The most celebrated section of the Long March runs across the Great Snowy Mountains and Grasslands/Swamps of northern Sichuan. Chairman Mao and his Red 1st Front Army trudged across this unforgiving territory, sparsely inhabited by hostile Tibetan herders, from June through August 1935. With a group of five Americans and one German, we aimed to retrace their route from the foot of the last and biggest of the Snowies, across the Grasslands and along the disused Songpan-Gansu Highway to the gateway of Northwest China. I approached this route with much anticipation and emotion, as this was the way Andy McEwen and I walked on our first exploration of the Long March in 2002-03

Day 0 – Chengdu

Having all arrived safely in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, our team paid a visit to one of the last surviving veterans of the Long March. He Wendai is 92 and still in remarkable shape – and delighted to chat and take photos with a group of foreign would-be Marchers. He was a member of the Red 2nd Army Group, led by his cousin, General He Long, who later became one of the 10 Marshals of the People’s Republic of China and served as Minister of Defense before falling from grace during the Cultural Revolution. While we planned to trek across just one snow mountain and traverse the Grasslands in around six days, I calculate that Lao He climbed at least 11 snowies and took 32 days to cross his section of the Grasslands during the Long March.

From the left, we are: Philipp Engelhorn; Stephen Lyons; Ed Jocelyn; He Wendai; Dean King; Gordon Wallace; Lawrence Gray; Andy Smith; Michael Tan.

Day 2 – Jiajin Shan

We reached the first of the great Long March mountains at lunchtime on day 2, after an extended break provoked by the local constabulary. A road block had been erected at the foot of Jiajinshan, ostensibly because of road works higher up. Given that the road works had only started that morning, and the locals had only been informed the evening before, this seemed at first to be a convenient excuse to turn undesirable groups of foreigners away. Jiajishan marks the border of Aba Prefecture, which has been more-or-less off-limits to foreign tour groups since last year. Chengdu-based tour companies hadn’t taken a single group this way throughout 2009. However, I had been assured that a group of “7 friendly foreigners” (as Chengdu paper Huaxi Dushi Bao called us) would be allowed through. And so it came to pass, after much studying of documents and patient smiling (on my part). The cops said we could take our chances with the road – and as things turned out, the road works were no joke. It was with some relief that we piled out of our bus on the second switchback you can see in the picture above, and tested our lungs by climbing up to the next one. As we started up, however, the clouds rolled in and the rain began to beat a tattoo on our waterproofs. It took the best part of two hours to walk just a few hundred meters, which still left us far short of the pass. Drenched, we drove the rest of the way to the pass, which you can see below on a sunnier occasion when Andy and I came this way in 2003.

Day 3 – Zhuokeji

The Tibetan town of Zhuokeji is among the most distinctive sites on the Long March trail. The town itself had changed little since 2003, with the exception of a few houses that had acquired pitched roofs. When Andy and I last visited, a number of families were planning to convert their homes into guesthouses; it seems the anticipated tourist rush never materialized. Although we stayed in a very pleasant home, whose owners were delighted to have paying guests, no sign announced its status as a guesthouse. In fact, there wasn’t a sign to be seen in town – it’s a defiantly non-commercial place.

Initially, we had been directed to an establishment just beyond the southern end of town. It turned out that this was a bath-house/brothel, whose rooms were not designed for overnight stays. Long March scholars will be familiar with “The 8 Points of Attention”, the strict rules governing the Red soldiers’ behaviour on the March; the friendly ladies of Zhuokeji offered us “The 8 Points of Service” for a mere 400 yuan. “All the local leaders come here,” they bragged. Yang Xiao and I made our excuses…

The enormous building looming in the background belonged to the chieftain of Zhuokeji. It is now a museum, and 60 yuan more expensive to get into than in 2003. Like many places along the Long March trail, Zhuokeji has been included in the Communist Party’s “Red Tour”, a patriotic-educational event launched in 2005 to give Party members free holidays, er, I mean help imbue younger generations of Chinese people with Revolutionary idealism and a spirit of dedication and self-sacrifice. Although he ran away when the Long Marchers arrived in 1935, the chieftain later threw in his lot with the Communists and joined the new order after the Revolution. His original fortress burned down in 1936, suspiciously close to the time the Red 4th Front Army passed through Zhuokeji. The current building is considerably smaller than the one occupied by the Reds. One (probably apocryphal) story tells of Chairman Mao meeting the old chieftain in Beijing and thanking him for the use of his library.

