Not long before arriving in China for this journey I came across the oddest of picture captions, its wording quite hauntingly bizarre. It appeared in a volume of photographs taken by an eccentric Austro-American botanist-explorer named Joseph Rock; it was beneath a black-and-white picture, dated 1924, of a scene he had captured in the mountains of the Upper Yangtze valley, which showed two teenagers supporting between them a curious-looking object, like an unformed sculpture of soft clay, as tall as each of them. Whatever the object was – plasticine torpedo, melted petrol pump, alien being, squashed motorcar – it seemed to have a nose; on close inspection it looked as if, once upon a time, it had been some kind of animal.
Indeed it had. The caption read, without further comment:
‘Two Moso boys displaying a fine specimen of the Boneless Pig. After being slaughtered, boned and salted, these huge pigs are used as mattresses for up to a dozen years before being eaten. This custom, originally a protection against famine, still exists today in Muli and Yongning.’
Beg pardon? I read the caption once again, more carefully. Somehow the corralling within a single paragraph of such words and phrases as ‘pig’, ‘mattress’, ‘a dozen years’, and ‘eaten' had a surreal quality to it, and for a moment I wondered if I might have taken a surfeit of unfamiliar pills during the night.
But apparently not. A day or so later, while further reading up about this corner of the world, I came across a second, equally strange reference, this time to a people like the Moso, who lived near by and who were known as the Nakhi. Among the many sterling qualities of these folk was the habit, exclusive to the lovelorn among them, of committing suicide by drinking a mixture ‘so that the vocal cords become paralysed and the victim is unable to cry for help’. Clearly the people who lived in these mountains had some rum habits – and since the mountains in question were those that begin, almost precisely, at Pingshan, where the boat traffic up the Yangtze is forced to a halt, we were now fast moving into their territory.
‘This is the demarcation line,’ writes a guide, ‘between the Han people and the Yi minority ethnic groups, and the other many ethnic minority groups of the Tibetan foothills.’ Downriver, where Lily and I had been travelling for the past weeks, had been what passes for the normality of mainstream China, or what geographers call China Proper. Ahead of us now lay the very much more wayward world of the non-Chinese, the world of those who have been incorporated into the Chinese Empire, but who live irredeemably and steadfastly beyond it. In one sense, the Pingshan city boundary is the far western expression of what might be called the Chinese Pale.
It was in Leibo, the seat of a semi-autonomous Yi county, that matters began becoming a little strange. Lily and I had managed to get rooms in a small inn, and after noodles at a restaurant run by a memorably handsome Yi woman, we retired to our respective beds, exhausted. At one in the morning there was a thunderous hammering on our doors, and a squad of Chinese goons demanded that we present ourselves for questioning before the local office of the Public Security Bureau.
We came down in our pyjamas, befuddled from sleep. There were three men, all Chinese, greasy-haired, smoking, wearing black leather jackets. Why were we in town? they wanted to know. Did we not know that foreigners were prohibited here? Was I not aware that the hotel was forbidden to accept guests from outside? Lily, who was blamed for having led an innocent abroad, was given especially harsh treatment – to which she responded by standing up to her full and daunting height, and with a stentorian voice demanding respect and courtesy from men who were, she insisted, no more than mere officials whose duties were to serve the citizenry.
It was a stunning, high-stakes outburst, the kind of response to a police inquiry that would hardly be dared in London or New York, let alone the rugged hinterlands of western China. But perhaps I didn't yet know Lily to the full: her outburst was the first of many, and it worked a charm. The three policemen became promptly craven, they offered to settle their argument with us – fully justified, since Leibo (which means ‘thunder and wave’) was very definitely a closed city – by levying a fine of about one dollar apiece, and they asked only that we leave town by sunrise.
Once the mood had become calmer and more friendly, and cigarettes were being offered around, and cups of tea, I asked one of the men why they had been so suspicious, so eager to throw us out.
‘Because of the Yi,’ he said. ‘They are a very troublesome minority.* They hate us. This is their town, in their eyes. Relations between us and them can be very poor. Foreigners often stir things up, and we don't like that at all.’
So we left next morning, after having had breakfast on a grassy knoll overlooking the river, which uncoiled soundlessly a thousand feet below. There were small wild strawberries here, intensely sweet. In the distance ducks squabbled and chuckled, and large brown buzzards swung lazily in the thermals. All was perfect peace. Up here the arguments between Han and Yi had no relevance at all: only the river mattered, and made all the difference. It was a ferocious-looking beast, a rich syrup, lined with white streaks, squeezed between cliffs every bit as steep and forbidding as those back in the Gorges – an unforgiving place for any shipmaster.
Downriver the Yangtze may have been impressive for its power and width and might: here it was speed and sharpness and caprice that made it all so daunting. From high up on this perch the river looked just as everyone had said it would: the most difficult and dangerous big river in the world. There were rapids every few hundred yards. I watched idly the progress through the rapids of some of the endless procession of logs that had floated downstream from the faraway forests of northern Sichuan. As each one breasted a rapid so an end rose, arching high out of the river before then tumbling back deep below the foam, and then the whole log skittered from bank to bank in a way that no ship could ever have survived. In one or two places small sampans dashed from bank to bank, taking farmers to the water meadows opposite: but I noticed they never ventured up or downstream, for fear no doubt of being caught in the currents and ripped to pieces on the rocks below.
Navigation was out of the question. But crossing the river — that, as the sampans below were demonstrating, was not by any means an impossibility. In fact the boats were providing a timely illustration, since my next destination, a couple of hundred river-miles upstream, was the most famous crossing point of all – the place where Mao Zedong and his Red Army managed to make it from the river's south side to the north, in the early summer of 1935. In fact it was sixty years before, almost to the day, when Mao managed the most decisive act of what has since come to be known as the Long March.
To reach such a place so hallowed on the Chinese political landscape is still not easy – though hardly as trying as it had been for Mao's weary and underfed young soldiers. First we found the bus to Xichang, a town well to the north of the Yangtze on a huge tributary known as the Yalong Jiang. The ride in normal circumstances might have been merely terrifying – for its first few miles the bus roared and smoked along narrow dirt roads on top of cliffs hundreds of feet above the river, and more than once a tyre smashed the retaining mound of dirt and became instantly suspended in space, those riding above that wheel looking down a dizzying void into the river foaming below. At such moments all the passengers were asked to get out, slowly and carefully, while the driver and his men pulled the unladen vehicle back onto the roadway.
My confidence in our survival was hardly helped by the braking arrangements. The driver had a contraption of small rubber hoses that ran around the back of his seat: it provided cooling water for the brake shoes, and was supplied from a bladder on the roof.* Whenever the bus began to run downhill, usually on a road with a sharp turn and a cliff at the bottom of the slope, the driver would reach behind him and turn a small brass spigot on the tube, allowing the water to flow; but more often than not the tube would become loose, water would flood the floor of the bus, and the driver, aware that his brakes were starting to smoke and were not arresting our downward progress one bit, would call for a passenger – me, usually, since I was sitting directly behind him – to find the tube and reconnect it, quickly! It always worked – we had the system down pat after fifty miles or so – but it made the ride more interesting than perhaps it needed to be.
Had ours been an ordinary bus service the degree of onboard terror would probably have been limited to this. But in fact ours was a bus that crossed – once the red-and-white striped barrier of the Pale was passed – into territory controlled by the Yi; and that simple anthropological reality transformed a journey that was merely frightening into an experience more akin to nightmare. For the Yi – the men huge, handsome, large-nosed, chocolate-brown, reputedly fierce, turbaned (with their hair protruding through a hole in the turban top), and the women equally attractive with blue-and-white striped costumes that in other circumstances could be thought of as charming – demanded that they had a prescriptive right to ride in this weekly bus, no matter how many were already in it and with utter disregard for any trivia like the paying of fares, or for any Han Chinese who tried to lay down the rules for running this particular service.
The bus was built for perhaps fifty passengers. By the time we were halfway to Xichang I had counted 140 people on board, as well as several dozen chickens and a pig that kept getting caught in the automatic door and might well have been rendered boneless and fit for mattress duty by the time the trip was done. Men would squeeze into the smallest of spaces that remained and still, around the next bend, another group of Yi would be waiting, would flag the bus down and insist on jamming themselves inside: woe betide any driver who might refuse. ‘I knew a man who didn't stop,’ said the driver to me in a private moment, ‘and he was never allowed to drive that route again. They threatened him and his family. They terrorized him.’
