This blog recounts a few of our adventures on a tentative research trip to Xishuangbanna, home to most of China’s ancient tea trees and possibly the origin of tea itself. We visited in late-November/early December 2012, travelling by bus from Kunming via Pu’er. You can see another (and more considered) account of this journey on Prof Gary Sigley’s blog.

November 30, Pu’er

A six-hour ride took us to Pu’er via Mojiang and Ning’er. There were no alarms on the road, which is in excellent condition: you can now drive from Kunming to Bangkok and be on a freeway practically all the way. Apparently in honour of the foreign passengers, the driver put a couple of Western movies on the DVD player: The Mechanic with Jason Statham followed by Salt with Angelina Jolie. Both were ultra-violent/ludicrous and I did wonder what parents of the various children on the bus thought about this x-rated fare.

Bear with me a moment while I try to preempt confusion  about the name of this place. Pu’er is, of course, synonymous with Yunnan’s most famous tea, which was named not for its point of origin, but for the great market where teas from all over southern Yunnan were traded from at least the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Now the first problem is that the tea market of Pu’er was not in Pu’er…except that it was. Gah! Let me try bullet-pointing this:

• Pu’er County, where the historic tea market was, is now called Ning’er County;
• Ning’er County is now part of a prefectural-level administrative region known as Pu’er City;
• The Pu’er City government is located in what’s called Simao District (pictured above), about 60 kilometers south of Ning’er County Town. Because the whole Pu’er City region is run from Simao District, the latter is often referred to simply as Pu’er. Our bus, for example, was listed as Kunming-to-Pu’er;
• And just to confuse matters still more, the modern tea market is in Simao District, i.e. still in “Pu’er” but not in the same town as the historic market.

Anyway, to sum up: if people are talking about Pu’er in historical terms, they mean Ning’er; if they’re talking about Pu’er today, they mean Simao District.

And if you’re still reading this nonsense, don’t worry – it should get less turgid from now on.

Pu’er was a pretty clean city, mostly built within the last five years from the look of things. Construction was still booming all around town, so it seems the tea business is still doing OK – there’s nothing here to attract tourists, but the climate is excellent and it’s clearly a decent option for young Chinese people in search of a more relaxed work-life balance. After dinner we stopped at People’s Square, where quite a large number of locals were enjoying the night air. A pirate copy (I presume) of Rise of the Planet of the Apes was showing on a giant screen, but no one was paying any attention. I’ve rarely seen a new town show its village roots so obviously, with people making their own entertainment in traditional style.

Besides various hawkers and games, there were several circles dancing to the accompaniment of lusheng (a multi-piped instrument I’ve always associated more with Guizhou than Yunnan) and a rough kind of banjo. The liveliest circle, however, was composed of prancing youngsters and multiple harmonicas. Our team’s very own mouth-organist, Prof Gary Sigley from the University of Western Australia, joined in and quickly developed the circle from seven or eight to around 30.

Chinese officialdom has latched on to the concept of the “tea and horse trail” partly because it offers a convenient narrative that binds these peripheral regions to the main course of Chinese historiography. This statue in Pu’er also reflects the imperial/colonial thrust of official history. Here we have Zhuge Liang, chancellor of the Kingdom of Shu-Han and one of China’s most revered historical figures, bearing a sprig from a tea tree. Zhuge Liang led an army into this region in the year 225 and popular legend has it that he brought tea with him; hence the ancient tea trees of Yunnan are all descended from the great man’s gift. And so we have an imperialist war of aggression neatly transformed into a beneficent visit, bringing civilization and economic advancement to the savages.

December 1, Pu’er to Jinghong

After breakfast we walked to the big tea market, the Cha Yuan Guangchang, where we spent a couple of hours not only trying tea but also gaping in horror at the market’s other main line of business. This tiger was carved from a single hardwood tree; it’s illegal to cut down this kind of tree in China anymore, so the Pu’er market’s vast collection of tasteless lions,  eagles and boardroom tables is supplied from the forests of Laos and Burma, instead. This tiger was asking 1.8 million yuan (US$285,000), while a table so big it would surely require its own office building cost a mere 1.6 million (US$250,000).

Gary bought a small bag of this yueguang bai (“moonlight white”), which hailed from the county of Jinggu (the first stage northwest of old Pu’er). The leaves are supposedly dried in the moonlight, rather than in the daytime. I’m not sure how that could work in practice – another research trip awaits! This is the fancy “single leaf” variety, which looks nice but actually doesn’t taste as good as the cheaper versions (IMHO).

In the meantime, two more of our team, Gary Price from the US and Jinpa from Lhasa, were testing teas from Zhenyuan, the next county north from Jinggu. The lady in the shop showed us a picture of a tea tree near her village that was supposed to be 2,700 years old. It’s walled off and you have to apply to the local government to get in to see it. If it is 2,700 years old, that wouldn’t do much for the Zhuge Liang story, but can we believe the numbers? I spoke to a scholar in Kunming who claimed to have been present at one “expert inspection” of an ancient tea tree: the experts had a hearty lunch with the local authorities and then went to see the tree, looked it up and down and said, yes, this tree must be very old. They then took a guess at its age and the local government wrote that down as gospel.

After the usual row about money with our local driver (note to would-be researchers: apply for extra grant money for a higher class of transport!),  we went to visit a rumoured Tea Museum 20 km away in Yingpanshan. This turned out to be located within the grounds of the Wanmu tea plantation, and charged 50 yuan per person at the gate. Inside, the museum was absolute bollocks and there was  nothing else except an appalling fake display of ethnic minority houses and dancing. Prof Sigley gave them a proper serve about it; water off a duck’s back, of course.

Next stop was Jinghong, the capital of Xishhuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, about four hours’ drive away and a wonderful place to visit in winter, as it’s just on the edge of the sub-tropics. This was my first visit since 2000 and I was quite dumbstruck by the scene as we drove across the Mekong and into the city. It was a tiny place in 2000. I remember walking across the river and getting completely lost among the fields, forest and tiny villages, finally begging a bed in a wooden house belonging to some Hani people who could speak even less Chinese than I could at the time. Impossible to imagine now. The north bank of the river is  a building site, with huge apartment blocks going up and plenty already complete, plus fancy restaurants and bars.  Over the water in the main city, I couldn’t recognize a thing. I think it’s grown even more than Lijiang. In the evening after dinner we went to the bar street by the river, which was quite appalling. The traffic was bad, too. Nice and warm in the evening, though, and it is pleasant to be by the river and enjoy the excellent local barbecue.

December 2, Jinghong

You can see tour boats at the left of this picture as well as a massive new suburb of Jinghong under construction in the distance. It’s possible to sail down the Mekong from here, but the big boats can no longer go upriver owing to nearby dams.

We spent most of the day in search of information about the old tea trails, but pretty much drew a blank. Although the Tea Horse Trail is also part of Xishuangbanna’s tourist pitch, and the town was certainly once a trading post and caravan stop, we found no one who knew of any existing trails or relevant information. So we stashed our heavy gear at the hotel and prepared to move on to the tea-producing areas themselves.

December 3, Nannuoshan

Nannuoshan is one of the “Famous Tea Mountains” of southern Yunnan, renowned for the quality and antiquity of its tea plantations. The people of Nannuoshan mostly belong to the Hani ethnic group, and they have been growing tea as far back as folk memory can go. We visited one of the local tea producers, whose family has been in the business since at least the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Nannuoshan’s prize resource is its forest of “ancient tea trees”. The tea pictured above is a recently planted cutting, of course, but serves to illustrate the “large leaf” variety (camellia sinensis var. assamica) that distinguishes Yunnan tea in general.

