On the dashboard of our van, a solar-powered Tibetan prayer wheel spins continuously as we make our way through the bumpy roads linking Lijiang, Dali and Tengchong.
After our fourth or fifth near-collision, I begin to stare at that miniature golden cylinder. Maybe a little Buddhist intervention will save us from crashing into a truck laden with giant boulders or plunging off the road into the canyons below.
We had come to see the northwest part of Yunnan, bordering Myanmar and Tibet, an ancient landscape that is rapidly changing. With the countless shops in fake-historic Lijiang selling identical Yunnan handicrafts, along with the rowdy backpacker scene in Dali, sections of Yunnan are being lost to the kind of tourism that involves busloads of passengers wearing matching baseball caps.
Lijiang, “restored” in the ancient style after a 1996 earthquake, was exactly the sort of place we wanted to avoid. Having lived in China for almost two years, we had already seen “Impression West Lake,” Zhang Yimou’s over-the-top evening extravaganza in Hangzhou, so there was no need to take in “Impression Lijiang,” set against the backdrop of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. And if we wanted to fight crowds like those on the cable car up the mountain, we could stay home in Beijing and wander through the Forbidden City on a hot summer day.
Walking around, we could imagine what it was like to be among the traders of old. The roads linked China to Tibet, Myanmar and other parts of Southeast Asia, bringing Yunnan’s tea to the world in a network that “vastly predates the modern world,” says Ed Jocelyn, founder of Red Rock Trek, a tour-guide company based in Dali.
We were far from the first foreigners to trek these parts. The Austrian-American explorer Joseph Rock lived near Lijiang from the 1920s to 1940s and cataloged the area’s people, plants and languages with a thoroughness that hasn’t been upstaged since.
His Yunnan was a far rougher place, with bandits attacking caravans and yak-butter-greased rope slides being used to ferry both people and terrified horses across raging rivers. At one point he describes a village as “charmingly situated, if not overclean.”
Fueled by a surprisingly good cappuccino from the nearby Old Tree Café (now that’s modernization I can get behind), we met our guide, Frank Hitman, for a hike to the base of a mountain called Shibaoshan, or Stone Treasure Mountain. This region of China is famed for its biodiversity, a contrast to Beijing, where we make do with tightly landscaped parks and a few sad birds. Unesco says that the area known as “Three Parallel Rivers”—the Yangtze, Nu and Mekong—may harbor “the richest biodiversity among the temperate areas of the world,” with 6,000 species of plants and endangered species such as the red panda.
As the heat, elevation and birdcalls increased, I started to think of the hike as a Buddhist boot camp. Maybe true awakening comes through sweat.
A few hours later we were rewarded with the sight of the Shizhong temple, which includes 16 grottoes carved in the reddish rock that date back to the eighth century. Yunnan’s ethnic diversity and links to the outside world have meant that the province is home to several forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, animist religions such as Dongba, and other faiths.
More than one statue can be seen in the grottoes at Shizhong, including a layman, Vimalakirti, whose worried facial expression stands out in contrast to the serene Buddhist visages.
It’s possible he was worried about what we saw next: something called the Yoni Shrine, a miniature grotto with a carving that may or may not be connected to worship of female reproduction. A tourist from Guangzhou began telling us about the other intimate body parts he’s seen represented on his travels, and our faces started to take on the look of Vimalakirti as we inched away.
A few more hours of driving under the protection of our solar prayer wheel added yet another religious faith to the mix. As we dodged traffic and headed south, we saw minarets in the distance. Muslim towns are scattered across the plains, populated by the Hui, who were converted by the Mongolian invaders and played a critical role in trade as drivers of the caravans on the tea-horse road.
As we wandered its grounds, we were greeted by the elderly imam, who showed us a stone tablet used in the past to call the faithful to prayer. Today, the call is piped through loudspeakers that enter individual homes, although while we were visiting, the only call we heard involved an announcement that someone needed to register his car. It was a rare touch of modernity in a place that seemed fixed in time, somewhere in the Ming dynasty.
Source: Wall Street Journal
