81-year old Living Buddha of Dzangar monastery

81-year old Living Buddha of Dzangar monastery, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Lamas assemble at Choni (Jone), Gansu, 1927

Lamas assemble at Choni (Jone), Gansu, 1927, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Village girl at Choni (Jone), Gansu, 1928

Village girl at Choni (Jone), Gansu, 1928, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Tibetan nomads, Gansu, 1927

Tibetan nomads, Gansu, 1927, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Butter sculptures at Choni, Gansu, 1927

Butter sculptures at Choni, Gansu, 1927, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Tibetan nomads east of Kokonar

Tibetan nomads east of Kokonar, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Nguluko, near Lijiang, Yunnan

Nguluko, near Lijiang, Yunnan, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Butsang Ngolok chief with his wife

Butsang Ngolok chief with his wife, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Lijiang market, 1928

Lijiang market, 1928, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Yi woman in market near Yanyuan, Sichuan

Yi woman in market near Yanyuan, Sichuan, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Yongning monastery, 1928

Yongning monastery, 1928, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Yongning monastery 2004

Yongning monastery 2004, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Spoof TV holiday programme from Muli

Happylee's pics of Gongga Shan/Minya Konka

贡嘎寺 Gongga Shan/Minya Konka, originally uploaded by jiulong.

These are a couple of samples of pics taken by a Chinese guy called "happylee" and posted at the douyouhike forum. You can see all his excellent pics here:

http://www.doyouhike.net/forum/157272,0,0,1.html

Gonga Shan 贡嘎寺

Gonga Shan 贡嘎寺, originally uploaded by jiulong.

More glimpses of Muli monastery ( 四川 木里) and Wachang

Here's some video of the area around Muli monastery. It all looks very green and fertile because it is the middle of the rainy season - August. Usually it is much more bleak and brown than this. The video also shows a bit of the valley around Wachang - the nearby small town where most Muli people live. As you can see, the inhabitants of this so called "Shangri-La" are more interested in mobile phones and motorbikes than in eternal life!

Muli ceremony and lunch

Latest video is some more coverage of the Muli monastery ceremony and me having lunch with the monks there. All from August 2004.

More Muli monastery video 木里大寺

muli front 木里大寺, originally uploaded by jiulong.

This one shows a ceremony taking place at the monastery in August 2004. Includes conch shells!

Arriving at Muli monastery: video

A short clip of the walk around from Wachang village to the monastery at Muli. Taken in August 2003.

Ford trimotor at Lijiang, 1936

Ford trimotor at Lijiang, 1936, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Hired by Joseph Rock to fly from Kunming to see the Yulong Xueshan mountains.

Zhongdian Songzanlin temple

Zhongdian temple, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Zhongdian Songzanlin temple

Zhongdian Songzanlin temple, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Hike to Muli part 3: descent from Gibboh Pass

Muli porter2, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Here is the video of my hike to Muli in August 2004. The scenery is very green because it is the wet season. This section shows the descent frm the Gibboh Pass at about 12,000 feet down towards the town of Wachang. It was getting late in the day so we hitched a ride near the end and the jeep got stuck in the river. This was the only traffic we saw on the Yongning to Muli track.

Video of Wujiao and Renjom Gompa

This is the tiny Mosuo village (Rock called it Vudju) half way between Yongning and Muli, where Rock stayed in 1927, at the small monastery of Renjom Gompa. It is still an overnight stop on the hike between Lugu Lake and Muli.

Leeches on crossing the high pass between Lugu lake and Muli

After leaving Wujijao, there is a long hike up to the Gibboh Pass at 4500m. In summer there are many leeches along the way, as you can see in this video.

Cizhong video

Video of a visit to Cizhong, the Catholic Tibetan village on the banks of the upper Mekong near Deqin in NW Yunnan.

Video highlights of Konkaling (Yading 亚丁)

Shenrezig, Yading, originally uploaded by jiulong.

