Getting from one side of this enormous
9,000-foot deep gorge to the other took him “five terrible days”. It required a
descent to the Yalong river, which his caravan crossed with the aid of dugout
canoes, and then a steep climb up the eastern side of the canyon. He eventually
emerged at a mountain pass called Wadzanran, where the mountain scenery left
him awestruck:
“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 seem to
back up his claims, showing a narrow ribbon of river buried 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 of sublime
scenery and desperately wanted to be one of those ‘privileged few’ to make the
journey to the Yalong canyon. But as with Muli, I could find no trace of “Muti
Konka” or the Yalung canyon on modern maps or in guidebooks. Joseph Rock seemed
to have been right. It had become a closed land.
This was literally true. The whole region around
the Yalung had become an officially ‘closed area’ following the Communist
revolution in 1949, and it remained off limits to foreigners into the 1990s. To
visit a closed area required a special permit that would only be granted to
official groups travelling with a Chinese government escort. Another reason for
the paucity of visitors to the Yalung canyon was the lack of any decent maps of
the area.
So, while I remained curious about the mountain
called Muti Konka, it remained in the back of my mind throughout the 1990s as I
explored the more accessible places visited by Joseph Rock.
Then in 1997, on a visit to London, I popped
into the Royal Geographic Society library near the Albert Hall to see what they
had in the way of maps of Yunnan and Sichuan. To my delight, I found they had
the original sets of Joseph Rock’s large, hand-drawn maps, on which he had
recorded the routes he had travelled. These original maps contained much more
detail than the small sketch maps that accompanied his National Geographic
articles. Armed with a photocopies of Rock’s ‘Minya Konka’ route map - which was
as big as a dining table - I started making plans to re-trace his footsteps across the Yalung.
I immediately ruled out following his route from
Lijiang via Muli. Having experienced the massive scale and steep gradients of
the landscape around Muli, I decided to try reach the Yalung river (now known
as Yalong) from the north, starting from Kangding. My modern Chinese map showed
there was now a road running towards the Yalong from the town of Jiulong, which
was a day’s drive south of Kangding. Intriguingly, this road corresponded with
the route taken by Joseph Rock in 1929, through a valley called Yangwe Kong. I
wanted to visit this valley because Rock had described the Yangwe Kong valley
as being completely isolated, even by the already remote standards of the
Tibetan borderlands of the 1920s.
“No outlook in any direction! Here people live and die without
the slightest knowledge of the outside world. How oppressive to be buried alive
in these vast canyon systems! Or are they happier for it?”
This sounded like it could have been the inspiration for the
Shangri-La legend. After reading this, I was curious to know - would the modern
inhabitants of the Yangwe Kong valley still be as isolated? Comparing maps, I
noticed that the names of many villages mentioned by Rock in the valley were
similar to those marked on the modern road maps: could the place marked
‘Sedjuron’ on Rock’s map be the ‘Sanyanlong’ on the modern Chinese map? Modern
‘Diwan’ was in roughly the same place as Rock’s ‘Deon’. And the riverside
hamlet of ‘Mutirong’, where Rock crossed the Yalong by dugout canoe, tallied
with the modern Chinese settlement of Maidilong.
The best option to get to Jiulong seemed to be via Kangding in
the north. However, my first tentative attempt to get there in the spring of
1998 - after a trip to Gongga Shan - was thwarted by the impassable condition
of the Kangding to Jiulong road. Floods and landslides had washed out the dirt
road, leaving it strewn with a mixture of silt, boulders and the twisted branches
of uprooted trees and bushes. In October 2004 I made my next attempt.
Kangding was now easily reached from the Sichuan capital of
Chengdu (and its international airport) in a day, thanks to a tunnel that had
recently been bored directly through the 4500 metre high mountain of Erlang
Shan. Theis ease of access had transformed Kangding into the something of an
alpine resort.
By 2004 Kangding had developed into a bizarre mixture of
Tibetan market town and hive of Chinese consumerism. Its high street straddled
the raging torrent of the Dardo river, flowing fast and cold right down out of
the mountains. The river was flanked by colourful modern retail outlets selling
everything from Nike sports gear to cream cakes.
Khampa nomads and Tibetan pilgrims were still in evidence in
town, rubbing shoulders with Han Chinese girls sporting the latest Nokia mobile
phones and Hello Kitty accessories. On the main town square teenage Tibetan
monks leapt around in their crimson robes to slam basketballs though hoops,
without attracting a second look from the well groomed staff in the marble
lobby of the four star hotel.
In a Body Shop-style beauty store I saw a tough-looking Khampa
Tibetan man with red thread woven into his hair dutifully following his wife
around to peruse jojoba oil and facial scrubbing sponges. There was an internet
bar where a dozen teenagers played online war games, completely absorbed in
their headphone-cocooned virtual battlefield as electronic American accents
clamoured “Fire in the hole!”.
But Kangding still had some of its old streets. There were
still rickety old wooden houses in the centre of town, and still the old market
for raw yak meat and a wide array of vegetables and fruit. I spent a lonely
night at the Black Tent Hotel, attached to the Anjue Si Buddhist monastery.
I re-read Rock’s article from 1929, when he had travelled up in
the opposite direction, towards Tatsienlu (Kangding) from his home ‘base’ at
Nguluko near Lijiang. With his usual large entourage of Naxi assistants, cooks
and Tibetan bodyguards, he made his way north, first to Muli, where he had
previously befriended the fat ruler of the ‘kingdom’ of Muli on his travels to
this “Land of the Yellow Lama”, and where he had also rested while on his
expedition to the Konkaling mountains. On this occasion, he found that the Muli
king was in residence at Kulu monastery - a lesser one of the trio of Muli
monasteries.
Joseph Rock had stayed for a week at Kulu, waiting for better
weather, and in his article he recounts some of the strange ways of the Tibetan
potentate. They shared a meal of fried eggs, bits of mutton, Chinese noodles
and a bowl of sour yak cream “of which the king is inordinately fond”. Rock
spoke to the king in Chinese, which was translated into Tibetan by the king’s
secretary.
