Rock was skeptical and dismissive about the supposed effects of these devil dances, until he found himself severely disturbed during one such performance at the neighbouring Hochiassu monastery near Choni. While watching the dances he noticed that some of the crowd of local onlookers appeared to have become possessed by spirits and were flailing about. Other spectators laughed at these 192 possessed until they too became infected and equally manic. Rock and his missionarly companions then also started to feel queer. “I began to feel a bit uneasy ... and Mr McGilvrey felt terribly oppressed,” Rock wrote later. “At that moment I felt a most peculiar sensation, as if I was giving way to some unknown force, and I felt myself become powerless. I managed to say ‘I must go, I cannot stand this’ … and left the chanting hall as quickly as I could.” He felt slightly better when he moved away from the devil dancers, but had a second ‘attack’ when he settled in a nearby room: “I had hardly sat down when the powerless feeling came over me in a few minutes, and my sight was practically gone. I could ill distinguish things. I tried to repress this feeling and started taking deep breathing, but every second I felt myself going and I came to the conclusion that if I did not leave immediately I would be unconscious the next minute.” Rock only recovered when he had fled from the monastery, and was left shaken by his experience. Despite his self image as a man of science, he could only conclude that “There is a power or spell of some kind...” “I may say that never in all my life have I felt in such a sudden manner my willpower and my control over my being leave me ... It was like filtering of something though one’s body which took charge of one completely. It was the elimination of self and the control of self through another force, which I fought, but to which I would have sucuumbed. The lamas explained this as the god of the monastery taking possession of one’s body.” Nevertheless, with the aid and hospitality of Prince Yang, Rock settled in Choni and installed himself in the yamen there while he prepared to mount his much-anticipated plant collecting expedition to Amnye Machen. And as a preface to his future anthropological and cultural studies of the Nakhi in Lijiang, he also made many observations about the customs and people of Choni. The monastery was famous for its library, which contained rare copies of the two major Tibetan classical sacred texts: the 108 volume Tandjur and the 209-volume Kandjur. It took a large team of monks about a year to print just one set of all these volumes, and Rock was able to buy a complete set and pack it off to Washington, where it was lodged with the Library of Congress. During his time in Choni, Rock seemed to get along well with the sinicised and relatively ‘modern’ Prince Yang – going to him for advice about how to travel to Amnye Machen and even borrowing money from him when his funds from the US failed to come through on time. However, like the King of Muli, Prince Yang could also be a cruel and despotic local ruler. He had several wives who he kept in servitude and with bound feet. One of them he had beaten severely after she tried to leave without his permission to visit her ailing mother. The wife hanged herself shortly afterwards Even Rock acknowledged that Yang was a bad sort, noting that he was not popular with his local ‘subjects’. To maintain his grip on power the prince kept a network of spies and informers in addition to his own local army of enforcers. He imposed fines on the local people and ‘squeezed’ businesses for his own income. According to Rock, the prince was only tolerated because he was seen as a buffer between the locals and the even more hated Chinese. 193 My own journey to Choni started at Labrang (Xiahe). The locals told me there was no direct bus to Choni, but that I could catch a bus to the town of Hezuo an find one there. According to my map it was only about 70km to Hezuo and a further 100km to Choni, so I hoped I might do it in one day. I didn’t want to have to spend a night in Hezuo - there didn’t seem to be much there apart from a reconstructed nine-storey temple that Rock had photographed back in 1925, when the town was know as Hei Tso. As things turned out, I didn’t need to stop over in Hezuo. When our bus trundled into town mid morning it looked like any other nondescript scrappy provincial Chinese town - a mix of concrete high rises and garage-front stores. A friendly Tibetan sat behind me on the bus pointed out the street corner where I should catch the Choni bus, and I jumped off the Xiahe bus just as the Choni service was departing. I was able to flag it down and jump on without having to buy a ticket. The ride to Choni took us over rolling dull grassland and a couple of gentle passes. There were a few Tibetan herder’s houses en route, quite basic concrete blocks, but all of them seemed to have glassed-in ‘conservatories’ in front of the living areas. This seemed to be a standard feature of the Gansu-Qinghai grasslands. Before we reached Choni the bus descended into Lintan, another scrappy town with a large Muslim population and many prominent mosques. This was the old “Taochow” that Rock had written about - but he never mentioned the obvious Muslim character of the town. After a tedious hour long wait during which time I attracted many stares from bemused locals, the bus started up again and took us the final hour’s drive down to the riverside town of Zhuoni. I felt a certain excitement on arriving in the town. Choni! I was here! I immediately took a taxi from the simple courtyard bus station up the hill to see the Chanding monastery. Zhuoni was a busy little town with really just one main street running up from the Tao river. There were a few modern shops, restaurants and hotels by the riverside, but otherwise it was a quite unremarkable place. It didn’t appear to be Tibetan, and most of the locals looked like Han Chinese or low key Hui Muslims. About a kilometre up the hill we turned left into the the entrance of the monastery. As I walked through the main gate, I recognised the layout of the place from one of Rock’s old photos, but the buildings were not the same. They had been rebuilt in a similar but not identical style. I started to wander about the buildings and take photographs, and it felt strange because there was hardly anyone about. Apart from one or two Tibetan monks that I glimpsed walking about, I had the place to myself. The temples were all padlocked and there was nobody about to ask about having a look inside. I tried to catch the attention of one monk but he scurried off, unwilling to talk. I eventually found myself at the highest part of the complex, stood in front of one of the larger temples. It had started to drizzle with rain and it all felt like a bit of an anti-climax. A group of local people emerged from one of the outhouses and peered over my shoulder at the copies of the old Rock photographs of the place. The pictures barely rated a murmur, and when I asked one of the older men in the group about the pictures he just said “kanguole” - “We’ve seen them before.” I don’t know what I’d expected to find at Choni, but this was quite underwhelming. I’d known that the original buildings would no longer be there - Rock himself had heard that the monastery had been almost completely destroyed after his departure by Muslim forces 194 during the sectarian fighting of the late 1920s. According to Rock’s biography, Prince Yang of Choni had abducted, raped and murdered some women related to the Muslim General Ma. In retaliation, the Muslim forces had ransacked Choni and slaughtered many of the locals. Prince Yang escaped the killings, but when he returned to take up residence at his yamen in 1928 he was set upon by his on servants and lynched in a nearby riverbed. Well, that was one version of his sticky end - I was to hear another version later in the day. It was mid afternoon when I trudged back down the hill in the rain towards the town centre. I was hungry and was also anxious to find somewhere to rest up. After devouring a tray of steaming xiaolongbao in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant I walked into the modern town square - complete with massive video screen - and entered what I thought was the main hotel for Choni. It was a mistake. The stark interior appeared to be a deserted office complex. A man emerged from a side doorway and asked tersely what I wanted. When I said a room, he just gestured in that Chinese way with his lips and chin that this was next door. When I reemerged into the daylight outside I read the sign and realised that I had just been trying to check in to the town’s Communist Party Headquarters. The hotel was actually next door, but I didn’t even get chance to check in. At the reception I had just asked the female clerk for a room when I was approached by two young uniformed cops and a humourless-looking Chinese guy in a suit. One of the cops ostentatiously showed me his official badge in a leather wallet, and held it under my nose for my obvious perusal, as if to emphasise that there was no possibility that he might be an imposter. Then he uttered one word in English: “Passport.” As the guy in the suit leafed through my passport, I was politely ushered to sit in one of the voluminous leather couches nearby. Without any prompting, I launched into Chinese, to make an explanation of what I was doing there. I told them I was a tourist and that I had just come to visit the Choni monastery and take some photos because I had seen some pictures of how scenic it was in an old magazine. I took out the pictures of Rock to show them. The cops’ stiff and formal attitude loosened a little when they heard me speak Chinese, and they gave me the almost reflex compliment for a putonghua-speaking laowai: “You speak Chinese so well”. I babbled on, telling them that I was just here for the day and planning to leave the next day to go back to Lanzhou. “How did you get here?” they asked. When I said I had come on the bus from Xiahe, they frowned and corrected me - “You mean from Hezuo?”