Monday, February 23, 2015

In Search of Ancient Funan


                                                                           by Jim Goodman

flooded plains east of Takeo, Cambodia
       When the Bronze Age was just getting under way in northern Vietnam, around the 19th century BCE, the lands around the Mekong Delta in the south were all swamps, subject to annual flooding during the rainy season as well as by the waters of the sea.  Over 4800 km from its source in the Tibetan highlands of China to its mouth in southern Vietnam, the Mekong continuously carried and deposited a massive amount of silt as it coursed its way to its mouth, while sea tides pushed these deposits around to create patches of land. 
       Human habitation of the Delta lands was quite difficult in the beginning.  Peat bogs, swamps and thick forests covered most of the spaces between the rivers.  In some places a portion of land rose one or two meters above sea level and on these fingers of dry land people could make farms.  Most such sites were near the coast, such as in present-day Sóc Trăng and Trà Vinh provinces, where the oldest Khmer settlements exist.  Others were near the Seven Mountains of An Giang province in the west, bordering Cambodia.
Khmer village on the canal east of Takeo
       It was this latter area that bears evidence of the earliest organized state or political entity in the Mekong Delta.  It has become known as Funan because that was the name ascribed to it by Chinese envoys to Angkor Borei, now in southeast Cambodia, from the state of Wu in the third century CE.  No one knows what the people living there called their country.  Local officials there informed the envoys the state had been around since the 1st century CE, allegedly founded by an adventurer from the Malayan Peninsula who subdued and then married the local princess.
       At the time of the envoys’ visit Funan was a rising power, in control of the sea trade between China and India, which is what aroused the interest of the state of Wu, one of the Three Kingdoms that formed after the collapse of China’s Han Dynasty.  Whether it was a single state or, more likely, a commercial alliance of ports, Funan apparently controlled the lands and ports of southwest Vietnam, southern Cambodia, lower Thailand and as far down the Malayan Peninsula as the Isthmus of Kra.  Merchant ships in those days often offloaded their cargo there for transport by land to the Indian Ocean side, where ships then took the goods on to ports in India.  Sometimes ships sailed on to places in Indonesia, or even continued beyond the islands to land on the Indian coast.   Much of this trade comprised what were the luxury goods of the times—animal hides, rhino horn, spices and gold.  
       Besides commerce, the rulers of Funan oversaw an extensive agricultural sector, creating cultivable areas through the construction of canals and levees.  The traces of one important canal have been found that linked Óc Eo, a site in the southeastern part of Vietnam’s An Giang province, with contemporary Angkor Borei in Takeo province, Cambodia.  If not the kingdom’s capital, Angkor Borei was certainly one of its most important cities.  It was also connected by canal to Takeo, which was a seaport in ancient times.  Sufficiently sited inland, it was safe from any pirate raids or attacks by rivals.
Óc Eo jewelry
Independence Monument, Takeo
       The canal that connected Angkor Borei with Óc Eo ran just east of the Seven Mountains and was 70 km long.  Óc Eo had a rectilinear grid, with transverse canals bisecting the main canal running north and an additional canal linking it with the sea.  Óc Eo’s large population lived in houses on piles or stilts on the land between the waterways.  The city was home to various craft specialists, as attested in the tools and artifacts unearthed there, such as beads, rings, pendants and medallions, which is also evidence of the existence of a class of people wealthy enough to indulge in such jewelry.
Muslim Chăm village en route to Angkor Borei
       In addition, archaeologists have found coins and gold medallions from 2nd century Rome and silver coins from Persia and Gupta India, a hint of how much East-West commerce flourished back then.  Indeed, the 2nd century Roman geographer, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, wrote of a Greco-Roman merchant’s journey to Kattigara, at the easternmost end of the Empire’s maritime trade route, where Roman merchants met their Chinese counterparts.  Some scholars believe Kattigara was Óc Eo’s port.  Others suggest it was Rach Giá, with which Óc Eo was connected by a canal, or Hà Tiên, a port in southwest Vietnam next to the Cambodian border.