Rock was bemused by the hapless assistant, who would have to
wait by the king’s side for hours with his head bowed in deference. When Rock
took pity on him, the king swept some food scraps off his plate and gave them
to his servant “as if he were feeding his favourite dog”. Joseph Rock also
makes a coy reference to the king’s weird practice of having his stools moulded
into pills, and these Royal dropping then being given to the Muli peasants as
medicine! The Muli king also had the mummified remains of his uncle [who had
died 60 years previously] kept in a shrine in the dining room. “Thus royalty in
Muli is never lonely, but always has company, although not of a very talkative
type!” quips Rock.
By April 1929 the weather had improved, and Rock set off on his
trip northwards from Muli accompanied by a bodyguard of 10 Pumi [Hsifan]
soldiers from Muli, and a Muli lama. His long journey to the Minya Konka peaks
and Kangding took several weeks, starting with an arduous trek of several days
through alpine meadows and fir forests to the edge of the Yalong canyon. The
river marked the eastern boundary of Muli territory, and here the trail
descended 6000 feet in steep zig-zags to the Yalong river, which flowed at an
altitude of 7300 feet. It was at this spot that Rock first caught sight of the
isolated mountain peak of Muti Konka, rising to a height of about 19,000 behind
the village of Mutirong on the far side of the river.
But first, he had to cross the canyon. After descending into
its depths, he and his caravan were ferried across the river by locals in a
pair of dugout canoes. The villagers would not have helped him had it not been
for the presence of the Muli lama whom Rock had brought along as a guide. The
local peasants obviously feared this representative of the Muli ruler, as they cringed
and bowed their heads in his presence.
Across the Yalong river, Rock rested in a flea-ridden chapel
before setting off to climb out of the gorge and cross the Wadzanran pass en
route to Chiulung (modern day Jiulong). It was inhospitable country. In some
parts, the trail was too steep even for loaded mules, and the loads had to be
carried by Tibetan villagers for three days. There was neither water nor grass
for the animals to feed on. Everything had to be portered up from the bottom of
the gorge.
It took him five gruelling days to get across the Yalong canyon,
and when he reached the top on the far side Rock marvelled at how much effort
was needed to travel such a short way:
“Where Muti Konka rears its eternally snow-capped crown 19,000
feet into the sky, the Yalung flows 12,000 feet below. From the Wadzanran Pass
I looked back to Reddo, only a few miles as the crow flies and yet the drop and
climb had required five terrible days!”
Oddly, however, Rock provides no photograph of the Muti Konka
peak he describes in such dramatic terms. After crossing the Yalong river and
ascending through mountainous terrain on the eastern bank, Rock rested at the
small town of Jiulong. He then had to cross another high pass, the Chiprin,
[now known as the Jizu Shan pass] to the north, to reach Kangding and the Minya
Konka range.
Seventy five years later, in 2004, I was about to take the 7am
bus in the opposite direction, from Kangding to Jiulong and into the unknown.
In the early morning chill of October 13th, our bus climbed out of the damp
mist of the Kangding river valley and burst out into sunlight at the Zheduo
pass, at 4280 metres. The pass was marked with a cairn festooned with red,
green, yellow and blue prayer flags, white Tibetan scarves and hundreds of
printed sheets bearing the Tibetan script Om Man Padme Hum. We had entered the
cultural realm of Tibet. This potholed road was the main Sichuan-Tibet highway,
and most of the traffic was heading to the next town of Litang and perhaps
beyond to Barkham and eventually Lhasa.
After a brief mid morning stop near Xinduqiao, we branched off
southwards. The scenery was immediately very different. The road ran beside a
foaming turquoise river through a valley of golden brown hills that reminded me
of Otago in New Zealand’s South Island. In place of the utilitarian and often
shoddily built Chinese buildings, there were now very solid H-shaped Tibetan
farmhouses with flat roofs. These two storey structures with their white-edged,
T-shaped window frames and flags flying from the roof looked like forts.
Further south, the valley deepened and the steep hills were forested with
pines, oak and birch trees, giving a pleasing variety of autumnal colours, from
green, to yellow to red.
At one point we passed a lamasery that had high stone watch
towers, similar to those portrayed in Joseph Rock’s article. The few people we
saw by the wayside were all Minya Tibetans, dressed in traditional chubas or
capes with coloured threads woven into their hair.
As we bowled along under the mid morning sun the sublime
scenery contrasted with ridiculous onboard entertainment. The TV at the front
of the bus played video clips from Indian MTV, on which Bollywood-inspired
dance productions were accompanied lyrics such as “I’m so lonely in my life/ I
want to have you as my wife”.
To reach Jiulong, the bus had to cross what Rock described as
the Chiprin La, one of the highest passes he tackled on his journey. I
anticipated this section with some trepidation: on Rock’s journey [when there
was no road] he had crossed the pass with great difficulty during a blizzard
with his 20-strong mule caravan on his way to Kangding.
“As we ascended, the snow increased in depth and the blizzard
in fury, for we were now above the timber line. We could see nothing but a
purplish white wall and I seemed lost in a whirling mass of white. Up and up we
climbed until finally I saw through a haze of snowflakes a few sticks which
denoted an obo or cairn and hence the summit. Never did I exclaim more heartily
with my Tibetans “Lha Rgellah ! Lha Rgellah!” (“The Gods are victorious”, the
accustomed shout of every Tibetan on a pass.”
On the modern map the Chiprin pass was described as the Chizu
Pass, and it proved to be something of an anticlimax: a barren gap in the bare
hills, ascended by a snaking road over a treeless landscape. We paused at the
top for a minute to allow a young Chinese mountain biker to get out and prepare
for his freewheeling descent to Jiulong.
Rock wrote: “The Chiprin pass proved to be 16,000 feet in
elevation. Our descent was very difficult. Men and beasts and loads were many
times catapulted into the snow, some of us sliding in a snow bank up to our
necks ...”
After crossing to the southern side of the Chizu pass the
scenery appeared greener, and the climate somewhat milder. Instead of the
blockhouse-like Tibetan houses of the Minyak Tibetans, the Tibetans of Jiulong
county had more conventional stone-built dwellings with Chinese-style tiled roofs.
As we neared Jiulong town the building took on a grim appearance due to their
construction with sooty-coloured local stone. They reminded me of the
pollution-blackened buildings of northern English industrial towns.
By mid afternoon our bus had rolled into what had been the town
of ‘Chiulong’ where Rock had rested for several days after his arduous crossing
of the Yalong and its canyons. He had described it as a ‘scattered hamlet’ with
a friendly Chinese magistrate in residence “who could endure his post only by
sleeping from one inebrious state to the next carousal”.