This is the “King Tea Tree” on Nannuoshan, one of the Jinghong area’s prime tourist attractions. We passed several groups coming and going during our visit. I daresay it’s only a matter of time before one has to buy a ticket to view this tree, which the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has declared to be 800 years old. Many of the trees on Nannuoshan are said to be at least 600 years old. Those that remain are especially precious, as many of the old trees were cut down after the Revolution, and especially after the beginning of Reform and Opening and the rise of a fashion for more closely planted tea bushes similar to the plantations in Sichuan and eastern China. More recently, fashion has swung back in favour of the “authenticity” of the ancient trees, which is good news for those villages lucky enough to still have some.

Interesting though the old trees were, my main aim in visiting Nannuoshan was to speak to this gentleman, who is the father-in-law of our host. His family has lived on the mountain for many generations, and his memory stretches back far enough to recall times when caravans still came to buy tea in his village. This was one of the true starting points for the Tea Horse Trail, and I wanted to see what, if anything, he could tell us about where the trails went – and what kind of people came to trade with the Hani tea farmers.

Much of what he knew came from his own father’s tales. In the 1930s and 40s, there was already a tea factory nearby, and so that was the first stop for most of the village’s harvest. From there, caravans would pick the roughly processed tea up and transport it either west to Menghai, where there were a number of further processing factories and trading houses, or directly east to Jinghong, from where the trail led north towards Pu’er. What I found most interesting about his recollections, however, was his memory of Tibetans coming to trade salt for tea. It’s extraordinary to think of Tibetans coming all this way to trade: ordinarily, the Tibetan tea caravans would only go as far as Zhongdian or perhaps Lijiang, where they would sell their own goods and buy tea to take on the two-month journey back to Lhasa. To continue all the way to Xishuangbanna meant making a round trip that would take a full year – and that’s assuming the Tibetans stopped here. Perhaps they continued trading all the way into Laos or Burma – after all, the salt they carried to Nannuoshan was most likely bought in northwest Yunnan; it certainly wasn’t brought from Tibet, where salt is a scarce commodity.

Where any of the old trails intact? Sadly, he thought not. With the modern road now running past the foot of the mountain, any footpaths to Menghai or Jinghong would long since have been overgrown. Having already drawn a blank at Jinghong, we decided to continue to Menghai and see what we could find there.

There was a small museum of Hani culture by the main road at Nannuoshan. We enjoyed this picture from one of the approved local artists, showing the Hani welcoming progress into their backward land. If only he had gone the whole way and depicted Zhuge Liang at the wheel!

December 4, Menghai to Meng’a

Menghai was only a short bus ride away. Like Jinghong, the town was in the throes of a massive building campaign. But whereas Jinghong greets visitors with sculptures of elephants (the nearby Wild Elephant Park is probably the main tourist attraction), Menghai has decided to build its image around the tea trade: the road into town was lined with caravan-related sculptures like those pictured above.

Oh dear, oh dear. “The Tea Horse Trail Starts Here”, says the sign. This, declared Prof Sigley, was the worst theme park he had ever seen. I found it hard to disagree, especially given the whopping 90 yuan entrance price.

The boss was very obliging (not to the extent of letting us off the price of admission, mind you), so I’m sorry to slag off his theme park, but it really was a load of old cobblers. He told us this map had upset some officials and tourist developers from rival parts of the Trail. Frankly, I’m not surprised – they may just have been upset on the grounds of geographical and historical accuracy.

This representation of the ancient caravan trail had been constructed from stones “acquired” from several different parts of the trail in Yunnan. In other words, the real trail had been despoiled to create this mockery.

Amidst all the fakery and nonsense, the boss had actually collected some quite interesting artifacts in the course of an eight-month journey from Menghai to Lhasa. If only he’d given them to a proper museum. He said the theme park had cost 60 million yuan (US$9.5 million) and was designed to give tourists “the whole picture” of the Tea Horse Trail.

“Did it work?” I asked Tina.

“No,” she said.

Although the theme park did have some details about the old tea trading houses in Menghai, which date from the late-Qing/early Republican era, it didn’t have anything to suggest how we should proceed in tracking the caravan trail north. The tea trail theme park boss was adamant that the caravans all went first to Jinghong, but I couldn’t believe that. There is an important and very old ferry crossing over the Mekong at Simao (not Simao District, but a port town on the river of the same name – I know, I’m sorry), and a quick glance at the map showed that a route that ran from Menghai to Pu’er via Simao would save at least a day and probably two on the journey. It wouldn’t necessarily make sense to go via Jinghong if you were heading to Pu’er to trade.

So we hoisted our backpacks and started hiking north, aiming to interview people along the way to see what, if any, memories of the caravan trade might persist. The photos above and below show me practicing my field research by joining in a game of tuo luo with some Dai gentleman who had obviously left the village women to get on with the work. The aim is to knock the spinning top out of the square with your own top – and if your own top not only knocks out your rivals, but also remains spinning in its place, then you get maximum points. I scored nil, but did at least learn that the older men present could remember caravans passing both ways through their village in the 1950s. The Dai here seem to speak little Chinese, by the way, so it was pretty difficult to converse. Our informants reckoned the old route lay through Meng’a and Mengwang, and reckoned that while the old trails would have been replaced by the modern road as far as Mengwang, from there it would be possible to hike a mountain trail all the way to the ferry at Simao.

Given our limited time and disinclination to hike along a road, we waved down a local bus and squeezed on with an assortment of Hani, Dai and Lahu peasants. They were friendly folk and told us that we should consider going to a place called Mannuo, a Bulang village not far from Mengwang that had a large number of ancient tea trees. The bus took us as far as Meng’a, a truly dreadful little town.

I’ve been to a lot of awful Chinese country towns, but Meng’a almost took the biscuit. What a dump it was. But the sun was setting and there were no more buses that day, so we found rooms in a scummy lodge and went to bed early.

December 5, Mannuo

Mengwang was only another hour and a bit on from Meng’a, the road twisting and turning as it rose into the mountains close to the border of Xishuangbanna and Pu’er City. Rubber plantations covered many of the slopes, and it was hard to see how any foot trail could have survived. Mengwang was the end of the line, however, and from here it looked as if we could make the river in a day – assuming we could find the way. The locals weren’t unfriendly, but it was awfully difficult to strike up a conversation, let alone ask directions. Given what we’d heard about Mannuo, however, we decided that we’d hike the 6-7 km up to that village first. It also seemed reasonable to suppose that if Mannuo had ancient plantations, then they must also have had a path to haul their tea to the ferry at Simao. We decided to see if we could go that way.

Mengwang was a principally Dai area. Like dominant peoples everywhere, the Dai seemed to have taken the good land in the valleys and left smaller ethnic groups such as the Bulang and Lahu to scrape a living in the mountains.

The entire valley floor below Mengwang was covered by an enormous banana plantation.

Mannuo is principally a Bulang village, although there is also a small Han community on its periphery. Although it might look quite “traditional” in this picture, these houses are all modern constructions. Until little more than 10 years ago, most houses in Mannuo were still grass huts. According to the village chief, one person in the village was always deputed to keep an eye on everyone and make sure they put fires out properly.

The Bulang are not a numerous people: there are only around 100,000 of them in China and a few thousand more in Burma and Thailand. By tradition, they are supposed to have been the earliest inhabitants of southwest Yunnan. Some Chinese anthropologists also suggest that they were they earliest people to drink tea. According to oral tradition in Mannuo, they were the original inhabitants of the valley around Mengwang. When the first Dai came to the area, the Bulang regarded themselves as “elder brothers”. To help the weak newcomers, the Bulang gave them the best land and moved up the mountains, where only they had the ability to survive. It’s a nice way to rationalise a process that probably wasn’t nearly so harmonious.