Phnom Da
       Besides the jewelry and artifacts preserved in museums, Óc Eo’s legacy has all but vanished. Other than archaeology students, it doesn’t attract visitors.   Angkor Borei, however a shadow it is of its former incarnation, does get tourists who usually make it a day trip from Phnom Penh.  The starting point is Takeo, a quiet, pleasant town a couple of hours south of the capital.  A nice temple stands across from the Independence Monument, a replica of an Angkor Era stone tower.  A lotus-dappled lake flanks the town, with a walkway and park on the near side that gets active in the evenings.  But tourists don’t come to Takeo to check out its small list of attractions.  They rarely stay the night anyway.  They come for the journey to Angkor Borei, both for its historical significance as well as for the boat ride itself.
       To get there visitors take a motorboat from the wharf at the western edge of the city.  A couple of restaurants serve good Khmer food here and a kind of run down colonial-era neighborhood in the vicinity adds a little bit of atmosphere.   A larger Vietnamese boat bringing merchandise from Châu Đc, distinguished by the pair of eyes painted on the prow, may be docked at the wharf, along with small motorboats used for transport to hamlets on the canal. 
sculpted naga, Phnom Da
       The ride to the ruins of old Funan goes due east for nearly an hour on a canal across flooded plains, passing Buddhist Khmer and Muslim Chăm villages.  It’s not always a straight route either, for the pilot sometimes has to steer around places he already knows are too shallow for the boat to get through.  Local peasants may be standing at spots in these plains, the water at most knee-high in the dry season, casting fishing nets or even planting rice or vegetables.  The plots may be marked off by low-rising mud dikes.  Egrets fly over and dive for small fish.  Occasionally the land off to one side or the other rises slightly above the water level and is host to a collection of houses and a temple.  Aside from the temples, which are historically a relatively recent phenomenon, the landscape observed on the boat ride to Angkor Borei probably closely resembles that of the entire Mekong Delta area two thousand years ago.
Ashram Maha Russei
       Not much remains of Angkor Borei’s ancient splendor, other than remnants of a wall, a moat and a couple water tanks.  Its original buildings were made of wood and have all perished.  However, the boat makes a stop at a small river island about 20 km from Angkor Borei.  Two buildings stand here that give us an idea of what religious architecture looked like towards the end of the city’s heyday.  The older of these is Prasat Phnom Da tower, dedicated to Shiva, atop a small hill and visible from afar, made of brick and stone.
       Only one of the doorways on each of the four sides opens to the interior, where lay a few housings for the linga that were originally installed.  The other doorways are false, but flanked by sandstone columns, decorated with carvings and sculptures of rishis (Hindu holy men).  Arching over the top of the door was a decorative tympanum, but only traces of the friezes remain, mostly the multi-headed nagas at the corners.  Most of the top part of the tower has crumbled, so it is not possible to guess at how ornate it might have been.  Yet with its square base, height, architectural elements like the false doors and decorations, this tower, dating from late 6th or early 7th century, could almost be a prototype of the Chăm towers that began appearing in south central Vietnam not long afterwards.
typical house,in the village below Phnom Da
       The other temple in the area is the Ashram Maha Russei, made of gray laterite stone in the 7th century and dedicated to Vishnu.  It’s rather small, wedged into the slope near the base of a mound, in three distinct sections, but without carved embellishments.  The entrance to the interior altar is so narrow only a single devotee can enter at a time.  
       Buddhist temples must have existed in the area by then, for museums today hold Buddhist sculptures from the period.  The religion began penetrating the area from the 4th century and was popular with the urban merchant class, as in its native India.  Local Buddhist scholarship developed and near the end of the 5th century two Funan monks, Mandrasena and Samghabara, moved to China, where they lived several years translating sutras from Sanskrit into Chinese. 
Hindu deity, Angkor Borei Museum
Funan Buddha, Angkor Borei Museum
     