By the time the 140 were tucked inside, the vehicle was as full of humanity and assorted zoology as physics would permit – whereupon fresh members of the minority clambered up the outside and parked themselves on the roof rack. The driver had taken about as much as he could and pleaded with them to get down – in the end hurling stones at them to try to dislodge them. The men simply caught the stones and hurled them back, sending the driver scampering into the shelter of his cab and trying to drive on.
We ground slowly up a range of hills to a plateau where a weather station recorded the winter snowdrifts – and although we made it down the far side and into a tiny village with a dusty main street lined with hovels, there was a shriek of metal and a gasp of mechanical exasperation; the engine had finally given up its attempt to transport the gross overload, and the bus sagged to a halt. The huge crowd of people and animals promptly spilled out and gathered around, laughing and staring down at the driver who was trying gamely to work out what was wrong and then make repairs.
But by the time the seriousness of his situation had begun to sink in, Lily and I had already found ourselves a substitute – a friendly policewoman, a Yi herself, tall and handsome and with what Lily later enviously remarked were ‘spectacularly large breasts’. For a small sum in folding money, she agreed to drive us the remaining distance across the final range of hills to Xichang. We made it by dark: I imagined by then, and probably until late the next day, that all the Yi from the bus were still waiting, since so far as I could tell it had blown its main gasket and shattered a half-shaft at the same time – the kind of repair that even a normally ingenious Chinese driver would be hard-pressed to effect.
Xichang, blessed with so clear an atmosphere that locals call it ‘Moon City’, is China's Cape Canaveral – the principal site of the country's (currently unmanned) space effort. Satellites are lobbed up into orbit from here with impressive regularity, using the commercial workhorse rocket that is known, appropriately, as the Long March.
Once, when I was being shown around the gigantic Hughes Aircraft headquarters in southern California, I came across one of the satellites that was about to be sent up from Xichang. It was a huge drumlike communications satellite that had gone wrong sometime after its first launch; it had been plucked from orbit by the American space shuttle and brought back down to earth for repairs. At the time I saw it, it had just been bought by a consortium of businessmen in Hong Kong; a few months later it was shipped off to Xichang and eventually launched back into space by a Chinese rocket in April 1990 – inaugurating, as it happened, one of the most profound cultural revolutions the modern East has ever seen.
For the satellite soon began beaming down the various pro-grammes of the Hong Kong-based organization that the owners set up – Star TV, it was called, Satellite Television for the Asian Region. The effect of the programme was to erase, with consummate ease, a whole slew of cultural boundaries that extended from Kuwait to Japan. Within the huge broadcast footprint of the satellite, an unending diet of popular music, sports, news and old films became instantly available to anyone below who had a satellite dish – meaning that Chinese in Shanghai could watch Taiwanese films, and Indians in Bombay could dance to Seoul music, and Iranians and Koreans could watch football from Hokkaido and Singapore.
The implications – a cross-pollination of ideas among the region's young, a steady homogenization of cultural icons, the creation of a new, Pan-Asian identity among the millions of viewers – have already proved fascinating, despite being little anticipated by the satellite's owners.’* They have been hardly recognized in Xichang itself, however: it is one of the few towns where satellite dishes are hard to find, and when I asked a taxi driver what was the main business of the town, she replied simply, ‘Wood.’
Lily and I had a fight on the day we were due to leave Xichang. We had been together for several weeks, the journeying had been trying and we were both tired. But what happened was almost entirely my fault; the way it developed offers an illustration, perhaps, of that most misunderstood sensitivity common to almost all Asian peoples, which we have come to know as ‘face’.
The circumstances were simple enough. Earlier in the day I had discovered that there was a young Scotswoman living on the campus of a small college in the Xichang suburbs; she wasn't in when I called, but I arranged to stop by on my way to the railway station. Lily and I were due to catch a 9 p.m. express to a Yangtze-side steel town called Panzhihua; I supposed that if we left the hotel at eight we could pass by the college, I could deliver my message and the miniature of Johnnie Walker I had as a gift, and then drive on to catch the train. We duly left the hotel in a taxi, and I sat back to enjoy the drive.
But ten minutes later I realized we were going the wrong way – we were heading directly to the station, and not making the expected detour. I asked Lily why and she fell suddenly silent, embarrassed. Then – and here was my big mistake – I yelled at Lily, demanding that she have the taxi turn around and go back to the college. The driver did so, but said there was now not enough time – if we went to see the teacher we would surely miss the train. So I exploded, screeched at Lily and, with a cry of exasperation, ordered the man to turn back around again and head for the station. I would write to the woman and explain later. She, I knew, would be waiting, and would be disappointed. I certainly was: this all could have been so easily avoided.
Lily refused to speak to me. She boarded the train, sobbing. She asked the conductor if she could continue to Kunming, and on being informed that she could, she told a fellow passenger to tell me that I could get off at Panzhihua on my own. She would not come any farther with me, but would fly back to Shanghai. I could continue the rest of the way alone. She had never been treated so badly; all westerners, she said, were crude and ill-tempered bullies; I was the worst she had ever met, and I had no idea about the sensitivity of the situation in which I had placed her.
But mercifully the journey to Panzhihua takes a good five hours, even in an express. They gave me time to explain and cajole and apologize with sufficient fervour that, when the express lurched at last to a halt, she had agreed at least to get down and come into town with me and to consider the situation afresh. We talked late into the night, and, under the influence of several bottles of Tsingtao beer, she explained the problem.
It wasn't that I had been angry, she said – that she could well understand. She had misunderstood, and it was her fault that we hadn't asked the taxi driver to make his detour. She felt bad for the Scottish student, and she realized that both the student and I had been disappointed. But that didn't forgive the crime that I had committed – and that, so far as she saw it, was that I had been angry with her in front of the taxi driver. It meant she had lost her dignity, her standing, her face; in front of a stranger. I had made her lose face, and that was an unpardonable error.
But, I spluttered – who cares about the driver? She had no idea who he was, nor did he know or care who she was. He was a stranger, and his opinion of her, of us, was of neither value nor interest.
‘That's not the point,’ she retorted. ‘It makes no difference how little I knew him. The fact is, as far as I am concerned I did know him. He and I had been talking. He and I had been friendly. He and I had been party to a relationship, and it makes no difference how tenuous it was and how brief it had been.
‘And then you, great clumsy western ass that you are, you shamed me in front of him. You made me look an idiot before him, and it changed his relationship with me. You western people do this kind of thing all the time. You are so damned unsubtle, so totally unaware of how we feel.’
There were tears in her eyes at the end of this speech, but I could see that her rage was spent. I offered more apologies, I agreed I had been an insensitive brute of a lao wai, I promised that in future I would try and be more aware of her feelings and those of all the Chinese with whom I dealt. She sniffed, dabbed at her face and then smiled and ordered another beer.
‘OK – all over,’ she grinned. ‘Problem over. Now let's see where the Long Marchers did their stuff.’
A driver named Wang, and his girlfriend, Pu Ping, agreed to drive us to the place where Mao had crossed the Yangtze. They expected it would take us two hours to get there: it took fifteen. The main roads out of the city were straight and lined with the eucalyptus trees the British had imported from Australia; but within ten miles or so we had to turn off towards the river valley, and there were few roads better than cart tracks; we inched our way along the precipices and across huge ranges of hills, slowly and painfully. ‘Ayaaah!’ Wang kept crying, ‘I had thought Mao's memorial would be easy to get to.’
Mao had already commanded his forty-five thousand marchers for five months by the time it became clear he had to cross the Yangtze and move northward from the hills of Yunnan into the vitally important province of Sichuan. He and his senior planners had chosen three places where they might do so – all of them were in these upper reaches, above Yibin. The central place, where Mao and Zhou Enlai would place their headquarters and where most would cross, was to be at the well-known caravan crossing point of Jiaopingdu – the place where the merchants from Yunnan would traditionally bring opium and placer gold and exotic cloths north from Burma and Annam; and where traders from Sichuan would wait in their caravanserai on the left bank, with salt and silver and hides and Tibetan medicines and herbs for their colleagues travelling up from the south.
