The River at the Centre of the World (40 page)

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?’