Friends told me about a matriarchal community in the remote southwest, out of bounds to foreigners and inaccessible to all but the hardiest Chinese backpackers. On an island in the lake stands a shining Buddhist-style temple that provides the community’s spiritual and, until recent times, political centre. The man fishes in a long wooden boat rowed with one oar and, when he comes on shore, the woman in her large red-painted house with windowless upper storeys decides whether she will open the door to him or another. If a foreign man comes, he may be invited to share board and bed. There is no marriage as such. There is no word for father.
Was it fact or fable? The journey to the West for Chinese isn’t always to New York. The country has its own land of romance, a potent realm of wonders far from Peking. I set out to see if I could find it.
In the foyer of Chengdu’s top hotel, where saffron-clad American Buddhists wait for their delayed plane to Lhasa, capital of Tibet, the home from which the Dalai Lama is exiled, I bump into an old mate, an actor who has become a national television star for his role in a martial arts soap opera. The actor insists on lunch, and leads me through the city’s maze of Elizabethan-style houses to an eating place. For once I know what it feels like not to be stared at in China. All eyes are on the star, a handsome, chubby-cheeked guy with waved hair, in the best tradition of Chinese romantic leads.
Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, is the city of hot food and hot tempers. The proprietor bellows the praises of his famed Chungking hotpot as he places stools around the earthenware stove on which a wok, full of stock, oil and red chillies, bubbles in readiness. You pick up the raw ingredients with your chopsticks, plunge them into the blood-coloured brew for a precise number of seconds, dip them into a chilli and garlic sauce – and eat if you dare. Squid rings, pigs’ brains, geese tripes, congealed ducks’ blood, and cows’ trachea (the part that moos), are balanced with mushrooms, shallots and bean sprouts. Bodies sweat therapeutically. The actor poses for a photograph with a live loach – a cross between a baby trout and an eel – between his chopsticks.
Afterwards, the actor stops at a street stall to buy oranges. Polished cotton underwear shows through a tear in the vendor’s shabby clothes. He sticks a cigarette in his pipe and joins the actor in transferring oranges from a big basket to a smaller bag. The actor makes a fuss of picking out the best oranges. The vendor, meanwhile, picks out the worst and drops them into the bag too. The actor then rummages for the worst ones to place them back into the vendor’s basket, whereupon the vendor picks them out again and drops them back in the actor’s bag, calmly puffing on his pipe. The routine continues.
The train goes south-west into mountains. In the musty velvet-and-lace compartment an old cadre eyes me with suspicion. At last, given a chance to brag, he softens. He is an ex-revolutionary pilot, engineer, herbalist, poet and elder, whose knowledge is supposed to go unquestioned. He explains that in most important respects China is more developed than the West. His own command of Chinese medicine has brought people back from the dead. In order to decline his offer of a cigarette, I say that Smoking is a Health Hazard. He asks me if I have relatives in Australia who could organise a promotional tour for him and his medicines. In return he points on the map to a shortcut to Ru Gu Lake, the site of the matriarchal society. Out of politeness I take his advice. I get off the train somewhere near the border of Sichuan and Yunnan. The elder has given me a letter of introduction to the manager of the local army hostel.
The town of Xichang is to become world-famous for its satellite launching pad. It is off-limits to tourists, but no one seems to mind that I am there. On the steps of the cinema, where Love Story is showing, the local young people play sluggish courtship games. Their dress indicates that they are Yi people, down from the mountains, members of what the government in faraway Peking calls a ‘national minority’. They number some four million. The town also has an entrepreneurial off-shoot of the local electricity company, where you can pay to queue for a hot shower. Otherwise, I find little to do but eat while waiting for the next day’s bus. The town serves the best roast duck and spicy beancurd in China, with a side dish of tender pea leaves tossed in oil. Huajiao, the local pepper, a kind of aromatic mustard, imparts the genuine mouth-numbing Sichuanese taste.
There is one clapped-out, chock-a-block bus a day that crosses the mountains to the last town before Ru Gu Lake. Its name translates as Source-of-the-Salt. A few kilometres underway, the radiator springs a leak. Since there is no way of fixing it, the driver decides to push on anyway, stopping every few minutes to pour in water. The trip takes twelve hours, at first through yellow-flowering fields and clusters of neat mud houses with upturned eaves. Spindly gums said to be introduced from Australia after the goldrush are the most common trees: the area is heavily deforested. Higher, through scrubby conifer forest, the road winds to a mountain pass where the travellers are given a few minutes to stare down into the mint-coloured waters of the Golden River a thousand metres below. The road then descends, tortuous and dusty, to cross the river on a narrow suspension bridge that marks the entry into the Autonomous Region of the Yi people. The appearance of the land changes from greens and blues to a bare moonscape as painted by an Italian neo-expressionist: black, magenta, chrome-yellow and ash-grey. The vegetation is minimal. The turned earth shows the peculiar colours of the mineral-rich soil from which the people profit so marginally. They are herdspeople, not cultivators. The best way to make ends meet, apparently, is to crawl down the tiny tunnels of the coal or lead mines, where the digging is done by hand. The work is dangerous: eighteen months is the limit permitted per stretch.