. I said yes, and told them how I had swapped buses there. This did not compute, and I was told that “foreigners are not allowed to travel on the bus from Hezuo to Choni.” I could only presume that the bus station in Hezuo had been instructed not to sell Choni bus tickets to foreigners, and that I had evaded this by jumping on the bus as it left town. I made what I hoped sounded like a sincere and humble apology and promised that I would leave town as soon as possible. I showed them my return bus ticket that I had bought for the next day. Seeing all my camera gear, the older man in a suit asked if I was a journalist. I said no, and that I was a pharmacist - which was not untrue in that I had trained as one. He walked off with my passport and left me in an awkward silence with the two young cops. I was feeling a bit nervous and my mind was racing through the possibilities of what might happen to me. Arrest? Put in a cell? A fine? Deported to Lanzhou? The one thing I really dreaded was having my rolls of film confiscated, and I cursed myself for not concealing them. I continued babbling on, trying to reassure them that I was just a regular tourist. I told them that I had just arrived in China from Australia and had already visited the big 195 monastery at Xiahe, and therefore assumed there was no problem in coming to see the smaller monastery at Choni. One of the cops said that I was not able to visit Choni because it was ... he struggled a moment for the right word ... “sensitive”. Speaking in an official tone he said that due to the current situation relating to minorities, it was not safe for me to be there. The older cop returned with my passport, which he had photocopied, but he didn’t give the passport back. He repeated the question about how I had got to Choni, and I repeated the answer I had already given. He then asked again whether I was a journalist, and I repeated that I was a pharmacist. He then pulled out what looked like an iPhone and tapped something on the screen. He showed it to me and it was a Google search on my name. The first entry was of the medical newsletter website that I worked for, and my title “Michael Woodhead - Editor”. “Is this you?” he asked. I could hardly deny it - it had my photo there. I mumbled something about being a pharmacist who worked for a medical information service, but I could see they had already made up their minds. “Zou!” (Let’s go!). I didn’t ask where we were going, but just accompanied them out of the building and along the street, one cop on either side of me. One of them solicitously insisted on carrying my backpack. I was taken into a courtyard next to the Party HQ and we entered an unmarked building that had a similar arrangement of corridors and apparently deserted offices. A police station? Or Party offices? Up the stairwell to the second floor, I was ushered into a room with a leather sofa, a coffee table and a couple of chairs. It could have been a doctor’s waiting room. And there I was left to stay for the remainder of the day, with the two young cops for company. When I asked what was going on I was again told that “foreigners were not allowed in Choni” and my situation “was under consideration by the relevant authorities.” The older cop had disappeared with my passport again, and I was brought a cup of green tea and told to “rest a while”. And there I “rested” for the remainder of the afternoon. After the initial shock of being detained had worn off, it was very tedious. Outside there was a constant hammering and crashing from a construction site, but otherwise there was nothing to do. I tried chatting to the two cops, but their thick local accents made it difficult for me to understand what they were saying. They were polite and friendly, but a little distant. To try break the ice a bit more, I told them a bit about myself and my family, how I was married and had two kids and we often visited China to see our Chinese relatives. In turn, they asked me what Sydney was like, and a few questions that revealed how little they knew about the outside world. Did we eat rice every day in Australia? Do they have many Chinese in Australia? And what kind of cars did the police drive in Australia? All this time the door was always open, but it was quite obvious that I wasn’t going anywhere. I tried to pass the time by pacing the room, looking out the window at the builders and then reading a bit of my Eric Newby book, Love and War in the Apennines (in which he had to work out how to pass many long hours in captivity). Late in the afternoon, I asked the cops if they were hungry. As if the thought had just occurred to them, they turned the question back on me - Was I hungry? Would I like to go out and eat something? When I said yes, they simply replied “OK - let’s go ...” and we headed out and back downstairs. It was as if they were making it all up as they went along. Not knowing how this would all pan out, and not wanting to push my luck, I suggested the first restaurant that I saw on the street outside, which inevitably was a Lanzhou beef noodle 196 place. I went in and ordered the standard bowl of noodles from the Muslim chef-owner, but the cops didn’t have anything. They just sat around as I ate, and said the same things that all Chinese do when around a foreigner eating. “Oh, you can use chopsticks! What do you think of our Chinese dishes? Nice? Can you stomach them?” On our return to the ‘waiting room’ in the government building we were met at the door by the plain-clothes cop. He returned my passport and just stated the obvious. “Tomorrow you are taking the bus to Lanzhou.” I wasn’t sure if this was a question or an order, so I just replied “Yes”. He then said vaguely that I could rest where we were and take the Lanzhou bus in the morning - it departed at 6am. One of the cops took me down the corridor to a smaller corner room that had a single bed with a bed roll, a chair and a table on which was a massive TV that seemed to take up half the room space. Down the corridor was a poky bathroom and squat toilet. Next door to me was a similar room with an earthy middle-aged guy wearing a tatty suit in residence. He seemed to be the caretaker/doorman. His room also had a kettle and he spent most of the evening watching TV, smoking and cracking melon seeds. The two cops said they were going to leave me there, but first they would have to take my photo. I assumed they meant I would have a mugshot taken for their records, but instead they both pulled out their smartphones and took cheesy self-portraits of the three of us, instructing me to say “cheese” each time. One of them gave me the parting advice to “go to sleep early, you have an early start.” The other added that I should drink more kaishui because I probably wasn’t accustomed to the high altitude. And so it was that I was apparently left to my own devices in the room. Was I still in detention or could I go out if I wished? I wasn’t going to try find out. I turned on the TV and surfed the usual range of channels, but soon got bored of the Women’s Channel, the Army Channel, the Kid’s Channel and the Learn American-accented Chinglish channel. There seemed to be more ads than programmes. Then I decided to take the cops’ advice and drink some water, but the flask in my room was empty. I went next door to ask the caretaker if he knew where I could get hot water and he jumped up to get me a filled flask from the several he had arrayed in the corner of his room - as if having a foreigner to live next door was the most normal thing in the world. He asked the usual questions that I got asked all the time by Chinese when on the road in China. Where was I from? Was I here travelling? Was I alone? How long had I been in China? I told him that I had come to see the monastery because I had been inspired by seeing pictures of it in the old days. He seemed puzzled as to why anybody would come all this way to see Choni monastery, and said that Labrang (Xiahe) monastery was “more fun” to visit. I told him that I had heard about the old Prince of Choni and that I had hoped to visit his old yamen or quarters. The caretaker then became quite animated and started telling me that there was now a memorial in town to the old Tusi. His old mansion had been turned into a primary school, he said, and there was a big memorial built there. I told him how Joseph Rock has lived in the area for two years, but the caretaker had never heard about Rock and didn’t seem interested. Instead, he said the “Choni Tusi” had become a hero of the Red Marchers because he had aided them when they had passed though the area in the 1930s. That made me stop and think - because this contradicted what Rock’s 197 biographer had said about the Prince of Choni being killed in 1928. The caretaker then recounted to me the story as if it had been told many times before, almost like an official history. He said the Prince of Choni had been warned by his Chinese mentors in Lanzhou to be on the lookout for the arrival of the Red Army marchers in the early 1930s. The Chinese warlords in Lanzhou were affiliated with the Kuomintang (KMT) anti-communist Nationalists and wanted