From the serene and friendly hamlet below Phnom Da, typical of settlements along the canal, to Angkor Borei is another 15 minutes by boat.  Today Angkor Borei is just the largest of the villages in the flooded plains of eastern Takeo province.  It does have a small but interesting museum, housing sculptures from the Funan period and the earliest extant stone inscription in the Khmer alphabet.  These sculptures are of deities from the Indian subcontinent—Vishnu, Krishna, Surya and Shiva, as well as the Buddha.  Trade with India resulted in the importation of ideas that came with Indian merchants, Brahmin pundits and Buddhist missionaries.  These included the Hindu religion with its many gods, the forms these deities took in sculptural representations, the Sanskrit language and alphabet, stone inscriptions and palm-leaf manuscripts and the temple complex.  Among the important secular influences were rectilinear urban grids and artificial water systems, such as canals and reservoirs.
Funan sculptures, Angkor Biorei Museum
       Maritime trade made the area called Funan wealthy.  But it was Indian influence that gave the culture its prime identity, with a religious bent far more complex than traditional animism, a code of law based on ancient precedents, a writing system (Sanskrit) that provided the basis for an indigenous (Khmer) alphabet, and a class basis for society that assigned people their positions, as well as their rights and duties.  But the strict Indian caste system did not become part of Khmer or Mekong Delta culture.  Brahmins had privileges as the religious class and royalty and military commanders came from the martial class, but among the rest no special taboos or notions of impurity regulated relationships between people of different classes and occupations as they did, and still do, in India.             
       In the 7th century maritime trade routes began altering, relying less and less on the coastal ports identified as part of Funan and more on direct sailing from Indonesia to southern China.  The wealth and influence of the coastal area rapidly eroded as political power shifted inland to new centers in the Cambodian heartland.  Yet the cultural parameters already established in the south continued to shape the new Khmer polities that arose from the 7th century.  The main difference was that these states, culminating in the Khmer Empire, would be much more sophisticated, organized not around seaborne commerce, but rice-based agriculture.  All other aspects of the state and society had their roots in Funan.
contemporary Angkor Borei
       The defunct state not only influenced its successors in Cambodia.  Chăm kingdoms in central Vietnam, though of unrelated Austronesian origins, modeled their realms on Funan as well, culturally, politically and economically, continuing to absorb influences from Funan’s Khmer successors long afterwards.  Unlike the latter states, though, the Chăm kingdoms’ success and power mainly derived from maritime commerce.  They were ideally situated to take advantage of the shift in seaborne trading routes after the 7th century.   In this sense, even more than Chenla or Angkor, the Chăm kingdoms were the genuine offspring of the state of Funan.   