At Jiulong, Rock made speacial mention of a collection of stone
watchtowers called Taputzu, balanced precariously on the hillside and rendered
unstable by earthquakes. He wrote in exasperated terms about how the local
population lived at the base of the towers, apparently unconcerned by the
threat of being buried alive should they collapse.
The modern day Jiulong seemed a typical small Chinese town of
concrete apartment buildings mostly built in the ubiquitous style of white tile
and blue glass. As a nod towards local sensibilities, some of the newer
buildings were built in a faux-Tibetan style, with imitation wooden window
frames and Tibetan-style roofs rendered in concrete. Jiulong was basically a
one street town nestled in a steep grassy valley, with a large hotel, the
Longhai Dajiudian, at the top end of town overlooking what passed for a town
square. The main street thronged with Tibetan and Yi people, many dressed in
their traditional capes and headwear.
My plan was to make a low-key approach to visiting the Yangwe
Kong valley, perhaps hiring a jeep or horses to get there. But a young Chinese
guy I’d got talking to on the bus, a Chongqing TV reporter called Yang Shi, had
other ideas. After a late lunch of greasy noodles, he led me straight to the
five-storey Communist Party office and took us up to the fifth floor to seek
out the local party leaders to seek “permissions”.
The interior of the building reminded me of the East German Stasi
HQ that I’d recently visited on a trip to Berlin. We passed committee rooms
where within I glimpsed groups of people smoking and drinking tea. With my
backpack and hiking boots I expected to be challenged and thrown out at any
moment. Instead, we were greeted with bemused respect. “What does the foreign
friend want?” everyone asked.
On the fifth floor we were welcomed into the office of Mr Gao
Linzhong, the head of the Jiulong county propaganda department. A man of small
stature, he looked a little like Kim Jong Il, but his manner was acerbic and
down to earth. He ushered me into his executive leather chair where I sat
awkwardly, feeling like I was in the headmaster’s office, looking at the
picture of Mao Tse Tung sellotaped to the wall alongside maps of China and the
world. Otherwise the furniture consisted of a large pine desk, a water cooler
and a pot plant.
After serving us green tea in paper cups, he perched on a stool
and perused some of the old photographs I’d brought along with me - taken by
Rock of their local area and people. I told Mr Gao about Rock’s visit to the
Jiulong area, and his description of it as a “scenic wonder of the world”. That
seemed to get his attention.
As he flicked though the pictures, his interest grew, and he
started to comment on them: “The local Yi people still wear this kind of jacket
... hey, you can only find that kind of old gun round these parts ... and that
looks like Deon ...”
He suddenly stopped and went to the open window, from where he
shouted someone’s name. “Wang Qi! Wang Qi! Come and see this!” A short time
later, a burly Tibetan man in Chinese clothing ambled into the room, and joined
Mr Gao in perusing Rock’s old photographs. He paused at one picture taken of a
group of Tibetans stood in front of some old wooden shacks. The big Tibetan scrutinised
at it more closely and said to me:
“This is Mundon. And that man on the right is my grandfather.”
Our conversation continued over a lavish dinner at a local
restaurant. Wang Qi told me his Tibetan name was Zago Tsering, and that he was
now the director of education for Jiulong county. Zago been brought up in the
Yangwe Kong valley and remembered the tales his grandfather had told of a
foreigner passing though. But he had never known who “Luoke” was.
After several toasts to our friendship and health, Zago
announced that he personally would take me to Mundon and combine a “fact
finding tour” with a visit to his relatives. We would also try to see if we
could get to Muti Konka, which he said was the sacred mountain visible from a
point high above his home village.
The next few days, however, proved to be a frustrating “hurry
up and wait” period of inactivity and occasional bursts of enthusiasm and
announcements of our imminent departure. I was invited to numerous banquets hosted
by local officials at which our venture was toasted with beer, baijiu (white
spirits) and tea. These banquets also meant I had to try numerous strange dishes
containing bits of what appeared to be beaks, claws and tentacles.
During this waiting period it rained and Jiulong felt grim. I
seemed to meet all the local dignitaries, and also many visiting officials from
the Sichuan capital of Chengdu. At each one the Propaganda department head Mr
Gao would say:
“Let our foreign friend tell us what Mr Rock wrote about this
area”.
And he would repeat Rock’s phrases about the Muti Konka area
being a scenic wonder of the world, and there being nowhere else in the world
with scenery quite like it.
“That’s our new tourism slogan!” he would enthuse. “Look at
Shimian county down the road - they get thousands of tourists and what have
they got? A few waterfalls and some rare alpine frogs! According to this
foreign friend we’ve got ‘the best scenery in the world ...”
“And our frogs are bigger than theirs!” added the Assistant
Party Secretary, sat next to him.
I drank endless cups of tea with officials who I presumed were
having have some input to our forthcoming trip. But whenever I asked about
setting off, the answer was always: “take it easy - probably tomorrow”.
Feeling frustrated wuth my enforced inactivity in Jiulong, I
made some side trips to nearby local attractions. Up a dirt road some 25km to
the north west of Jiulong was Wuxu Hai (lake), situated at the foot of some
grey limestone peaks known as the 12 Beautiful Daughters. Joseph Rock had
passed through this area, but despite his reputation for meticulous recording
of every peak and minor geographical feature, he makes no mention in his
article or maps of the picturesque lake.
Wuxu Hai was an idyllic spot, a mile-long expanse of water
surrounded by peaks and wooded hillside. I spent spend a pleasant day there by
the lakeside watching the weather changing around the peaks higher up the
valley. The local Tibetans lived in log cabins around the shore and I got one
of them to guide me on a walk up to a waterfall further up the alpine valley,
beyond which there was said to be hot springs and a sacred lake, Tian Chi, six
hours further into the mountains.
In the evening, I stayed in one of these local log cabins,
squatting around the kitchen fire, talking to Mr Xu, the village leader, and his
blind son who was surprised to find he was talking to a foreigner. As he expertly
stoked the wood-fired cooker, I wondered how the blind kid managed to avoid
injury from the many hazards within the cramped interior of the cabin. And as
we talked, Mr Xu’s wife busied herself making butter tea and converting yak’s
milk into butter using some strange manual separator with a crank handle.