to prevent the Long Marchers moving north through a narrow defile called Lazikou near Choni. The Long Marchers had already won a victory by capturing the Luding Bridge from KMT forces in the now legendary battle that enabled them to cross the Dadu River and escape entrapment. The next barrier that Mao and his marchers faced after the Snowy Mountains was gaining access to the grasslands via Lazikou. According to the caretaker, the Choni Prince had been told to gather his local Tebbu Tibetan fighters and use them to help block the Lazikou gorge at a narrow bridge over a river. The steep-sided Lazikou gorge was a great obstacle and could easily be defended against thousands by just a few hundred armed men. However, the Long Marchers such as Mao and his army chief Peng Dehuai had good intelligence about the Lazikou pass and its would-be defenders. They sent runners ahead with letters to the Choni Prince, saying that they were just passing through and would not occupy Choni or make any demands on the local people and their resources. The envoys stressed that the Long Marchers were an anti-Japanese force, and a friend of all the minority peoples. Whether through patriotism or political calculation, the Choni Prince decided to defy his KMT sponsors and side with the Long Marchers and allow them passage through the Lazikou gorge. He instructed the Tebbu Tibetans to assist the Long Marchers and act as guides. The Red soldiers still faced a tough battle at Lazikou against KMT forces, but with the help of Choni Prince’s guides they were able to outflank the defenders and make a breakthrough and eventually reach the Gansu grasslands and go beyond to establish their new revolutionary base in the loess caves of Yanan. The general commanding the local KMT forces was humiliated by the defeat at Lazikou and would exact his revenge on the Prince of Choni for his treachery. According to the caretaker, several years later, after the Long Marchers had passed through and KMT control was reasserted, the general returned to Choni and attacked the Prince’s compound. The Choni Prince was captured and executed, but his son managed to escape. When I asked what happened to the Prince of Choni’s son, the caretaker said he became the new tusi until the Liberation, when his father, the late Prince, was declared a revolutionary martyr by none other than Zhou Enlai himself. Hence the local memorial. I found it grimly ironic that the Han Chinese authorities portray the non-violent Dalai Lama as an evil serpent, and condemn the ‘old’ Tibetan society as feudal and barbaric, citing examples of child sacrifices and serfdom. And yet here in Choni they put up memorials to the despotic local ‘Prince’ who had raped and murdered women and brutally taxed and oppressed the local people. I was later to see similar memorials to the savage Muslim leader General Ma Pufang in Xining. In China, political expediency can turn monsters into masters - and vice versa. 198 Interestingly, I also learned form the caretaker that the grandson of the Choni Prince had also grown up in the area, become a magistrate and was still alive and carrying on the family tradition, he added. So it seemed that for once, the visit of Joseph Rock to an area and his acquaintance with local nobles was just a footnote in local history rather than a defining moment as it had been for his Shangri-La inspiring travels in Yunnan and Sichuan. I retired to my room and tried to sleep, even though the construction hammers on the building site outside my window continued to clang until late into the night. I was worried that I would sleep in and miss the bus out of town but I needn’t have worried. In the early hours I was woken by a young Tibetan woman night clerk who rapped on the door at 5am. I was ready to within a few minutes, but oddly found I had no escort. The young woman sleepily - and with a hint of sullen resentment at being woken so early - unlocked the thick bike padlock chain around the handles of the main glass doors of the building and released me like a bird into the cold dark morning of Choni. I made my own way down the main street towards the bus station, humming to myself and wondering what would happen if I turned round and made a last visit to the monastery. Would anyone be watching to stop me? The streets were deserted except for a couple of old ladies sweeping up dust with those crude stick-and-branch Chinese sweeping brushes. I bade them a hearty “good morning” in English and strode across the bridge to the waiting bus. Already a few would be passengers were stood around the locked and darkened bus, stamping their feet and smoking in the nippy morning air. They looked at me with curiosity and I smiled back stupidly, happy to be “out of jail”. At five to six the driver strode up, opened the bus door and started the engine. I took my place on the half empty bus, which suddenly filled to capacity with babbling passengers who seemed to come out of nowhere at the very last minute. I looked out of the grimy window at Choni as the sky just started to lighten. A woman came down the aisle to check everyone’s tickets, and then when I turned again to look out of the window, there was a tiny police van pulled up next to the bus with my two cop friends stood next to it. They didn’t acknowledge me, but as the bus pulled out I looked back and saw them still stood there, watching my departure from Choni. Interlude in Xining The bus from Choni to Lanzhou went through unexpectedly marvellous scenery. I’d thought it would go back the same way as I had come - on the good but boring road via Hezuo. However, I found that instead, the bus took a more direct but uncomfortable route northwards back to Lanzhou over some dirt roads that went over some high passes, into spectacular limestone gorges and also through some interesting Hui Muslim towns. The first stop was in another grotty small town, known simply as “New Town” and which seemed to be predominantly Muslim. After that the tarmac road deteriorated into a rutted dirt track and the bus trundled along for mile after mile until it went over a high pass and 199 into a limestone gorge similar in appearance to the countryside around Muli in Sichuan. This was the Lotus Mountain (Lianhu Shan) district, and it culminated in a small town called Yeliguan, which was surrounded by steep sided rock walls. The bus threaded along a narrow gorge from here, but I noticed that a tunnel was being bored through the mountain to improve access from Lanzhou to this town, which appeared to be being groomed as a tourism centre. Emerging from the gorge, we rolled out into a flatter landscape dotted with small Muslim settlements, each with its own distinctive mosque. These Chinese-style mosques all had triple golden crescents jutting from their roofs. It was a straightforward drive back to Lanzhou from here - delayed only by a busy market clogging the road in one of the Muslim towns near Kangle. Back in Lanzhou, I found the place quite overwhelming. It was noisy, pushy, crowded and very rough around the edges - quite unlike the more sophisticated and flashy cities of eastern China. Again, the Hui Muslim presence was very marked, and sometimes even made me forget I was in China. I checked into another grubby hotel near the station and bought a soft seat ticket to Xining for the next day. Xining was a revelation after Lanzhou. Where Lanzhou was oppressive and congested, Xining was light and open. The air felt fresher and everything seemed quite green and new. In fact, it almost had the air of a midwestern US town - this was the Chinese frontier and the Han Chinese here had all moved from the east. The buildings were modern and not very Chinese, and the roads were wide and the traffic flowed freely - quite unlike the congestion and confusion of Lanzhou. I was a bit worried when the train whizzed through the city centre without stopping and continued into the no-man’s land of the western suburbs. Then it was announced that the train would be terminating at Xining West station because the central station was being rebuilt. It had only taken a couple of hours or so to make the journey from Lanzhou. Our train pulled in next to a long distance train that was marked as “Shanghai to Lhasa”. The very idea made my mind boggle. Could Joseph Rock and his contemporaries ever have imagined there would ever be a rail link between Shanghai, the urbane “Paris of the Orient” on the Pacific, and the remote Lhasa, ‘forbidden city” on the roof of the world in the Himalayas? I noted that the carriage opposite me was a hard seat. Who would ride a hard seat from Shanghai to Lhasa - and how long would that take? Everything about Xining seemed to be positive. The people seemed open, friendly and down to earth. I had an honest taxi driver take me to the city centre, and I checked in to the wonderful Lete Hostel, situated on the 15th floor of a high rise just south of the town centre. The hostel was run very efficiently and affordably by a young Chinese woman who had worked in hotels in Switzerland. Something of the Swiss approach must have rubbed off - the hotel was clean and well organised and had a neat little bar-cafe where you could eat her home made pizza and drink a Qingdao beer for only 40 kuai. It was odd to be back among other laowai again. Even more odd was the fact that they all had laptops or iPads and spent all their time gazing at them and tapping on them. This is the “new normal” for travellers in the digital age, but it made it hard to start conversations and chat. When I did get talking to a few other guests, it appeared that most people at the hostel were using Xining as a