Return visit to Maidi Gangga 麦地贡嘎 and Mundon 猛董 after 20 years - reuniting with Tibetan friends

I have just revisited the 'lost' mountain of Muti Konka (Chinese: 麦地贡嘎 Maidi Gangga) in Jiulong county (九龙县), Garze, Sichuan, which I first visited in 2004. I wrote a lengthy article about my first trip, describing how I got to visit this remote place only through the help of a local official in Jiulong called Wang Qi, who is of Pumi Tibetan ethnicity. 

Twenty odd years ago he took pity on me, a hapless and disorganised western hiker, and arranged a mini-expedition to take me to his home village of Mundon (猛董, Mengdong), high up in the hills above the Yalong river canyon(雅砻江大峡谷). 

At that time there was only a rough road down the Yangwe Kong valley, which we travelled by Landcruiser to Sanyanlong (三岩龙). From there we had to ride  horses (mules) to get up the steep hills to Mundon and eventually to the lake at the base of Muti Konka.

Not surprisingly, there have been many developments in the region over the last two decades. On my trip back there in October 2025, I found that there is now a good highway into the Sanyanlong valley, and also now a rough 4WD gravel track that leads up into the hills and eventually to Mundon, via the mountain lake.

I travelled courtesy of botanist Professor Zhu Dan of Sichuan university, who organised the trip with his usual skilled driver Jiang Yong, and accompanied by anthropology expert Professor Wang Liang, of Nantong University. 

It took us just over two hours on a smooth tarmac road to get to Sanyanlong, via the Wuxu Hai (伍须海) road - the lake has now been developed as a tourist attraction, with several guesthouses in the village, but the gatehouse to the location appeared to be closed to visitors when we passed.  Because it was dark I did not get to see much of the Druderon Pass and Kangwo Shan mountain this time round, but I got good photos on my first trip.

The village of Sanyanlong is almost the end of the road before the valley runs down to the Yalong River. It is now a bit more developed that the collection of wooden houses that I saw 20 years ago - there are a few concrete buildings and even blue neon decorated street lamps. Last time I had to lodge with locals but now there is a hotel - the 'Mengdong People's Guesthouse' (猛董家人酒店) - although we opted to stay at a more informal simpler homestay place run by a Pumi family, which had four-people rooms. 

The reason for this was that we wanted to keep a low profile in regard to county officials, as my colleagues did not have permission to accompany a foreigner into this area. The ruse did not work because we received a visit from the local cops the next morning after we had finished breakfast, and had to do a bit of explaining as to what we were doing in the valley. It all got sorted amicably after our driver flashed his official-looking badge from the Sichuan government.

We had a late dinner in Sanyanlong and the local people were very friendly, although one bloke was a bit too friendly after having had a bit too much to drink. The locals were mostly Pumi people and they were fascinated to see the photos I had taken twenty years ago - although none remembered seeing me. They recognised my guide/sponsor Wang Qi in the photos and said he had now retired from his official post as head of the education department in Jiulong and had moved to Chengdu. The police we met the next morning also said they knew Wang Qi and even said they would pass on my phone number to him! 

The next morning we got in the Landcruiser and set off to try find the new road/track that according to the map would take us up to the mountain. We missed the turnoff on the first attempt, and ended up driving half the way down to the river, until we met a local bloke who told us - among other things - that there was now a ferry service running on the Yalong river between the Sanyanlong valley and Maidilong and Bawolong. He also put us in the right direction for the mountain road, to which we backtracked about a kilometre to a bridge. The road was good tarmac initially, with a series of switchbacks until it reached a ridge. This then led west to the village of Lawaling (which I visited on my previous trip). 

After opening a gate across the road, we stopped at the village, but there appeared to be almost nobody around. We found one nice old lady who chatted to us and tried to sell us some songrong mushrooms. There was a great view far down into the canyon to the river from her back yard, similar to a photo taken by Joseph Rock. 

Walking further up the road we met a couple of guys sorting potatoes and bits of dried mushroom/fungus, who  told us the road was now good to get up to Muti Konka, the lake called Chang Haizi (长海子), and beyond to Mengdong.

Beyond Lawaling the road was just a gravel track and after an hour of twists and turns and a few false trails we arrived at the lake beneath the mountain. On my 2004 visit this had been an idyllic setting of an alpine lake with with blue water reflecting the white snowy peak of the Muti Konka mountain and its ridgeline. There had been just a single stone hut occupied by a family of yak herders. In 2025 there were now a handful of Chinese sightseers who had also arrived by 4WD. This time the weather was cloudy and it was raining, so we had no views of the mountain, or even of the lake. There were now a couple of concrete buildings at the lake, and some construction was going on to build a bigger structure, which I assumed would be a visitor centre.

After dodging a truck delivering some stone materials, we chatted to a local guy who turned out to be the same bloke who had been here 20 years ago. He was wearing one of the traditional Pumi yak-hair smocks, edged with red wool. He said he remembered me from my 2004 visit and remarked that my article and the publicity around it had led to a surge in visitors to the lake, for which he was grateful!

He took us into his 'kitchen' where we sat down to have some butter tea and yak yoghurt. Then I was introduced to his wife who also remembered me from 2004 and pointed out that she was the one in my photos milking a yak! 

Since it was raining, we remained in the kitchen for an hour or so, chatting about the changes to the area. The couple told me that they now had  a lot of visitors to the lake, who came mostly by 4WD, as there was now a circular circuit road through the mountains, to and from the Jiulong valley road. They said the new construction was for a bigger yak pen, not a guesthouse. We posed for lots of photos and videos and added each other as WeChat friends.

Jiang Yong then drove us up from the lake to Mengdong village, which took about an hour along the new gravel track - a trip we had previously done with horses. It wasn't a great road, but not that bad either. The weather was very cloudy and foggy, and sadly we did not get to see the great clear views over the canyon that I had enjoyed on my previous visit. 

On arriving at Mengdong, we found that it was deserted. The tiny temple was still there, but  the previous five or six buildings appeared to have been demolished, and there was nobody present at the one remaining home. There were a couple of out buildings and a couple of temporary marquee-type tents, bit not a single souls at the hamlet that had previously been home to two or three families, including children. We could only speculate that this was simply too remote a spot for subsistence farming. We'd also learned that the school I had previously visited in Sanyanlong had closed, with local children now educated by boarding at ''good' schools in Jiulong, which were able to attract higher  quality teachers and have better facilities than the basic place that I'd seen in this remote valley.

With little to see and nobody to talk to, we didn't linger for long at Mengdong. It was about 3pm when we got back in the Landcruiser and crawled and twisted back along the gravel track' over the ridge back to Chang Haizi. 

Prof. Zhu Dan, me, Prof. Wang Liang, driver Jiang Yong

We did not stop here on the return trip, but continued on back in the direction of Sanyanlong. We took a couple of wrong turns and had to backtrack until we found the right road, which seemed to be of much poorer quality o the return leg. So it was a relief to regain the tarmac road as we neared Lawaling, and to descend to the Sanyanlong valley and 'speed' back to Jiulong.

No longer worried about the attention of local officials, we checked in to a posh hotel costing 300 yuan a night and had a great hotpot dinner to celebrate our success in getting to the mountain. 

We found the lost monastery of Baron Gompa (八窝龙 寺庙) near the Yalong River (雅砻江) canyon

 I've just returned from an exciting trip to western Sichuan with my friends Professor Zhu Dan (Sichuan University Dept of Botany) 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 2004. 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. 

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 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 set off 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 above 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. 

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.