Beyond Shangrila: the Mountains of Deqin

    

                              by Jim Goodman

 

       Mountains in Yunnan rise higher the further northwest you go in the province.  They top more than 4000 meters in Dali Prefecture and over 5500 meters near Lijiang.  There are other 4000+ peaks in Ninglang County and upper Nujiang, but the biggest of them all lie in Deqin Autonomous Tibetan Prefecture, for most of its territory is geographically the southeastern tip of the Tibetan Plateau.  Here the mountains stand over 6000 meters.

       The most accessible and popular part of the prefecture is Shangrila County.  It used to be called Zhongdian until 2001 when, to promote its tourist potential, the government claimed it was the site of the Shangrila of James Hilton’s famous novel Lost Horizon and so officially changed its name.  With its broad plain, traditional Tibetan houses, lovely monasteries at Songzhanlin and other places and friendly people, it certainly appeals as an idyllic escape from the commotion of wherever the tourists came from.

       The Shangrila hype notwithstanding, the village of the novel had a very different setting, in a valley with a triangular-peaked snow mountain towering over one end.  Shangrila lies at about 3100 meters and from various points in the county, especially in winter, one can see some snow around the mountains beyond the plain.  But they are not very high and to see anything resembling the mountain described in Lost Horizon one has to go further on to Deqin, the next county north.

       Not long after leaving Shangrila city, after passing Napahai Lake, the landscape abruptly changes.  From here on the topography is all mountainous, with no more broad expanse of relatively flat land.  The road runs along the higher parts of the mountain slopes that, in the early 90s during my visits, were largely denuded of trees, with stray hamlets clinging to the hillsides. Then it descends to cross the Jinshajiang, the River of Golden Sand that is the moniker for the Upper Yangzi, and soon pulls into Benzilan, the first major town in Deqin County.

       There were two Benzilans then.  In the lower one, the original Tibetan settlement, the houses lined a ridge overlooking a small plateau that served as farmland and pastures.  The upper one was the commercial center along the main road, full of shops, hotels and restaurants catering to travelers on the Shangrila-Deqin route, most of whom stop here for lunch.

       From Benzilan it’s up into the mountains again, where the slopes are high and barren again, although not necessarily due to deforestation.  Many gradients are so steep they never supported forests anyway. But streams run down them and there, on modest gradients, Tibetans built their settlements that are patches of green in the otherwise dusty brown landscape.   Around 15 km from Benzilan a turn-off takes one a short distance to a dramatic view of a bend in the Jinshajiang,  The river makes a loop 2/3 the way around a conical hill  protruding from the vertical cliffs on the eastern bank.

       Back to the road, the next stop north is the monastery of Dongzhulin, 103 km north   of Shangrila, at an altitude of 3000 meters.  The original monastery lay further away from the road and was built in 1667 during the reign of the Kang Xi Emperor, who himself was interested in Tibetan Buddhism.  In the 19^th century Dongzhulin housed over 900 monks and 12 Living Buddhas (reincarnations of famous lamas).  It was here that the French missionary Père  Renou disguised himself as a trader and stayed to learn about Buddhism and to speak the local dialect in order to, after he left the monastery, proselytize Christianity among Deqin’s Tibetans.

       Dongzhulin became associated with the Tibetan Revolt in 1958, allegedly storing arms for the rebels, and in retaliation government forces leveled the monastery.  In 1985 it was rebuilt in its current location, a splendid traditional-style building, four stories high and supported by 82 thick wooden pillars.  The ground floor houses large images of various deities like Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gulugpa (Yellow Hat) monastic order, Avalokitesvar, Manjusri and others.  Portraits of celestial beings, demons, benevolent and wrathful deities fill the walls.  The 3^rd floor features huge images of the Maitreya Buddha, seven meters high, and Sakyamuni, ten meters high.  The other floors are for reciting sutras and performing private rituals. 