Life in this rural part of the China- Tibet borderlands was
still very basic and close to nature. There was no electricity or running
water. Everything was done by hand, and it brought to mind our old nursery rhymes
about sitting in corners eating curds and whey.
After returning to Jiulong and facing more delays, I made a
visit to the Yeren Miao or “Wild Man Temple” a few kilometres to the south east
of the town, along another rough farm track. This temple was located in a cave
half way up a cliff. However, despite its name the temple had no connection to
the mythicalYeti. The local legend had it that some statues and temple
structures had mysteriously appeared at the cave in the middle of the night,
and these had been placed there by a “Wild Man”.
The small temple contained relics that purported to bear
footprints and handprints of the Wild Man. I stayed a few hours at this lonely
spot, browsing around the wooden temple and talking to the caretaker.
Interestingly, I noticed the temple had on display a copy of a one of Joseph
Rock’s photographs, a portrait of a monk. In his caption for the photo, Rock said
the monk was the young abbot of a monastery at Zuosuo, near Yongning. However,
the Yeren Miao caption claimed him as a local Living Buddha.
Into the Yangwe Kong valley
“Zou Ba!” (Let’s Go!) were the words of Zago Tsering on a
bright Monday morning. At last, true to his word, there was a Toyota Land
Cruiser parked outside the hotel, loaded with supplies for a family visit. In
pride of place on the back seat was a food mixer - the modern Tibetan’s way to
prepare butter tea – as well as boxes of dried noodles and two large leaky
containers of a very volatile smelling liquor.
Also shoehorned into the back of the car were Zago’s wife Pema
and their 20-year-old daughter Namu, back from her studies at medical school in
Chengdu. Namu was beautiful, with dyed bronze hair, and a face like a serene
Tibetan Buddha, which only made her relentless teasing of her father seem all
the more incongruous. As we set off up the road to the Yangwe Kong valley she
giggled conspiratorially with her mother.
“A-ba! (‘dad’) - Will they have a horse big enough to carry you
up the hill?” she mocked.
Later on she hummed songs and practised counting up to a
hundred in the local Tibetan dialect: “Dali, Nali, Songli ...” It didn’t seem
like we were setting off on an expedition to find a lost mountain.
“Have you got my handbag? asked Pema in the back. “I’ve got
something special for Aunty Mera in it”
At first, the route followed the familiar dirt track north
towards Wuxu Hai, but after a few kilometres it branched off westward, up a
much rougher track. Above us towerred a great rocky peak that Rock had marked
on his map as “Black Limestone Peak” - so he had been this way. The side road
was in terrible condition, hardly fit for vehicles. Almost immediately we were
being tossed around inside the car - I clung on tightly to the handles on the
doorframe, but still could not avoid being constantly jolted and bashing the
sides of the Land Cruiser as it rocked and bounced over potholes, ruts and
boulders.
In this way we inched up a pine-forested valley to what Joseph
Rock called the Druderon Pass. It was a lonely place of fir trees and some old
water races diverted through little shacks, to turn water wheels, presumably
for grinding corn. But there was no sign of human habitation.
After a tortuous, twisting ascent on the switchback dirt road
we finally rose above the tree line and reached the pass. The landscape might
have been Scotland - brown moorland and an alpine tarn - and the imposing
shouldered wedge of a grey limestone peak, which Zago told me was Kangwo Shan.
This was another mountain pass that Rock claimed to have
crossed with great difficulty:
“We had already been informed at Deon Gomba, a tiny monastery
recently looted by the Konkaling bandits, that the Druderon although not high,
was snowed in and hence impassable. With an exhausted caravan it seemed
hopeless ...” he wrote.
“The following morning when I looked out of my tent and beheld
our camp almost buried and our animals shivering in the cold, I really feared
for the shelterless men who had stayed behind with the exhausted mules. I also
feared for the two of our soldiers who had braved the pass the evening before.
They were to go to [Jiulong] to bring us yaks, which could plough a trail
through the deep snow and help us across. The snowstorm continued for a short
time; then the sun appeared. This was the last day of April, 1929.”
Again, we were fortunate to have clear weather and a good
driver for our crossing of the Druderon Pass. Over the other side of the pass
we halted briefly and the view was of wave after wave of receding hills.
Somewhere on the distant horizon, Zago pointed out a hill –“That’s Mongdong,
where we are going today,” he told me.
We descended into the Yangwe Kong valley and the condition of
the zigzag road deteriorated even further. On some sections landslips meant we
had to get out of the car to allow our driver to negotiate them alone. Some way
down there was a cluster of stone buildings called Diwan, but there was no sign
of the monastery called Deon Gomba mentioned by Rock.
“All gone,” said the driver, simply, twirling his hand.
When I mentioned that Rock had described the pass as forming an
ethnic dividing line between Tibetans and the Hsifan tribe, Zago winced visibly.
“Hsifan is a derogatory term and actually the people on this
side of the pass are Pumi. We are similar to the Tibetans but our language is
different to Lhasa Tibetan dialect,” he said curtly.
So now I would finally get to see this valley that Rock had
claimed to be so oppressive, whose inhabitants he believed to be “buried alive
inside vast canyon systems”. And yet as we bumped and rocked down the Yangwe
Kong it didn’t seem particularly oppressive. In fact it had rather a pleasant
climate and outlook.
Under sunny skies we passed small settlements called Shigen and
Bongbongchong where the fields and yards were planted with maize. There were
apple, orange and peach trees, while pigs and goats roamed freely and a river
flowed green and clear beside the track. It could almost have been an isolated
valley in mediaeval Europe. The local houses were of simple Tibetan style, built
of stone but with practical sloped roofs of Chinese curved tiles - and almost
every one had a satellite TV dish.
The local Pumi people wore contemporary Chinese-style clothing
- army jackets, plain trousers and gumboots, and many carried wicker baskets
strapped on their backs filled with vegetables or firewood. We saw a hunter
carrying an old rifle who was happy to pose for a portrait. “The climate here
is too warm for people to wear traditional Tibetan clothes” said Zago. The only
item of clothing Joseph Rock would have recognised were the homespun yak hair
cloaks with wide red seams that some men still wore.