8th century Chăm towers near Phan Thiết, Vietnam

                                                                         * * *




Monday, February 16, 2015

Going Remote for New Year—Celebrating on the Nanding River


                                                  by Jim Goodman

Junzhai 
       As Lunar New Year approaches in Yunnan travelers there, like anywhere else in China at that time, have to make up their minds where they intend to spend the next several days.  Plane, train and bus ticket possibilities shrink hourly.  Restaurants start locking up for the holidays and I’ve spent New Year in cities where the only place open to eat was a single noodles stall.  Hotels in popular New Year getaway destinations in Yunnan jack up the price for rooms and services, 500% in Jinghong, for example, compared to ‘only’ 300% for the Water-Sprinkling Festival in April.
       I faced this problem one February when I was in Xishuangbanna to see the Jinuo Temaoke Festival.  Being a solar calendar event, that year the festival took place several days before New Year.  But I didn’t want to pay the extra price for staying in Jinghong, with nothing particularly interesting scheduled for the holidays anyway.  So I decided to explore some place where I’d never been and settled on Junzhai, in Lincang Prefecture, on the right bank of the Nanding River, about 25 kilometers upriver from Mengding.
       This city I knew from a visit over a decade earlier, dominated by the Dai nationality, with a few De’ang and Wa villages in the hills.  I hadn’t crossed the river then, but it looked similar to the landscape on the Mengding side—rice fields and rubber tree plantations, backed by hills.   On the map Junzhai is identified as a Wa, Lahu, Lisu and De’ang autonomous district. Surely one of these minorities will be doing something for New Year, I reckoned. 
Dai woman,Junzhai
elderly Dai woman, Junzhai
       An old friend and veteran Yunnan traveler joined me for this excursion and we took the long and sometimes grueling bus ride to Gengma, stayed the night and left for the Nanding River in the morning.  We continued to Mengding to take a look, found it full of new buildings, all with Dai-style angled roofs, fancy hotels and only one restaurant still open.  Well, it was just two days before New Year.  We arrived at noon in Junzhai, basically a one-street town, found a simple guesthouse and three small restaurants still open, so for sure we could eat this night.  Whether they would close from tomorrow we didn't know yet, but I’d brought a duty-free bottle of 18-year-old Chivas, so if the drink shops were going to close, too, we anyway had decent liquor to enjoy for the holiday.
planting winter rice near Junzhai
       Most of Junzhai’s inhabitants are Dai and some of them were busy planting the winter rice crop.  We walked out of the town on the road going upriver and passed two rather uninteresting De’ang villages.  Their houses were modern ones of brick and concrete, without any temple, and only a few women wore De’ang style clothing, usually just the distinctive short jacket over a sarong.
       At the end of Dabao, the second village, a banner strung across the road welcomed everyone to the New Year celebration ground.  The venue was a slope that stretched down to the riverside, where a wooden swing had been erected and children were taking turns on it.  Some tables had been set up between the swing and the stage a little ways up the slope, but vendors hadn’t started laying out their goods yet.  The stage arrangements hadn’t been finished yet, but one of the men overseeing the work hailed us over, introduced himself and invited us to have dinner with them the following two evenings.  Well that solved the food problem we might have had.
Junzhai rubber worker
       Returning to Junzhai, we walked out the other end and down the road past the turn-off to Mengding and came to a side road leading uphill.  A wooden gate straddled this road, with a buffalo skull mounted on the overhead crossbeam.  Got to be a Wa village, we guessed, and headed up the hill.  Fortunately, the climb was neither strenuous nor very long.  Unfortunately, the village wasn’t Wa.  It was Han and the villagers were rubber plantation workers. 
       So much for our exploration that day, but the following morning we discovered it was Junzhai’s market day, which ought to attract some ethnic minority visitors, we assumed.  Dai women tended most of the stalls, the younger ones in modern clothes, the older ones in pale blouses and sarongs and big black or white turbans.  Vegetables, grains, fruits, shoes and sandals, cheap clothing, New Year gift packages and calendars were their wares.
       A few De’ang women set up stalls, but we didn’t see any Lahu, Wa or Lisu, or at least not anyone wearing anything ethnic-style beyond the Dai and De’ang women.  The latter we could recognize by their waist-length jackets, with a little embroidery enhancing the back, but none seemed particularly dressed up.  No jewelry and nobody wearing the rattan waistbands I’d witnessed on De’ang women in the Mengding market years ago.  They were very friendly, however, probably meeting foreigners for the first time ever.  Couldn’t speak much Chinese, though.
De'ang vendor
       The market began shutting down early afternoon, so we walked to Dabao next.  The fairground there was all set up, vendors stocking goods on their tables, rows of chairs in place in front of the stage, the swing by the riverside active again.  On the slope above the stage were several food stalls, with small tables and stools at each, serving ordinary meat, vegetable and rice meals, as well as such exotic dishes as deer, dog and wildcat.  More food stalls, run by Dai vendors, lay beyond the rows of seats in front of the stage.  Beverages of various kinds were also on sale here, plus a couple stalls offering games of chance, like trying to loop bottles of beer with a small hoop tossed from ten meters away.
       After a late afternoon stroll along the river we returned to the fairgrounds to see the man who invited us the day before striding down the slope to greet us, his hands outstretched in welcome as he happily escorted us to his table.  We shared an opening round of drinks with him and his other guests while waiting for the cooks to bring the ingredients of our meal.  They seemed quite pleased to have foreigner guests, obviously for the first time and all confessed they had never met or even seen Americans or Germans before. 