       In the early 90s Dongzhulin had about 300 monks and one Living Buddha.  There was also a Buddhist nunnery attached to it.  Nuns follow the same rules as monks, shave their heads, wear robes, recite sutras, etc, but have the option of staying in the nunnery or living at home.  Most stay in the nunnery across the road in Shusong. 

        From here it’s another 80 km or so to the county capital and halfway there the road runs through a forest and over a pass at 4000 meters.  The peak of Baimashan looms to the left of the road.  Though only 4292 meters high, it is perpetually covered in snow.  The pastures on the edge of the forest are prime yak grazing areas in the summer months.  The whole area is a protected nature preserve, home to foxes, deer, leopards and bears.  The poplar trees and parts of the pine groves turn yellow in autumn and local species of the maple tree turn red.

       From the pass the city is another 35 km through stony hills with thin patches of forest and scarcely any human habitation until just before the city.  Formerly called Atuntse, and known to local Tibetans as Jui, Deqin is about half the size of Shangrila and at around 3400 meters a slightly higher altitude.  It is sited on slopes that funnel precipitation down to a stream at the lower end of town that eventually empties into the Lancangjiang (Upper Mekong).  Most of the buildings then were modern concrete structures, with a quasi-Tibetan style in the upper end neighborhood and no style at all elsewhere.

       The only remaining wooden buildings were around the central market, which was about half the size of Shangrila’s but less ethnically diverse, for nearly all the city’s residents are Tibetan.  Several shops here and on the main street specialized in Tibetan clothing, crafts and jewelry.  City residents and villagers come here to sell off heirlooms, furs and herbs and purchase Tibetan belts, scarves, carpets, woolen cloaks, brocaded silk, fur hats and ornaments of coral, turquoise and silver.

       Most Deqin women, though, didn’t seem to be as fond of wearing traditional clothing as in Shangrila County and when they did the outfit resembled  more the style of Lhasa, with an ankle-length dress and a long striped apron in front, rather than the ensemble popular in Shangrila County.  On the whole, they were not as outgoing or engaging as their counterparts in Shangrila/Zhongdian, but invariably polite and cordial.

       Deqin has a mosque, not for Hui but for Tibetan Muslims who converted to Islam when part of Hui-run caravans in the past.  The population is overwhelmingly Buddhist, but the devout had to journey to villages beyond the city, as Deqin had no big monastery of its own anymore.  During the Qing Dynasty, especially in its last decades, lamas from high-ranking Tibetan families ruled Deqin as their private fief.  Around the end of the 19^th century two new developments began to challenge their practical autonomy.  Under pressure from France, the Qing government allowed French missionaries to proselytize in Tibetan areas.  At the same time the government inaugurated a land reform policy in these same areas.

       Both of these threatened the lamas’ authority.  Land reform would target their own family holdings and conversion to Catholicism would undermine their religious leadership.  In 1904, the British colonial Government of India authorized the Younghusband Expedition, a military invasion of Tibet ostensibly designed to prevent the Russians from taking it.  London disapproved of the move and the following year Younghusband’s forces withdrew.

       Among the Tibetans the incident provoked outright rebellion against anything and anybody foreign.  In 1905 a widespread uprising began at Batang in southwest Sichuan, where the lamas instigated attacks on the foreign missionaries, all their converts and Chinese government officers.  Victims suffered grisly deaths, especially the priests, and the rebellion spread to Litang and Kangding in Sichuan and down into Yunnan in Atuntse/Deqin.  Massacres of priests and their followers took place in Deqin and Cikou, the French mission in the Lancangjiang valley south of Deqin.  Marauders mounted the severed heads of the priests on the Dechenling Monastery gate in Deqin.

       Chinese government forces halted the rebels’ advance on Xiaowieixi, the next Christian settlement south of Cikou.  They then marched on Deqin, isolated and surrounded the lamas in Dechenling and finally slaughtered everybody inside and burnt the building to the ground.  Chinese officials took charge of the administration, but eventually married local women and stayed on after their service was completed.  Surviving Christians rebuilt their demolished church in Cizhong, a little north of Cikou, this time in a French village style.

