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, 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 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-Worker-Peasant’ 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 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.
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.
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 mid-afternoon, 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 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 well-formed 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.
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 post-apocalyptic 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.
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.