Jiaopingdu might be difficult to get to today, by car; but the mule trains of old plodded their way there with regularity, and the site where the traders boated their wares across the stream has an antiquity to it as venerable as the great passes and stopping points on the Silk Road, five hundred miles to the north. Quite possibly this is where the ancient Burma Road crossed the river, where the merchants from Prome and Pagan and Mandalay, on their way to the old Chinese capital then known as Changan – now Xian – dealt with this most formidable frontier of rushing water.
The caravanserai was full of waiting traders on the day in late April 1935 when Mao's scouts, coming from the south, first reached the river. Their reconnaissance was to ensure a safe river crossing for the so-called Cadres Regiment, the unit in which the Communists' top leaders were marching, along with their infantry guardians from the famous First and Third Army Groups.
The scouts demanded boats – any boats, in whatever state of repair they could acquire. ‘We are Red Army men,’ they reassured the traders. ‘We are here to kill the landlords and the evil gentry. In ten years we will come back and give land to you.’ Faith or naïvety – or coercion, more probably – impelled the traders to find five rickety boats for them, two on the northern (the Sichuan) side, three on the Yunnan bank. A Nationalist sentry detachment was surprised while playing mah-jongg – its stacked weapons were captured, its members were shot. Another couple of days and the scouts had acquired two more boats, and by early May most of the scouting party was safely installed on the Sichuan bank. The Nationalist troops had been frightened away: they hid, presumably, in the hills across which Lily and I, Mr Wang and Pu Ping were now bumping our uncomfortable way.
Mao and his senior colleagues crossed the river before dawn on Wednesday 1 May. They found a collection of eleven caves hollowed out of the sand cliffs on the Sichuan shore and made these their headquarters for overseeing the river crossing: Mao had his own cave, Zhou Enlai another, and there were separate caves for radio operators, other senior members of the Party and the security guards.
From here they watched as the seven boats shuttled back and forth over the stream. Each crossing, each boat full of soldiers, took three minutes. The horses were frightened and had to be forced to swim alongside. By day the operation was quite easy, so long as there were no KMT air raids – and the river's formidable cliffs acted as a kind of protection, for few bombers dared make it down beside them. By night, huge bonfires were lit on each bank, to guide the boatmen in.
The thirty-six local men who ferried the thirty thousand soldiers from south to north were paid either a Mexican silver dollar or five ounces of opium – it was an axiom of the highest public relations value that the Long March organizers should bend over backwards to be fair to all potentially sympathetic workers they met along the way. No food was stolen; no house was ransacked (other than those belonging to landlords, which were adjudged fair game); no woman was molested; no peasant was insulted. And the ferrymen were paid fair wages.
By all accounts the operation took nine days, and not a single soldier, man or woman,* was lost. When the boats were finished with, they were released into the furious stream and were swept away and seen to break up on the rocks a hundred yards below, as expected. The soldiers of the KMT bombarded the marchers from the cliffs and hills, as expected; but Mao's men had breached the most important barrier on their long progress north and their morale was hugely boosted as a result. The existence of mere Nationalist gunfire was as nothing compared to the rigours of crossing the greatest river in all of China's vast geography.
Today there is a suspension bridge where the crossing took place. There is no need for a caravanserai, for such traders as make the trip hurry across the river on a steel roadway in about half a minute. The caves are still there on the northern side – dark and dank. In the largest is a hand-scrawled piece of agitprop graffito, the epitaph ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’. The official memorials are on the southern side – a statue of a marcher with a huge paddle raised like a banner, a poem in Mao's memorably wild calligraphy, a museum, which an obliging old man opened for me. I was the first foreigner he had ever seen, he said; and though I doubted him, I could not actually find, on perfunctory inspection, another barbarian name in the visitors' book.
The museum had more on its walls than in its display cases – maps, charts with arrows, blurry photographs in sepia, drawings of the passing heroes and brightly coloured posters were everywhere. Under the glass were just a few broken paddles and lanterns, some straw sandals and a leather sailmaker's device known as a bosun's palm, and which some marcher had evidently used to repair a tent. But most of what the marchers had, they took on with them – filing cabinets, guns, food, paper, swords, chairs, ammunition, books – and little is left but the footprints, the memories and the legends.
A thunderous explosion suddenly shook the building and Lily and I rushed outside. A cloud of grey dust was rising from the bank of the river – iron ore, explained the museum keeper. In fact only the ore trucks on their way to the smelters at Panzhihua use the new bridge – those, and the occasional school buses that come here from Kunming and Chongqing, bringing youngsters to have the heroics of the Long March firmly instilled into their half-formed minds.
On the way back to Panzhihua that evening, Driver Wang made a chance remark that, as it happened, triggered another long and happy cascade of coincidences. ‘A lot of foreigners live near the city,’ he said. ‘They are building a dam. The biggest in China. And I don't mean the Yangtze dam. They are working on something else. You should go see them.’
I did, next morning. The dam site turned out to be on the Yalong – a huge, double-curved concrete dam being erected across a narrow gorge in a river that, in its own way, is quite as impressive as the Upper Yangtze. The Yalong Jiang was the source of all the logs we had seen down near Leibo – the woodsmen of the forests of upper Qinghai province use the river to transport hundreds of thousands of logs each year, a trade so important that the dam's designers have had to build a special spillway for the logs alone, and a tunnel to take them around the dam wall and keep them well away from the turbine blades.
The foreigners who worked on the project – Italians and Germans, Wang had said – lived in a compound of bungalows a mile or so from the site. I hailed the first obvious outsider I spotted going in through the security gates – a smallish man with a bushy chestnut beard – and I asked him if by any chance he spoke English.
‘I'd be a bluidy fool if I didna',’ he replied. ‘Name's Walker, Frank Walker. From Lochcarron. That's Scotland, if you hadnae guessed. Why not come up and have a wee bite to eat?’
And within a lightning flash of a moment I was plucked from the hot, dusty, alien centre of China, where I had been thinking only of Long Marchers and straw sandals and Sichuan peppercorns and whether or not the Public Security Bureau would interfere with that night's sleeping arrangements, and transplanted instead to ice-cold air-conditioning in a room hung with pictures of landscapes of Wester Ross and soccer heroes, at a table covered with red gingham, drinking from a glass of Newcastle Brown Ale, talking to people with names like Irene and Jonathan and Gemma, watching them watch a Ken Dodd comedy special on their television, listening to them making plans for tennis that afternoon and bridge that evening and the fancy-dress party on Saturday night, and in an instant forgetting as readily as if I had been molecularly transported that there was quite another world outside the iron fences through which we had passed just minutes before.
Frank Walker's life was that of the professional expatriate. China today had been Iraq three years before,* and next it would be some godforsaken site in Africa or deeper Asia or who knows where. He and his family took their two- and three-year postings in their stride; they existed in a world of foreign schools and pen pals and video rentals and The Club and advertisements for tax havens and discussions about exchange rates and vaccinations and trying to learn brand-new languages and dealing with security guards and looking forward to the weekly mail calls from home and having to pay for long-distance telephony and going months without butter or fresh milk and having to eat dinners of baked beans and Danish biscuits from tins and dealing with the afflictions of strange insect bites and crowds who stare at you and of living with unfamiliar and half-worthless coins and listening to odd radio stations playing weird music and driving odd-looking cars and waiting for the six-monthly long-haul flights home.
His job was to look after the fleet of huge trucks that haul dirt and rocks away from the excavations: their brand name is Terex, the company belongs to General Motors, and the factory is in Glasgow. There were thirty of them, reinforced giants of steel and tungsten thirty feet tall with tyres bigger than a man: they had come by land all the way up from Canton – no train was big enough to carry them – and Frank in his Peugeot had led the convoy twelve hundred miles, going no faster than twelve miles an hour over rutted roads where no foreigner had been for years. The looks on the village children's faces, as they spotted this vast armada of western iron rumbling through – were ‘never to be forgotten’. It had taken three weeks to go from Canton to the Ertan dam site – a memorable journey, said Frank with a grin.
Frank invited me to ride a Terex on a working expedition into the heart of the mountain – a terrifying half-hour, as it turned out, of heat and dust and insufferable noise. The Chinese driver was an irrepressibly cheerful little man, five feet nothing and seemingly quite unsuited for driving the forty tons of mixed metals that constitute a Terex earth-moving truck. He told me he had been a farmer until the dam builders had hired him the year before – and now he was having great fun, the power steering and computerized brakes allowing him to throw his gigantic toy around as though it were made of straw and tissue paper.