Further down the valley, we were brought up short by huge
boulders that blocked the road. As we slowed to tackle the obstruction another
large chunk of rock bowled across the road just metres in front of us. I looked
up to see about twenty Tibetan faces peering down from over the edge of a cliff
a hundred feet above the road. I had visions of being attacked by tufei
(bandits) - but Zago assured us this was just the local way of quarrying for
building materials. The villagers had not been expecting any vehicles to comec along this rough trail, and had been
dislodging large boulders to roll down across it, without giving thought to
what lay below. It took us a few minutes of grunting and heaving to shift the
boulders from the highway under the watchful eyes of the locals, and then we
were on our way again.
A few miles further on we halted again, this time at the large
village of Sanyanlong - a veritable metropolis - where there were a couple of shops,
a clinic and a sizeable, neat Chinese-style school. The school kids flocked out
to see us, and Zago, being director of education, went in to make a quick
visit. I popped my head into the clinic, a simple treatment room where a demur
female doctor in a white coat was inserting an IV drip into a woman’s arm.
“Conditions here are very poor,” she said apologetically.
I recalled Rock’s 1929 comments about “Sedjuron”:
“Whenever we came to a village the peasants would gather about
us and with folded hands would beseech me to dispense medicine to sick
relatives. Often I could help. Sometimes I had to refuse”.
At least now Sanyanlong had a clinic.
By mid-afternoon we’d reached the end of the line – a place
called Shantien, wedged in between the steep sides of the head of the valley.
This was Zago’s home village and there were many happy shouts as we parked the
Land Cruiser and aunts, uncles and cousins emerged to be reunited with their
relatives from town. From the courtyard where cows and pigs grunted, we climbed
up steps hewn out of a log up to the first floor of balcony of his ancestral
timber-framed home.
Inside the roomy interior we had a late lunch of fatty bacon
and some bitter courgette type vegetable, and everyone slurped bowls of suyou
cha - butter tea. On the walls were the usual gallery of framed family
pictures, but also an old hand-coloured photograph of a meeting of the Dalai
Lama and Chairman Mao. “My dad’s brother is a well known huofo (living Buddha)”
said Zago, pointing to a picture of another maroon-clad benign-looking monk. IN
this remote village there was nothing out of the ordinary, it seemed, with
having a Communist Party official and a prominent member of the Buddhist clergy
in the same household.
During the meal a toothless old man brought in an old flintlock
rifle to show me, similar to the ones portrayed in some of Rock’s photographs. Other
historical artefacts were also brought out to display, such as an old chest
containing bricks of tea – a reminder that this place had once been a stopping off
point of the tea and salt caravans between Yunnan, Tibet and India. I was also taken
upstairs to see a huge rounded coffin, which was being prepared in advance by
Zago’s uncle. It was a Han-style coffin, Zago told me, as if I should know
these things – adding that Tibetans were buried in a sitting position.
He then took me up on to the roof of the house, which was
strewn with drying-out maize stalks, as well as a sweet pink form of barley
called mocheng mian and flat wicker trays of red peppers. Zago wanted to point
out where we would be going. He gestured towards a large pointed peak down the
valley called Sazanran, to the right of which flowed the Yangwe Kong river down
a cleft towards the Yalong river. “We’re going over that …” he said. It looked
impossibly steep.
IN the evening, the Joseph Rock photographs came out again, and
everyone crowded around to see their old villages. Zago’s uncle looked at the
one of Mundon and asked me: “How does the foreigner have pictures of our old
village when even we don’t have them?”
The big ascent to Mundon
The sounds of clanking horse bells heralded the arrival of our
horses for the next part of our trip. The four horse handlers strapped on our
bags, adjusted the stirrups and straps and we were soon setting off up a steep
rocky trail behind the houses through the bushy hillside. Almost at once the
handlers were urging me “Qi ma , qi ma!” (Ride the horse). At first, I tried to
walk but as the altitude took a toll I soon conceded and let the horse sweat
its way more surely up the narrow and zig-zagging trail.
As we ascended, an impressive view of the lower half of the
Yangwe Kong emerged, along with a bird’s eye view of the narrow cleft of a
gorge that lead down to the Yalong river, far below.
“Why did Rock take the trouble to climb all this way over the
hills when he could have just gone down to the river there? I asked Zago. The
simple answer was there was no place to cross the Yalong at that point and no
settlements on the steep sides of the canyon there.
“This is the only way to cross to Muli and Yunnan,” he said
flatly.
Our track eventually crested and crossed over a cleft in a
razorback ridge of Sazanran, to descend equally steeply to some more
settlements in a beautiful steep sided valley on the other side. I marvelled at
the deep green tones of the precipitous slopes, and the surrounding ridges that
hung like crenulated brocade. But what an isolated place it was!
With its steep enclosing valley walls, this was surely the
place that Joseph Rock described as having “no outlook in any direction”, and
where he thought it was so oppressive “to be buried alive in these vast canyon
systems!”
We dismounted, drank the clear water from mountain streams and
we went down, passing a few isolated farm houses on our rollercoaster descent
only to begin another weary ascent as the day drew to a close.
For hour upon hour, up and up the poor horses strained, by now
needing constant urging from the handlers as they paused every twenty steps,
panting and sweating. “Cho! Ra-cho!” After numerous false summits, it took what
seemed like hours before we were able to “fang shan” (reach the top of the
mountain). When we did, it was dark.
We were on top of a rounded ridge overlooking the Yalong river
canyon. Even in the fading light, it was very impressive. Down there far below,
somewhere in the gloom, I could just make out a few faint pinpoints of orangish
light far below, presumably houses along the river bank in Muli county across
the river. Above, a crescent moon cast a little illumination to guide us
further up the ridge. The horses stumbled on up the ridge track.
By now, I could barely make out the track and I wondered how
the horses could see where to put their feet. I was glad I could not see the
steep drop that I would face should the horse stray off the ridge. It was a
surreal and marvellous experience to be riding under the faint moonlight, with
the canyons far below and the long jagged ridge of the Muli mountains opposite
marking the divide between earth and the night sky. An inverted carpet of stars
and the Milky Way lay above our heads.
Saddle sore and worn out from the day’s ascent from the remote
Yangwe Kong valley, I strained my eyes to look for any sign of a settlement. The
only lights were those faint pinpoints far below, across the Yalong river
canyon, in distant Muli county. The only sound was of the horse bells clanking
and the occasional “Cho!” to stir them on from the handlers, shadowy figures
who could only be seen by the orange glow of their cigarette tips.