I am slowly adding video that I have taken in the places where I have previously posted photogrpahs. This video is of the main section of the inner kora [circuit] around the three scared peaks at Yading: Jambeyang, Shenrezig (pictured) and Chanadorje. It was taken in May 2002, but as you can see there was still a lot of snow about.

An trip to see Dr Ho in Rock's old village of Yuhu near Lijiang

Yuhu near Lijiang, originally uploaded by jiulong.

This is a video of the start of my trip to Muli in 2003, flying from Sydney to Lijiang. There I did an interview with the venerable Dr Ho, the self-promoting herbal doctor and one-man tourist attraction. His clinic is at Yuhu, the Naxi vilage where Joseph Rock used to live in the 30s [when it was known as Nguluko]. Dr Ho claims to have known Joseph Rock and even learned English from him.

Some video of the Muli monastery ceremony 木里大寺

Muli monastery ceremony 木里大寺, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Here is a small section of video that I have just uploaded to Youtube. It shows a ceremony at Mulli that I recorded back in 2003. I have only just got round to learning how to download compress and upload video. There will be more on the way of my trips to Muli, Yading and the Mekong.

More new uploaded videos at the bottom of this page.

Wuxu Hai blind kid

Wuxu Hai blind kid, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Just found this pic from my last visit to Wuxu Hai. The Tibetan kid who looked after the lodge there was blind and had only one hand. He had a great sense of humour - and didn't realise I wasn't Chinese until I told him. His sister would come in and tell him bedtime stories.

The Sichuan-Tibetan borderlands of Southwest China - the world of Joseph Rock [洛克]

Anjue Si, Kangding, originally uploaded by jiulong.

It all started more than 12 years ago, after my first trip to China. Enthused by the mountain scenery I had encountered on a hiking trip near Dali in Yunnan, on my return I browsed through some ancient copies of National Geographic magazine in the local library, looking for other interesting places to visit in China. Among the articles on the Great Wall and Suzhou’s canal’s, I came across one by an eccentric Austrian-American botanist called Joseph Rock, describing a trip he had made through the Sichuan-Tibetan borderlands of Sichuan from Muli [木里] to Kangding [康定] in 1929.

His goal had been to reach the then unknown mountain of Minya Konka [Gongga Shan or 贡嘎山], which he believed might be higher than Mt Everest. But first he had to cross an enormous 9,000-foot deep canyon of the Yalong river [雅砻江], a journey that 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 inspired him to write:

"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 and tried to find out more about the canyon and its grand scenery. However, after consulting maps and guidebooks, and in subsequent years trawling the internet, I could find no mention of “Muti Konka” or the canyon. Joseph Rock seemed to have been right. It was still a closed land. And it became a challenge I could not resist.

One of the main reasons why the canyon remained unvisited was that since the Communist revolution in 1949 the surrounding areas of Jiulong [九龙] and Muli had been off limits to foreigners. Until the 1990s, they had been “closed areas” that required a special permit usually only granted to official groups on visits escorted by a Chinese government minder.

So, while I remained curious about Muti Konka, it remained in the back of my mind as I explored other little known areas of south west China that I had learnt about from other articles written by Joseph Rock. I made a hiking trip from Lugu Lake [泸沽湖] to the former semi-independent kingdom of Muli that Rock described in “Land of the Yellow Lama” [National Geographic April 1925]. Again, this was “off the map” and officially a closed area, but I discovered that Rock’s sketch maps were still reliable and that the local authorities in these out of the way areas did not seem concerned by the arrival on foot of a permit-less foreigner. Instead of being ejected, I was welcomed and treated as a curiousity.