staging post to get to Lhasa on the train. When I mentioned I was heading down to Amnye Machen nobody had ever heard of it. 200 I was worried about whether Ragya monastery would be another too-sensitive “closed to foreigners” area like Choni, but had no problem buying a bus ticket to nearby Dawu - apart from a bit of a jostle with the usual would-be queue jumpers. With a couple of days to kill before my departure for Ragya, I took a stroll around the “Muslim quarter” of Xining around the grand mosque. It was an interesting area with varying degrees of adherence to Islamic dress codes. Some young girls wore just a loose headscarf with flashy Chinese clothes, while others wore a veil that covered their mouth and a full-length skirt that went right down to the ground. It was interesting to see that Muslim women dressing this way also attracted stares of bemusement and puzzlement from Han Chinese as well. And in this way I spent a whole afternoon just mooching round the area near the mosque, people watching, perusing the market and stuffing my face at one of the many great Qingzhen (Muslim) restaurants there. Kumbum (Taersi) monastery Joseph Rock made a visit to Kumbum monastery in September 1925 but it doesn’t rate much of a mention in any of his articles in the National Geographic. It’s surprising because Kumbum was then one of the most important Gelugpa monasteries in the Tibetan-speaking world. Perhaps it didn’t rate a mention because it is so close to ‘civilisation’ in the form of Xining (then known as Sining) the provincial capital of Qinghai. Kumbum was often the home of the Panchen Lama - then as now the great political (and more pro-Chinese) rival to the Dalai Lama. However, another American adventurer who visited Kumbum a fw years before Rock had something interesting to say about it. Fred Schroder was a Klondike fortune-seeker turned China trader. He plied camel caravans between Mongolia and north- western China in the early years of the 20th century, and wrote a little of his experiences in a book China Caravans. He describes a visit to Kumbum, which then stood on the border of Han and Tibetan influence (“wehere the blue-clothed Chinese disappeared and we began to see nomads ressed in sheepskins”). Schroder notes that Kumbum was a scared place for thousands of pilgrims because it was the birthplace of Buddhism’s Martin Luther - the Tsong Khapa, who purified Lamaism and rid it of corruption in the sixteeth century. At that time Kumbum was already a large and self sustaining community with thousands of monks who both prayed and worked as traders, labourers, policemen, doctors and stable hands. Such was the fame of Kumbum that even in the pre-WW1 era there were professional tour guides, one of whom gave Schroder the basic tour. After seeing the many temples, colleges of botany and medicine and the impressive Kumbum library of ancient texts, Schroder also saw Kumbum’s famous “Tree of Faces”. This was a tree said to have sprung from the hair (or blood, depending on who you believe) of Tsong Khapa, and which had leaves which bore likenesses of Tibetan deities. The branches and bark of the tree were also said to resemble images of Gods and prayers such as the characters Om Mani Padme Hum. In fact, the name Kumbum is said to come from the phrase “hundred thousand images”. If you started at the tree for long enough you would begin to see images of relatives you would meet in the coming year – a very popular thing for family and clan-oriented Tibetans. 201 During his stay at Kumbum, Schroder surreptitiously tested the bona fides of the gold roofing of the temples, dropping nitric acid on to it and finding it to be the real thing. He also claims to have popularised the stetson hat among Tibetans, after the resident Tashi Lama took a liking to his “centre crush” Canadian Mountie hat. And like Rock, he found that the lamasery had a special storeroom for relics and curiosities, containing an odd collections of old bones, coins, bowls and some ancient rapiers that could have dated form the time of Marco Polo. There is still a sacred tree compound at Kumbum, but whether it is the original “tree of Faces” I could not ascertain. Sadly, Kumbum now seems to be more of a museum piece than a real spiritual centre of Tibetan Buddhism. The lamasery is now also virtually a suburb of Xining - you can catch a local bus from just near the youth hostel and it takes only about half an hour to get there. I spent a pleasant morning visiting Kumbum, and even in May it was quite busy with tourists. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant place, and had a fair number of genuine Tibetan pilgrims doing a circuit of the monastery, prostrating themselves all the way. One of the odd things about Kumbum monastery is that it is situated in the middle of what seems to be a predominantly Muslim town. When you get off the bus and walk the half a mile up to the monastery, most of the people you see are Hui Muslims. To Amnye Machen – or not Joseph Rock starts off his article about his 1926 expedition to the ‘mountains of mystery’ the Amnye Machen peaks - with the now familiar litany of outlandish and colourful claims. It is a remote and unexplored region, he writes, forgotten by time and peopled by warlike and nomadic Tibetan bandit tribes who know nothing of the outside world. An arduous journey across bleak grasslands is needed to reach this unknown mountain, which he says is 28,000 feet high - “almost as high as Everest” (it is actually only about 25,000 feet in height). His article continues in this vein for several pages, perhaps to make up for the fact that he achieved so little. His generously-funded and extravagantly mounted expedition did not get anywhere near the mountain, despite two years of trying. After floundering about in the gorges and canyons of the upper reaches of the Yellow valley, Rock only managed to get a glimpse of the Amnye Machen range from a distant mountain pass 30 miles away. This seems especially odd to the modern reader as these days the mountain is easily accessible and can be circumambulated in a few days by backpackers. The terrain in the immediate vicinity of the mountain is bleak but poses no particular deterrent to the competent and prepared traveller. So why did Rock spend so long faffing around in the labyrinths of the Yellow river gorges - especially (as he admits himself) the area is so disappointing from a plant collector’s point of view? Perhaps it is easy with the benefit of hindsight and the images of Google Earth at one’s fingertips, to forget how difficult it must have been to approach Amnye Machen in the 1920s. The area had been visited earlier by several western and Russian explorers, but it was still very much an unknown region. The main barrier to any curious outsider must have been the hostile Ngolok tribes who lived in the area and who violently repelled any intrusions by outsiders. And yet Rock had already dealt with a similar situation when trying to visit his socalled “Holy Mountains of the Outlaws”, the Konkaling mountains near Muli. This time 202 however, the scale of the country was much greater, and his friendship with the wily Prince of Choni was of little use because the prince held no influence over the distant Ngoloks in another province. Nevertheless, Rock took the advice of the Choni prince, who told him that the best way to approach the Amnye Machen mountain would be via the small monastery of Ragya (or ‘Radja’ as Rock calls it) on the upper reaches of the Yellow river. With a commission and a large cheque from the Arnold Aboretum to conduct a comprehensive plant hunting expedition in the botanical ‘virgin territory’ of Amnye Machen, Rock set off in the spring of 1926. He didn’t travel lightly. In addition to his 12 Naxi helpers, he had 34 mules and 60 yaks carrying five months of supplies. As if this wasn’t enough, he also hired a mob of surly and cantankerous local Tibetan horsemen, known as ‘Sokwo Arik’ to act as a bodyguard on his journey across the grasslands from Labrang to Ragya. This was also one of the few trips on which Rock took along another westerner. Although he doesn’t mention him by name, Rock brought along the American missionary William Simpson “dressed in Tibetan garb”, to act as a Tibetan translator. As already mentioned, Simpson had been working as a missionary in the Labrang area, but Rock soon found he disliked the missionary’s “do gooder” ways and lack of firmness with the natives. Their journey from Labrang to Ragya took them westwards over bleak and boggy grasslands, peopled only by a few itinerant nomads living in black yak hair tents. Rock’s photographs portray the Tibetan nomads as wild and magnificent people, but in his writings he dismisses them as ignorant, superstitious and filthy. On one occasion he looked on with disgust as an old woman pulled out a dirty bowl for him from on top of a heap of dung, wiped it with her filthy fingers and greasy clothes and then filled it with a hunk of yak butter that had the imprints of many other soiled fingernails scraped into it. Rock made his excuses to leave by saying that he had to take photographs outside. According to Rock, this was a land that time had passed by - the local people had never seen a car or could conceive of a train. They had no concept of electricity or modern appliances and believed the world was flat. Things had not changed since the time of Marco Polo, he wrote. He played them records by Caruso and Dame Nellie Melba and they marvelled at the music produced by the “Urussu” (Russian) - their local word for all foreigners. The landscape they travelled across was ‘dreary’ and