Some time around 8pm we finally saw a faint pinpoint of light
ahead. Mongdong! We came upon a cluster of shadows - buildings? In the darkness
we gathered outside the locked wooden gate of a Tibetan house on the hillside,
and an incredulous old man’s voice from within eventually replied to shouts
from Zago and the handlers. A dog barked, a faint light went on inside and a
torch shone out in our faces. The old man mumbled the Tibetan acknowledgement
of “Oh-ah-uh” and let us in.
Hauling our weary saddle-sore limbs up another notched log from
the muddy courtyard, the handlers took care of the horses. Within the smoky
dark scullery we huddled around a wood fired stove as Pema’s uncle cooked us a
late dinner of fatty yak meat, boiled potatoes and sour yoghurt. This was the
house of Pema’s father and uncle and they had a lot of news to catch up on.
Recognising that the foreigner could not stomach much of the
tough yak meat, they made me some roast potatoes by burying them in the ashes
of the fire. I sat in the dark by the fire, peeling the potatoes with my
fingernails and eating the insides with a sprinkling of chilli flakes. The
villagers pored over the old photographs that I had brought with me.
Zago’s grandfather told us he well remembered the visit by
Joseph Rock to their village. He recounted the story of how as a five year old
he had been intrigued by the silent foreign visitor, and had been very curious
to hear how he spoke. So when Rock had bedded down for the night, the young kid
and his older brother dropped a few dried leaves near his bed and set fire to
them to see what the visitor’s reaction would be. Unfortunately, their ruse
worked better than expected, because the flames from the burning leaves set
fire to Rock’s sleeping bag. The westerner (Rock) jumped up and started yelling
at them, as they scarpered outside to hide behind a nearby bush. Rock spent
much of the next morning in angry silence, sewing up his sleeping bag.
Grandfather had another Rock anecdote. Later on during Rock’s
visit to Mundon, when the young lad was acting as a guide to the botanist,
grandfather claimed he had tricked Joseph Rock out of his camera. He said he
had spied the strange equipment hanging up unattended on a tree branch, and he
hid the camera in some bushes. Joseph Rock became distraught when he could not
find his precious camera and paid a handsome reward it was “found” by the young
uncle. Grandfather remembered that Rock was so relieved to get his camera back
that he actually kissed it when he had it back in his hands. However, the
unworldly young Tibetan kid was not to profit from his trickery. Unaware of the
high value of the silver dollars he had received from the foreigner as a
finder’s fee, he said he was later tricked into exchanging them for just a few
pieces of working clothes by a trader in Muli.
Perhaps it was the
altitude, but I felt dozy and dizzy and lay down on some yak hair blankets on
the floor, pulling my sleeping bag around me. The walls of the room were covered
in posters of “Distinguished Animals and Birds of Ganze Prefecture” and an
official notice with a Tibetan monk on that pronounced “This is a Safe and
Civilised Household”.
The others soon joined me to bed down on the wooden floor. “If
it wasn’t for me you’d still be here digging up spuds,” Zago teased Pema in the
dark. “If it wasn’t for you we’d have been here half a day earlier. You’re so
fat your horse needs a rest after every five steps,” Namu teased her father.
Muti Konka: the mountain with a monster legend
The following morning I rose before the sun came up, from among
a pile of snoring bodies in the wooden room. Our party of eight had quite taken
over the Mongdong uncle’s house. Tottering round in the cold, with my legs and
thighs still aching from the previous day’s long hours in the saddle, I somehow
managed to find a flask of hot water (kaishui) to wash with and put my contact
lenses in.
At the time of Rock’s visit there had been no water here at
all. It had to be “carried by the women from a thousand feet below”. This time
there was a little, thanks to a diverted mountain creek, enough to make a weak
cup of Nescafe to warm me up as I stood on the balcony and watched the sky
lighten and reveal the Muli mountain ridges. To my surprise the string of
lights I had seen the night before were not houses along the river, but
belonged to a settlement only half way down the canyon. This really was a
massively deep gorge!
As the others began to rise, Pema’s cousin, a rugged but
cheerful looking Tibetan, climbed up from the cow yard clutching a flapping
chicken by its legs. “Morning!” he hailed, and pulled himself out a stool to
sit on. Before I could react he had slit the bird’s throat and was directing a
stream of steaming dark blood into a bowl as casually as if he was pouring red
wine from a casket. I moved away as he efficiently started to pluck and wash
the now lifeless carcass, which was a very unappetising greyish white colour.
Joseph Rock described Mongdong (Mundon) as a “dreary Hsifan hamlet”. But as the
morning sun rose over the peaks it seemed to me anything but dreary. The views
across the gorge were superb and this collection of four family houses seemed
to be a cheerful little community.
Drawn by the sound of chanting and the throbbing of a drum, I
visited the small Black Hat Buddhist temple next door, outside which in a stone
shrine some burning juniper branches sent up a trail of smoke into the blue
sky. Within the dark and dusty interior a couple of old men in ordinary clothes
were conducting a morning blessing, impervious to a young boy and girl toddlers
who gamboled around them. The bumpy surface of the whitewashed interior wall
was covered with colourful Buddhists frescoes.
On an exterior wall at the entrance there were more beautiful
pictures of Buddhists figures in delicate faded sky blues, yellows and pinks.
All their faces had been scratched off during the Cultural Revolution. “Tai
yihan” (What a pity) said Zago, by my side. Back in the house there was a shout
of “Breakfast!” and the whole household and visitors were soon slurping bowls
of fresh chicken stew with potatoes, bones and all.
We were farewelled from Mundon/Mongdong mid morning by all the
four families of the hamlet, many of them dressed up especially in their finest
Tibetan clothes. We posed for a few portraits, and then it was time to depart.
Again I tried walking up the trail, but even a short stroll up the relatively
easy slope left me breathless. I remembered we were close to 4500 metres high.
“Qi ma!” urged the horse handlers, and I quickly complied.
“Without horses you’d have no chance of getting to here,” said Zago. And as
Rock had noted: “Merely walking or climbing over a steep trail at heights of
16,000 feet is difficult enough, without carrying 80-100 pounds on one’s back.
This feat was performed by the Hsifan peasants through fear of our lama, who
represented the Muli king ...”
This time it was our horse handlers who bounded up the hill in
frayed plimsolls. Their singing of Tibetan songs seeming to grow louder and
more enthusiastic as we climbed higher. Perhaps it was to do with the amount of
Ara - spirits distilled from maize - that they consumed. By the afternoon they
reeked of it.
