by Jim Goodman
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| dawn over Dayan, Lijiang's old city |
After a long
and arduous journey overland starting from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, up
through northeast Burma, into Xishuangbanna and then through Simao Prefecture
to Dali and further north, Joseph F. Rock arrived in Lijiang in spring of 1922. As a professional botanist who had made a
solid reputation for himself working in Hawaii, Rock had an assignment from the
U.S. Agriculture Department to collect specimens of a blight-resistant chestnut
tree, to help alleviate a blight crisis with the tree in the American species. He was also to collect seeds of any other
previously unknown ornamental or useful plant, native birds and small
mammals. For Rock, the job gave him a
chance to go to China, a long cherished dream.
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| typical red wooden Dayan houses |
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| one of the canals running through Dayan |
Lijiang lay on
a high-altitude plain (2400 meters) dominated at the north end by Jade Dragon
Snow Mountain (5596 meters), its heavily wooded slopes filled with thousands of
different plant and flower species. It
was certainly an attractive place to work.
But although he frequently visited Dayan, the old town of Lijiang, for
picking up supplies and taking photographs, he took up residence in Nguluko, a
village close to the mountain and the last settlement north of Dayan.
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| Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the Dry Plain above Lijiang |
Fascinated by
China since his teenage yehen he was still in Austria, (he had already
learned to read the language) Rock was there at last, in the peak of health in
his late 30s. It wasn’t a very Chinese part
of China, though, for most inhabitants were Naxi, a separate minority with
their own distinct traditions.
Eventually, when he completed his botanical assignment, he got more
involved in recording and studying Naxi customs, culture, history and
especially their unique dongba tradition.
The dongbas
were a kind of shaman, versed in myriad ceremonies minor and major, who read
their prayers with the use of books with a mostly pictographic script, unique
in Yunnan. Over time, Rock with his
meticulous devotion to detail, collected the books, learned to read them and
translated many. He also wrote a long
and detailed two-volume history of Lijiang.
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| Dayan waterway |
Rock enjoyed
both his work and that he was doing it alone, on his own terms. He got along fine with his Naxi neighbors, learned
their language, too, employing many of them, but did not develop; anything like
friendship with them. He taught them how
to collect, preserve and press plants, taxidermy on wildlife specimens, how to
cook Western-style food for him, assist his photography sessions and photo
processing, but never hung out in a tavern for a drink with them or otherwise
be socially engaged. He was kind to
them, looked after their health and family matters, but always viewed them
paternally, likening the villagers to children, as he wrote in his
diary, unsophisticated and innocent.
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| old town street |
Lijiang was not
the only place with chestnut trees and when Rock felt his work crew was trained
enough he took them on botanical caravans to Tengchong, Dehong and northern
Burma. Aside from his botanical work,
the journey whetted Rock’s appetite for exploration. When his work for the Department of Agriculture
concluded Rock got jobs from National Geographic for organizing expeditions
of discovery to remote parts of western China.
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| Rock's photo of a Dayan market day |
Beyond Lijiang
he traveled up to Deqing through Shangrila County and the forests of the Baima
Mountains. From Deqing he turned south
through the Lancangjiang canyon to the Christian settlement of Cizhong. From there he ascended the Biluo Mountains,
crossed the crest of the range and descended to Dimaluo in Gongshan County. Mountains still dominated the landscape, peaks
of the parallel Gaoligongshan Range across the Nu River already visible.
It was
certainly a photogenic route and Rock stopped often to take dramatic
photos. He chose his angles carefully
and produced wonderful shots of scenery, hilltop churches, remote temples and
local lifestyles, like caravan ponies being sent across the swirling rapids of
the Nu River on rope-bridges.
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| rural road in autumn |
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| village north of Dayan |
Technically
speaking, it was quite a chore not only to set up and take the photographs, but
also to process and print them in the field.
The camera was big and bulky, required a sturdy tripod and used large
plates with a very low film speed, and thus long exposures.
This was fine for still-life landscape shots,
but for portraits Rock had to ask his subject to remain absolutely still for
half a minute or more to avoid any possibility of blur.