disappointing, not just to the eye but also from a botanical perspective. So instead of plants, Rock noted the many types of wildlife in the region - marmots and pheasants, blue sheep and rabbits. There were tame birds that had never learned to be afraid of man. But there were also wolves, following the expedition caravan at a safe distance and watching them from the ridgelines. From Labrang they passed through the Sang Chu valley, still littered with the bones of Tibetans slaughtered in a recent battle with the Muslims. Traversing grasslands dotted with the black tents of nomads, they crossed a 13,000 foot high pass - in a blizzard in June - to descend towards the Yellow River. The ‘unruly’ Sokwo bodyguard were then paid off to return to Labrang, “without a word of farewell or the slightest sign of interest in me”. It is here that Rock makes another “first white man” claim - this time, to be the first to explore the steep canyons of gorges of the Yellow River, which he says are at least 3000 feet deep. 203 “It gave me a peculiar feeling in this lonely wilderness to be the first to look upon this mighty river flowing through hitherto unknown gorges,” he writes. After exploring several sheer-sided tributary valleys of the Yellow river and killing a pair of eagles (“now in the museum at Harvard”), Rock made a brief stop at a monastery called Dzangar, before continuing upriver to Ragya monastery. Once again he was both enthralled and disgusted by the extremes of a remote and secluded community. “Few in the outside world know that Radja Gompa exists ...Life here is unbelievably crude ...” One of the strange things he encountered at Ragya was a room room full of clocks and timepieces collected by the Abbott of the monastery. It reads like a scene from a movie. “From floor to ceiling, clocks and watches of every description and size were ticking away, each keeping its own time regardless of the actual hour. Clocks struck at various intervals, some in unison, others in quick succession.” Rock added to the collection with the gift of a watch. After the long journey, Joseph Rock settled in to quarters at the Ragya monastery, and prepared for the next phase of the expedition - the approach to Amnye Machen though Ngolok territory. However, the officials of the monastery warned him against taking his expedition into Ngolok territory, saying the tribes would probably murder them. If he was to go, he must make a quick dash on horseback, before the Ngoloks knew of his presence, they advised. Rock demurred and asked the lamas to send an envoy with requests to visit - and accompanied with generous gifts for the Ngolok chiefs. He had not come all this way for a brief visit, and he wanted to spend an extended period collecting plants and viewing the mountain. While waiting for a reply from the Ngolok, he explored the area around the monastery - photographing the stupendous cliffs under which it sat, and the tiny hermit residences on the hillside, where lamas lived on nothing but nettle soup. He observed the daily lives of the lamas and again was scornful of their superstitious and feudal ways. One lama was observed ‘printing’ Buddha images on the surface of the Yellow river by slapping a board onto the water carved with a sacred image. “He occupied himself in this way for hours,” Rock observes drily. Rock also recounts cynically how the Living Buddhas always seemed to be found among the offspring of families of high lamas and officials - how convenient! To Raja Gompa from Xining After my run-in with the cops at Choni I didn’t rate my chances of getting to Ragya monastery because of its previous history of Tibetan troubles. After all, Choni was a quiet and obscure backwater, far away from the turmoil of Sichuan and Qinghai. Ragya, on the other hand, had already had ‘uprisings’ by local Tibetans. According to reports in the free Tibetan media, in 2009 a riot had developed in Ragya after a Tibetan flag was displayed at the monastery. Police arrested and beat a monk they suspected of hiding the flag, and the monk reportedly drowned while trying to escape by swimming the Yellow river. This prompted hundreds of locals to surround and stone the police station at Ragya, leading to scores of other arrests. 204 So I wasn’t too hopeful of getting there - and even if I did manage to get a bus ticket, I feared being kicked out of town, just as had happened in Choni. Well nothing ventured, nothing won, so I tried my luck at the chaotic ticket hall at Xining coach station. The bus station was a throw-back to the old China of the 1990s - a dark hall containing long lines of unwashed nongmin all pushing and shoving towards ticket selling windows clutching their wads of renminbi. On my first attempt it took me half an hour to reach the tiny window, only to be told to go to Window Number 7, where the line was even longer and wilder. I braced myself and after another tedious and tense wait, fending off would-be pushers-in, I got to the window and was able to buy a ticket to Dawu, the nearest major town to Ragya. The only problem was that the ticket was for three days later - a Saturday. And the bus departed at 11.30 am, rather than the usual sparrow-fart crack of dawn departure time. The woman told me it took only seven hours to Dawu, but that seemed optimistic given my experience of the roads so far in this part of the world. Anyway, I had three days to kill and to mull this over. Three days. I nearly went mad. There’s only so much you can do in a provincial Chinese city like Xining. Visit the museum, wander round the market, visit some parks and try a few day excursions. By the third day I was thoroughly bored of Xining and the Lete hostel. As I’ve said already, this hostel was a pleasant and well run place, but it had the usual quota of creepy and cringeworthy westerners. There was an older English gent who seemed to spend every day sat in the common room/bar tapping away at his laptop and striking up conversation with any strangers he was able to make eye contact with. Nothing wrong with that, but he was a bore who loved the sound of his own voice, spouting the usual bar-room reactionary world view. He proclaimed that he had been able to retire from his work in the “financial sector” and was now able to travel at leisure. Like a lot of expats, he had only bad things to say about his home country and how it had gone to the dogs. Travelers who he buttonholed would initially gave him the benefit of the doubt and a sympathetic ear, but soon acquired a glazed look and made their excuses to leave. The old bore would then start to regale the Chinese girls working behind the bar with the same stories and conspiracy theories, and they would nod politely but awkwardly, barely understanding a word of what he said. The sad thing was that I felt the same way myself. I’d hardly spoken any English during my week on the road and I craved conversation. And yet I did not want to end up like the bore, so I just sipped my beer and read my new copy of 1984, purchased at Xining’s Xinhua bookstore. I found it hard to cope with nobody to talk to. Going a whole day without using your voice is odd - and after three or four days I started to think I was losing my grip on reality. I started singing to myself, just to hear English words. Then I started talking to myself and having conversations with imaginary companions. If I was feeling this desperate for company after just a week, how did Joseph Rock manage for months on end in the wilderness with just his Naxi ‘boy’ assistants for company? Did he not care for companionship and conversation? No wonder he was so cranky. Saturday 5th May found me at the Xining bus station, looking for the coach to Dawu. I was expecting the usual long distance coach and was surprised to be ushered towards a minibus already bursting with Tibetans and their luggage. But they were a friendly and cheerful lot 205 and I managed to squeeze onto the last seat near the door, and soon we were crawling through the gridlocked traffic and road of Xining. I found myself sat next to a couple of Tibetan teenage girls, the one nearest me having angelic looks and pouty lips. However, as soon as we got going she started to play rap and hi-energy music on tinny speakers plugged into her mobile phone. And so as the bus strained over the first mountain range and into a barren eroded loess valley, my attention was distracted by an LL Cool J song that seemed to consist of the phrase “Shut the F### Up” repeated ad nauseum. The landscape around the first town of Guide (pronounced Gwee-duh) was a weird arrangement of serrated and eroded red soil mounds and ridges, with not a blade of grass in sight. However, in the town itself, and along the banks of the Yellow River, the land was irrigated and marked by its vivid green grass and trees. We continued south and up onto a bleak grassland plateau. This was where the Tibetan nomads had once roamed, but now they had been corralled by the Chinese government into grim settlements of identical small houses arranged in neat rows. The Tibetan nomad now used a motorbike instead of a horse, and was confined to the road festooned with powerlines and mobile phone towers, with the occasional dirt track leading to more remote settlements. There was little to see out of the window, and I soon settled into a bored stupor. Then, as our bus pulled up and over another bleak grassland pass I was surprised to see a late model black Range Rover abandoned by the side of the road, with a goat chewing grass next to it. As we passed it saw that the axle was bent and one of the front wheels had been twisted at an unusual angle, rendering