       Junzhai’s not exactly on the usual tourist trail in Yunnan and none of our fellow diners had ever been further than Mengding or Gengma.  And on any given day, actually, neither Mengding nor Gengma is likely to have any Americans or Germans in the city.  What they know about either country is whatever they have derived from state-run television.  Other than both countries were rich, they didn’t have a clear impression.  Nor did they attempt to make up for that by asking a lot of questions about our countries.
De'ang woman
De'ang women in Junzhai
       Instead, we talked about things that mattered more to them—rice, rubber, floods—and what brought us to Junzhai.  Never been here, so curious.  Where have you been?  Well, Mengding, Gengma, for starts, as well as De’ang villages in Dehong, where they live in stilted houses.  And a host of other places in the province.  So we could discuss Yunnan and that’s something we both knew about.  Yes, wonderful Yunnan, they assented, with mountains and valleys and ethnic minorities like our own De’ang right here in good old Dabao, which may not seem like much to seasoned Yunnan explorers but was going to be real special tonight and tomorrow night because it is our New Year and we take it seriously.      
The show began with a Tibetan dance.
        So they were very moderate in refilling our liquor cups, lest we get too drunk to enjoy the show.  A little after dark the seats began filling with spectators, fresh from their own banquets at home.  As special guests we were escorted to the middle of the front row.  After a short speech by a district Party official the show commenced.
       Performed by local troupes and district villagers, consisting of several costumed dances interspersed with solo performances, the show was remarkable for having not a single De’ang dance or song, though the host village was De’ang.  The first act was a Tibetan dance, with girls wearing blouses with extra-long sleeves that they waved through the air.  Next came a Uygur number from Xinjiang, the first of three throughout the night, with men in long caftans and women in billowing pants and matching, bare-midriff blouses.
Uygur dance performer
Disco dances were part of the show.
       Other Tibetan dances, with leaping men in off-the-shoulder coats, a Nosuo Yi dance from nw Yunnan, solo singers and instrumentalists and a couple of modern disco numbers comprised the rest of the night’s program.   The show concluded long before midnight, but as no fireworks were scheduled the fairground stalls began closing down shortly after the show’s end.  We returned with the crowd to Junzhai and opened my bottle of 18-year-old Chivas to toast the New Year with a tumbler of whiskey each. 
       To our mild surprise the next morning, the official New Year day, most of the small shops, including the little restaurants, were open for business, even if customers were very few.  We took a leisurely walk upriver to Dabao, arriving just after mid-day.  The hike made us hungry, but the fairground stalls were all open, including the food stalls with the exotic menus.  Not getting this opportunity very often anymore, I couldn’t resist having a meal of grilled deer and wildcat.  The other stalls offered pork and chicken, but we would get that in the evening anyway.
Wa dancers performed the second night.
       That we did, as our hosts graciously plied us with one dish after another of various parts of these animals, punctuated with cups of rice liquor and convivial conversation.  How did we like the show last night?  Wonderful.  It was totally unexpected, meaning, they thought, we didn’t expect a show at all before we came, and meaning, as we thought, we didn’t expect a show in Junzhai to be dominated by dances from Tibet and Xinjiang.   And tonight?  Tonight was going to feature a Wa troupe, not from Junzhai district, but from the mountains near Gengma.
       Once again, after the meal we were seated in the middle of the front row.  Six district Party officials sat on one side of the stage and rose when the young female emcee for the night introduced them to the audience.  Then she introduced their American and German guests and we had to stand and make a slight bow to acknowledge the polite applause around us.  Then the show could begin.
       It was a lot better than the night before.  The various Wa troupes--young female, young male, older female—were better coordinated, more practiced, more exuberant, too.  Aside from occasional solo singers (including the emcee herself) the performances were all Wa, even the instrumental soloists.  The young Wa women, in their traditional, hand-woven, wraparound skirts and blouses, stole the show with their energetic choreography, incorporating bits of the Hair Dance in most numbers.
      About two-thirds of the way through the show the emcee grabbed the microphone in between sets to tell the audience that life in Junzhai district was getting better every year.  There was cleaner water, greater prosperity, etc.  “Do you know why?” she asked the crowd.  Nobody responded.  “Do you know why?” she repeated, looking around at the people.  Still silence.  “Because of the Communist Party!” she shouted.  At that the Party officials seated on the side of the stage stood up and vigorously applauded.
energetic Wa dance troupe
       No one else did.  The emcee looked a little embarrassed but the officials sat back down and the show resumed.  Lethargic audience?  No, for after another sight of Wa girls tossing their long black manes around in another sprightly dance the crowd applauded loud and long.  After the last act the audience rose from their seats and joined the performers in a ring dance, led by musicians on lutes and gourd-pipes.
       The crowd broke up after about a half hour and we joined the walk back to Junzhai.  Back in our lodge we uncorked the whiskey and drank toasts to our holiday good luck--a New Year venue where we paid no surcharge for the hotel, better meals than we had imagined, genuine rural hospitality where strangers become honored guests, an unexpected small town public celebration and the bonus of a stunning performance of wonderful Wa dance troupes.  Happy New Year indeed.
children enjoying the New Year swing