We roared through the portals of a huge tunnel and, belching thick smoke from our exhaust, we gunned downwards into the centre of the mountain, under a glistening roof of wet granite. A chain of dim lights marked the way: every so often there would be an open cavern with a gaggle of men and strange machines that were digging, burrowing, tunnelling. Sirens would sound, red lights would flash, there would be the crump of distant explosions, and the walls would throb and pulse. The driver would merely pause and grin, then gun his engine, and roar forward again into the abyss.
Ten minutes later and we were at the site where we had been ordered to collect and haul away the fifty tons of newly broken rock. The driver spun the vehicle around like a London taxi and then backed gingerly downward into a brand-new raw-rock tunnel, the wheels slipping and scratching for a hold on the newly fractured gravel on the floor. The mighty vehicle at first slid this way and that, the cab scraping angrily against the dripping walls, the headlights uselessly illuminating the rock ceiling. There was no other lighting in the tunnel – and there was still smoke pouring from the blast site and ghoulish screams and yells from an excavator crew, who were eagerly talking us backward to where they could dump rock onto us.
Then there came a sudden cry to stop! The driver locked the brakes and we held our breath as, with a deafening roar and a terrible bouncing and rocking and the wails and shrieks of tortured coil springs, we reeled under the assault of tons upon tons of rock that were now pouring onto us from on high. Then a hiss of final gravel and dust and there was a blessed silence; the driver lit a cigarette, but as he did so there was a shout from outside, the crew urging us to be on our way and make room for another truck, another load. The driver snapped his gearshift into forward and slammed his foot down on the metal pedal, and we creaked slowly, but then faster and faster, back up the slope, out into the lit tunnel, and after ten more minutes and to my eternal relief, back into the sunshine again.
A foreman ticked off the driver's load – another forty renminbi added to his pay slip. I jumped down, thanking him profusely, declining his kind suggestion I might enjoy another go.
‘They kill themselves all the time,’ Frank announced cheerily. ‘They've no idea how to handle these monsters. Last week three lads stole one from the parking lot and drove it straight off the cliff into the river.
‘They've not been found. Nor has the Terex for that matter – the river's powerful deep. And you know what? One of the boys had just been married, and his widow came up to where the Terex had gone over, and she jumped in the river too, killing herself. Pretty girl. Stupid, too, so far as I can see.
‘I'll never understand these people. If they're not working they're asleep. If they're not sleeping they're eating. And if they're not doing either of those then they're killing themselves. Odd folk the Chinese, if you ask me.’*
Some of the single men took a more tolerant attitude. I spent one afternoon in a bar with two Britons, one a crane driver from Middlesbrough and the other an electrician from Cleveland, and with the six young Chinese tarts they had managed to find who, when we met, were entwined around them like convolvulus, vowing not to leave, and getting stickily drunk on enormous glasses of Bailey's.
‘Our interest in these girls?’ said the crane driver, when I asked him. He pinched one, whom he had introduced as Hourglass, and she giggled warmly. ‘It's purely sexual. Oh sure, they say they want to marry us and come back to the West – but quite frankly, and I can say this out loud because they haven't the faintest idea what I'm saying, we're only interested in screwing them. And very good at it they are, too.
‘And you know what the nice thing is – they're so fucking backward in these parts they'll do it without asking for money. They think they're in love with us! They think the sun shines out of our arseholes. Have you ever heard anything so stupid?’ And he thwacked Hourglass on her backside again, making her coo with delight.
Lily, who was appalled, was about to say something – but the expression on the man's face changed suddenly.
‘You keep quiet, young lady,’ he said, wagging a finger at her. ‘This is my business – hers and mine. No poking your nose in where it don't concern you.’
*
I found a dead man on the street that evening. I saw him from the corner of my eye, lying beside the road as we drove back to the hotel. I told the driver to turn round and go back for a look.
The man was lying on his back, his eyes wide open. He was quite naked. He seemed to have a head injury – perhaps, I thought, he had been knocked down by a car.
On the other side of the road a group of men were sitting around a small fire, tucking into blue-and-white bowls of rice. They were no more than thirty feet from the corpse. I asked them if they knew what happened.
‘Oh, that fellow!’ said one of them, laughing and pushing great balls of rice into his mouth. ‘He was just a crazy man. Always around here, shouting at the cars. Never wore any clothes. Some minority, I guess. I could never understand what he was saying. Hit by a car a couple of hours ago.’
The men seemed not in the slightest bit concerned that they were having their dinner beside a cadaver, and none of them had bothered to see – after the car hit him – if he had been killed outright. I suggested that we might cover him up.
‘Suit yourself,’ said the same man, pausing briefly from his feeding and gesturing with a chopstick to where a roll of matting stood by a wall. ‘Use that.’
And so I unrolled the matting and carried it across to the man and knelt and closed his eyes, before placing the mat over him so that his head and most of his body was covered. His feet stuck out of the end; they were dirty and calloused from years of walking barefoot. He may have been mad; but he had had a knotty stick, which I found and placed beneath the mat, beside him. When he was alive, a few hours before, he probably looked like a harmless mendicant, or a Chinese palmer. We were near Tibet; there were lots of pilgrims in these parts.
On the way home I called in at a police station, and they thanked me. Later that night I drove past and the man had been removed. The group were still sitting around the fire, and they waved at me as I passed, doubtless thinking that I was quite as crazy as the man who had met his end beside their evening dinner table.
Our taxi driver's first remark about a dam being built and the foreigners working on it had triggered a cascade of coincidence. Frank Walker was the first link in this trail: his translator, a rather sulky young lady named Ena, was the second.
Ena was a pretty and willing girl who, her pouting aside, enjoyed something of a following among the young male inhabitants of Panzhihua. One of her friends, an insurance salesman who dreamed of greater things, turned out to have as his hobby a passionate interest in the headwaters of the Yangtze. Ena knew that Lily and I were going there; and one day she introduced us to her young man, who was named Wu Wei. He fell on us with glee: as an insurance salesman his life was rather dull. But nine years before, he said with evident pride, he had been a member of one of the all-Chinese expeditions of river rafters who had managed to paddle their way down the entire length of the Yangtze. He himself had only been on the upper reaches, specifically along the tributaries known as the Dam Qu and the Tuotuo: any help he could give to us, he would. And perhaps we would like to see some videotapes?
And so for the next two days, dawn to dusk, amid the blaring car horns and the grinding din from the city's steel mills, we watched tape after tape of the expedition's progress along the upper reaches of the river. Wu's interest was in Tibet – and even though he was a Han Chinese, born and brought up in Yunnan, he kept a photograph of the Dalai Lama taped to the inside of one of his living-room cupboards and was constantly critical of China's repressive policies towards what the government officially called Xizang Autonomous Province, but which he insisted on calling Tibet.
‘We have been brutes – no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘I love the Tibetan people. I have always said we should cherish them, regard them as brothers, as equals. We should not seek to dominate them. They are different. Their way of life, their religion – all different. Who are we Chinese to tell them how to live their lives?’
Lily blanched on hearing this. We had not discussed Tibet in much detail; but whenever we had, and whenever I had said how terrible a shame it was that China's policies towards the Tibetans had been so cruel, she had reacted defensively. I knew that she was secretly proud of – or at least a supporter of – her country's foreign policies, and that she saw the Tibetans as primitive innocents who had been consistently misled by religious zealots and egged on by western romantics; but now Wu – a Chinese like herself – was taking the same position as I. She fell quiet, but I knew we would have to face the problem in a day or so. I knew also, if I was to avoid a scene like that on the Panzhihua train, that I would have to deal with this disagreement with the utmost caution and tact.
Wu then came up with an idea. He would make contact with a friend who had also been on the expedition, a man who lived in Chengdu and worked for an organization that had access to four-wheel-drive cars, which would surely be needed if we hoped to get high up on the river. He had a feeling the organization would be eager to help. But that was for the following weeks. For now, he said – can I lend you my own car and let you explore the reaches close to Panzhihua? If you like, he added hopefully, I can come along as well, and be your guide.