Dug into the bare black mountain slopes are the low farming settlements of the Yi. The mud walls are black and the grey planks laid for roofing are weighed down with black stones. Their sheep and goats are black or chocolate-brown and the herdsmen wear black, bell-shaped capes with long black tassels around the bottom. Under the cape they wear bell-bottomed trousers that stop below the knee. On their heads they wear big black turbans that look top-heavy. The Yi women wear headdresses of woven ribbons, bright striped towels and gorgeous stiff embroidery, built, with the help of their glossy black plaits and studs of silver jewellery, into great winged, peaked constructions, as if they belonged to some lost order of Dutch nuns. They complete their outfits with embroidered jackets and tulip-shaped can-can skirts of ochre, russet and red. Once the Yi were the rulers of a great southern kingdom that stretched as far as Laos.
As soon as the bus arrives in Source-of-the-Salt, I am spotted. An official from the administration leads me to the town office to meet the mayor. Although he is Yi, the mayor has taken a Han name. His authority is subordinate to that of the Public Security Bureau chief, a Han from outside the town. I am welcomed as a friend come from afar. The only other foreigner mentioned is an American pilot who crashed there in the fifties. The Yi put that funny ginger-haired creature in a cage and fed him scrapings. He married one of their slave women in the end. I tell the mayor that I have seen the movie.
The mayor promises to provide the visitor with every assistance in getting to Ru Gu Lake. There is no bus, the road is almost impassable, the last car to drive it overturned – but he promises to do what he can to rustle up a vehicle and driver. Meanwhile, he will fix up a bed in the living quarters attached to the town office, and he invites me to join him for an evening of spirits and television.
Two young men call on me in my room. The first is the town’s only university student, who is home for the holidays from the Minorities’ Institute in Chengdu. He is a pleasant, but melancholy boy determined to talk about the culture of his people, which dates back at least a thousand years, to the Tang dynasty. The language is still spoken, but not taught in schools.
The other man is a young Party official who is marrying a girl from the local bank. He has procured the four essentials necessary for marriage – fridge, washing machine, tape recorder and colour television – and has even managed a video recorder. For a boy from the backblocks, it is no mean tribute to the Four Modernisations. He turns on the television in the traveller’s room. Slowly he has to admit that there is seldom any television reception in the area. And he has never seen a video cassette.
The mayor’s summons comes. Dinner is served. The Yi people are renowned for their drinking, and toasts are proposed till the bottle is empty. The mayor jokes about the matriarchal community down the road and its legendary hospitality.
The sun is up early, and I prepare for the road. The mayor is nowhere to be found, nor is there any transport. One excuse after another is offered. At last the student arrives, cast as the bird of ill-omen. Higher instructions have been received. Before I may journey to Ru Gu Lake I must first go back where I came from to get my passport stamped. I am advised to take the first possible bus, back twelve hours over the mountain road. In the meantime I should rest within the confines of the town office.
It is a brilliant sunny day. I sit on a stool in the courtyard, by the locked gate, cursing the system. In the afternoon, kids on their way home from school come and stare at me. They are shy and giggle. I point my camera at them and take shots through the bars. The quest for the matriarchy has once more been prohibited by some mother of a patriarch.
If the way to Ru Gu Lake is blocked from one side, a roundabout route through Yunnan, the southern-most province, leads to an approach from the other side, through Dali, a city on the old Burma road between India and China. After the Yi Autonomous Region, Dali presents the opposite face of minorities’ China. Dali, a prosperous place of ‘fish and rice’, lies between a lake dotted with sail boats and a range of snow-capped mountains. The pagodas are newly restored. In the fields farmers bless their new, but traditional-style mansions with fireworks, flowers and lucky pigs’ heads stuffed with camellias. I am directed to the No. 2 Guesthouse, and from there to the Coca-Cola Restaurant, where cold beers and a pizza made from mountain cheese enable me to relax. Life is different now I am back on the Lonely Planet road.
I hire a bicycle to go to the next village, Lijiang, one stage closer to Ru Gu Lake. But at a certain point along the road I am pulled over and told that I need written permission from Peking. Ru Gu Lake is still out of reach, even though the lands beyond Lijiang have long since been opened up. Well, the journey, not the arrival, matters. Long may the matriarchs queen it serenely, safe from sticky-beaks and pestering anthropology PhDs. Closing the mosquito net around my bed in the No. 2 Guesthouse, I have reached the end of my exploring for the time being.
At night I am woken by a blood-curdling scream. Looking down from my balcony I see a sow running through the cobbled lane below with her throat slit, a gang of men shouting in pursuit.
1987