Prof Sigley walked into the village first and immediately made friends with the village chief. He recently set up a small cooperative to try and make more of the village’s ancient tea trees. As it had taken most of the morning for us to hike up to Mannuo, and as it seemed like a very interesting place, we asked if we could stay the night. Of course, he said.

The chief took us for a tour around the village. He said this was their biggest and probably oldest tree, though he had no idea how old it might really be. He said the elders in the village had no knowledge of when the trees were planted. This particular specimen was almost as thick at its base as the “King Tea Tree” on Nannuoshan.

We visited this gentleman, Xu Zhihong, who is part of the Han community on the edge of the village. He gave us some of his gu hua cha, made from leaves picked just four days previously. Tina reckoned it was the best tea she tasted on the whole trip (and that included a very expensive, 25-year-old Pu’er – which frankly took the “earthy” taste a bit too far).

Then we went to the home of the village chief’s parents, where we enjoyed a pot of really traditional Bulang tea: the leaves simply thrown raw into a pot of boiling water. The chief said on balance the villagers probably liked this kind of tea best. In the past, he said, the Bulang of Mannuo paid little attention to the details of making or brewing tea; if it tasted good, that was all that mattered. The fine distinctions of Pu’er tea were alien to them, but now they needed to learn about the market’s demands so that they could make more of their good fortune in having so many old trees. What I found interesting about this was how it emphasized how little the traditions of these ancient tea producers have to do with the modern promotion of Pu’er tea, packaged as a local cultural artifact with a long ancestry, when it fact it’s more a result of requirements and processes imported to the region by Han outsiders.

We had dinner with the village chief and his wife, who really rolled out the red carpet for us. We were presented with wild boar and a vivid red dish of cooked pork tossed in raw pig’s blood. The chief also got out a small bottle of his home-made firewater, but he was a civilized character and didn’t force it on us. It’s refreshing to encounter this kind of hospitality, so different to the “official” version of local culture peddled to tourists in Jinghong. There, one is plied with booze and, if one demurs, lectured on the importance of respecting local traditions – which apparently demand guests get roaring drunk to show their appreciation of their hosts’ warm-heartedness. This, of course, is actually the drinking culture of Chinese officialdom, the driving force behind tourism development.

December 6, On the Trail to the Mekong

In the old days, said our host, the villagers of Mannuo did haul their tea over the mountains to the Mekong. They would set out at night in order to arrive at the river early in the morning. They would cross in rafts to the town of Simao on the east bank, sell their tea, and then return to the village by evening. Caravans would also sometimes come direct to the village to trade. The old folk spoke of strange people who travelled with the caravans; the village chief said he believed they must have meant Tibetans.

We meant to get an early start, but the village chief insisted on killing a chicken and cooking it for our breakfast, which was thus delayed until 10 a.m. Besides the chicken and left-over wild boar, there was also a small bowl of a dark, fragrant meat. “What’s this?” asked Tina. “A small bird,” said the chief, “Be careful when you eat it, there might still be pieces of shrapnel.”

The chief was most unwilling to tell us how we might hike directly to the ferry over the Mekong. It’s often this way in rural China: people want to direct you onto the main roads, perhaps because they are concerned for your safety; perhaps because they think they if you get lost and into trouble, they will be held responsible. I wore him down in the end, though. Just as we prepared to depart, he finally spelled out which villages we should aim for and pointed us in the right direction, the led us down the hillside for the first few hundred yards. It wasn’t quite the old route, he said, but that wasn’t possible any more. I could well believe him – the thickness of the forest where the slopes were uncultivated made it obvious that any trail would disappear in short order if it wasn’t well trodden.

Much of the day was spent guessing which way was best. People were hard to find; people who could speak intelligible Chinese still rarer. After one wrong turning on the way back down into the valley, we had to ford this river to avoid a lengthy double-back.

Once across the river, we began the climb into the mountains between Mengwang and the Mekong. The only available trails were like this one pictured above: cut just wide enough for tractor-trailers to haul logs and other mountain produce, and good enough for motorbikes to get in and out of the most remote villages. They wound this way and that and we made very slow progress. As the sun began to set, we were still nowhere near the river and had passed no villages for several hours. There were no clear spaces to camp at all. About an hour before dark, we got lucky – the only grassy space for miles around appeared below the road. It belonged to an old Yi couple who lived nearby and didn’t have the energy to dig the heavy clay on this patch. They welcomed us to pitch camp, showed us where we could get clean water, and invited us to stop by and watch TV at their place. Everyone has TV.

December 7, Simao

We were up at dawn and on the road soon after. As things turned out, we had camped at the only possible place, which was still almost three hours short of the river.

The town on the west bank was a weird looking place.

Locals seemed to have engaged in a competition to see who could build the most outlandish mansion. No one seemed to have a job, however, and there wasn’t much business going on. It turned out the town was populated by people resettled by the dam developers. They had been given a handsome payoff to build new homes, but now had nothing else to do.

Our team was down to just Prof Sigley, Tina and me by this time. We took the ferry across the Mekong to the river port of Simao, now a depressed sort of place as the dam had cut off most of the river traffic from the south.

Health and Safety wouldn’t approve of this trip, noted Prof Sigley. While it had been cool, even cold up in the mountains, down by the river it was blazing hot. We were parched by the time we had hiked up into town and found a small place to have lunch. “Do you have any cold beer?” I asked the boss lady. “Of course not,” she said, “It’s winter.”

Anyway, I found some cold-ish beer in a nearby shop. From Simao we got a bus back to Pu’er, then another bus on to Jinghong to pick up our stuff. From there, it was a short flight back home to Dali and a well-earned big pot of tea!

I think our trip confirmed my thoughts about there being a caravan trail from Menghai to Simao and then to Pu’er. Besides which, Mannuo must have been producing tea and selling it northwards for centuries, so it is just as much as starting point for the Tea Horse Trail as Nannuoshan or Menghai. It was fascinating to see people drinking tea in surely its rawest form, just as it was to think of those Tibetan traders visiting these far-flung places all those years ago.

Yang Xiao recently accompanied a Tibetan mule team into the Balagezong area on the border of Yunnan with Sichuan. He sent these pix straight after returning to Shangri-la.

The caravan consisted of 11 horses and mules, whose main task was hauling gear for a film crew shooting a promo video for Balagezong.

Yang Xiao got to tag along on the strength of being mates with the director.

The destination was the rock formation pictured above, known to locals as the “Natural Pagoda”.

The team trekked two days in and two days out, making a small circuit but camping at the same point on both the inward and outward journeys.

Unlike the kora trail, which we attempted in autumn 2009, this route is easily accessible by pack animals, and Yang Xiao says it can be extended further into the range and made into a lengthy circuit in at least two different directions.

As well as the film crew, local musicians accompanied the caravan (it was a musical promo).

The muleteers put on a show around the camp fire on the second day.

The people of Balagezong originally hail from the Batang area, which is now part of western Sichuan. There are no records of when exactly they decamped to this remote spot: old villagers put it anywhere between 400 and 1,000 years ago.

The old village is now mostly deserted, as the people have moved to more modern homes at the bottom of the valley, where a sealed road now connects them to Zhongdian.

The tourism area was created by a local boy made good, making this an unusual example of a “scenic attraction” not contracted by outsiders.