Day 5 – Dagu Shan

One consequence of the terrible earthquake that struck Sichuan last year has been a massive campaign to rebuild the province’s roads. Whether damaged or not, highways have been ripped up for reconstruction all the way from Chengdu to our trek departure point in Heishui County. Ordinarily a two-day drive, it took us four days to reach the valley above and the village of Xia Dagu. Behind Xia Dagu is Changde Shan, the fourth of the Snowies crossed by Mao’s Reds. Although Andy and I came this way in 2003, we were puzzled as to the location of this mountain – not realizing we had walked straight past it, following the river valleys in a loop around its base. Especially puzzling, then, was why the Red Army didn’t do as we had; why bother climbing over a 4,0000+ meter mountain when you don’t actually have to? Even now, having reviewed the army records, I can only conclude that some of the advance units had idiot guides. Most of the units who came behind did exactly as we did, and as Mao did, and left Changde Shan out.

Most striking to me was the extent of development in this valley, and the damage done to it in the name of tourism development. The entire valley has been “contracted” by a tourism company spun off from the local government. They have built an enormous reception center at the head of the valley, blocking it off from outsiders and even controlling the movements in and out of villagers, who are being paid not to farm. Perhaps they think farming spoils the view. They had no such qualms about the two hydro-electric dams built since 2003. What was formerly among the most pristine sections of the Long March has been despoiled to a shocking degree. On the up side, the three villages of Xia, Zhong and Shang Dagu have been transformed. Six years ago they were dark, brooding collections of ramshackle wooden homes; now every family has a new, concrete house with a pitched roof and they all, quite understandably, seem very happy about that.

I’m typing in the UK and my notes are in Beijing, so for now I can’t tell you the names of this pair, who live in the first hut we came to on Dagu Shan’s top pasture. Their mother ladled out hot, yak milk tea while we caught our breath. This pasture is at 12,880 feet above sea level; we had trekked up from 9,540 feet at Xia Dagu in the morning.

This hut is home to the above brother and sister during the herding season, which lasts from late April to mid-September. During the winter months, the yaks are driven down the mountain to a more comfortable altitude, while the families move to more solid homes in the village of Shang Dagu, two or three miles north of our base at Xia Dagu.

Dean pays in kind for our tea. By and large, I find the herding Tibetans are not terribly interested in cash money. They prefer to make a trade or, better still, make friends. I once asked our great friend Jiacuo, who appears a few photos down the page, if he would sell me a certain item. He answered that he would happily give it to me, but if I wanted to buy it, it would be very expensive (left unspoken was the further notion that, if I did buy it, we would no longer be friends).

Andy and I drank tea and made friends on this very same pasture six years previously. This was late in the season and only nine ladies, of whom eight are in the above photo, were still looking after the herds at that point.

I brought a book of the pictures Andy and I took in 2003 and went in search of our old friends. Only two of the ladies pictured were around; the others were scattered around other pastures on the mountain’s many slopes. The older lady closest to me and the girl in the pink jacket both feature in the older photo.

This lady, Qiuzuo, showed Andy and me the way in 2003. It turned out that she was the aunt of one of our mule handlers, and that the baby in the photo, Nie Jianlong, had now grown up into the young fellow staying two huts down from our camp - pictured below with his younger brother.

The 2009 version of Nie Jianlong (right).

Day 6 – Dagu Shan

As briefly mentioned above, this is Jiacuo, who hails from Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in southern Gansu Province. His home sits on the Long March trail at a point through which every one of the Red Armies passed in 1935-6. Chairman Mao stayed just around the corner from Jiacuo’s house. Yang Xiao and I met and made friends with Jiacuo during our journey along the Red 2nd Front Army’s Long March in 2006. At the time, Jiacuo was also Marching, having hooked up with Li Wanbin, a Chinese Korean from Jilin Province who had trekked more of the Long March than anyone else, alive or dead. Jiacuo is great with horses and also one of the nicest, most reliable men we have met in our many years trekking around China. When we started planning this expedition, Jiacuo was the first person we called. In the background, the dark shape on the mountainside is the Chinese character for “shang” as in Shang Dagu. The herders spread salt on the grass to attract the yaks to pay special attention to that area, thereby “branding” the land itself as belonging to their village.

