The main text that follows first appeared in the June 2004 issue of "Mandala", the magazine of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition
Map of Yunnan Province showing the route of this journey
Map of this journey in western Yunnan
For the context of this journey, see Map of my travels in China, 1993-2003
Known to few foreigners, the great valley of the Nu Jiang in the far west of China's Yunnan Province is a precious jewel - spectacularly scenic and a treasure-house of botanical and ethnic diversity. This is the river that rises as the Nakchu north of Lhasa, and reaches the sea through Burma as the Salween.
The valley is squeezed between the parallel Burma border some twelve kilometres to the west and the parallel Lancang Jiang (Mekong River) some twenty-five kilometres to the east. It stretches north 330 kilometres to the border of Tibet from Liuku, the city that gives the only road access to the valley.
Liuku and beyond are reached easily by overnight buses from the provincial capital Kunming. For the greater part of its length the valley is served by a first-class sealed road and frequent buses - enabling the traveller to jump on and off at will.
Last October I set out with my companion Xiang Xin, Mandarin-speaking native of Zhejiang, with ten days to explore the region. We wanted to see it before the inevitable development of tourism.
Inevitable? Just so. Five years ago the Chinese government responded to the contribution of logging to erosion and to the siltation and flooding of rivers in central China; it outlawed most logging in western Yunnan, western Sichuan and the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Clearly the gentler alternative is to develop tourism - for the enormous domestic as well as the international market. In pursuit of that, last year China obtained UNESCO approval of a World Heritage site - the 17000 square kilometres of eight reserves in western Yunnan that form the Three Parallel Rivers Protected Areas.
China had long received criticism for its logging of old forests. Praise for the ban when it came was, tellingly a cynic might say, more muted.
The trouble with banning logging over even such a large region is that it may push open the door to logging elsewhere - and in this case "elsewhere" is just over the border in the ancient rainforests on the market in Burma. From Liuku we caught buses west to Pianma and then north along the Burma border to Gangfeng, where the road was jammed by an endless stream of Chinese trucks laden with huge logs from Burma, heading for the innumerable sawmills of Gangfeng, Pianma and places between. So that is one consequence of the ban.
It is a complex matter. One thing to note is that China's use of timber, with the notable exception of some ethnic housing, is often minimal - concrete electricity poles, railway sleepers and, of course, concrete buildings with aluminium window-frames, those hideous white-tiled boxes so loathed by foreign tourists.
A competitor of conservation and tourism is construction of dams for hydro-electricity. Local authorities have been pushing hard for development of thirteen dams on the Nu Jiang - twelve in Yunnan and one in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. An unprecedented intervention in April this year by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao suspended the plans and ordered a review.
Far to the north of Liuku, we hitched a truck ride from the county-town of Gongshan, west along the wild road over the Gaoligong Shan range to its end at Kongdan village. Kongdan is on the Dulong Jiang, tributary of the great Irrawady River of Burma and home of the D'rong nationality. The valley has had this (seasonal) road access for only about four years, and lies entirely within the Three Parallel Rivers reserve.
A complicated scheme is now in place involving the restriction of rice farming, with free issue of rice by the government. We saw the sealed contract between the government and the village authorities whereby the government pays the village to establish timber plantations on cleared land. We saw that extensive planting has been done already. How far this kind of activity extends on a wider scale was, of course, beyond our observation, but the movement we saw is in the right direction, and necessary no doubt to satisfy the requirements of the UNESCO listing.
In some ways the D'rong people, who number only about 5000, are even more vulnerable to encroaching Chinese influence than Tibet. As with most of the smaller minorities, their language is unwritten, a useful excuse for the exclusive use of Mandarin in school beyond second grade. Their way of life is generally more primitive, their culture surely lacking some of the conspicuous resilience of Tibetan culture in the face of the Han.
Study of the social sciences remains severely under-represented in Chinese universities. For the most part government agencies remain not so much insensitive as merely oblivious to the vital social and psychological aspects of cultural confrontation - just as in Tibet. We were told of enforced use of iron to replace timber roofs, and the consequent dismay of people whose practice of having indoor fires without chimneys depends on escape of smoke between wooden shingles.
The Nu Jiang catchment is populated by Tibetan-related ethnic "minorities", most notably Lisu, Nu, and (particularly in the north) Tibetans - all apparently (to the eyes of a passing visitor) living in harmony. Our first contact with Tibetans was at a Harvest Festival dance (the third most important annual festival after Easter and Christmas) half way up the valley at Fugong, where a number of people in Tibetan dress were joining in with the Lisu majority.
Much of the valley's population is Christian, the visible churches being of the two denominations permitted by the government - Jidu Jiao Tang, or Jesus Church, and the Tian Zu Jiao Tang, or Lord of Heaven Church - the Chinese, formerly Roman, Catholic Church. The difference between the Chinese names, with its origin in different words for "God" adopted centuries ago, leads to the unfortunate popular usage where "Christian" excludes "Catholic".