The prime attractions of Balagezong should remain relatively quiet, as it takes more time and effort to get there than most tour groups would allow. There are easily accessible walking routes  in the valley, plus a large new hotel.

These girls were brought in from Aba and Ganzi to liven up the video.

We’ve been planning a return trip to Balagezong ever since 2009, but the road-building between Zhongdian and Deqin has made access difficult for the last two years. Starting next year, however, things should be more or less back to normal, so we’re hoping to revisit the range and explore more of its lovely alpine lakes. If you’re interested and in VERY good shape, do let us know!

Yang Xiao has been making the most of the last days of autumn, exploring some new routes close to the border between Yunnan and Sichuan. He  sent these pix from a six-day hike northwest of Zhongdian. YX reckons this is a relatively accessible route: although it reaches 4,000+ meters above sea level, the gradients are not too steep and the trails are in good condition, making it similar in difficulty to the Mt. Tianbao hike.

Yang Xiao set off from close to Langdu, hiking towards the northwest. He was aiming for a pass due west, from where he expected to regain the main road back into Zhongdian. The first day was at relatively low altitude, passing through some good pasture to the lake pictured below:

This is Wudi Hu, where Yang Xiao chilled out for a day.

From Wudi Hu, Yang Xiao headed up towards the pass.

For his third night on the trail, he camped by this stretch of water, known as Bengong. Conditions were already deteriorating.

The following morning, YX tried to continue upwards, but despite the sunshine he ran into ever-deepening snow. As the weather began to turn, he thought better of his original plan and shifted direction towards the north.

He spent his fourth night close to this point. One of the outstanding features of this trek, he said, was the long stretch of primeval forest on this day. You can see some of the deep, thick green in the background of the photo above, and a close-up below:

According to Baima Qupei, a Tibetan herder Yang Xiao met later, wolves inhabit this forest – this was eyewitness testimony, by the way, not rumour.

Pictured above are Baima Qupei and his wife, Larong Zhuoma.

The fifth day took Yang Xiao back into herding country and through some lovely pastures. He camped close to the spot from where he took the picture below, then hiked out the next day to the main road between Zhongdian and Xiangcheng: a place familiar to us from New Long March 6, when we hiked that way in summer 2007.

This is the first in an occasional, but surely lengthy series in which we explore shorter trails in and around the Dali area. For the weekend of October 22-23, we set off from Xizhou to cross Mt. Cangshan.

The first part of this route follows a trail blazed by Kublai Khan’s army in the 13th century, but more recently upgraded courtesy of the Great Leap Forward. This stone was erected (accidental symbolism, surely?) in August 1958 to commemorate the heroic aspiration of the labouring masses, whose lofty spirit and ceaseless toil would make the mountaintops ring with the sound of machinery. The fallow land would grow fruitful and welcome multitudes, thanks to the Great Communist Party, Mao Zedong, etc..

Anyway, back to the beginning with a fine omen as viewed from the window of Chateau Red Rock.

The first part of the trail follows an easy dirt path, offering great views back over Xizhou and Lake Erhai.

The overall elevation gain is around 800 meters, and about half of that was accomplished in the first hour – opening up a view over most of Erhai and the Dali plain.

Further up, the route narrows and there are some nice sections of stone-paved trail. A 10-strong mule team passed us at this point, but the animals detoured along a secondary path that was hidden from my prying camera.

With most of the climb done by midday, the rest of the day’s trail was a gentle stroll along the ridge path leading into the ‘V’ above.

Looking back, you can see the flat, wide trail to the right, and our last sight of Erhai in the distance.

The remains of the stone road built in the late 1950s became clearer as we entered the broad pasture called Huadianba. This was the focal point of the GLF plan: 250-hectares of virgin land to be transformed by industry, mining, agriculture and herding.

It was a fiasco. The land was totally unsuitable for farming, and since only pack animals could negotiate the road up and down, it wasn’t much use for industrial development, either. Rather than multitudes of happy labouring folk, Huadianba is now home to this yak herd. The yaks seemed contented.

It’s terrific for camping, though! Tina tucked in early, after which an unseasonal downpour began. It lasted all night and all the next morning, after which we decided not to press on; instead, we retreated back the way we had come (camera stowed deep in the dryest recesses of my pack, so no more pix). We shall return!

As usual, we spent the Chinese National Day holiday period trying to avoid the crowds and explore new trails. This time we opted for a relaxing schedule, taking in a lovely stretch of ancient trail between Midu and Weishan before hiking around the Taoist sacred mountain of Weibao Shan. The guardians of the temples on Weibao Shan were especially easy-going, allowing us to roam and camp freely among some of the most beautiful Qing-dynasty temples I have seen in China.

Back to the beginning, though, and we started just west of Midu County Town after a slap-up lunch in the village restaurant pictured below, whose specialty was a steaming pot of chicken and mushrooms. The boss said we were the first foreigners ever to visit her establishment. She excitedly posed for photos with us and paid us back with shots of home-made yangmei liquor. It wasn’t the worst thing we had to drink on this trip.

Our chief muleteer, Chen Er’rong (who also joined us earlier this year to explore the route between Weishan and Fengqing), joined us after lunch with a single mule to haul our personal affairs up to camp. He and the rest of our team had traversed the mountain from the opposite direction early in the morning: the other mules and muleteers had remained at camp to get things ready for our arrival.

A dirt track wide enough for vehicles led up to a reservoir about an hour and a half from where we started. Both sides of the trail were thick with a kind of small eucalyptus tree, and we soon passed the first of several small operations making eucalyptus oil. From the reservoir, the trail narrowed and steepened as it climbed past an isolated Yi village. We met several of the villagers on the trail: some tidying up their fields, others bringing animals home from pasture or carrying baskets of fresh pine cones, which they roast before extracting the nuts.

Camp was around three hours hike from where we started, and I forgot to take a picture so you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you it was a good one – four stars, I reckon, especially for the view over the well-preserved stretch of ancient stone-paved road that begins here and leads all the way to the pass, just over an hour’s hike further up.

So, why is this ancient road here? It formed part of the caravan trail between Midu and Weishan, which was a single day’s stage for the fast-moving mules of yore. In the wider scheme of things, Midu-Weishan was one section of a route that ran from Chengdu via Yunnan to Burma and, ultimately, as far as India. That’s usually called the Southern Silk Road, although in the Yunnan tourist literature you may also see this section referred to as the Bonan Ancient Road or the Yongchang Ancient Road. Those names refer to old place names west of Dali, through which the main caravan trail passed on its way to Baoshan and Burma. The Midu-Weishan route offered an alternative, slightly southerly route to Baoshan; it also allowed travelers a shortcut if they were traveling from Kunming south to the tea plantations of Pu’er. You really need to look at a map to make sense of this – I think if you zoom out a bit from this one, you might be able to get some idea.

This hoof print worn into the stone is testimony to the number of pack animals that have walked this trail over the centuries. The road narrows at this point and mules had no choice but to step on this stone…

…and that is still the case, as our own animals demonstrated. They cast around for a way not to tread here (they walked around the stones on soft ground whenever they could), but none succeeded.

In our Weishan guide book, the name of this pass is translated as “Birds’ Passage Impregnable Pass”. It’s an especially significant route, not only for caravans but also for the migratory birds that use this pass on their travels. Villagers used to come here at night and set nets to capture the flocks; we also found nets strung between the trees, but they were supervised by a team of scientists on their annual visit to catch, tag and then release the migrants.

We were accompanied by a small caravan of three mules and one donkey – the first donkey ever to join us! They were a bit out of shape and asked for a good rest and snack at the pass.