We ascended up the ridge, gaining fine views of Mundon from
above, through fir forest that was regenerating from a 1984. In parts, whole
swathes of the mountainside had been denuded of trees, while others seemed
untouched. Ahead we could see the high ridge of the Wadzanran pass, and Pema
warned that if it rained we would likely see many wenxue (leeches) emerging.
“As big as fish some of them are,” she commented. But the weather stayed fine
and clear.
We reached a plateau and clearing, ideal for camping, where the
horses rolled on the grass and we had fine views in three directions: to our
right the serrated ridges falling gradually to the Yalong river and rising
again in Muli county. To our left were the ridges that trailed off into the
Yangwe Kong. And ahead was the Wadzanran pass.
“That’s where the bandits used to lie in wait for the mule
caravans that came up from Yunnan,” said Zago. “They were bad guys - you
wouldn’t want to meet them!” By now, peeping above the crest of the brown
grassy hill ahead was the tip of a snow peak. “That’s Muti Konka!” exclaimed
Zago.
It was frustratingly near but I could see little of it. After
our break we continued, skirting around the left hand side off the rounded
ridge we were ascending, seemingly away from the Wadzanran pass. When I
expressed my doubts, Zago told me: “We aren’t going up to the pass - I’ve got
something better to show you. Something Rock missed.”
And as we rounded the ridge, suddenly the whole length of the
Muti Konka ridge came into view. And what a sight its snow covered heights
were. As well as the majestic main peak, there was a second snowy dome and in
front of it a rocky knob, not covered by snow. “Muti Konka is the yak spirit
mountain,” Zago told me. “The peak there is its horns, this ridge is one leg
and the Wadzanran ridge is another leg. The pass is its knee,” he said. The
rounded second peak, Jachong, was Muti Konka’s wife and the rocky knob, named
Yandron Zemu, was its little sister, he explained.
There was even better to come. As we continued around the hill,
suddenly the lower reaches of the mountain slopes came into view. And there,
far below us lay the most perfect alpine lake, kidney shaped, with much of its
length hidden from view behind the forested arm of a descending ridge. On its near
shore was a grassy plain where several tiny houses could be made out. It was
like a scene from old Switzerland.
According to Zago, the alpine lake beneath Muti Konka was known
as Zuni Ho to the Puma, or Chang Haizi [Long Lake] in Chinese. We sat down to
have a rest and one of the horse handlers, a gentle older man, told us of the
legend of a monster in the lake’s depths. He recounted how he himself had seen
something splashing around under the surface of the lake some twenty years ago,
and the large waves it had created on the shore. It was hairy, with the head of
a horse, he said, matter of fatly, sucking on his cigarette. No one doubted
him.
Lonely life at Chang Haizi
We descended steeply though forest to the grassy clearing in
front of the lake, and were welcomed by one of the two yak herding families who
made a living there. As his dog barked at us, Mr Champei invited us into his
primitive house made of grey boulders. Inside the timbered interior it was
surprisingly light and airy - quite a contrast to the mucky darkness of
Mendon’s dwellings. As we settled down for ‘suyou cha’, I looked around and
wondered, like Rock, how these people coped with the isolation. But even here,
two days hard horse rise from the nearest dirt track, they had electricity from
a distant hydro power station.
There were light bulbs and a dusty old hi-fi player. And as
with all Tibetan houses, they had a picture frame on the wall, filled with
family photographs. Some of the older ones were of the family in quilted
PLA-style uniforms - from the 1970s. The more recent ones showed them on
excursions to the Big Buddha at Leshan, down in the Han-dominated Sichuan
lowlands. These were not people cut off from the outside world any more.
We settled down around the central fire, above which was
suspended a wicker basket from which hung black entrails of condensed grease
and soot. Inside the basket were mounds of cheese. A yak’s skull decorated with
motifs like tattoos took pride of place on the mantle piece and the lady of the
house was soon preparing butter tea in the usual way using a plunger to squish
a mixture of tea and liquid butter up and down inside an elongated wooden
bucket.
For our dinner she first prepared Yumi Momo (maize bread) by
cooking the maize dough in the ashes of the fire. While that was baking she
took out a black old kettle that appeared to have noodles inside. It was
actually yak cheese, congealed on lengths of tree twigs that had been put
inside the kettle. She unwound some of the stringy cheese and mixed it with
green peppers to make a kind of macaroni they called gyedon, or xiulai, in
Chinese. This was complemented by more fatty yak beef and thin strips of fried
potato stir fried with chillies.
Namu, the big city student, surprised me by her quick
adaptation to our primitive surroundings. I had been misled by my initial
impressions of her pouting mannerisms and constant fiddling with her mobile
phone. I had expected her to be squeamish in this environment, but she was
obviously born to it. Looking incongruous in her trendy city clothes, she
expertly built up the fire, served up the tea and bantered with one of the
young Tibetan horsehands, Tsemi. He seemed to be a bit of a jack the lad, but
his ribald conversation and jokes kept everyone enthralled throughout the
evening.
A bottle of ara (maize) spirit was passed around, and Tsemi was
a good mimic: there was some joke about mispronouncing jiujiu (uncle) that had
everyone in fits. Pema laughed until she choked, and I reflected it was a long
time since I had heard such unrestrained laughter. I felt a bit left out.
The toilet arrangements were simple - you just went outside
somewhere, not too near the house or the lake. In the darkness I wandered some
way off and turned off the torch. It was almost completely black except for the
overarching white presence of the mountain, like two arms of a ghostly cloak
around the lake. I couldn’t see the house at all, and I panicked. Without a
torch, I felt that even from a few yards away I would not have been able to
find the house again.
Back inside, I settled down in a dusty corner and fell into a
fatigued sleep to have strange and vivid dreams. Was it the altitude or
something else at work?
Visiting the relatives at Roni
There was frost on the ground as I emerged from the boulder
shack and saw Mrs Champei milking a yak with a bright green plastic bucket.
Above reared Muti Konka, still in shadow as the sun had not yet reached over
the ridgeline. We were meant to have an early start but the horses could not be
found.