it undriveable. Why abandon such an expensive car out here? Was it because no breakdown truck would venture this far into the wilderness? The road was smooth and we made good progress. I dozed off for a while, and woke up at a dogleg in the road where it turns 90 degrees to the west. This was a feature that I had seen on Google Earth when planing the trip and it was surreal to now find myself ‘in’ Google Earth, or rather the real equivalent. The road ascended three more undulating passes, each higher than the last, before we started a long and twisting descent towards the Yellow River and Lajia. At this point I should have been in a state of wonderment and excited anticipation. I was about to reach my much sought-after destination. But the Tibetan girl next to me was still playing her irritating tinny gym music and someone else at the back of the bus was playing jaunty Tibetan disco-style karaoke music at the same time. I was fed up and just wanted to get off the bus. We passed through a dramatic red canyon and then suddenly emerged onto the main street of a small Tibetan frontier town of Hebei (‘North of River’). The town seemed busy - perhaps because of all the construction activity related to the building of the Maerdang hydro dam and power station, which was mentioned on a big propaganda poster just outside the town. Downhill again, I readied myself for getting off at Lajia. I hadn’t told the driver about getting off here until the last rest stop, because I didn’t want to risk being refused boarding for the bus or getting kicked off at the nearest PSB station - but he only seemed bemused by my request. 206 And then suddenly we were there. I recognised the huge distinctive cliff face, below which were clustered many monastery buildings. But Lajia had sprawled since Rock’s time, and there were now many more modern buildings and streets on both sides of the river. There seemed to be a festival or fair on in town - the road was clogged with cars, vans and motorbikes, and there were crowds of festive-looking Tibetans and monks milling about the roadside. As we hit this gridlock, the driver signalled me to get off. I hauled my bag onto my back and jumped out of the open door, right in front of a policeman. My heart sank and I expected a quick rebuke and apprehension, but he just looked right through me. Not interested! Before he had any chance to think further, I legged it down the road through the crowds, towards the bridge. According to my guidebook there was only one guesthouse in town and I was worried that with all the Tibetan festival visitors it would be booked out, especially this late in the day. And sure enough it was. The manager of the Muslim guesthouse near the bridge just waved me away. I sauntered over the bridge in a desperate, pessimistic mood and walked into the ‘new’ part of town, and was fortunate to find a place called the Rujia Guesthouse that took me in with no qualms. The place was overseen by a fey teenage kid with a camp vibe and bizarre stuck up hairstyle, who just shrugged and said ‘dunno’ when I asked him why there were so many people in town. The hotel was right next to the Yellow River and by the time I had unpacked my bag and had something to eat it was dark and did not see any point in going up to the monastery. Instead I sat in my room, trying to read 1984 and dreading the prospect of a knock on the door from the local PSB. They never came. I was up bright and early on Sunday, eating one of those Greek-style yoghurts that are so popular in Qinghai, and swilling it down with a cup of tea made with the kettle in the room. It was only just light and still something of a gloomy dawn when I set off back up the road to go see the Ragya monastery. As I got closer to the river I couldn’t help grinning at the sight of the towering cliffs, appearing just like they were in Joseph Rock’s photos. However, intruding into the view in the 21st century was a newly built petrol station, of the appropriately named U-Smile franchise. With no other shop open so early in the morning I wandered in to buy a drink. The layout was the same as petrol stations the world over. A couple of fridges containing drinks and ice creams and a few shelves of snacks, motor accessories, magazines and maps. The barcode scanner beeped as the sleepy assistant scanned my Ice Lemon Tea and I headed back out into the vision from the past. It was still only 7.30 in the morning and there was nobody else about except for a lone Tibetan woman scurrying up from behind me. She was wearing the usual long skirt and chunky jacket, along with some agate bead necklaces, a scarf wrapped around her face as a mask against dust, and a bonny sun hat. She overtook me as I sauntered over the bridge, and as she passed me she turned around and said a cheery “Hello! Good Morning!” I was taken aback. I had hardly spoken any English in the last week and now I was being hailed in fluent English by a wild looking woman in the middle of nowhere. I muttered a surprised “Good morning” in return, and the Tibetan woman asked in faintlyaccented English if I wanted to see the monastery. When I said yes, she bade me follow her and said: “I am going there also.” Then I recognised the accent - Indian. The woman 207 explained that she had spent several years in a Tibetan community near Dharamsala, but she had now returned to live in “Golog” as she called this part of the world. Without saying anything else, she led me into the monastery complex and ushered me though a doorway, shielded by a heavy canvas curtain. It was one of the main prayer halls and inside there were about 30-40 monks all sat in rows and chanting away. They looked up in surprise at my arrival, and started nudging each other and gesturing at me. The chanting continued, although it seemed to miss a beat. The Tibetan woman smiled and then disappeared through another dark doorway. I hung around in the prayer hall for a while, trying to take a few discreet photos with my Rolleiflex without a flash. There was a whole row of candles down one wall, which seemed like a major fire hazard given that the whole building was made of wood! The chanting was overseen by a senior monk, who periodically put on his yellow “cock’s comb” lama hat and blew on a conch shell, to the accompaniment of a drum and some cymbals. Then after about half an hour some young monks emerged with kettles full of butter tea, and they scampered around pouring the thick tea into the bowls of the monks sitting in rows. I was surprised to see a large image of the Dalai Lama on display, given his pariah status with the PRC government as a separatist. Perhaps Ragya was just too remote for the authorities to pay much attention. After an hour or so I headed back outside and found there were more Tibetan visitors milling about the place. Many of them were circumambulating the prayer hall or other temples within the complex. I ascended to the highest temple, which many Tibetans were circling, and I looked beyond, higher up the hill, to see if there was a way up to the summit of the crag. All I could see was another clutch of prayer flags and a strip of white material beneath the crags. I set off up the hill, along a faint track, and after much huffing and puffing at this altitude, I reached the “white line” which turned out to be a plastic water pipe. I followed it around to the right as it wended higher up the hill. The track petered out and the terrain became more difficult, covered with thick spiky bushes as I passed directly under the crag. There didn’t seem to be any obvious way up to the summit, and the water pipe disappeared into a narrow defile between two almost vertical rock faces. I squeezed through and followed a little further up this mini-canyon but the terrain soon became impassable - I had reached a dead end. I turned back and skirted round to the right even more, heading up a gentle grass slope riven with small gullies created by erosion. As I rose higher I attained a grand view of the side of the Ragya crag, and I could see this was one of the sites from which Rock had taken a photo of a group of tents. Now the landscape was devoid of any tents - just a couple of Tibetans further down foraging for the lucrative congcao fungal caterpillar. Atop the crags I could just make out a nest of prayer flags - but how to get up there? The sides were far too steep and covered with brambles. How had Rock managed to get to the top? There must be a path somewhere. Just as I was wondering about this I sensed I was being watched. I looked up and there on the skyline in the distance above me was a man in a suit stood gazing down at me. For an instant I jokingly thought it was the ghost of Joseph Rock, then whoever it was turned around and walked away behind the ridge, out of sight. 