Our muleteers have been in the mule and donkey trade for many years, and formerly trod these routes on their way to and from animal markets around the region. It’s bad business to do things that way these days: they load the animals in a truck, instead.

Once over the pass, there wasn’t much of the ancient road left, and we soon departed the forest and stepped onto a more modern road leading to Weishan County Town. We cut in and out of this road along as it looped down the mountain, allowing us to get back onto comfortable trails some of the time, but we took a wrong turn and once in the valley were faced with an unpleasant stretch through Weishan’s industrial district!

Ugh! At least we’ll know better next time…

Once safely into the old city of Weishan itself, things improved greatly. Although this was the middle of the National Day holidays and Weishan is only an hour’s drive from Dali, there were few tourists around. The main street retains much of its old-fashioned, local flavour as well as its Ming-dynasty layout and architecture. Little noodle shops still hang their fresh wares out to dry in the morning; old fellas drink Weishan’s “baked” tea in tumbledown tea houses; and we even found an old-style cobbler to fix Melinda Rajta’s hiking shoes, which had fallen apart before we even reached the Impregnable Pass (Yang Xiao showed off his Gear Guy skills to fix them up well enough to reach Weishan). On our way back through Weishan at the end of the trek, we stopped to buy tea by the old main gate and were passed by a funeral procession: the massive coffin was carried by six bearers, while tied to the lid was a live cockerel, doubtless destined to be sacrificed at the burial site.

Our mules stayed overnight outside town, while we rested and showered at a small guesthouse just by this old bell tower, which marks the center of the old town.

You can see more photos of Weishan from our previous visit in spring here.

The following morning, our caravan came in via the south gate, picked up our stuff and headed back southwards. There isn’t a real south gate anymore – the old city just runs out into a no-man’s land before the first village begins.

Right on the edge of that no-man’s land we happened across a lively livestock market, where mules, donkeys, horse, cows and pigs were being traded amid much tea-drinking on the sidelines. The market takes place once every five days and it was a shame we didn’t know about it in advance. I would have been interested to have our muleteers’ thoughts on the local products and prices, but they had already pushed on to a grassy verge to give the mules an early morning snack.

We followed a quiet village road for about three hours before reaching the beginning of this broad path up Weibao Shan. Further up, part of this path was fully paved: it’s an ancient pilgrimage trail for the villagers of Xincun, which tradition says was home to a gentleman named Xinuluo, the first King of Nanzhao. This trail leads to the temple of ancestral worship of Xinuluo, which was first built in the early 8th century (with the kind permission of the Tang emperor, according to the information in the temple itself, which goes to great lengths to emphasize the “submission” of the Nanzhao kings to the Tang and their essential “unity” with the Chinese Empire). The state of Nanzhao was centered on the Weishan plain, to which Xinuluo and his fellows moved in the mid-7th century (Xinuluo made himself King in 649AD).  Xinuluo and his people are considered the ancestors of today’s Yi people (Weishan is an Yi and Hui Autonomous County), and this temple of ancestor worship has been made a cultural symbol for the Yi people in general: for the last four years, a large festival has been held here on the 8th day of the 2nd lunar month, attracting Yi from as far away as Liangshan in Sichuan. The elderly local man who showed us the way was scornful of this festival, which he said had nothing to do with genuine local traditions.

There were three Taoist priests in the temple, as well as an elderly couple from the local village who were responsible for looking after the buildings. All tried to insist we should sleep inside the temple itself, but we opted for the more spacious and comfortable grassy space around the performance area in front of the temple gate. There were excellent facilities here, including a clean toilet with automatic taps and hand-dryers – not the usual conditions for a Red Rock camp! The temple was extremely interesting, with several new memorials to the early Nanzhao kings in addition to the old hall to Xinuluo (most of which was of recent vintage, as the buildings had been extensively damaged during the Cultural Revolution). All focused on the excellent relations between the Nanzhao rulers and the Tang Dynasty, with the brief exception of a major war during which the Nanzhao were “forced” to side with the Tibetans. The exhibit on the fourth king, Piluoge, also glossed over the way he “unified” the six kingdoms of Yunnan – with the connivance of the Tang, he called the other leaders to a meeting, during which he nipped out, had the doors locked, and then burned the building to the ground.

Weibao Shan is listed among the “14 Famous Taoist Mountains” of China. While some of the temples have a priest or three in attendance, most are looked after by old folk from the surrounding villages, who grow a few vegetables and flowers in the grounds. One of the temples (Zhujun Ge) has an enormous  camellia tree in its courtyard. A plaque announces that “Mr Davis the chairman of International Camellia Society” has declared it to be the world’s highest Ming Dynasty camellia. Anyway, it was too tall to photograph.

Seriously, though, I thought the temple pictured above, Wenchang Gong, was as lovely as any I have seen in China. I can hardly imagine a finer place to drink tea than the pavilion in the center of the Dragon Pond. Although it was still the National Day holidays, there were only a couple of other tourists in the place; as a rule, there’s no one there other than the voluble old lady who reeled off an unstoppable list of temple facts after I interrupted her frying peanuts in the temple kitchen. She reckons there are 15-pound carp lurking in the deep water under the bridge below.

What we could see were the fading frescoes on the bridge, which date from 1759.

This, so they say, is the earliest-known depiction of a traditional Yi dancing ceremony (of the kind now held on the circular concrete area next to our campsite).

Not all the art in the temples is of similar antiquity or interest. The character above the sage’s head is dao/Tao.

There’s a fascinatingly eclectic mix of gods, philosophers and classic tales in the 20-odd temples around Weibao Shan. This painting of Zhong Kui, a “ghost catcher” in Chinese mythology, was on the wall of a room used as a kitchen in Zhujun Ge – hence the sooty appearance. His sword is on the table, on the far side of his drink, so he appears to have been disarmed by the lady on the musical instrument – no doubt an attractive ghost. But what’s going on with his hand gesture? Is he saying, no more tunes? No more drinks? Why doesn’t he pick up his sword and let her have it?

Here’s one for today’s Socialist Taoist tourist: a jade frog with glowing red eyes that promises “Wealth through Harmony”. Taoism + Communism – you can have it all on Weibao Shan

The toughest part about hiking Weibao Shan was all the steps. Hard going for the mules, especially. We spent the first morning visiting the temples on the north side of the mountain, then packed up and moved to the south face, where we found a beautiful collection of temples almost completely free of other people.

Once again, the locals in charge were happy to let us sleep where we wanted. We set up the kitchen and dining area behind Peihe Lou (the “Crane Fostering Tower”) and in front of a small temple dedicated to Laozi, Confucius and Sakyamuni – the locals really take no chances when it comes to prayer.

There was some excellent gardening going on here. The courtyards and verges were ablaze with flowers, particularly chrysanthemums whose flowers were being harvested and dried for later use.

This is the Temple of the Three Sages.

And here are the sages themselves. I’ve never seen them all in the same place before.

This was another first for me. I’d seen plenty of “sacrificial” areas before in Chinese temples, but never one that was still in use. This tablet stands just outside to the temple to the God of Wealth: the most popular of the local gods, judging by the fact that it was the only temple to have been restored and tarted up. According to the corn-liquor soaked gentleman who showed us around, 5,000 chickens a year give up their last breath on this spot. Many of those are killed on a single festival day when Yi from the three closest villages visit this temple to make sacrifices, eat, drink, sing and dance until the sun goes down.

I had to hold my breath to take this shot…

We had been lucky with the weather in so far as it hadn’t rained much, but this afternoon was the first time we really saw some clear skies. The moon rose over the Crane Fostering Tower while we got dinner ready.