Part of our team reaches the pass over Dagu Shan, which is 14,661 feet above sea level, the highest point of Chairman Mao’s Long March.

The view from the pass, looking across a ruined gun emplacement that defended this strategic point in pre-Revolutionary days.

Yang Xiao and Michael circumambulate the mani at the pass over Dagu Shan, casting Tibetan prayer papers towards the heavens with the traditional cry that, I believe, means something like “Victory to the Gods”.

For Yang Xiao and I, one of the most satisfying moments in all our explorations came with the discovery of this flower. It’s a Meconopsis horridula, a variant of the celebrated Himalayan Blue Poppy. Yang Xiao has been exploring the Tibetan highlands since the mid-90s; I have trekked thousands of kilometers across them since 2003. We had heard about this flower, but never before seen it in the wild. The wildflowers throughout this expedition were remarkable in number and beauty: I have made a separate blog here to display the best of them.

Photographer Philipp Engelhorn makes new friends on the north side of Dagu Shan.

Descending Dagu Shan, I was able to enjoy the view of the valley for the first time. When Andy and I came in 2003, it was early September. There were no flowers, it rained most of the time and the peaks were shrouded in thick cloud. I was so exhausted after crossing the pass that I stumbled and fell into a stream. Happily, a Tibetan family was camped nearby and took us in. I looked for them on this occasion, but they weren’t around. Several relatives were herding on our route, however, and they enjoyed the pictures from six years before…

The women in this valley wear a unique head dress after marriage. Made by hand using coral, turquoise and amber, these were reckoned to be worth 30,000 yuan, more than US$4,000.

Day 7 – Dagu Shan to Mao’ergai

From Dagu Shan, we descended into the Yanggong Valley, where for the first time in three days we encountered permanent settlements and some of the hallmarks of “civilized” life: electricity cables, cold bottles of pop, motorcycles and plenty of man-made trash.

Although we stopped for refreshments in this village in 2003, Andy and I were oblivious to this historic site. Chairman Mao stayed here, but more importantly he summoned his rival, Zhang Guotao, to a meeting in this house. I had never previously understood the location of this event, which is referred to in the Chinese histories as the Shawo Meeting. Zhang describes it in his memoirs as a tense affair, located in a narrow, wooded valley heavily guarded by Mao’s men. I could never fathom where this could be. There were no villages called Shawo around the area described by Zhang, which is mostly a wide, fertile valley along the Mao’ergai River. And indeed, the village above is called Wodeng. It turns out that the Reds coined their own name for Mao’s house here, which overlooks a river in which there was – and still is – a large sandbank. In Chinese, “Shawo” stands for the “house by the sand”.

This is the room in which Mao and Zhang Guotao faced off. With me is Yixi, whose grandparents hosted the Chairman in 1935. It’s a tiny room, with space for no more than 10 or 15 people at the most – evidence that the big decisions on the Long March were debated and decided by a very small group of leaders. Yixi doesn’t get any benefit from his historic inheritance; quite the opposite, in fact, as the government doesn’t permit him to do anything at all to his house, which has been in the family for well over 100 years. Even if part of it falls down, he’s not allowed to repair it. Yet he gets no cash to maintain the structure, which now stands out as the only such old building in the village – everyone else has knocked down their old homes and built more modern structures like the one to the left in the photo above.

While I was sitting around on Chairman Mao’s throne, however, a much more important event was unfolding outside. Gordon Wallace had sized up the river and taken out his fishing rod. A crowd of curious Tibetans instantly gathered and accompanied Gordon to the bank. He assembled his rod, tied on a fly and cast. The Tibetans’ amusement changed to astonishment and consternation when Gordon immediately reeled in a fish – at which point he ensured his place in local legend by unhooking and liberating his catch. Tibetan Buddhists aren’t supposed to eat wild animals, and many areas strictly observe a traditional injunction against eating fish. The assembled throng applauded. Tales of the tall stranger and his magic pole will hopefully baffle anthropologists in the 25th century.

To see Part 2 of this adventure, click here…