I've just returned from an exciting trip to western Sichuan with my friends Professor Zhu Dan and Prof Wang Liang. We visited the Yalong River (雅砻江) canyon for the first time and located the site of the small monastery Baron Gompa that was photographed by Joseph Rock in 1929 for his article about Gongga Shan ('The Glories of the Minya Konka') in National Geographic (click here to view pdf).
The trip also saw us revisiting places such as the Gongga Shan monastery and the Yulongxi valley, to where I first travelled in 1994 - and to see the many changes that have taken place there. Similarly, we revisited the mountain of Muti Konka and the hilltop hamlet of Mundon in Jiulong county, which I visited on a trip in 2003. Amazingly, I was able to meet up again with the yak herders who hosted me at the remote mountain lake and also the family of the Tibetan official Wang Qi who had guided me to this remote spot 22 years ago.
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| Map (looking from west to east) of our route from Jiulong to Bawolong. |
It's been a long-held ambition of mine to visit the Yalong River canyon, which was described by Rock as having mile-high cliffs and taking 'five terrible days' to cross, down and up again, on his journey from Muli towards Gongga Shan. His lofty-worded article is full of superlatives about the grandeur of the canyon, and the Yalong river remains a remote and unvisited place because the steep sides and lack of any terraces mean that there is still no road running along some sections of the river south of Xinduqiao. The only way to access the river is via a rough road that snakes over the 4000m high hills from Jiulong.
We began our journey from Jiulong after we had already visited Gongga Shan and Mundon - more about those trips in later articles (suffice to say that we got glimpses down into the Yalong canyon from near Mundon, where the views were similar to the those photographed by Joseph Rock).
In a Landcruiser Prado driven by the intrepid Jiang Yong we headed west from Jiulong, initially following the road towards Wuxu Hai (lake), which is now a tourist attraction, although the place appeared to be closed to visitors when we passed by the official entrance gate. The route then took us up into the forested hills along a decent quality road that twisted over two high passes before descending towards the Yalong River: it took us about two hours before we started making the final descent towards the river.
Sadly, it was a cloudy day, and we only got a hint of a view of the mountain to the south - I'm guessing this was the same Kangwo Shan that Rock described as seeing when he crossed the Druderon Pass.
We stopped on the switchback road down to Bawolong to ask local people if they knew about the location of the monastery that Rock described as Baron Gompa, 'north of Baurong [Bawolong]', but they could not help.
We also stopped to snap the great views of the Yalong river far below the road. The river flows at about 2000m altitude, and the descent from the pass was another 2000 metres, confirming Rock's statement that the canyon is at least a mile deep. Looking down into the canyon we could see there was a construction site on one of the few terraces next to the river - presumably related to the building of new dams along the river.
This was confirmed when we finally hauled in to Bawolong, where there were new accomodation blocks for the construction workforce of the Mengdigou Hydropower station (孟底沟水电站) and dam, which the signs said was expected to be completed in 2030.
According to the Chinese media, the Mengdigou project has just sealed the river to build the dam, and will combine hydropower and solar power.
With this massive building program on its doorstep, the village of Bawolong was no longer an isolated and quiet Tibetan riverside village. The main street was a surprisingly ordinary looking collection of restaurants, shops and official buildings in the usual concrete style. We stopped for an hour to have some lunch, which we washed down with a few sips of craft beer, after our walkabout revealed that even in this remote spot there was a craft brewery.
Ironically, after coming all this way, we found that there were few good views of the Yalong River to be had from the village of Bawolong itself - it was too deeply embedded in the canyon. We could see a jetty where a flat-bottomed vehicle ferry was said to run a service down to connect with the Sanyanlong valley. There was no road going south - the sides of the twisting canyon were simply too steep to allow one.
We therefore got back in the Landcruiser and headed back in a north-east direction to see if we could locate the site of the Baron Gompa. We had seen no significant villages or settlement on the road into Baolong, but there had been one or two houses by the roadside, and we stopped at one of these to ask the local farmer if he know of the site of an old temple.
He directed us towards to village of Baitai (白台), which was located in the hills away from the road, about five kilometres away. At the turnoff for baitai, another couple of locals confirmed there had been an old temple in the area and directed us up a rough dirt track beyond Baitai. It was tough going, even for the Landcruiser, and we followed a couple of false trails until we returned to a small side track near the village.
After twisting up the hill track, we found a flat area that looked like it might be the site. The site was now surrounded by a high fence of wire and sticks, but there were some ruined buildings on the opposite side that looked like the might once have been the monastery.
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| Site of the Baron Gompa above Baitai village - this image shows the outlines of the ruined buildings. |
Professors Zhu Dan and Wang Liang went to find a way through the fence while I walked around to investigate the remains of the walls. Up close, there was no way to tell if they had once been part of a monastery or perhaps more recent farm buildings - there was so little left of them. Just some packed earth walls and wooden window frames, most of which were overgrown with grass and bushes.
After examining the site from various angles, Prof Zhu Dan declared that it was indeed the site of Baron Gompa. He got us to climb over the fence (there was no gate or door) and after pushing through wasit-level grass we found a corner of the enclosure where the view matched the perspective of Rock's photo of Baron Gompa. We could see the same small hills and slopes, only with the monastery buildings now absent. Similarly, the tall pine and spruce trees in Rock's photo were no longer there.
The local people were unable to tell us anything about the history of the monastery, only that it had not been there for decades. One said there had been two stone lions remaining at the site, but we could not locate them. In his article, Rock says little about the Baron Gompa except that it was a place where his mule train made an overnight camp on his way back from Gongga Shan heading towards Muli and his home near Lijiang. His photo shows his tent pitched alongside one of the buildings.
His article describes the area thus: "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 passes in blinding snowstorms ...". In the 21st century we became some of the privileged few to have revisited the region.