This was the view from our kitchen-cum-dining tent in the late afternoon.

And this is the same view by moonlight just as we were getting ready for bed.

The best was saved for last. After breakfast on our final morning we walked down an interminable flight of steps to reach the “Everlasting Spring Grotto”, built in 1715. How this survived the Cultural Revolution I have no idea, but it’s just dazzling – though faded. It’s a National Level Protected Building, the only one on the mountain. The interior of the grand hall is fairly dark and so it was hard to photograph the art, but after I made a generous donation I felt empowered to borrow a table as an impromptu tripod and take a shot of the ceiling. I’ve reproduced it here in as much detail as the web page can handle. I especially loved the flying dragon in the caisson.

One Taoist priest lives here. He puts on a good show. He played a couple of nice tunes, but his piece de resistance was a brief display of Tai Chi.

I should have videoed this rather than photographing it. I can’t say I have a practiced eye, but this was the first time I had seen anyone achieve movements so fluid and graceful while doing this.

From the Everlasting Spring Grotto, we at last escaped the steps and returned to a fine mountain trail. About an hour’s steep hike took us all the way down to a village by the main road at the bottom of the valley, where vehicles were waiting to whisk us back to Dali (and the mules back home to Miaojie, about 10 kn north of Weishan).

I guess we might have been the first foreigners here, as well…

Starting from Shuhe, we headed north via Tiger Leaping Gorge for a short trek over Mt Tianbao to Xiao Zhongdian, and thence to Shangri-la. All told, this trip took just seven days from arrival in Shuhe (via Lijiang) to departure from Shangri-la.

Rather than starting at the beginning, let me first show you my personal highlight from this trip – the first Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconopsis horridula) we’ve ever seen in Yunnan. It was late in the season and so the flowers were past their best, but this is still a rare and thrilling sight.

Pictured above is the main obstacle on our trekking route: the crest of Mt. Tianbao, two days’ march southeast of Shangri-la.

Now, back to the beginning at the C’est la Vie guesthouse in Shuhe, which is run by a very pleasant gentleman from Beijing named Jeff. Our group gathered here before embarking on the drive north to the trek’s starting point on the south slope of Mt. Tianbao. Shuhe, it must be said, is rapidly degenerating into a copy of Lijiang Old Town: crowded, noisy and full of identikit stalls selling tat from east-China factories. The Tea & Horse Trail Museum is still worth visiting, however, and C’est la Vie is a lovely staging post on the quiet northern edge of town. Jeff also directed us to an excellent restaurant for dinner.

In theory, we had a five-hour drive interspersed with rest and sightseeing stops in Tiger-Leaping Gorge and at the White Water Terraces. In the event, we spent almost all our spare time on the side of the road, waiting for the police to sort out a multi-vehicle snafu caused by the idiot drivers in front of and behind us (back in 1980s Manchester, we would have called them “boy racers”). The road from Lijiang down to the Jinsha River is especially narrow and winding, and we had picked the busiest weekend of the year. A 4-wheel drive rammed the car behind us, which was shunted into our rear (having maintained the local six-inch safety gap between vehicles). With half of Yunnan Province tailgating behind us, this caused an inevitable pile-up. None of our party was hurt, but a French boy in one of the other cars had his nose and upper lip split when his face collided with the seat in front. My wish for Christmas? Proper driving instruction and testing for China.  I feel there’s a spirit of selfish, reckless individualism abroad in this country, and it finds deadly expression in the car culture.

It was, therefore, with especial relief and pleasure that we abandoned the vehicular mode of travel and joined our 10-mule caravan. On this first day, we hiked for just 45 minutes up to camp, which was on an autumn pasture at around 3,100 meters above sea level. After most of our crew had retired to their tents, the sky cleared and a full moon shone over the valley. The shot above was taken by moonlight; Yang Xiao is brushing his teeth in the right of the picture.

The following morning, two of our team were feeling very ill: most likely from a combination of altitude sickness and the shock of an unfamiliar diet and environment – they had landed from the US just a few days earlier. They struggled onwards and upwards to reach our reserve campsite on Benghuo Pasture in the early evening (where they couldn’t be persuaded to try any yak butter tea!). Louisa picked up a few leech bites along the way, but fortunately the campsite itself was relatively leech-free. Once liberated from their loads, our mules frolicked around this pasture quite joyously.

All our mule handlers came from the village of Haba, about 60 km south of Mt. Tianbao. They boosted their camp supplies by foraging for wild produce.

Mt. Tianbao stands on the edge of the Yunnan-Tibet Plateau. The yak herders here are all Tibetan.

Sick people make happy mules. Originally, we planned to hike today all the way to the highest campsite on the range; Benghuo was only the halfway point, so the mules had an easy day.

I believe this is a yak/domestic cattle halfbreed called a dzo in Tibetan, pian niu in Chinese. They are generally considered larger and stronger than pure-bred yaks. They also give more milk, but the Zhongdian [Shangri-la] Tibetans consider butter made from dzo milk to be inferior.

Our third evening on the mountain was spent here, 4,100 meters above sea level, only one-two hours away from the pass over Mt. Tianbao.

Here’s a misleadingly happy picture: Ira Belkin, three-quarters of the Kellogg family – Lousia, Sam, Q – and Kathy Levitan trying to dry out and warm up during a brief interruption of evening sunshine. It rained almost throughout today’s trek, and our entire group arrived at camp soaked through and shivering. The mule handlers quickly started a log fire in the hut behind the tarp, but most of our group was driven out by the acrid smoke from the wet firewood. As I took the picture, Ira said, ” The sun always shines on Red Rock treks, eh?”

The first time I ever went hiking and camping in China’s mountains was with Yang Xiao in 2001. We got completely drenched. Yang Xiao’s comment at camp was, “We are hikers, we like all kinds of weather!” Somehow, I have never found that thought comforting.

Here’s Yang Xiao enjoying the right kind of weather. It only lasted an hour or so, and then the rain set in again for the whole night. Our campsite was a bog by morning.

The pass over Mt. Tianbao is just over 4,400 meters above sea level. Our group took between one hour and two and a half hours to make the trek from camp to pass.

Ira was suffering from the thin air, but took a slow-and-steady approach and reached the pass in good shape.

Once over the pass, we hiked about half a mile across a plateau to the head of a valley leading west to the Xiao Zhongdian plain. The view opened up suddenly and dramatically across Abuji Lake to the crest of Mt. Tianbao.

After a grey, drizzly morning, the sun broke through at lunchtime. The lake is still more than 4,000 meters above sea level: too high for fish, but home to a large number of salamander.

After a lengthy lunch stop, we had to push on down to lusher pastures. The mules had gone two days without a proper feed, and our team needed to descend to a more congenial altitude.

I haven’t been able to identify this flower yet. If anyone can help, I’d be grateful!

After the travails of the previous day, the mountain gods rewarded us with a glorious afternoon’s stroll through the wildflowers. We had to descend about 400 meters to reach camp, which took the advance party only about an hour and a half.

Locals reckon there are no significant wild animals left on Mt. Abuji, which rises to the right of this shot. Yang Xiao saw deer there earlier in the year, though.

Any ideas what this is, folks?

Perhaps our rock-climbing friends would like to tackle Abuji. Adam, what do you think?

We headed initially for the nearest pasture, but found it too crowded with people, yaks and dogs.

The caravan pushed on ahead to get camp set up in good time for dinner.