208 I started up the hillside to where the figure had been - following a faint path up to a notch in the ridge. When I got there some ten minutes later, there was nobody around, but I could see a long roundabout way that might lead up to the top of the crag. I skirted the side of the hill, following the contour line and into another new valley. Again as I got higher the sides became steeper until near the top the track became very exposed and the sides of the hill gave way to almost vertical stone faces. I picked my way carefully up the trail to yet another ridge - which proved to be another false summit and led to yet another ridge. After much more scrambling I finally topped out on a grassy platform amid a maze of ridges and steep slopes. I was level with the summit of the crags now, but it seemed even further away than ever, and I was separated from it by several huge gullies. This wasn’t the way to the top. However, I had great views over the surrounding hills. This hillside was the place where Joseph Rock had been brought by the lamas of Radja to celebrate the feast of Amnye Machen. They set up tents, picnicked on butter tea “the usual unpalatable Tibetan delicacies” and burnt juniper twigs on a makeshift altar as an offering. “After final prayers, the Buddha left riding a beautiful horse with its saddlecloth and trappings of gold brocade and sheltered by a big gilded umbrella. When he was safely out of site the lamas played hilarious games and frolicked to their heart’s content in a very childish manner...” Rock wrote. No such splendour or fun and games for me. Unable to reach the crag summit, I reluctantly turned around and shimmied my way cautiously down the slopes, feeling rather scared of the steep drops on either side, and taking great care with every foothold and handhold above the rock walls. Back down at the first ridge, I was startled by a flock of sheep that came around the hillside. And there with them was the man in the suit I had seen earlier - a Tibetan shepherd. Not the ghost of Joseph Rock after all. When I finally got back to the monastery, it was thronging with visitors - whole Tibetan families on a day out. Some were doing circuits of the buildings while others queued up to enter one particular room, which contained a sacred circle or mandala. After queueing up myself for fifteen minutes I managed to get in to see the mandala. I’d expected a pious atmosphere of reverence and solemnity but all the Tibetans in the room were coo-ing, smiling and taking photos of it, as if it was a rock star. I started to take a picture myself, when suddenly the room went quiet and the temperature seemed to suddenly drop a few degrees. I turned around to see an old and very serious looking monk, who everyone else was deferring to. He gave me a puzzled, disapproving look, wrinkled his brow and then walked out again. Not sure what it was all about - very odd! Outside, there were quite a few monks about now - their chanting duties over for the time being. One was exceedingly tall and looked like the James Bond villain Jaws. He told me he was an ethnic Mongolian monk and was well over two metres tall. I was surprised by the number of monks who came up to me and welcomed me in English and asked if they could be of any help. This level of English language ability was quite 209 extraordinary for China. Then one of them explained that there was a local school that had been set up independently to teach Tibetan and English. They had certainly done a good job, but I had to wonder how long this would last in the current environment of control in Tibetan areas of China. I later read several news items about similar independent schools in Qinghai and Sichuan being shut down by authorities. For the time being, though, Radja was a pleasant and friendly place. It was not on the tourist map and so people were open and natural. On this Sunday afternoon there was almost a festive air, as families and friends milled around, chatting and catching up with each other. A few people roped me into have photos taken with them, while others just patted me on the back in a comradely way, as if to congratulate me for making it to Radja. It was all quite a contrast to the image of Radja painted by Joseph Rock in 1923. As he bided his time here waiting for an opportunity to evade the Ngolok tribes and visit Amnye Machen, he was scathing of the local monks for their filthiness and ignorance. “Few in the outside world know that Radja Gompa exists. Life here is unbelievably crude ...” he wrote. He noted the many hermit monks who lived in tiny chambers on the hillside below the crags - structures that were still there. He also bemoaned how the water supply had to be brought up to the monastery from the Yellow River in buckets. Even after being filtered it was still as thick as pea soup, he observed. While waiting for the head lama to arrange passage through hostile Ngolok territory, Rock stayed in the Radja area for more than a month, making side trips into the Dakhso canyon of the Yellow River and an 18-day trip northwest to the Jupar mountains. He then grew impatient and threatened the Radja lamas that he would seek help instead from the Muslims instead. Perhaps this was why the monks sent him on a wild goose chase through the canyons of the Yellow River. They said he could make a quick dash to the mountain from the camp of the nearby Dawu clan. Rock concurred, and took only horses and a minimum of supplies to ensure they could ensure a highly mobile party. They would need to be quick to escape the hostile Ngoloks, he was told. “I had come to the conclusion that to work at Amnye Machen peacefully would be out of the question. It is feasible to get there, but to stay and work is another story. It would mean either keeping a large well-armed party for one’s protection or else depending on the friendly co-operation of all the Ngoloks.” He did not get the friendly co-operation of the Ngoloks, and was told bluntly by a local relative of one Ngolok chief that the Ngoloks were expecting him and planned to murder him if he intruded on their territory. Rock decided to chance his hand by skirting the edges of Ngolok territory on a quick trip escorted by Gomba, the chief of of another local Tibetan tribe, the Jazza clan. From Radja monastery they crossed to the west side of the Yellow river and headed for a small peak called Amnyi Druggu, from where he hope to be able to see and photograph what Rock still suspected and hoped would be the highest mountain peak in the world, Amnyi Machen. Rock found that in terms of flora and fauna, the western side of the river was quite different to the barren eastern grasslands. 210 He found the region to be “one great zoological garden” abundant in blue sheep, deer and wapiti, as well as bird life - much of which he shot and despatched as samples back to the museums of Washington DC. And in the region of another friendly tribe, the Yonzhi, Rock at last found many flowers - blue poppies, primulas and forests of junipers. After several day’s journey, they eventually ascended Amnyi Druggu, and Rock got his long awaited view of Amnye Machen. However, he says little of his first glimpse of the mountain, saving his praise for a better viewing he obtained through his telescope from a peak in the nearby Tarang valley a few days later. “I shouted for joy as I beheld the majestic peaks of one of the grandest mountain ranges of all Asia,” he effused. And still he believed the mountain to be as high as Everest. “We stood at an elevation of nearly 16,000 feet, yet in the distance rose still higher peaks yet another 12,000 feet of snow and ice!” He was completely wrong. Rock says that without a theodolite he could not measure the exact height of Amnye Machen, and yet he still concluded it was higher than 28,000 feet (its true height is 20,610 feet). His wild overestimate was to fuel speculation for decades to come about whether Amnye Machen was a contender for the highest mountain in the world. During WW2 some American freighter pilots flying the Hump route into China claimed that they had been blown off course near Amnye Machen and estimated its height to be 30,000 feet. This later proved to be a hoax. But Rock was never taken to task for his surveying gaffes. He left the mountain with the usual sentimental odes of triumph and romantic lament: “With difficulty I tore myself from that sublime view - a view of the eastern massif of the mountain from the west of the Yellow River which no other foreigners had ever had. I remained for some time alone on that isolated summit, lost in reverie and easily comprehending why the Tibetans should worship these snowy peaks as emblems of purity.” He returned to Radja and after some extended wandering to the north to visit Lake Koko Nor, he eventually made his way back to Choni. looking back on his trip, he acknowledged that it had been botanically disappointing - and he blamed this on the high altitude and yearround cold climate that did not support plants or trees. My own return from Radja more than 80 year later was a lot easier and rather mundane. After another night at the Rujia Guesthouse I hopped on an empty coach that made the return journey on the smooth highway all the way back to modern Xining in a single day. As we crossed over the high pass above Radja I looked back and saw the snow peaks of the Amnye Machen range in the distance. Ho hum. Give me the Yading peaks or Minya Konka anyday. Postscript: Joseph Rock and the ‘real’ Shangri La Imagine an earthly paradise high in the mountains where men and women live amid spectacular scenery and never grow old. 211 In this utopian setting some wise monks safeguard the finest aspects of the world's culture while renouncing its violence and materialism. This is the Shangri-La that writer James Hilton conceived in his novel "Lost Horizon," in 1933. At that time, he was writing for a world that had just gone through the senseless slaughter of World War I and was experiencing economic collapse and mass unemployment following the Wall Street crash of 1929. It was also a time of the emerging dictators and rising militarism of Hitler and Mussolini, with the prospect of an even greater war on the horizon. No wonder audiences took so readily to an escapist fantasy about a lost world of peace, civilisation and beauty. "Lost Horizon" became an instant bestseller and was turned into a successful movie by the legendary director Frank Capra. The appeal of Shangri-La was so strong that even the US