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| Tibetan village, Deqing County |
On these
expeditions Rock brought a portable darkroom tent where he developed the
negatives and later made prints.
He
dried them by pinning them to lines strung across the shadier parts of his
campground.
If the expedition were to be
a long one, he sometimes dispatched a couple of his workers to take the plates
and prints back to Lijiang.
Never in a
hurry, fascinated by everything exotic he encountered, he also traveled in
grand style, intentionally designed to impress folks along the way. Besides the contingent of workers and aides,
the caravans included armed guards.
These were turbulent times in southwest China, with warlord armies and
local armed gangs on the loose. He
brought a portable rubber bathtub so he could stay clean and a fully outfitted
kitchen for his cook to prepare his Western food. His meals were served on a proper dining
table with Western chairs and Rock always dressed for dinner, even though he
rarely dined with a guest, and listened to Western operas and symphonies on his
portable phonograph.
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| Baimashan forest, Deqing County |
He was
passionate about detailing everything he witnessed, eager to learn the precise
meanings and intentions of the rituals, for example.
At times he included so much detailed
esoteric information that his editors felt that they had to take much of it
out.
Rock fumed, but in the end worked
out some sort of
modus vivendi with
National Geographic.
They sponsored more expeditions to even
further remote places in Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai, where he discovered new
unknown mountains and recorded elaborate Tibetan rituals.
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| Meiile Snow Mountain group, highest in Yunnan |
All that
suddenly came to an end with the Wall Street crash at the end of 1929 and the
beginning of the Depression.
National
Geographic could no longer financially support expeditions like
Rock’s.
The explorer lost his job.
Rock returned
to his Nguluko home and absorbed himself even more in Naxi history, traditions
and religion. In his view the village dongba
tradition, unique to Naxi culture, was in danger of extinction. Rock was already familiar with it and had
written one National Geographic article about it early in his
career. Now he decided to record and
preserve for posterity everything he could learn about this tradition, from the
purpose and meaning of every ritual detail to the deciphering of the
manuscripts.
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| Rock's portrait of a Naxi woamn |
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| Rock's portrait of a dongba in action |
He was on the
alert for any kind of
dongba rite anywhere in the vicinity and was there
with his camera and notebooks.
Some were
simple, involving a single
dongba and lasting less than a day.
Others, like special funerals, required a
group of them and a series of rites, maybe even with dances, that carried on
for several days and nights.
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| Lion Mountain rising above Lug Lake |
In his
eagerness to get everything exactly right he won the confidence of his
informants.
Once, very early in his
studies, the performing
dongbas asked him not to photograph the rites so
as not to upset the attendant spirits.
Rock put away his camera and just took notes.
When it was over, and they agreed that the
spirits were no longer around, he persuaded them to re-enact the rites for his
camera.
Not many
Westerners were ever in Lijiang in the 1930s, other than a few temporary
travelers. Dayan had two Christian
missionaries and a church, but they made no converts the entire time they were
there and Rock usually avoided them.
Peter Goullart, a White Russian emigrant, was the only other Western
resident. He had a government job
forming co-operatives and personally a naturally gregarious personality who
enjoyed socializing with the locals in the Dayan wine shops. Rock, of course, was the opposite, quite
content at being a loner with his own worthy mission.
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| Rock's retreat at Lugu Lake |
Rock viewed
Dayan as a place already compromised culturally by Chinese Han influence. He
fretted the same would happen to Naxi culture in the villages, with the demise
of the
dongba tradition.
He went
to Dayan for supplies or research or photography, but for social calls only
occasionally when he felt unbearably lonely and craved some time with fellow
Westerns.
The encounter might just be
for a dinner or an overnight stay and then we was back to his research
work.
He got along with Goullart, but didn’t
cultivate a friendship with him.
Rock
also knew Edgar Snow, the American reporter covering the Chinese Revolution,
and traveled through central Yunnan with him.
Snow was a bit of a libertine compared to Rock, and his willingness to
indulge in some of China’s illicit pleasures shocked the rather sanctimonious
Joseph Rock.