Having arrived two hours ahead of our straggling back-markers, Lao Wang and Xiao Lin took time out to enjoy the evening sunshine and a refreshing cup of yak butter tea. This was our fourth and final campsite, and by this point all our team were feeling fine. Having been up to 4,400 meters and descended to just 3,600, the ill effects of high altitude had worn off. We celebrated with a bottle of Shangri-la’s finest wine: “Enduring Pulchritude”.

After a relaxing stroll along the valley floor on the final morning, we left the mule team at Dejiling Lamasery, a stone’s throw away from where highway 214 cuts across the Xiao Zhongdian plain on its way to Shangri-la. We made a brief tour of the main hall, notable for its many pictures of the 10th Panchen and a remarkable table dedicated to one of the lamasery’s living Buddhas, whose photograph surveyed an impressive array of auspicious alcoholic beverages. We then snacked in the lamasery’s courtyard and finally made the 45 minute drive into Shangri-la and a well-deserved rest and shower (though the hot water ran out before everyone was washed – sorry, Q!)

This is a subtitled video of a journey in the footsteps of Xu Xiake, who traveled between Fengqing and Weishan in 1639. The voice over consists of extracts from Xu’s diary.

It’s only seven-and-a-bit minutes long, by the way…

Click here to watch!

Caravan on Tea Horse Trail above Lushi

This journey retraced not only a key section of the Tea & Horse Trail south of Dali, but also part of Xu Xiake’s final journey in Yunnan. Xu was a traveler and diarist of the late Ming Dynasty. In 1639, he was on his way to the sacred mountain of Jizushan, where he planned to inter the ashes of a monk friend who had died during their journey together.

Two of our four mules descend Louti Jie, “Steps Street” in the ancient town of Lushi.

Lushi’s old buildings and cobbled streets have been preserved by neglect. They stagger inconveniently down a hillside; what was once the main street is called Louti Jie, “Staircase Street”,  and you may imagine from that how unsuitable it is for modern transportation. Rather than rebuild the old town, the locals have erected a new one around the modern road on the ridge above. Most of the old shop fronts are shuttered, perhaps permanently, while the courtyards are left to elderly generations who would rather not leave their ancestral homes. It was once a prosperous tea-producing and trading town; the north-south highway now bypasses it, and even the old caravan trail has been broken by the creation of a reservoir behind the Xiaowan Dam on the Lancang River.

Our muleteers say that all the caravans once stopped here: to pray and to rest. Above this resting place is a village called Machang, “Horse Field”, where mule teams formerly grazed before or after visiting the market in Niujie, just four kilometers away to the north.

The mazy trails through the hamlets and tea plantations above Fengqing finally resolved into a single path leading through the heart of the Fengshan range. In places, the trail cut through rocky defiles too narrow for our mules’ wide loads, which had to be lifted off the animals and carried sideways by the muleteers themselves. At about 2,800 meters above sea level, bamboo forest crowded the path. Again, mules had to be unloaded and packs carried through low, narrow corridors slashed through the fast-growing thickets. Impatient cows bellowed on the trail behind us, anxious to reach pasture. The only people we met were three young men carrying home-made rifles, destined to take aim at the mountain’s bird population. They kept us on the right track, showing where the trail divided on the ridge: one section veering eastwards to Xiaowan; the other dipping through a short ravine into a grassy bowl where a handful of cows and pigs grazed.

Xu Xiake crossed the Lancang River on a raft, most likely bamboo poles strung together in the manner still used in parts of Yunnan. On this journey we crossed both the Lancang and Heihui rivers, both times in flat-bottomed motor boats just big enough for our six people and four mules. Our animals had never ventured this far from home before, and none had ever set foot on a boat. They didn’t like it…

This lady encouraged, almost obliged our party to use her home as shelter from the midday sun. She was indignant at the idea of payment for our use of her kitchen, firewood, and tea leaves. “It’s not easy for you people who leave home,” she said. “I should be hospitable.” She rejected a little badge combining the Canadian and Chinese flags, which my Canadian comrade Jacques Castonguay tried to present as keepsake. Couldn’t we send her some photos of her 3-year-old granddaughter? She worried, “Won’t that cost a lot of money?”

The first time we brought the lead mule, Hua Jiao, to the waterside, he dug in his heels; pulled forward by his lead rope, he reared away, hind legs scrabbling for purchase on the loose bank. Finally, three men pushed while one pulled; left no choice, Hua Jiao clanked onto the steel prow and thence towards the stern to make way for the others.

For passing caravans, the only room available in Jinma was in a courtyard that once belonged to the Zi family, and now hosts the Jinma branch of the Communist Party School, the village Communist Party Committee, and the village clinic. This is one of the joys of travel in rural China: one can arrive in unlikely places with an unlikely assortment of people and animals, and not only do people welcome you to stay, they seem genuinely pleased to have you stable mules on their doorstep, set up camp in their courtyard, and make abundant use of their kitchen. For one night only, the Zi family courtyard was transformed into something close to an old-fashioned ma dian, the kind of caravan inn that lined the Tea and Horse Trail throughout Yunnan.

Lu Yingcai established Lushi’s first tea plantation and processing plant in 1937. For several years, Lushi boomed, but these were the last days of the caravan trade. With Lu’s death and the opening of a new road to the east, the Fengqing-Lushi-Weishan branch of the Tea and Horse trail was snipped off like an oxbow lake. Lushi turned from trading hub to dead end. Today, Lushi’s tea growers sell their produce to the Yunnan Dianhong Group in Fengqing, so that Lushi itself has no brand of tea to call its own.

The people of Lushi deal with their trash by driving a few hundred yards out of town and dumping it all down the hillside below the road.

Louti Jie in Lushi again, sans mules.

Old Lushi comes alive for just a couple of hours each morning, when the street between Louti Jie and the town square hosts a market. We resupplied with fresh fruit and vegetables, pork for that night’s pot, plain unleavened breads and pancakes stuffed with beans and bean sprouts.

Mules still haul supplies through the old streets, clattering up and down the stone steps and scattering bands of small children, who roam and play freely in narrow warrens perfectly designed for childish imaginations.

The people could not have been friendlier. At every turn we were invited to sit, drink tea, and chat.

Some of the flagstones on Louti Jie still bear the imprint of the caravan trade.

My favorite mules always remind me of my cats.

As we grew accustomed to Xu Xiake’s trail descriptions, we learned to put our trust in his distance measurements. Although some of Xu’s footpaths had vanished under new roads or fallen away from disuse, several well-worn mountain trails were still exactly where he described them, including the one to Chafang Temple, two hours above the Xi Niujie ferry crossing.

The temple was largely destroyed in the 1960s, but rebuilt by public subscription in 1998.

Locals maintain this clear space for their own enjoyment. They were happy to let us borrow it for ours, too.

The slogan exhorts mules to Stick to the Socialist Road!

This water buffalo caught our attention with his green bath.

The dimensions of Old Weishan are astonishing: stretching more than a kilometer from north to south, it is at least as big as the famous tourist attraction of Dali Old Town, which is only an hour’s drive to the north. Still more surprising is the almost complete lack of tourism development.

On my 1950s map, Weishan still bore the old name Xu Xiake used: Menghua, named after the Meng tribe who established this valley as the political center of the Nanzhao Kingdom in the seventh century. The map showed it as a walled town, but today only the massive northern gate tower, Gongzhen Lou, remains.