Because of linguistic differences between ethnic groups, some congregations consist exclusively of one nationality. Lisu in particular (whose written language, officially encouraged by the government, was devised by missionaries ninety years ago) are usually members of the Jidu Jiao Tang and Tibetans of the Tian Zu Jiao Tang, so that in the county town of Gongshan, for example, there is an ethnic divide between the two congregations and buildings.
What it is that Tibetan-ness means to Tibetans in this region is beyond the ability of a passing visitor to gauge. Certainly those who regard themselves as Tibetan seem in no doubt about that identity, and elements of national dress are common, especially but by no means only among women. There are at least some Tibetan practitioners of Buddhism, although the people we asked did not know of any monasteries or religious. Is there an issue of pastoral neglect here?
It is scarcely surprising that knowledge of the Tibetan written language appears to be poor. At Dimaluo village, in a side-valley east of the Nu Jiang north of Gongshan, we were delighted to sit in on an evening class in a back room at the catholic church, where about twenty-five ethnic Tibetans were learning the Tibetan letters in their consonant-vowel combinations, reciting the components in the traditional way. The pronunciation and U-chen letter formation suggested the teachers were less than expert, we saw no text books, and the classes had only been going for a short time; but the enthusiasm was inspiring. We heard of no other such classes and whether enthusiasm will be enough remains to be seen. Perhaps some sensitive, non-intrusive help could make a difference.
A couple of hours by foot further into the high mountain divide between the Nu Jiang and the Lancang Jiang, we came to Baihanluo, a village centred around a 130-year-old Catholic church, populated by a mixture of Tibetan and Nu people. A Nu farmer we met told us that over the last century or so the Nu have adopted Tibetan ways (and in some cases Tibetan identity, especially through intermarriage) because they regard Tibetans as more advanced and competent, particularly in their farming methods. Most Tibetans arrived from adjacent counties to the east in the first half of the twentieth century, and effectively introduced animal husbandry to the region.
A fortnight later and far to the east we came to Yongning, close to the Yunnan-Sichuan border. On the edge of town we visited two large and well-maintained Tibetan temple complexes and saw some of the twenty-odd resident monks, mostly of the Mosuo branch of the Naxi minority. The Mosuo, many of whom practice Tibetan Buddhism, are dominant here and at the enchanting Lugu Hu (lake) nearby, where the shoreside town of Luoshui is experiencing a tourist boom.
From Luoshui we visited two Tibetan temples. One was on an island, reached by one of many traditional row-boats ferrying an endless stream wealthy Han tourists to a Tibetan temple whose only attendant appeared to be a lay security guard. The tourists were respectful, but the place still had the feeling of a museum.
The other temple was high on the mountain-side behind the town, where we found a pair of artisans painting new murals; one of them was chanting but left off to greet us and respond to the few remarks we were able to make in Tibetan. Few tourists, it seems, visit that temple. Here and at Yongning Tibetan Buddhism was being practiced, apparently untroubled by already burgeoning tourism nearby.
In the benign autumn weather many of the places we visited seemed idyllic, an almost perfect combination of rustic simplicity and access, however limited, to schooling and medicines.
But times are changing. The priest who visits Dimaluo and Baihanluo churches once a year comes from Yanjing (Tsakhalho), the oldest church in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, whose massive new building was consecrated last Christmas. For centuries Yanjing has depended on its salt production by methods that cannot hope to survive free-trade competition. The effects of such competition on Tibetan agriculture may be no less profound.
From the present end of the road at Kongdan, a road is planned within three or four years, north along the Dulong Jiang to the Tibetan Autonomous Region - linking villages along the river, as well as that hitherto remote corner of Tibet, to the world. Beyond the end of the Nu Jiang road we encountered Tibetan traders with their horses, bringing traditional herbs from Tibet to trade for rice; within three or four years or less, a new road is planned to run north into Tibet. A new road to Lugu Hu is nearing completion, giving easy access for the first time from the Sichuan side: tourist development around the lake will be massive. I have a hunch that within a few years there will be a road circuit from Lugu Hu north to the holy Konkaling Mountains in Sichuan, then to Daocheng, and east to Muli Tibetan County; for tourists it will be a wonderful journey, but it will destroy isolation so great that when I visited the region two years ago my best reference was a report in the National Geographic of Joseph Rock's expedition in 1928.
The changes will bring opportunities as well as threats for Tibetans and other nationalities. In one way or another those changes over the present decade are certain to be profound.
So that's some of the "interesting" part, though it scarcely touches on the personal experience and memories.
Voices ... voices. Faces ... faces. And always - What Peta would have made of it all.
The voices, including Peta's above all, and the faces as well, are in my head. Some of the faces are here on this Web-site too, the most beautiful of all the last. More than any set of landscapes, coming together here, people whose only connection with each other is that I passed by; caught in an instant and preserved now by this electronic medium, they are a gallery describing what the journey was.
We have sent prints of most of these photos to the people concerned.
Tony Williams,
with Tong Xiang Xin
Melbourne,
February 2004