       The main reason travelers go to Deqin is not for the city’s few attractions, but for the view of the nearby snow mountains. On a clear day this is truly magnificent.  Leaving Deqin the road heads towards the Lancanjiang and after climbing out of the city’s valley and into the countryside, doming to Dong village and the modest Feilai Temple, surrounded by grain fields.  Inside the main hall is a large statue of the mountains’ guardian deity.  In the annex, when I visited, the carcasses of freshly killed goats hung from the rafters.  As the monks were presumably vegetarian it wasn’t their food.  Some Bon, pre-Buddhist sacrifice? I wondered, but never did find out.

      Lovely  Taizishan Snow Mountain, 6054 meters altitude, is visible from the approach to Dong.  A little further on, at a small break in the forest, is the most celebrated viewpoint.  Looking west one can clearly see Meili Snow Mountain, at 6740 meters altitude the highest in the province.  From its peak a long wide glacier runs down in front.  This is the most accessible glacier in Yunnan and in later years tour companies promoted one-day hikes to it and back or overnight camping at the glacier’s foot.  Adventurous travelers could also go on extended treks in the nature preserve around the mountain.

       On my visit the viewpoint also featured several chortens and strings of prayer flags, adding a religious aspect to the scene.  After a few years the government built a high wall between the road and the viewpoint with a ticket booth in front of its only door.  The entry fee was 150 yuan.  On my visit it was free.

       The road continues along the Lancangjiang Valley all the way to the Tibetan border, passing both forested and barren areas and through tunnels chiseled out of the cliffs.  It is a good example of Yunnan’s road engineering skills, though occasionally subject to landslides, which are always quickly restored.  Herder take their yaks along the same road and wherever fatal accidents have occurred, people have erected chortens on mounds of stone slabs inscribed with Tibetan prayers.

       About 30 km north of Deqin the road swerves away from the valley to cross the Adong River.  Upstream stands a major hydroelectric plant and a switch pulled here daily around midnight plunged Deqin and vicinity into darkness.  Further up, 64 km from Deqin, lies Foshan, a nondescript town from where the Lancang River is the provincial boundary between Yunnan and Tibet.  Just past Foshan is the rather prosperous village of Nagu, famous for the ancient stone coffins found nearby, but unfortunately they had been removed to a museum by the time of my visit.  Another 40 km is the Tibetan border, with an old Naxi settlement on the way, a relic of the early Qing Dynasty when Naxi troops from Lijiang guarded the border.

       While the mountains south of Taizishan are not as high or dramatic, the scenery all the way to Cizhong is quite impressive.  A road from the south end of Deqin winds along narrow gorges cut by the Lancangjiang’s tributary streams, offering sporadic glimpses of the snow peaks, passes through three tunnels and then makes eight distinct bends on the descent to the riverside town of Yunling.

       From Yunling the road runs along the Lancang River, with excellent views across to isolated villages, monasteries perched atop ravines, deep gorges cut by streams, splendid tall, thin waterfalls spillling over sheer cliffs, and occasional thick forests that burst into a variety of colors in autumn.  Around Yanmen, 30 km south of Yunling, Nagu-like stone coffins have also been found, including remnants of ancient pottery and bronze artifacts.

       A little downriver on the opposite bank lies the county’s last major attraction—the Catholic Church at Cizhong.  Tibetans comprise 3/4 of the population, with Naxi at 20% and Han 5%.  The altitude is sufficiently lower here so that Cizhong farms can grow rice instead of barley.  Viniculture, introduced by the French missionaries, is also prominent and Cizhong has a reputation for its wine.  Tibetan Christianity never revived in Deqin, but here in Cizhong, in spite of 1905, it survived.  Its congregation is mostly the older generation, but its very existence puts Cizhong on the list of what-to-see for any traveler seriously exploring Deqin County.

    

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For more on Deqin and the Tibetans, see my r-book Living in Shangrila

 

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 20^th 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 19^th 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

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                      for more on DIqing's TIbetans, see my e-book Living in Shangrila