Sunday, September 16, 2018

CHAPTER 1. HOW IT ALL STARTED

                                                          [Click here to go to Chapter 2]

I first came across Joseph Rock's National Geographic articles about western China in the 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 had spent an interesting few weeks travelling around south west China. On arrival in New Zealand, where I had intended to find work, I was soon feeling bored and restless. I found myself passing a rainy evening browsing the travel book section in the old Takapuna public library, which was then 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 out of 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 had just made to Kunming and Dali had piqued my interest in south-west China. So when I came across some faded old copies of 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 we differently 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 interested in. Or more precisely, it was the articles that I found 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 his articles were of spectacular mountain country, Tibetan warriors wearing leopard skin capes and posing with matchlock rifles, or primitive 'Lolo' tribesmen preparing to cross raging rivers using inflated pigs bladders for buoyancy.

img649aIn one notable article, "Konka Risumgompa - 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, so I took Joseph Rock's hand-drawn maps and tried to compare them side-by-side with a map from a modern Lonely Planet China guide. On the modern maps, 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 north east of Lijiang, there was just an empty white area between two rivers. The same blank spaces were evident in the maps in all the other Chinese guidebooks and atlases that I consulted. 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, and wanted to find out more about these wild areas of China that had now apparently receded back into obscurity. Were those Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and those wild tribes shown in the photographs still there - or had they been eliminated in the Cultural Revolution? If they were still there - 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 shared an interest in south-west China with a deadexplorer. In my late 20s, I was living a peripatetic existence in London as a journalist, drifting from one casual 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 Mujahadeen. 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 had until recently been off limits to westerners, but which were now gradually 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 window from our Woolwich high rise office, 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. 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 office, and as I stood there in silence he would tot up the number of hours I had worked for the week and write me out a payslip, always seeming to find some reason to deduct a few pounds.
"Thank you. We won't need any help next week, but stay in touch ..." he would invariably say.
mims haymarketAnd so I would return to my gloomy bedsit in Eltham to listen to my Prefab Sprout records, or 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 criedwith homesickness at times. "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 various reasons. Following the fall of the
Berlin Wall in the previous year, 1989, China was one of the few surviving Communist states in the world. I had developed a somewhat morbid fascination with communist states 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 had
experienced a strange frisson of fascination and revulsion while travelling in an Iron Curtain socialist state, feeling like a voyeur from the 'free west'. I was particularly curious to see what 'communist' China would be like, given the recent bloody crackdown of June 1989. However, I was probably most interested in seeing what the 'real' rural China of peasants and paddy fields was like, rather than having much interest in visiting museums or China's drab grey industrial cities.

In the Woolwich Public Library one evening, I found a dog -eared guidebook called South-West China Off the Beaten Track. It
described a China that sounded quite both exotic and grim. The remote towns in Yunnan and Sichuan that it listed were illustrated with pencil-drawn maps that typically showed one 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 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 only just emerging from 40 years of being a closed society. The rigid framework of the communist state was loosening and it looked like there were now opportunities to travel 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 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, after they were turned back by police from a 'closed' area of western Sichuan.

I was committed. I wanted to go to south west China. To raise the money, I spent a week as a medical guinea pig in a drug testing clinic back in Leeds. I earned almost a thousand pounds at Hazleton’s Clinical Trails 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 did the testing on a regular basis. All without the knowledge of the DHSS, of course. When I told them I was going to China, I might as well have said I was going to the moon.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, i´m from Austria. In Austria nearly nobody knows something about Dr. Joseph Rock. I learnt about him, as I travelled through western china and came to Lijiang.

After that I read the articles in the NG Magazin and bought the book "LAMAS,PRINCES,AND BRIGANDS" with Joseph Rock´s Photograph of the Tibetan Borderlands of China. 2008 I was in Kalimpong / India and read an old article in Time Magazin from 1950. At this time Dr. Rock was forced to leave China and waited there for a return to China, what never happened.
I´m proud that China now appraises the work of Dr. Rock.

I like your website

Klaus Binder / Linz / Austria

mutikonka said...

Thanks Klaus - watch this space!

Jamie said...

Hi Michael

Looking forward to your next installment! (and getting back to the Yunnan/Tibet )

Jamie
NZ

omer said...

Hi Michael!
I'm Omer, from Israel. If you see many entries to your blog from Israel it's me(although now I'm living in Kunming and using VPN from Israel), I'm reading the whole thing, it's great, really inspiring.

This month I'm going to visit one of the places you describe, I'm debating whether to go to Muli from Lugu lake or to Nujiang(I think Nujiang, cause it's winter).

Anyway, I like your style and the non-patronizing way you describe the people, the places and yourself.

Looking forward to read the whole book.

mutikonka said...

Thanks for your comments - I have just returned from blogspot-blocked China and hope to post more soon from Joseph Rock travels. I have just bought the book about the conquest of Minya Konka by Terris Moore - some interesting pics in that too.

John Holmes said...

Hi Michael,

I've got "South West China Off the Beaten Track" by Stevens and Wehrfritz, too. It really is a timeless read, although things have changed very much since the authors researched it.
I kept my 1980s vintage Lonely Planet guide, too. You can't stay on Emei Shan for pennies anymore.
Christina Dodwell's "A traveller in China" is another readable example of travel in early 1980s China, very different to today.

Looking forward to seeing more... keep up the good work !

John and Jemi, Hong Kong

mutikonka said...

Hi John

I went on ebay and bought another copy of that old guide book - I'd lost the original. It really is an interesting read - not so long ago, but how things have changed. I'd forgotten all about FEC, 'closed areas' and two-tier pricing for foreigners! Hope to have some more on Gongga Shan soon, but having to re-write that chapter because I've just read the climbing book on it by Burdsal and Emmons.

Micah said...

Hi Michael,

Fascinating read and somehow parallel to my own travel bug -you've really struck a chord and I wish you the best of luck with publication. I'm off to Shanghai in a couple of weeks to live for 2 years and plan to follow your footsteps as well. I spent some time in Lijiang years ago where I discovered Peter Goullart ( http://pratyeka.org/books/forgotten_kingdom/ ), who you might enjoy reading if you haven't already. Have a look at my blog and videos from Lijiang on http://goplaces.wordpress.com if you've the time and don't hesitate to get in touch if you're returning to China and would like to grab a pint somewhere and talk! Best, and thanks again for your blog!

Micah

mutikonka said...

Thanks Micah. Still a work in progress. Hope to visit Chone monastery in Gansu and Ragya in Qinghai this autumn.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Hi Michael, I read your posts on Joseph Rock. I wonder what is the best way to contact you. The local government of 四川凉山彝族自治州 ( Liang Shan, Si Chuan) will hold a conference on Joseph Rock and his visits to the area, and one friend associated with local government made an inquiry if you are interested?
Thanks,

mutikonka said...

Xu Junyao Ni Hao

I am interested in the conference but I have just returned from 2 weeks in Sichuan (Yading) to Australia - because of my work I don't have much time for travel these days!

Michael

Unknown said...

Hermosas fotos de Michael y de Joseph/
MUCHAS GRACIAS/
La foto del Yama del Tibet, me hizo recordar a los Diablillos de Los Andes/
Les conseguiré imágenes/
Saludos