The trip involved a hike over a high mountain pass into a great river valley, where a magnificent walled monastery complex had once stood on a hillside high overlooking the Litang river

There I discovered that the town of Muli, once the home of more than 700 monks, had been almost completely obliterated during the 1950s after the Chinese takeover. Its impressive buildings had not been smashed, but systematically taken apart brick by brick to be used in the constriction of a nearby village of Wachang [瓦厂]. The autocratic and idiosyncratic rule of the Buddhist monks – described in colourful detail by Rock - had been replaced with a functional settlement of breeze block buildings. And yet a few fragments of the monastery remained and were being restored when I visited, once again home to about 70 young monks. And across the mountains from Muli lay the Yalong canyon, so near, but still beyond my reach. The scale of the landscape was way beyond anything suggested by the empty spaces on the maps.

Emboldened by my initial success, I made other journeys throughout the nineties in the footsteps of Joseph Rock. From the Sichuan town of Kangding I rode on horseback into the isolated valleys surrounding the 7550 metre high peak of Gonga Shan [“Glories of the Minya Konka, NG October 1930]. Returning to the Muli area, the next year, I trekked the Buddhist pilgrim’s “kora” around the three sacred peaks of Yading 亚丁[Konka Risumgompa: Holy Mountain of the Outlaws; NG July 1931].

And in Yunnan I travelled from Lijiang to re-visit the great parallel river canyons of the Yangtze, Mekong and Salween in the north west of the province. There, I found that within the space of a 100km there was an amazing transition from the leech infested jungles of Burma, through temperate Yunnan forests up to the wild snowbound borders of Tibet [The Great River Trenches of Asia; August 1926].

On this blog you will find some of Rock's pictures and my modern day equivalents.

Notes from my last trip to Jiulong and Wuxu Hai

diary11, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

A few people have asked me to write up the latest instalment of my travels to Jiulong and Wuxu Hai. As you may have heard, it didin;y last long or achive much because I felt so sick on thattrip.

I really haven't got the time to write up anything more than that for now. Instead, I will post here some scans of my travel notes in their original form, starting from my arrival in Kangding, until I got back to Chengdu. Just click on the page to see a magnified close up.

diary10

diary10, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary8

diary8, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary7

diary7, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary6

diary6, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary5

diary5, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary4

diary4, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary3

diary3, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary2

diary2, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

diary1

diary1, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

If you want to read more, drop me an email!

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from British Tibet Mission 1936-37

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from Lhasa MIssion 1936-37, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

The next few photos are nothing to do with Joseph Rock, but I have added them because they come from the same era and make a good point of comparison to his own photos. They were taken by the explorer Spencer Chapman, who was aprt of the British MIssion to Tibet in 1936. He wroe about his trip in a book, "Lhasa, the Holy City" and that is where I have scanned these photos from.

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from British Tibet MIssion 1936-37

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from Lhasa MIssion 1936-37, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from Lhasa MIssion 1936-37

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from Lhasa MIssion 1936-37, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from Lhasa MIssion 1936-37

Lhasa monastery by Spencer Chapman, from Lhasa MIssion 1936-37, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: nomad seen by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: nomad seen by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: beggar with skull drum, taken by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: beggar with skull drum, taken by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: cliff monastery near Lhasa, by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: cliff monastery near Lhasa, by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: Regent of Tibet welcoming British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: Regent of Tibet welcoming British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: Prime Minister of Tibet with wife and daughter, taken by for British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: Prime Minister of Tibet with wife and daughter, taken by for British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: Potala 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: Potala 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: view of Lhasa from south east - by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: view of Lhasa from south east - by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: as seen by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: as seen by British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: dancers for British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: dancers for British MIssion 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Rare photographs of Tibet: young Buddhist reincarnation 1936 by Spencer Chapman

Rare photographs of Tibet: yung Buddhist reincarnation 1936 by Spencer Chapman, originally uploaded by sydneyphoto.

Wuxu Hai

Wuxu Hai, originally uploaded by jiulong.

Jiulong, Tibetan knife maker

Jiulong, Tibetan knife maker, originally uploaded by jiulong.