Never before in my dozen years of travelling in China had a private individual ever offered – or been able – to supply me with both transport and his own time to show me around a corner of his country. There were always official guides available – Local Guides or National Guides, a corps d'elite of half-English-speaking and too often woefully ignorant young men and women, screened and cleared as faithful adherents to the Party line, who would, for a sizeable fee, escort you along a predetermined route to show off the nation at its best. There were also enthusiastic amateurs like Lily, who would jump at the chance of touring companionship, of helping a stranger in exchange for learning more about the cultural fingerprints of foreigners. But never before had I come across a sedate, employed, and politically independent-minded man or woman who would be willing or able to stop everything, drop everything and come away for no better reason than to demonstrate a part of his country of which he felt proud. Why would he do such a thing? I could only think of one kind of person who might do it.
‘I suppose you think I'm actually a policeman,’ Wu replied, reading my mind, chortling. ‘And I suppose you think that I think you're a spy. So that's the only logical reason we can travel together – me to show you what the Party wants and to keep an eye on you while you're travelling. That must be the logical view.
‘In fact it's more simple. I really am just fascinated by the Yangtze. Meeting someone else who likes the river – well, I just want to do anything I can to help. Believe it or not as you like. I think your people might do the same for me, if I ever come to your country.’
(I was ashamed to say this latter seemed rather improbable. The notion that a lone Chinese traveller might fetch up in Arkansas, profess a fascination with the Mississippi River, and promptly find a local insurance salesman who would take a week off to drive him from Osceola to Eudora was frankly laughable. The Chinese often have a stern and forbidding visage; but behind it, equally often, is a kindness and a hospitality few other people can imagine.)
Wu had two cars – a sporty-looking Toyota LandCruiser and a ratty-looking red Beijing Jeep, which showed that the spoils of the insurance business were every bit as handsome as in America or Europe. To our slight chagrin he elected to take the Jeep, and at five o'clock one sunny summer morning we set off westward, away from the blighted industrial landscape of Panzhihua. The last we saw of the steel city – a town that had been deliberately created by Mao's planners, and to which, during the fifties and sixties, the Great Helmsman had exhorted workers to move – was a long line of steam trains dumping torrents of molten slag down a slope that led directly into the Yangtze. It seemed a suitable memorial to the insanity of the Great Leap Forward – the making of a cliff of iron, the creation of industrial pollution on a titanic scale and with a callous disregard for the greatest of China's waterways. Wang Hui, Li Bai, Da Fu and Meng Jiao and all those other painters and poets who once loved the river – thou shouldst most decidedly not be living at this hour!
If there was to be some recompense for the dismal aspect from the rearview mirror, it was the beauty of our destination. I had a hint of it that morning when we climbed over some low hills and passed through the octroi post into Yunnan and came, via the steep valley of a tributary, to the Yangtze once again. Here we were on the Golden Road, so-called – the main route by which heroin (as well as rubies, and other more mundane trade goods) comes into China from the Golden Triangle of Burma, three days' hard driving away. The Chinese keep close watch on the trucks coming eastward: a group of policemen wearing machine guns were tanning beside the road, and they stopped us briefly, asking jokingly if we happened to be returning drug couriers, then waved us on. We stopped at a gas station and drank tea with a pair of Tibetan truck drivers: when I showed them a picture of the Dalai Lama, they clapped their hands to their foreheads in prayer and insisted on paying for the tea.
It was a warm and sunny early afternoon when we reached the main stream. The skies were a perfect blue, the air was alive with birdsong. In the short stretch of still water, the hesitant end of the tributary stream before the bar where it entered the ferocious whirlings of the Yangtze proper, two teenage girls – they were probably Yi, but perhaps Bai, a people whose homeland was a little south of here – were swimming. It looked like something out of an H. E. Bates story, filled with rustic bliss, sunshine and rude good health. The girls were astonishingly pretty; they were swimming in just their bras and panties, their bodies were strong and tanned, their hair close-cropped. They were blithely unconcerned when Lily, Wu and I drove up: they stood in the shallows and waved at us to come down and go swimming too, and they seemed genuinely disappointed when we shouted down that we had to be in Lijiang by nightfall.
We stopped at a small café beside the old stone river bridge and lunched on black chicken soup (made of a local bird with unusually dark and strongly flavoured flesh) and bowls of noodles. On the wall was a reproduction Madonna, fifteenth-century Italian, probably torn from an Alitalia calendar. A large red hen had made her nest against this wall, and the combination of old wood, Renaissance brushwork, a sleeping chicken and hanging baskets of Chinese spices made for an intriguing conversation piece. Wu smoked a couple of cigarettes and then tossed me the keys to the car. He was tired, he said, and it was as well if I became used to driving, however illegal such a thing might be. Besides, he would bribe any policemen we might meet.
And so, slowly and steadily – Beijing Jeeps having a tendency to boil on long uphill stretches, as well as a host of other problems – we inched our way up the western side of the valley. We passed small groves of banana palms and newly tilled fields where young boys were planting soybeans or rapeseed. Small fields of lavender, red stands of poppies, yellow mists of buttercups – it was all energetically colourful. Behind stood the jagged blue ranges of the Yunnan mountains, and down below the brown river was coiling and uncoiling thickly and quietly around their bases.
After climbing for half an hour the road suddenly flattened, and we came out onto a plateau of pine woods. It became greener and cooler and more moist, and there were flashes of falling water, with kingfishers darting in and out of rainbows. And then without warning, in the northern distance, there rose a huge, rugged and totally snow-covered mountain. The sight of it made Lily gasp with astonishment, and Wu snapped awake.
‘My God!’ he said, and rubbed his eyes. ‘It is Yuelong Xueshan – the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain! It's so rare that you see it as free of cloud! Good fortune, so they say. We will be very lucky!’ My American map showed the peak as standing 18,400 feet high, the tallest point for scores of miles around. It rose over the plain of Lijiang, where there were cornfields and rice paddies glinting in the sunshine. Below it, to the southern sunlit side, which I could see from my vantage point, the land was flat. The Americans had built an airstrip there in the late thirties, and from it they sent bombers up to protect Free China from the Japanese and flew sorties over General Stilwell's Burma Road.
Behind Jade Dragon Mountain, on the north side that I couldn't see, the Yangtze passes through what is said to be the deepest and most ferocious gorge of the entire river. The Tiger Leaping Gorge is a defile all too little known to the outside world – in the mid-1980s one expedition reported that only three westerners had ever glimpsed it – and it far outranks the Three Gorges in depth and spectacle. Nowadays it is quite easy to reach, and I had plans to be there in another day or two. What a changeable stream, I thought: down where the two young girls had been swimming, beside the bridge just half an hour behind, the Yangtze was just a decorously swirling stream – powerful, but not obviously murderous. A short way ahead, behind the hills, it apparently turned into a monster.
The town of Lijiang is one of the western China's true gems – one of the very few way stations in the Middle Kingdom on what, archaically perhaps, is still known as the Hippie Trail. Youngsters from around the world come to Lijiang, en route between the equally delightful towns of Dali and Xishuangbanna in Yunnan and Yangshuo in Guangxi province. They are on a circuit – the same people who visit the back streets of Chiang Mai, Kathmandu and Lhasa, or Panajachel, Goa and Trivandrum, end up with equal enthusiasm and curiosity and camaraderie in towns like Lijiang. No matter what regime is in power, nor what rules are in force, there is a universality in the appeal of such places – laid-back, easygoing, with colourful people and cheap and wholesome food. In the normal and depressing order of business, the youngsters come to such a place first as rucksack-carrying pioneers and discoverers; the tour buses come next; and then the airports and the big hotels.
Lijiang is currently poised delicately between the first two phases of this evolution – the youngsters are still making it here, but on buses as well as by hitchhiking (I picked up two young Israelis, taking six months off from their kibbutz, and they were typical of the breed); and the hotel lobbies have notices offering the day's programme to the tour groups of Dutch and Belgians who have found out about the local delights. No groups of Americans or Japanese, nor of Chinese ‘compatriots' from Taiwan and Hong Kong, not yet; no airport yet, either, though one was due to open, imminently; and no Holiday Inns or other chains, although I met an unpleasant Frenchwoman who had plans for a Sofitel, once the airfield opened. The developers are eyeing Lijiang, greedily and warily at the same time.
What tempts them all is a combination of the scenery, the weather and, most notably, the fact that the inhabitants are not Chinese. The dominant population of Lijiang are members of the Nakhi tribe, a people who have created for themselves a small and most unusual paradise. True, there is a Mao Square in Lijiang; and there are dusty and ugly streets lined with the boxy modern buildings that look like anywhere else in post-revolutionary China. Lijiang is run by the Chinese – there are Chinese policemen in their running shoes, and Chinese officials in the various government offices. But theirs is a colonial administration, as it is over most of cis-Himalayan China.