                                                                        * * *

Friday, February 6, 2015

New Gods for Frontier Peoples: Missionaries in NW Yunnan


                                                               by Jim Goodman

Lancang River Valley south of Diqing
       In recent years adventurous travelers in NW Yunnan have been trekking over the Biluo Mountains from the Lancangjiang Valley to Nujiang.  The route connects the village of Cizhong in Diqing County with Baihanluo and Dimaluo in Gongshan County, Nujiang.  It is roughly the same route taken by the French Irrawaddy Expedition in 1895 and early 20th century explorers like F. Kingdon Ward and Joseph Rock.   The unusual aspect of this journey is that whether it begins from CIzhong or from Dimaluo, it runs from one Christian settlement to another, the legacy of intrepid 19th century French Lazarist missionaries.
       The pioneer figure in this story was Père Charles Renou, who arrived in Yunnan in 1852 and headed at once for the northwest.  Intending to proselytize among Tibetans, he first had to learn the local dialect.  Posing as a Chinese merchant, he stopped at Dongzhulin Monastery, southeast of Diqing, befriended the lamas and learned the Tibetan language.  Two years later he crossed the Biluo Mountains and ended up in Bingzhongluo. 
TIbetan wearing a crucifix
       Cognizant of power politics in the area, Renou befriended the richest landowner and secured a fief from him in Bonga Valley, just over the Yunnan border inside Tibet.  His first Catholic converts were the slaves he purchased and emancipated from the landowner.  He augmented this number over the next three years with more purchases of mainly orphans and children sold by heavily indebted Nu families.  After baptizing them he enrolled them in a school, run by an ex-monk, to learn to read and pray in Tibetan. 
       Bonga Valley was practically uninhabited when Renou arrived.  The local Nu people believed it was the abode of malevolent tree spirits and feared angering them by cutting down the spirits’ homes.  Renou instructed them to keep uttering the names of God and the Virgin Mary to repel the spirits.  He was taking a chance, for if anything bad happened after the villagers cleared the woods the mission’s reputation would plummet.  Nothing did, however, so now the villagers reckoned the priests were more powerful than the local land spirits.
Nu Catholic, Shuangla
Pengda church, Gongshan County
       By 1858 the mission staff had expanded to five priests and the Christian community was growing so fast it frightened local authorities, including the landlord who had given Renou the fief and now wanted it back.  He took his case to the abbot of Menkong and then organized a gang that attacked the missionaries’ residence and burned down all their buildings, belongings and the documents concerning the rental of the fief.  The missionaries fled south to Puhua Monastery, where the local abbot gave them sanctuary.
Xiaoweixi Catholic Church, built in 1870
       That same year, though, China signed the Treaty of Tianjin, which gave Western missionaries the right to work in the interior.  It took nearly four years, but Renou won his case at Menkong, got his fief back and from then on paid rent to Menkong Monastery instead.  With this verdict the prestige of the foreign missionaries soared.  Nu villagers, whether animist or Buddhist, chafing under the harsh tax demands of their Tibetan overlords, now saw the missionaries as potential protectors against local authorities.  They also found the missionaries, many of whom had prior medical training, far more efficient dealing with illness than their own shamans.  They began converting en masse.
       By 1863 the mission seemed to be on a firm trajectory for future success.  Renou handed over management of it to his staff and trekked over the mountains to the Lancang River valley, the Upper Mekong.  Setting up in Cikou village, a mostly Tibetan settlement south of Diqing, after his long and patient efforts, in 1867 the villagers replaced their Buddhist monastery with a Catholic church.  Three years later, having been joined by other Lazarist missionaries, who began working further downriver, a second Catholic church went up in the Naxi village of Xiaoweixi.
       Both the Cikou church and the one in Xiaoweixi were built in classical Chinese style and resembled modest, Mayahana Buddhist, walled temple compounds.  The Xiaoweixi church is still the original building, two stories high, tiled roofs, with an added, triangular roof on top, with upturned corners and a cross at the apex.  A rather simple altar stands inside at the other end of the entrance and the flanking walls feature posters of the Stations of the Cross.
Baihanluo Catholic Church