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| A Yongshan and his family |
With his
dongba
informants Rock kept a strictly professional researcher relationship.
In all his time in northwest Yunnan the only
true friend he made was A Yongshan, the
tusi (local magistrate) of
Yongning, who lived on Nyorophu Island in Lugu Lake, northeast of Lijiang and
the most beautiful body of water in Yunnan.
As the
tusi’s guest Rock stayed in the island palace in an
environment of peace and natural wonders, perfect for working on his
manuscripts and enhanced afterwards by his long and interesting conversations
with his host.
The majority of
Yongning District’s inhabitants are Mosuo, a branch of the Naxi minority
nationality. The primary difference
between them is that the Mosuo are still mostly matrilineal, with property
owned by the women and passed on to the daughters. Mongol armies conquered the area in the 13th
century and Kubilai Khan left some of his officers behind to govern the
territory. These men married Mosuo
women, but within their clan retained the Mongol patrilineal inheritance
system. This clan, the A, was the
smallest of the five Mosuo clans, so that matrilineality still characterized
nearly 90% of the Mosuo.
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| self-portrait in native garb |
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| from the northern shore-- Nyoropho (top) |
With his innate
aristocratic, mandarin prejudices, Rock considered the Mosuo system
primitive.
The Mosuo had no marriage
ceremony to formalize sexual relationships, employing the ‘walking marriage’
custom wherein the male only comes to the female at night, returns to his own
mother’s house in the morning, and all children belong to the mother’s side.
This left the woman free to change partners to
try to get pregnant, since it didn’t matter who the father was.
Rock simply assumed that meant they were
naturally promiscuous.
Rock didn’t go
to Lugu Lake to research the Mosuo, anyway, but as a place to relax and put his
Naxi research findings in order. From
Nyoropho he had a direct view across the 2700 meters-high lake to Lion
Mountain, rising to over 4000 meters on the northwest shore. He rarely left the island on his sojourns
there and relished the relationship he had with A Yongshan, his best friend in
China. Unfortunately, this friend died
in the summer of 1933 and Rock never found an equivalent replacement.
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| witness to a dongba rite |
Rock took
solace in his work, for he was convinced of its importance.
Other scholars were specializing in Tibetan
studies but he himself was the only one working with the Naxi tradition.
Besides, he didn’t particularly like
Tibetans; interesting rituals but as a people dirty and uncouth.
He didn’t like the Yi in the mountains, either,
partly for the same reasons but also for their slave system.
He was never inclined to visit them, but
given Rock’s mandarin pretensions, one wonders what might have happened had he
visited a village and been hosted in grand style by a Black Yi aristocrat.
Maybe he would have learned about the
bimaw,
the Yi
dongba equivalent, and the Yi books with a separate alphabet,
covering Yi myth and history, legends, prayers, riddles and pharmacopoeia.
A change of opinion, then?
Rock quite
liked Naxi people, however, and maintained friendly relationships with his
staff and his neighbors. The aim he had
set for himself, to record the entire history of the Naxi nationality,
translate the dongba manuscripts, record and explain all the traditional
rituals, was enormous. And in view of
the cultural threat coming from modernization and assimilation, Rock was in a
race against time. He devoted as much
time and energy to his projects as humanly possible, until the new
post-Revolution government in August 1949, forced Rock to pack up his boxes of
research and leave China. He was never
allowed back.
Just as Rock
had foreseen, changes soon overtook the old ways. The dongba tradition was all but
forcibly wiped out, surviving only in remote villages. Decades later, with the launch of the Reform
Era, minority culture was no longer disparaged.
It didn’t mean every ancient practice revived, but it did enhance pride
and interest in ethnic culture and history.
For the Naxi, with a very unique history and culture, the prime source
of information is the work of Joseph F. Rock, the prescient preserver of their
ancient traditions, a man who worked passionately to achieve just this kind of
legacy.
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| Dayan 45 years after Rock's departure |
* * *
. for more on Joseph
Rock, Lijiang and the Naxi, see my e-book Children of the Jade Dragon