There is a low hill in the centre of town, with a television tower at its summit: this marks the dividing line between the dismal and the delightful. To its west, all is ugly, drab, modern and Chinese; to its east, however, is fussy antiquity – an exquisite collection of old wooden houses, with cobbled streets and tiny canals, high-walled secret courts like Oxford quadrangles, and everywhere the smell of warm pine and wood smoke. Tall men walk by with hunting falcons on their sleeves. Imposing-looking women, who wear blue bodices and trousers and stiff white aprons, and who have T-shaped, star-embroidered padded cotton capes across their backs, stand outside their little homes, minding their children and their most common household pets, parrots. These are the Nakhi, and they have been the object of Chinese disapprobation for hundreds of years, and western fascination for scores.
There are some quarter of a million Nakhi, most of whom live on the Lijiang plan: they are said to be descendants of Tibetans and they were long regarded by the Chinese as utter barbarians. They listen to their wizards, they cling to shamanism and to a Tibetan heterodoxy known as Bon (which is claimed to be far older than the Lamaist Buddhism normally associated with the Tibetans), they have a pictographic script that is unrelated to any other in the world and which is made up of entirely recognizable creatures and objects. And though technically they run their society along conventionally patriarchal lines, there is an odd matriarchal aspect to their lives, which penetrates deeply into even the spoken language. The addition of the feminine suffix to any noun, for example, makes it bigger, more powerful and dominant, while the addition of the masculine denotes weakness, delicacy and submissiveness. A female stone is a cobble or a boulder; a male stone is a pebble, or even gravel or a grain of sand.
To underscore the more conventional aspect of Nakhi life there is one well-known patriarch in town – a bespectacled eccentric ethnomusicologist named Xuan Ke. He is not a man who is overfond of the Han Chinese: during the Cultural Revolution he spent years in prison and forced-labour camps, often tied up with wire,* for the dual crimes of playing Schubert's Marche Militaire as an ironic welcome to a group of revolutionary troops, and for suggesting that Mao's greatness might not outlive that of Jesus Christ, with whom the Great Helmsman almost shared a birthday. Xuan Ke says he has been officially forgiven now, and he brandishes his passport to show he is allowed to leave the country whenever he wants. But Public Security Bureau men keep tabs on him, he says, and they were there, ostentatiously noting our arrival, when we came to call on him at his home.
He runs a small Nakhi museum in the upper floors of his old family house. It holds clothes, paintings, old musical instruments. For the last decade he has also led a small orchestra of elderly men, who play Tang dynasty Tao temple music. On our first evening, we went to listen: the concert seemed to be for the benefit of an obnoxiously Brylcreemed lounge lizard from Kuala Lumpur who claimed to be a Taoist master and was filming everything with one of those video cameras that have a large screen instead of a viewfinder: he held it in front of him and all of us behind could see the orchestra twice, once full-sized and real, and again on the four-inch screen.
There was also a group of geologists from Kunming – they were drilling test holes, they said, close to the Tiger Leaping Gorge. There was a possibility that a dam might be built below the Gorge in due course. ‘We have a duty to exploit the water resources of our rivers,’ said the group's leader, as the musicians were tuning up. I asked him if perhaps the Gorge was sacred, too beautiful to change. ‘There is too much beauty in these parts. A little less will not be a major loss.’
But now the musicians were ready, and this promising conversation had to come to an end. All the men in the orchestra, Xuan Ke explained, were Nakhi. Most were very old – five were more than eighty, three more than seventy. The five who were in their mid-sixties Xuan Ke called ‘my boy musicians’.
The oldest man of all, Sun Ziming, was eighty-three, and he had a long white beard that smelled of mint and tobacco. He had a gentle expression that belied the fierceness of his musical task, which involved thumping a large brass gong at the kind of irregular intervals that are said to be peculiar to Tang temple music. Old Mr Sun told me proudly that during the war he had been a caravan driver on the Burma Road, and that he would walk to Calcutta, taking four months. He would occasionally also walk to Lhasa, but all the other roads out of China in those days had been cut by the Japanese.
Another old-timer used a Persian lute, said to date from the fourteenth century and to be a relic from the Nakhi royal court, back when there was one. There was a frame of ten cloud gongs, a bamboo flute as small as a chopstick, a fish-shaped temple block that sounded if beaten with a mallet. Jew's harps are part of the local musical scene, too, and a man at the front played one, though with less of a role than the er-hu and pi-pa players, for the orchestra was geared this evening to playing Chinese music and did not bother itself with the decidedly odd sounds of the Nakhi themselves. They were taking the Nakhi music to London later in the year, they said. It was their first foreign journey, and probably also the first time that Londoners had been able to hear the sounds of what was billed as ‘The Land Beyond the Clouds’.
‘I think we are the only orchestra in China that plays good classical seventh-century music,’ said the director after a concert of two hours of ethereal, strangely blissful sounds. He grinned. ‘The Chinese must think it rather ironic that it is a minority people who have preserved it, and not the Chinese themselves.’
After the concert, and after we had shaken off the importunate Malay, Xuan Ke and I went down the road to the Din-Din Café, one of the myriad of small restaurants that are favoured by the young backpackers. We had banana pancakes and homemade granola, fresh orange juice and Italian coffee, so-called. The one supposedly local dish was Nakhi cheese, fried with sugar, which was none too exciting. A hand-chalked sign read, ‘Please accept our apologies if your preference is not available due to previous passenger selection.’ ‘Yes,’ said the owner, when I asked her if she had ever travelled by plane. ‘How did you guess? Bangkok. My only time.’ She had spent 20,000 renminbi decorating her restaurant, and she now made 4000 a month, clear profit. ‘Soon I will have chain,’ she said. ‘Like your Kentucky Fried, yes?’
I asked Xuan Ke to explain the rumour that Lijiang was the suicide capital of China. He became immediately animated and cheerful.
‘Yes, yes!’ he said. ‘This is a distinction we do claim. It is all to do with love. I like to think of Lijiang as the love capital, really. The boys and girls here, they fall in love in a most unfortunate way – the morals of the Nakhi people have never been very good. Much promiscuity, I think you would say. And so there is much disappointment, and many couples kill themselves to end their affair. It is a long, long tradition.
‘They have their special places to do the deed – a lake here, a mountain pass there, a riverbank there, a meadow up along the road below the Jade Dragon Mountain, near the American airfield. There is a ritual to it. The youngsters write notes, they call in the wizards to bless the event, and then they drink a mixture of black aconite boiled up with oil. It sounds very disagreeable to me. But it has the advantage of paralysing the larynx. Once they have drunk it they cannot cry out. They die quite quickly and quite peacefully – but totally in silence. No one can come to help them. If they are far away, and no one sees them, then it is all over. They drink the mixture, and they are found dead the next day. The wizards perform another ritual, and it is all over. Joseph Rock was the great expert on it. He knew how they killed themselves, and where, and why. He knew the wizards. He wrote all about it. I have the books.’
Xuan Ke and his father had known Joseph Rock well, and the little museum housed some of the great man's relics – his desk, his bookcases and some of his books, and the enormously wide chair that suggested, wrongly, that Rock had been an unusually portly man. His gold dinner plates and his folding canvas bath from Abercrombie & Fitch were no longer there; but the garden he planted, and his country house a few miles north, also near the American airfield, remained, memorials to a strangely memorable man.
Joseph Rock had been born in Vienna; his father, a melancholy man, was majordomo to a Polish count. He wanted his young son to enter the priesthood. But Joseph, who lost himself in bizarre night-time fantasies that included the learning of thousands of Chinese ideographs by the time he was a teenager, had other plans: he vaulted out of Vienna, signed on as a steward on a transatlantic steamer, arrived in New York in 1905, pawned his clothes, worked as a dishwasher and a waiter and at a score of other menial tasks before arriving, hungry and penniless – but already speaking ten languages, including Arabic and Chinese – in Hawaii.