While the others breakfasted on suyou cha and tsampa, I walked
down to the lakeside. The water was crystal clear, showing the blue-grey stones
on the bottom, receding into pale sandy depths. The surface of the lake was
absolutely still, and appeared to be covered with a fine coating of dust. I
witnessed an unusual and startling visual effect. When the sun’s rays first
appeared over the ridge, the surface of the lake became a perfect mirror
reflecting the snowy mountain and autumnal forest colours of greens, yellows
and reds and browns. However, as soon as the sun’s rays directly touched the
lake, the mirror reflection was instantly and dramatically transformed into a
window, revealing the sparkling perception of its depths. I threw in a small
pebble and watched the concentric rings of its ripples swimming and expanding
as shadows on the bottom of the lake. If there was a monster down there it must
be keeping very still, I thought.
I went for a short stroll along a trail up the hill behind the
boulder shack. In the early morning sun the unfolding panorama of Muti Konka -
or Maidi Gangga in Chinese - was magnificent. I was soon out of breath and
paused after a few hundred metres to look down over the lake to survey the
beautiful scenery. It was a sublime spot, and I wondered how many other
outsiders had visited this place since Rock’s time. And why had Rock not taken
any photographs of this stunning peak?
My silent thoughts were interrupted by the distant clanking of
bells. The horses had been located and when I returned they were chomping at
their nosebags of maize and being readied for the days exertions. Bags were
strapped on, the wooden saddle frames covered with itchy yak hair covers,
straps were tightened and then it was “Zou ba!” - let’s go!
It was another perfect clear sunny day as we farewelled the
Champei family to return to Sanyanlong by a different route, via the village of
Roni (Lawaling in Chinese). We first headed downhill into forest of firs and
yellow leaved Qinggan shu whose branches were festooned with a hanging lichen
known as old mans whiskers or muliusiu. Birds flitted around in the undergrowth
and bell-like blue flowers – qiuhua - paved the occasional clearings.
“You should come here in June when the azaleas and
rhododendrons are in bloom,” Zago told me. Later on, down the trail, he
suddenly urged us to be quiet and we dismounted. Creeping forward he pointed to
a flock of large grey quails, which suddenly darted off into the bushes with
much clucking and flapping. Ye-ji (wild chickens), he laughed.
And as we ascended a ridge opposite the Wadzanran pass he
pointed out the songron mushrooms growing by the wayside. “Good for cancer.
Japanese pay a lot of money for them - but we don’t have time to stop and look
for them,” he sniggered. It was a leisurely day’s ride up through sunlit forest
until we eventually crested the hill at lunchtime, and stopped to admire the
view back to the Wadzanran pass, and away over to Muli.
“It looks so close but it would take you half a month to climb
down into the gorge and back out again,” said Zago. “They used to do it in the
old times, but why bother now? You can drive there in a day from Jiulong ...”
Zago and the handlers spent a half hour searching for and
eventually spotting a pusa (religious image) of Kuanyin painted on the summit
rocks high above us. Then we descended through the forest until we suddenly
emerged above a neat village, situated on a flat platform of land at the end of
the ridge, high above the Yangwe Kong valley.
“This is Roni,” said Zago. “They are all family here.”
In the afternoon sun a couple of men were ploughing a furrow
through a potato field with a unruly yak. An old man in a tattered grey cowboy
hat waved us over. It was Zago’s uncle. There was much to talk about, he hadn’t
seen his relatives here for five years. Down in the village proper, among the
stone and dark brown timbered buildings, we were ushered as guests of honour into
the comfy chairs of the main room.
We sat amid an odd mixture of farming implements and DVD
players as the head of the house – Zago’s cousin - rounded up the older
relatives to drink tea with us. He wore a red silk Chinese waistcoat decorated
with circular celestial motifs and an upturned Desert Storm-style bush hat on
his head. Zago had to restrain him from killing a goat for us, so the cousin
compromised by have his son to chase two unfortunate chickens over the walls
and roofs of the cow shed, to be consigned to the pot.
While Zago caught up with the family gossip, everyone wanted to
have their photograph taken with me, and have their formal portraits taken. I
was taken on a tour through the old village to meet an old lama and see his
corner of a house where he made pious supplications to Buddha while a vicious
dog in the yard outside lunged and barked at me in seemingly rabid intensity,
threatening to snap the home-made chain.
Over another chicken and potato stew the 83-year old grandma,
Yanzhong Lamma, told me how she remembered the visit of Rock and his strange
entourage. He brought strange accoutrements like photographic plates and
binoculars they had never seen before, and her father had the honour of guiding
him over the hills to Jiulong. In an echo of this, the younger people of the
village marvelled at my LED torch and cooed as they stroked the plastic
Australian dollars they asked to see.
Before leaving, Zago pressed a 100-yuan note into the
protesting hands of his aunts and uncles and we headed off, past old
timber-framed buildings with iron tridents protruding from the rooftops and the
yellow painted stone swastika motifs embedded in the walls. We passed a stand
of old ash trees with a sweeping view of the Yangwe Kong valley, and began the
last descent back to Shantian. It was soon pitch dark and what little of the
moon there was remained hidden by the ridge. I was glad of my torch because its
little beam lit the way for us, down a steep track alongside a roaring but
invisible series of waterfalls.
As we paused in the dark, on a narrow terrace above the valley,
I asked Tsemi about what Rock had written. “This place is cut off from the
outside world - do you feel happy here? Would you rather be somewhere else?” In
his nasal Sichuan accented Chinese he confidently and matter of factly
dismissed the idea.
“We’ve got everything here - good food, nice people, good
weather and all this beauty - and plenty to drink. Why would I want to live
anywhere else?” he said. There was silence for a while as the others
contemplated what he said. The tips of their cigarettes glowed in the dark. “Do
you think you will you come back here?” asked Tsemi. “I hope so,” I replied.
The next day after we had rested at Zago’s house I received a
rapturous reception at every place we stooped on our bumpy journey back up the
Yangwe Long. The local Pumi people greeted me as if I had just returned from
the moon. “Xinku! Xinku!”(hard going, well done!) they said, smiling from ear
to ear.
At unscheduled stops I was plied with Qingke Jiu (barley
spirits) and toasted endlessly. I was taken on a tour of the local school, and
treated as the guest of honour. One of the local female teachers ushered me
into a room where most of the staff had been hastily assembled. With trembling
hands she held a glass of Qinke Jiu up in front of me and sang a high pitched,
ululating Pumi song of welcome, then draped a traditional white kata scarf
around my neck. “Welcome to come back here, please tell everyone about our
little place,” she said.