       Back in Bonga Valley, however, mission affairs suddenly took a turn for the worst.  Nu converts assumed they no longer had to pay taxes and land rent to the Tibetan overlords.  Ecclesiastical authorities in Menkong forbade conversions, ordered Christians to renounce the new faith and forced villagers to pay tax and debt bills.  Those who refused were killed or ran away further south.  Raiding parties burnt everything in Bonga Valley. 
       Because of the ongoing Muslim Revolt in Yunnan, the French Legation in Kunming could not get the government to do anything and advised the Nujiang priests to abandon their efforts north of the Yunnan border and lay low for a while.  In the Lancang River Valley, however, the Lazarist missionaries expanded their activities north and established churches in Diqing, Yanjing, Batang and Kangding.  With the end of the Muslim Revolt in 1873, French priests were able to join their compatriots in the new missions.
       However loyal their flocks might be, beyond the parishes the priests faced the very secular dangers of banditry and ethnic nationalism.  Unknown assailants murdered Yanjing’s Père Brueux in 1881.  Six years later an armed Tibetan uprising provoked the burning of the churches in Diqing, Yanjing and Batang and the desecration of Brueux’s grave.  The missions in Nujiang were unmolested at this time and in 1882 priests began proselytizing in Baihanluo, in the Biluo Mountains south of Bingzhongluo.
Dimaluo on a Sunday morning
       In 1904 French priests erected a church in Baihanluo, in a style that resembled a Tibetan dzong, the kind of building used by nobles and high-ranking lamas.  Converts saw it as a Catholic dzong, with the implications of an authority greater than that of local officials.  Though they may not have seen its establishment as a political challenge, the current group of French missionaries was an entirely different set than their predecessors in Bonga Valley.  So were the lamas of Puhua in Bingzhongluo.  The friendly relations between the two that had marked Renou’s time had turned hostile. 
       That same year witnessed the Younghusband Expedition, when British military units from India marched into Tibet and occupied Lhasa in August, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee to Mongolia.  Poorly armed Tibetans suffered heavy casualties opposing them.  After imposing a trade treaty on Lhasa, the British returned to India and the Dalai Lama returned.  But resentment over the Expedition, especially in the eastern, Kamba-inhabited part of Tibet, combined with fury over the foreigners’ burgeoning influence on people who were so recently subservient to Kamba lords and lamas, burst into violence. 
CIzhong Catholic Church
       Aroused by lamas in Diqing and further north, armed Tibetan gangs attacked the Christian communities, killed Cikou’s two priests and burned down its church, as well as the rebuilt churches in Diqing, Yanjing and Batang.  Egged on by lamas in Menkong, Puhua monks joined the rebellion and organized an attack that destroyed the Baihanluo church.  Kamba warriors also attacked Chinese posts up and down the Lancangjiang Valley, prompting the Qing government to dispatch troops to restore law and order.  The government campaign took two years to quell the rebellion.  Control of Diqing changed hands twice, resulting in mass revenge killings by both sides.  In Nujiang Qing forces crossed the mountains to Baihanluo, marched on Bingzhongluo and burnt down the Puhua Monastery.  The revolt in Nujiang subsided quickly, but the government stationed a garrison in Baihanluo to watch over the peace.
Pengdang Catholic Church interior
       Having survived the mayhem, the missionaries rebuilt their church, but in a different style, less resembling a dzong.  The new wooden building was narrower, with folding screened shutters in front, painted archway and belfry façade, a single two-story tower over the entrance, with upturned roof corners and a white cross mounted on top.  Recently renovated with freshly painted exterior frescoes, it still stands there today.  In the valley below, the church at the mixed Tibetan-Nu-Lisu village of Dimaluo, built several years later, features the same style of construction.
       Over the next couple of decades, as more French missionaries augmented the existing band of priests, the growing Christian Nu community built churches at Qiunatong, Pengda, Pengdang, Shuangla and Cikai.  These were more in a kind of Sino-European style, with square bell-towers, columned fronts and lavishly painted interiors.  The former animosity that characterized Nu-Tibetan relations faded away and converted Catholic villages like Qiunatong and Dimaluo had both Tibetan and Nu residents.
Tibetans leaving Cizhoing church on Sunday