He had the magical combination of formidable chutzpah and an unquenchable wanderlust. For a while he taught; but soon, surrounded by the delicious greenery of those overfertile islands, he turned to botany as by turns a diversion, a fascination, a hobby and then an obsession. Without either a degree or any formal knowledge of plants, he marched into the Honolulu office of the US Department of Agriculture one day in 1910, insisted that they needed a herbarium and won his way. Within a year, he was teaching botany at the College of Hawaii, and he published papers that are still regarded as classics.
But a craving for travel could not be ignored. He went to Washington and persuaded the Agriculture Department there that he should become an official plant hunter – a paid agricultural explorer, with his nominated territory that part of western China where the rhododendrons, and camellias and the tea varieties were being found in such abundance. He came out first in 1922; and for the next twenty-seven years, until the Chinese Communists dismissed him along with most other foreigners, he lived and explored with memorable energy and acumen, in that vast and tumultuous series of mountain ranges between Dali in the south and the cold deserts of what was then Amdo, and is now called Qinghai, in the north.
He worked first for the government, searching for sources for a substance called chaulmoogra oil, which was then thought to be a treatment for leprosy, and which was used in huge quantities in the great sad lazarettos of Hawaii and Louisiana. Before long, however, he began to chafe under the restriction of government work, even so far from home, and he transferred his professional allegiance to the more liberal board of the National Geographic Society.
He wrote papers and popular articles by the dozen, steadily transferring his affections, as he did so, from the region's plants to the region's people. He sent thousands of specimens home, but he never wrote a single serious paper about the botany of China. Within a few years of his arrival he had taught himself to be the world's greatest expert on the Nakhi people, and a translator of their terrifyingly complex pictographic language. He befriended a colourful figure known as King of Muli, and made similar comradely alliances in principalities called Choni and Yungning. He wrote vast tomes about the Moso – a people, related to the Nakhi, who lived on the northern side of the Yangtze and whose practices are more rigorously matriarchal than their country cousins. (For instance, their family names pass down from mother to daughter.) It was these people who slept and fed on the Boneless Pig, the animal of the mattress and of the slices that are eaten a dozen years later with locally whipped and straw-filled yak-butter and chunks of homemade cheese.
The Moso are a people who also have a highly libidinous reputation across China – whose reported eagerness for sex rivals that of the Trobriand Islanders, far away in the western Pacific. Moso women lead the charge here: they can take as many lovers as they like, and those drawn into these brief relationships are known as azhu, good friends. A survey carried out in 1983 found that of 1878 mature Moso women, no fewer than 393 carried on azhu relationships. The men invariably returned to their own homes when the night was over: if any children resulted from the mingling, the woman – who might begin her sexual activity as a young teenager – was allowed to keep them.
Not surprisingly the rate of sexually transmitted illness among the Moso has been staggering. Peter Goullart, a Russian-born Frenchman who came to know the area well and who wrote a biography of Joseph Rock, recalled a conversation with a Tibetan trader he met coming down from Moso country. Goullart, who was called on to treat occasional sickness, examined the man and discovered that he had indeed contracted a case of what one might call Moso Rose.
‘No! No!’ the man protested. ‘It is only a cold.’
‘How did you get it?’ Goullart asked.
‘I caught it when riding a horse,’ the trader replied.
‘Well,’ said Goullart, ‘it was the wrong kind of horse.’
Joseph Rock, who was not drawn to this kind of activity, instead drew maps, keenly but not very well. He surveyed mountains (managing on one occasion to make an absolute ass of himself by claiming in a telegram to Washington that a peak called Minya Konka was the world's highest, at 30,250 feet – his amateur use of the theodolite having misled him, it later transpired, by almost a mile). But wherever he went, he travelled in the grandest style, like a Victorian in Africa. Porters carried him everywhere in a palanquin, often trembling under the lash of his formidable temper. When it came time to halt, there was always a cook, an assistant cook, a folding table, starched napery, table silver, a leopard skin to sit upon and from which he would contemplate the view he always had his bearers select for him. There were bottles of well-travelled wine, no matter how far into the wilderness he had penetrated; there were Viennese dishes he had taught his staff to prepare; and after dining there was tea and a selection of liqueurs.
Then he would set off once again for more discovery and amusement – and glancing around happily, he would note in his diaries how his column of hired men stretched half a mile into the distance and how any village chief would regard him as a potentate from some fabulous kingdom and treat him accordingly. As well as his folding bath and his gold dishes, which impressed all who saw him, he invariably took a wind-up gramophone, and he would regale the villagers he met with scratchy Caruso arias played full-blast.
He remained in Lijiang throughout most of the anti-Japanese war, to the irritation of the authorities in Chongqing: he raised vegetables and listened to advice from his sorcerer friends, and to the news on his short-wave radio. When, on one occasion close to the war's end, he travelled back to America, he fell almost insane with grief on learning that his collections, which had followed him home on a ship, had been torpedoed in the Arabian Sea.
‘Followed him home' is perhaps an inappropriate phrase. Joseph Rock never had a real home, nor did he ever settle with any particular person, male or female; only in Lijiang was he content, and he said he wanted to be interred there, under the towering range of the Jade Dragon Mountain. We visited the house and the garden where he had wanted to be buried, in a village an hour north of town: it is cool, among the foothill pines, and there are meadows and crystal springs. A family of Nakhi live there now, and there was a cow in Rock's study, which is now used as a byre. A beautiful young Nakhi woman, her hair covered in a white bandeau, was nursing her baby in the room that Rock had used as his library: perhaps he would have been content to see that at least his house was being used by his beloved Nakhi, and not by the Chinese.
The latter threw him out in the end. The Communists distrusted those they regarded as barbarian priests and wizards and sorcerers, and they killed scores of them, and sent others off to be re-educated. Rock left finally in August 1949, two months before Mao Zedong declared the formation of the People's Republic. By then it was all over, so far as fun was concerned, up in the wilds of the west. He wrote to a friend: ‘If all is OK I will go back – I want to die among those beautiful mountains rather than in a bleak hospital bed all alone.’
But China never did let him return. He stayed in America, working in solitary misery, and he died in a Honolulu hospital in 1962. His books remain, and an Italian publisher brought out his definitive study of the Nakhi pictographs, completing the work in 1972. They remain as Joseph Rock's memorial – his books, his remarkable photographs – and three species of flowers: Rhododendron rockii, Primula rockii and Omphalog-ramma rockii. Considering that this son of a dreary Viennese manservant never took a degree in botany, or in anything else, and that he achieved all he did by an unquenchable combination of courage and barefaced cheek, the flower memorials seem touchingly appropriate.
Although he was memorialized by the names of plants, there were others who tramped these same hills and who made a great deal more of the region's extraordinary botany than Rock ever did. There was, for instance, Augustine Henry, a medical officer with the Imperial Maritime Customs and a colleague of the very unbotanical but properly named Cornell Plant. Henry, who found expatriate life tedious, explored in great detail the mess of vegetation zones that Yunnan's precipitous mountains piled on top of one another. He, like other plant hunters, would travel uncomfortably in a huagan, a chair, slung from the shoulders of local bearers. The work was dangerous and difficult, but well seasoned with rewards: Henry had numerous flowers named after him – a rhododendron, a viburnum – and he was one of the first westerners to sight the famously beautiful dove tree, which grows wild in western China, and nowhere else.
More famous still were the French missionaries Père David and Jean André Soulié, whose decades spent in the isolation of the western Chinese hills were amply rewarded by the discoveries of scores of splendid specimens. It fell to Père David actually to find the first dove tree – a delight that offers the illusion, created by paired white bracts that sprout beneath each flower, that scores of doves with outstretched wings have alighted on the branches and are waiting to fly away. The Linnaean Society gave it the name Davidia involucrata, and seeds from it were brought back to London by another hunter, the Royal Horticultural Society's great Ernest Wilson, a few years later.
Seeds from countless plants that were first found by these brave and inquiring men came pouring into Britain and America during Victorian and Edwardian times. Today, the fact that gardens and hillsides in the West are coloured by tea roses and peonies, by azaleas, camellias, chrysanthemums and rhododendrons is owed almost exclusively to the efforts of these men. Christian converts in western China remain something of a rarity: botanical converts in western gardens, however, suggest that the missionaries and their friends performed memorable tasks – even if, like Joseph Rock, they were not quite the tasks to which they were first assigned.