president, Roosevelt, used the name for his country retreat, subsequently renamed Camp David. Since then the appeal of Shangri-La has endured. There is now a hotel chain of the same name, the movie has been remade and the book remains in print. In the last decade there has also been a growing interest in tracking down the "real" ShangriLa. Citing extracts from Hilton's book, some areas of China, such as the scenic town of Lijiang, in Southwest China's Yunnan Province, now claim they were the inspiration for the ShangriLa. The neighbouring county of Zhongdian in Yunnan has gone so far as to officially rename itself as Xianggelila (Shangri-La). But Hilton is vague about the actual location of his Shangri-La. In his book, the protagonist Hugh Conway and his companions are flying from somewhere in India when a mysterious Mongolian pilot hijacks their plane. Instead of flying to Peshawar, the pilot flies "in the wrong direction" to somewhere in the Himalayas, where the plane crash-lands in the mountains, presumably somewhere in or near Tibet. Hilton then describes how his characters are taken to a fertile valley, cut off from the outside world by high mountains, and with what appears to be a lamasery that practises a mixture of Lamaism and Christianity. His valley of Shangri-La is dominated by a mountain peak, Karakal. These names already give some clues as to the inspiration for Shangri-La. Many have already suggested that the name is a variation on Shambala, an earthly paradise mentioned in early Buddhist writings from India. And Karakal may be a place on Karakoram, the mountainous eastern Himalayan area that was just opening up to western explorers in the 1930s. 212 In the late 1920s and early 1930s Tibet was still an almost mythical place for most Westerners. Very few people had ever visited the "roof of the world," and its borders with India and Nepal were only just being explored by the expeditions trying to conquer Mount Qomolongma. Many people still believed that Tibetan lamas had supernatural powers, could levitate and read the minds of others or act as oracles to predict the future. Was it so far fetched to believe that a hidden valley in this area might hold a group of such people who could live to the age of 200? However, for the main source of inspiration for Shangri-la, we should turn to the writings of the Austrian-American explorer, Joseph Rock. At the time when Hilton was writing "Lost Horizon," this eccentric and scholarly botanist had just published a series of fantastic accounts of his travels in Southwest China, in the National Geographic magazine published in the United States. Using a village outside Lijiang as his base, Rock made lengthy expeditions to far-flung corners of Yunnan and Sichuan, spending months at a time collecting plants, taking photographs, map making and recording the lifestyles of the many different ethnic minorities living in these remote highlands. His accounts of his travels made him a minor celebrity in the West, and Hilton is said to have based his writing of "Lost Horizon" on Joseph Rock's articles. Take the sacred mountain of Karakal, for example. In "Lost Horizon," Hilton describes it in terms similar to those used by Joseph Rock for his first sight of the Konkaling mountain of Jambeyang, now part of the Yading National Nature Reserve northeast of Zhongdian in Sichuan Province. Hilton wrote: "There, soaring into the gap, and magnificent in the full shimmer of moonlight, appeared what he took to be the loveliest mountain on earth (Karakal). It was an almost perfect cone of snow, simple in outline as if a child had drawn it. It was so radiant, so serenely poised, that he wondered for a moment if it were real at all.” And Rock described: "In a cloudless sky before me rose the peerless pyramid of Jambeyang, the finest mountain my eyes ever beheld. The sky was greenish black. The snowy pyramid was grey, but the apexes of both it and Shenrezig suddenly turned a golden yellow as the sunrise kissed them." Interestingly, in his account of the Konkaling area Joseph Rock also mentions a remote monastery that is cut off from the outside world. However, the reason had less to do with its physical isolation than the local bandits, who despite being pious worshippers at the temple would murder anyone who dared set foot on their territory. 213 And in contrast to the ageless inhabitants of Hilton's Shangri-La, Joseph Rock described the local people as looking old before their time. A nun who he presumed to be in her 70s was actually only in her 40s. Perhaps Hilton reversed this observation to make a 200-year old monk appear to look 70? So is Yading the real Shangri-La? Possibly, it is physically similar but not the utopia that Hilton described. Other mountains have also been suggested as the model for Karakal, including the now famous Mt Kailash in the western part of Tibet Autonomous Region. Another possibility is Mount Kawakarpo, whose name may have inspired that of Karakal. This mountain in northwest Yunnan is now also known as Meili Snow Mountain, and was also mentioned in one of Joseph Rock's expedition reports. The area around Kawakarpo also contains another essential component of the "Lost Horizon" story: French priests. In Shangri-La, the lamasery is presided over by a high lama who turns out to be a 200-yearold former French cleric, Pere Perrault. This missionary is said to have stumbled across the isolated community and decided to stay because of his fears of a coming catastrophic world war. In his article on Kawakarpo, Joseph Rock describes how he met a French priest in the remote hamlet of Cizhong in Yunnan, below Mount Kawakarpo. In another echo of "Lost Horizon," the real life Pere David settled in the remote mountain village after witnessing the sickening slaughter of World War I. And somewhat like the monks of Shangri-La who ate berries to maintain health and stay young, the French clerics of Cizhong planted grapes and made wine. The vineyard is still there today, and still producing wine! There are many other parallels between Rock's factual descriptions and Hilton's fictional prose. On a journey across the Yalong River canyon in Jiulong County, Sichuan, Rock described the sheer overpowering sense of isolation he felt when travelling through some remote communities: "No outlook in any direction!" he wrote in his National Geographic article of 1929. "Here people live and die without the slightest knowledge of the outside world! How oppressive to be buried alive in these vast canyon systems! Or are they happier for it?" "The scenery hereabouts is overwhelming grand. Probably its like cannot be found elsewhere in the world for centuries it may remain a closed land, save to such privileged few as care to crawl like ants through its canyons of tropical heat and up its glaciers and passes in blinding snowstorms, carrying their food with them..." 214 But for me, the place that sums up the atmosphere, if not the physical appearance of Shangri-La, is Muli, in Sichuan. Rock visited the monastery town of Muli several times in the 1920s and 30s, when it was the de facto capital of an isolated theocratic kingdom. A walled town of Buddhist temples housing about 700 lamas, this community sits high up on the side of the Litang river valley. The surrounding area now Muli County was presided over by a serene hereditary Tibetan regent, who was at that time regarded as both local king and high lama. Rock became good friends with the ruler of Muli, Chote Chaba, and was bemused by the eccentricities of this wily character. In his conversations with Rock, the king admitted knowing little of the outside world. He asked whether he could ride on his horse to Washington DC and believed it might be possible to fly to the moon. The king thought that binoculars could see through mountains, and that thunder was caused by dragons roaring in the clouds. Did Hilton get some inspiration from Rock's description of Muli? Rock found it to be a peaceful place in the midst of the anarchy and banditry that then existed in western China. The king had done deals with neighbouring bandits, allowing them sanctuary and to pass across his territory unmolested in return for refraining from molesting the citizens of Muli. And like Shangri-La, Muli was also a place where you could arrive and never be allowed to leave. Rock described how the king of Muli had a rule that an outsider who stayed in his kingdom for more than a year automatically became a citizen and was no longer allowed to leave the kingdom. The Muli king had also preserved some examples of Western culture that had found their way to Muli. He had a room full of unused photographic equipment, and showed Rock some picture postcards of nursery rhyme scenes, and asked him if there were really animals in the West that could sit at tables and talk. Today, the Muli Monastery is still there, and its atmosphere of isolation persists. There is only one major road that runs through the county from north to south. It is rarely visited by outsiders because there are no major scenic attractions in the form of mountains or lakes. And yet for me, it is still the nearest to Shangri-La in spirit. Not a place where you will live to a ripe old age, nor find a repository of civilization. But with areas like Yading, Deqen and Gongga Mountains now seeing more outside visitors, Muli remains the one place that remains a world apart. 215 So when it comes to the question of where to find the "real" Shangri-La, I can only say that there are many places in China that bear some resemblance to this lost utopia. But the real Shangri-La only ever existed in James Hilton's head. 216