       A few years after the suppression of the Kamba revolt in the Lancangjiang Valley, French missionaries returned to Cikou and called on their congregation to construct a new church, this time in stone, in the village of Cizhong, a few kilometers upriver. The new building looked more like a rural French church, except for its Chinese-style belfry tower.  Over 20 meters tall, the tower is twice as high as the nave, while both feature narrow, European-style, arched windows on their sides.  Engraved on the arch above the church entrance is a New Testament Latin quotation, calling upon the suffering laborers in the world to seek refuge in the Lord.
       Within the nave, arched columns left and right of the entrance divide the interior into three sections.  At the end of the columns the main altar honors Jesus and smaller ones left and right are dedicated to the Madonna and Child and St. Joseph.  The walls display illustrations of the Way of the Cross and the spaces above them, as well as the ceiling, feature Tibetan-style paintings of pheasants, clouds, lotuses, yin-yang symbols and very Oriental dragons.  Construction concluded in 1921 and the government garrisoned thirty soldiers there to protect it from marauders.
       In the following years, while Civil War raged across most of China, the mission continued its life undisturbed.  Besides religious and architectural concepts, French priests also introduced the very European practice of grape cultivation and wine production, both in Cizhong and downriver in Xiaoweixi.   They also accumulated a large library of books in both French and Chinese.
reading prayers outside the Dimaluo church
       With the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, missionaries anywhere in Yunnan were forced to evacuate.  Protestant missionaries in Nujiang took some of their converts with them when they fled into Burma, but the Catholics tended to remain when their priests departed.  The new government proved to be less iconoclastic out on this far frontier than was expected, even during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution, and the small Christian communities carried on as best they could without their priests and ministers.
       The inauguration of the Reform Era and the opening of China to the outside world, including tourists, did not mean the return of the foreign missionaries to Cizhong and Nujiang.  Their Sunday services continued without their presence, as they had for decades.  Rather than a Mass, though, these consisted of listening to spoken or recorded sermons and collective praying and singing. 
hymnal salvaged from the Cikou fire
       At Cizhong for example, the only ecclesiastical official was a rector, who was not permitted to hold Mass.  So the congregation assembled inside, men on one side, women and children on the other, and sang hymns, using partially burnt manuscripts, salvaged from the Cikou fire, like the Book of Psalms, De Profundis and Cantique au Sacré Coeur, translated into Tibetan.  The congregation alternately sang and chanted the verses, sometimes sounding like a row of monks at prayer time, sometimes like a medieval European choir.
       The place has also recently attracted a greater number of tourists.  It’s certainly an attractive village, at the base of high mountains beside the roaring Lancang River.  About 75% of its residents are Tibetan, 20% Naxi and 5% Han.  Naxi architecture, rather than Tibetan, dominates the house designs.  One of its characteristics is to suspend a carved fish beneath the apex of the roof at each end, which symbolized the element of water as a protective device against the element of fire, as in a lightning bolt striking the house.  Christian house owners have replaced this with a carving picturing a dove, the Catholic symbol of the Holy Spirit, their own protector.
dove on a  Christian house in Cizhong
       Guesthouses may have arisen, and trekking parties are stopping here on their way to and from Dimaluo, but this new attention is not likely to affect the traditional influence of Christianity on Cizhong’s mostly Christian population.  They have a resident priest now, who arrived from Inner Mongolia a couple years ago, to hold Mass and make the exercise of their religion more authentic.  They hold fond memories of the missionaries, influencing their hospitable receptions of Western visitors.  And they still cultivate grapes and make wine, a secular legacy of the French priests, and something they can share with their Western guests.
riverside Nu CatholicChurch at Pengdang
                                                                      * * *                                                     
                      for more on DIqing's TIbetans, see my e-book Living in Shangrila