Where Dali is crammed with guesthouses, cafes and bars, and shops selling every kind of local “ethnic” clothing for the passing tour groups, Old Weishan’s crumbling shop fronts host little more than you would expect in any small Chinese town: noodle shops, hairdressers, drink and cigarette kiosks, plus a particularly decrepit structure where the old folk drink Weishan’s traditional “baked” tea at two yuan a glass (plus endless refills of hot water). The tea leaves are baked in a clay pot before use, lending the brew a rich, smoky flavour.

It’s possible to walk straight along the former caravan highway through the heart of the old city, where much of the traditional architecture is intact.

Last week I finally got around to reading James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, the source for the “Shangri-la” moniker that adorns so much tourism literature (not least our own!). The outline of the tale had been familiar since childhood – when I caught it by chance on TV, the climax of the 1937 film version made a deep impression on my young mind. I suppose I preferred to guard the memory of that experience rather than seek out the “real” story.

Anyway, having read the original at last, I thought I’d pen a few thoughts about the origins of “Shangri-la”…

The town and eponymous county of Zhongdian in northwest Yunnan were officially renamed Shangri-la in 2001, if I remember rightly. Over the border in Sichuan, the local authorities in Daocheng County were also keen to tap the tourism potential of such a name change, but their claim was unsuccessful. A county-level name change must be approved by the central government, so the Sichuanese had to make do with renaming a small town as Shangri-la, instead.

The authorities performed several contortions to justify their claim on the “Shangri-la” name. I can’t find it at the moment, but I recall reading a report in China Daily in the late 1990s that claimed a stone inscription had been found referring to “Shangri-la” in the Zhongdian region. Chinese tour agencies these days like to claim that Shangri-la is actually a Tibetan word, translated variously as “the sun and moon in heart” and “land of sacredness and peace”.

Now I’m not going to disagree with my Tibetan friend who is adamant that there is, indeed, a word in Tibetan that sounds similar to Shangri-la and does have connotations with an ideal land (in a spiritual, non-temporal sense). Let’s consider, instead, how James Hilton could have known this, let alone known about stone inscriptions in Zhongdian? Since the name in its modern usage comes from Hilton, how did he come up with it? Are the correlations with Tibetan language and myth coincidental?

Sadly, I can’t find any evidence of diaries or interview transcripts that would give Hilton’s own answer. If anyone knows of such, please share!

The Place

I noticed in the novel that Shangri-la is specifically the name of the lamasery; while the valley below takes its name from the mountain above: Karakal, or “Blue Moon”. Shangri-la is thus not the name of a geographical location, at all. It’s the name of the institution that rules the harmonious society of the valley. The Tibetans who inhabit the valley get no benefit from this rule, except from alleged satisfaction with their lot (they do not speak for themselves) and an enforced separation from the rest of the world (sound familiar?). They are not susceptible to the life-enhancing powers of the area, which also display racial favoritism in being more effective on Europeans than on Asians. Rather than being a general Utopia, then, Shangri-la appears more like a retreat for privileged Westerners; I’m by no means certain that Hilton himself regarded his creation as ideal – the character Mallinson’s furious rejection of it as creepy and unnatural could quite reasonably be taken as a reflection of the author’s doubts.

It’s a curious reading, then, that has established “Shangri-la” as a general synonym for peace, tranquility and happiness.

Since it’s a made-up name in a fantasy novel, it’s seems absurd that the “where is Shangri-la?” question was ever asked, let alone answered categorically by Chinese government decree. It’s not unreasonable, however, to ask what locations provided the inspiration for the scenes described in the novel…

Wikipedia has an unsourceable claim that Hilton visited the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan some time before writing Lost Horizon. If that’s true, then there’s no need to look further for his main inspiration as to the physical description of Shangri-la and the valley of Karakal. He certainly never visited Tibet or China.

That said, knowing this would not totally undermine the common assumption that he took inspiration from the 1920s National Geographic articles on northwest Yunnan and western Sichuan by Joseph Rock. Why should he not draw on multiple sources? Rock’s photos and descriptions of high mountains and isolated Tibetan monasteries and communities can easily be seen as lying behind sections of Lost Horizon. The lamasery of Shangri-la was founded by a French priest; Rock encountered isolated missions staffed by French priests on his 1926 expedition across the 3 Parallel Rivers, including one Rock describes as having ample time to ponder the “futility” of his experience in the 1^st World War – the war, and the imminence of a sequel, is a constant theme in Lost Horizon. Rock’s excitable descriptions of “peerless” peaks in Yunnan and Sichuan are not dissimilar to Conway’s reaction to Karakal.

Rock was not the only available source of descriptive information on Tibet, however. Hilton would have been able to read the accounts of a number of travelers, and these may have been more important than Rock in firing his philosophical musing (of which, more below).

The Name

Hilton knew no Chinese and no Tibetan, except what he gleaned from reading Rock’s articles or those by other travelers in the region. When his hero Conway first hears of Shangri-la, he says that “la” is Tibetan for “mountain pass”, which I think is correct. Bearing this in mind, it’s tempting to argue that Hilton just made the name up by putting this one Tibetan word together with some other likely-sounding syllables.

The reference to “la” as a geographical term does seem to undermine the theory that Hilton based the name Shangri-la on “Shambhala”, which had been popularized in the west as a Tibetan Buddhist utopia – an ideal realm which existed both in spiritual and temporal forms. But reading the book and looking at the ideas about Shambhala current at Hilton’s time, I can’t help thinking that Shambhala was, in fact, uppermost in his mind. Perhaps the “la” was just a coincidence that Hilton was happy to exploit to add a little touch of erudition.

I read one internet piece saying that Hilton learned of Shambhala through Rock’s articles. I don’t think this can be true. I can’t recall Rock mentioning it, nor would Rock have been especially concerned with such an abstract concept. He enjoyed the exotic nature of Dongba and Tibetan Buddhist rituals, but he set little store by them. He was a rationalist through and through. Shambhala came to the West via a group of people who were anything but rationalists; rather, like Madame Blavatsky in the late 19^th century, they were mystics with a half-baked knowledge of esoteric Buddhism. I think the key figure for Hilton may have been Nicholas Roerich, who led a major expedition across Asia and into Tibet in the mid-1920s (funded by the same people who funded Rock). Given Hilton’s interest in this area and the knowledge he displays in Lost Horizon, it seems unlikely he could have overlooked Roerich’s journey; still less likely he was unaware of the book Roerich published in 1930: Shambhala; Hilton published Lost Horizon in 1933. Roerich’s Shambhala speaks of an ideal realm which can be approached both in spirit and in reality; he also speaks of an underlying unity of religions, which is a theme Hilton alludes to when the lama Chang asks, “Must we hold that because one religion is true, all others must be false?” When the missionary Miss Brinklow asks, “What do the lamas do?” Chang answers, “They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom.”

“But that isn’t doing anything.”

“Then, madam, they do nothing.”

I’m quite sure Hilton didn’t get this kind of thing out of Rock. The key to long life and satisfaction in Shangri-la is the surrendering of passion. Conway lost his in the War, hence his fitness to succeed the High Lama; Mallinson is still a hot-blooded youth, hence his rejection of Shangri-la. This does show Hilton had some appreciation of Buddhist ideas about existence, suffering, enlightenment and transcendence, and I suspect he may have acquired them through theosophist interpreters like Roerich.

And I think that’s quite enough of that. Should anybody else read Lost Horizon or happen across any interesting Shangri-la tidbits, please let me know!

Yang Xiao has been busy writing his thoughts about a recent journey along the Overland Track in Tasmania. He’s also written quite extensively on his latest experiments with Ultra-lite hiking. It’s for Chinese readers only, I’m afraid. Click here for the link:

There are several posts related to the one above – just search within the site and you’ll find them!