I had one more task before leaving Lijiang, and I was prompted to undertake it by a newspaper article that Bruce Chatwin had written of a trip in 1986 – three years before his early death of what those who cared for him said was an illness that he had contracted in China, and perhaps even on this trip. Ironically the man about whom he had written then, and who I was now coming to see a decade later, was a healer, a herbalist. He was a man whom Bruce Chatwin has made almost famous.
He is named Ho Shi-xiu, and he lives still as he did then, in a small Nakhi village called Baisha, halfway between Lijiang and the hamlet where Joseph Rock kept his country villa. Lily and I drove the six miles there, parked the Jeep in the grounds of a school, walked to the main street and turned south. Farmers and housewives and children were busying themselves on all sides – threshing grain, washing clothes, noisily spilling in and out of classes. Where would we find Dr Ho? Lily asked. I told her not to worry: Dr Ho was such an avid self-publicist that it would only be a matter of moments before he found us.
Turning south was in fact a mistake. We walked for more than a mile, pleasurably but pointlessly, drinking in the mountain air, peering up cross-streets, asking questions. The street was lined with willows, and a bright stream tumbled between the flagstones. A teacher asked me to spend a few minutes telling her class of ten-year-olds exactly where I was from; an old Nakhi woman asked me to help her untie the bridle of her donkey, which had become snarled on a tree; another woman, her daughter, showed me how to shave garlic to the thinness of gold leaf.
The guidebook I had with me struck a rather irritable tone about Dr Ho and Bruce Chatwin's somewhat overripe profile of him as ‘the Taoist physician in the Jade Dragon Mountains’. The publicity had gone to his head, said the book: now everyone wrote about him, everyone visited him, he was formidably wealthy compared to his fellow villagers, and he never let visitors pass without impressing his fame upon them. But where exactly was he? No one here seemed to know who he was; if he existed at all he had evidently gone to ground.
We retraced our steps, frustrated. After twenty minutes we found ourselves back in the stone-paved central piazza and struck off to the north. Two hundred yards along the way there was an almond tree in the middle of the road, and from behind it, as if responding to a stage manager's cue, stepped a slight man dressed in a blue wool cap and a long white doctor's coat.
‘My friends, welcome!’ he said, in the familiar and oily way of a man who is about to sell you something you know you don't want. ‘How very good of you to take time to visit my humble village. You have time to come to my little home?’
Dr Ho had found us. His having done so there was now no getting away from him. He looked quickly around to make sure there were no other potential clients coming up the street, then bundled us into the front room of his cottage, beneath a small sign that said Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Chinese Herbal Medicine Clinic. It was by no means an extraordinary house: the walls were of wood and a dark reddish mud from which poked tiny bristles of chaff. Inside there were shelves of papers and a desk covered with vials and bags of seeds, and there was a pleasant smell, like an old Irish Medical Hall.
Dr Ho spoke English quietly, just comprehensibly, telling us his life story in the compressed manner of a telephone pitchman who knows that at any moment his listener may put down the receiver. If ever I showed a sign of wearying he would put his hand gently on my knee. ‘Wait for just a moment, kind sir you have come a very long way to hear my story.’ He said he had learned his English at the nearby American air base: but it sounded quite Dickensian, not at all as though he had been schooled by the men of the Flying Tigers.
The Cultural Revolution that swept through Lijiang came as something of a mixed blessing for Dr Ho, who had returned to the town from Nanjing after falling ill some time in the early 1960s. The Red Guard detachment assigned to this part of Yunnan selected the doctor promptly for reform through struggle, or some such madness: he was immediately suspect for no better reasons than his ability to speak, not only fair Dickensian English, but an alarming number of other foreign languages as well, a skill that in the eyes of the Guards rendered his commitment to Han supremacy and Maoist ideals very far from certain. So his house was ransacked, suspect goods and books were confiscated and he was forced outside to work, set to tilling the mountainside and making orderly fertility out of wild Yunnanese fecundity.
But what the Guards did not realize was that the work they had set Dr Ho as punishment brought him into contact with the makings of a new and very profitable career. Working in the fields halfway up the Jade Dragon Mountain, he came across samples of some of the rare and unusual plants that forty years before had been studied assiduously by Joseph Rock. Dr Ho knew Rock's work and he recognized the possible importance of the flowers and shrubs that were growing in such abundance on these slopes.
He started to collect them, keeping them well away from the scrutiny of his minders, bringing them back each night to the small plot of land behind the house. There he began to grow them in pots and under glass. Thus was born the tiniest and most exotic of physic gardens, with strange and exotic samples of botany that exist to this day. As part of his discourse Dr Ho takes visitors to see them: there is a lichen guaranteed to cure shrunken ovaries,* the root of an orchid that is said to be good for migraine, a delicate green grass known as heaven's hemp – said to be peculiarly efficacious in seeing off bladder problems – and something called Meconopsis horridula, which, as its name half implies, works wonders for the temporarily dysenteric.
Dr Ho ground his plants to powder and soaked them in hot spring waters – trying them out on the villagers, varying the amounts and the mixes depending on the ailments presented and the age and sex of those he treated. Before long he had a following: the Chinese have always been eager for natural cures, for their own version of the Ayurvedic arts practised farther west, and Dr Ho's discoveries on the mountainsides seemed to work wonders, either from their chemistry or from their placebo effect.
He next combined his newfound pharmaceutical skills with his professed lifelong commitment to the way of Taoism – a philosophy that in any case sets great store by internal hygiene, the quest for immortality, internal alchemy and healing. And in 1985, formally and with some ceremony attended by Taoist priests, he established himself as a full-blown Taoist herbal healer. He sat back and anticipated a late middle age of well-meaning obscurity. What actually happened, however, was that a few months after setting up shop, and by pure chance, he was visited by the Adonis-like figure of Bruce Chatwin, his hand-tooled leather rucksack on his back, who swung into town with his pencil, notebook and an assignment from an American newspaper. Chatwin plucked Dr Ho from nowhere and cast him into the blinding spotlight of thoroughly respectable fame.
Whether or not there is any therapeutic value to any of Ho Shi-xiu's seemingly limitless range of teas, decoctions, infusions and tisanes, there is no saying – there have been no laboratory tests, so far. But such was Bruce Chatwin's following that, on his say-so alone, a string of the distinguished and the gullible promptly started to stream into Baisha to seek solace and comfort and the botanical assistance of Dr Ho's tiny clinic.
The doctor, a man not at all backward at coming forward, presents to anyone who is interested – and to most who are not – a thick stack of files and visitors' books that demonstrate the vast number of the great and the good, as well as the ordinary German tourists and Japanese bus-tour groups, who have come a-calling. There were the signatures of British ambassadors by the score, of television personalities like Michael Palin and John Cleese (‘interesting bloke – crap tea' he had written), of writers like Patrick Booz, of society ladies from the Upper East Side, and of regiments of Californians and health nuts from Oregon, Montana and the hills of Bavaria. There were newspapers articles in all known languages, preserved in folders of cellophane: he took them reverently from the stacks, offered them for viewing as though they were fragments of the True Cross.
Finally he peered at me, placing his wispy little white beard close up against my face and examining my skin and eyes. He leaned back:
‘Blood pressure, anxiety, loose bowels,’ he declared. And though I protested that I had none of these afflictions – although my daily inspection of the leavings below dozens of Yunnanese hole-in-plank lavatories had convinced me that the latter problem was endemic in rural Chinese life – he pressed a bag of powder into my hand, then a leaf or two and a twig, which he pressed between the pages of the book I was carrying, and cocked his head on one side.
‘These will clear up all your problems, I have no doubt,’ he said, and cocked his head again, an expectant expression on his impish face. I twigged: he wanted cash, and Lily counted out some ten renminbi bills into his hand, one bill, then two, then five – until, finally he smiled, closed his fist on the money and stood up.
‘You have been so kind to give me of your valuable time,’ he said, in as non-Flying Tigers a patois as it is possible to imagine. ‘I hope you will tell your friends to come and visit me too.’ Not I hope you will come back; just I hope your friends will come, listen to my spiel, hear about my fame, listen to my diagnosis of a life of diarrhoea and dyspeptic discomfort, buy samples of my potions and make me richer, and pass it on in due course.
He was a rogue, I thought – a lovable rogue of a snake-oil salesman, an amiable bit player in a circus of a grand tradition. He and his Taoist wizardry had taken me for fifty quite affordable yuan. But he had taken the late and much missed Bruce Chatwin, I thought, for really rather more.