The Allures of Tengchong

 

                                                            by Jim Goodman                            

 

       From ancient times until the advent of modern highways and railroads, the main means of long-distance trade and international commerce by land was the caravan.  Consisting of sometimes hundreds of animals, carrying both trade goods and their own provisions for the lengthy, arduous journey, caravans began connecting China economically with places as far away as Europe from the early Han Dynasty.  Because the main item exported from China was silk, the caravan routes became known as the Silk Road.  The most famous route ran from northwest China all the way to Europe.  Another, less traveled but not as long or grueling, was the Southwest Silk Road, running from Sichuan through Yunnan and on to Burma and India.

       Han Dynasty authority in Yunnan was intermittent and under the Tang and Song Dynasties, Yunnan was an independent state; Nanzhao during the Tang and the Kingdom of Dali during the Song.  Neither of these states exerted much control of their southwestern territories, relying on autonomous local rulers to keep the peace.  When the Mongols conquered Yunnan they set up an administrative center in Tengchong, but the area was still lightly populated and relatively lawless until the Ming Dynasty drove the Mongols out in the late 14^th century.  With Yunnan now part of China, the Ming encouraged Chinese settlement in the province. 

       Traffic on the Southwest Silk Road revived and as Tengchong was the last major stop inside China before crossing into Burma, immigrants arrived in droves and established businesses that all thrived.  The city’s setting was part of the attraction.  At an elevation of 1640 meters, with a mild climate year-round, it sits on a broad plain with mountains standing in a horseshoe shape around it, the opening to the south.  The land produced grain, sugarcane, tea leaves and oil crops.  Around 400 years ago tobacco cultivation began, generally on the slopes of the volcanoes north of the city.  A very high-quality tobacco, nowadays it is usually blended with other Yunnan tobaccos.

      Tengchong was also a transit point for silk and other items from Sichuan and Yunnan.  The city’s main import was Burmese jade, which the city’s craftsmen carved and prepared for export all over China.  The jade business is still part of the city, augmented in recent years by Burmese amber.  The city holds a Jade and Amber Bazaar every dive days, attracting merchants from both China and Myanmar.

       As their businesses prospered, some merchants left home to expand their business abroad.  This was particularly true in Heshun, 10 km south, a town famous for its high percentage of residents who became Overseas Chinese.  Retaining connections with the homeland, they endowed their families, and the town itself, with funds for nice houses, as well as parks, pavilions and even a library.  With architecture classical but influenced by foreign styles, obvious prosperity, quiet atmosphere, lack of slums pleasant parks, views and pavilions, Heshun is a popular excursion out of Tengchong. 

       Heshun translates as Peace and Harmony, an appropriate name for a town that exemplifies those concepts in its layout and atmosphere.  It lies on a knoll above a clear shallow stream, holding about 1300 houses and 7000 residents.  Nearly every family has at least one relative who is an Overseas Chinese. In fact, the number of Heshun-born Overseas Chinese is nearly twice that of the town’s current residents. Over the centuries it has earned a reputation for producing talented men—scholars and educators, writers and artists, philosophers and rich merchants. 

       A road winds around the base of the knoll and branching lanes lead to the houses, pavilions and ponds.  A classical gateway marks the entrance to each neighborhood.  The houses are usually whitewashed, with sloping tiled roofs and upturned corners.  All of them look like the domiciles of fairly wealthy families.  A few exhibit a mixed architectural influence, with standard Chinese style roofs, the corners turned up higher than usual, and very Western-like doors, balconies and windows.

       The only non-Chinese style building in town is the large library on the campus of Yiqun Middle School.  Set up in 1924, sponsored by Heshun’s native Overseas Chinese, it contains over 60,000 volumes, including some rare ancient texts.  The town’s other public buildings all reflect the traditional style, embellished with carved beams, painted rafters and vertical boards of poem couplets, inscribed by famous calligraphers.

        Some of these structures stand in the parks and rest-stops, of which there are several, often beside ponds.  The town has plenty of places for strollers to take a break and enjoy the serenity and scenery.  The ponds may be active at any time, with children playing or women washing clothes, using stone anvils mounted at the edge of the pool.  The women do their laundry under roofed shelters built long ago as a gift by newlywed husbands before they set off on their business travels.  Yuanlongtan, about 1.5 km behind Heshun, has the most limpid water and lies in front of the town’s largest temple compound, sprawling up the wooded hill behind it.

       Back in Tengchong it is difficult to find traditional architecture, as the existing such neighborhoods scattered between concrete high-rises are slowly but inevitably disappearing.  The city does boast one outstanding natural attraction not far from the center—Dieshuihe, a waterfall that plunges 40 meters over a sheer cliff.  Inscribed in stylized calligraphy on the side of the cliff are four characters that describe the waterfall as “a sword that sweeps away the dense miasma.”

       The words take on a poignant irony when one knows that in 1879 Qing Dynasty troops, fearing a revival of the Muslim Rebellion, massacred hundreds of Tengchong Muslims by hurling them over the falls.  The incident, not mentioned on any signpost in the vicinity, makes Dieshuihe a kind of historical attraction.  Another is the city’s former British Consulate, a large, forlorn-looking building built from 1921-31 and abandoned when Japanese troops invaded Tengchong in 1942.

       British involvement in Tengchong began with an expedition led by Augustus Raymond Margary to explore trade routes from Shanghai through China and into India.   While he was traveling a little north of Tengchong, in February, 1875 bandits waylaid his party and killed him and his ten Chinese workers.  Great Britain then demanded compensation from the Qing government, while local authorities countered that the British had not informed them in advance of Margary’s trip.  Well aware of the Qing Dynasty’s decline and weakness, the British   forced one of its ‘Unequal Treaties’ on China, this one called the Chefoo Convention.

       Under its terms the Qing government agreed to pay compensation to the victims’ families, arrest and try the killers, grant British citizens the right of extra-territoriality and make revisions in its trade policy favorable to Britain.  Ten years later Britain took control of northern Burma and Tengchong eventually became a trading post for goods coming out of British India. Prosperity returned to Tengchong and prevailed until the Japanese occupation of Burma.

       After the Japanese War came the Chinese Civil War, the establishment of a Communist system, the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, which reached into even remote cities like Tengchong, and finally the Reform Era.  From then on former businesses revived and thrived, while industrialization and exploitation of the county’s natural and mineral resources accelerated.  The construction of new highways across the province rendered access to Tengchong much easier, an asset which sparked growth of a tourist industry.

       While it doesn’t have the towering snow mountains of the northwest or the tropical environment of Xishuangbanna, the county is unique in Yunnan for its many volcanoes, some of them still active.  Relatively young volcanoes, geologically speaking, form a partial ring around the county capital.  Adventurous visitors can take a long hike up the side of one to see the crater and view other mountains from a high perspective.

       Most tourists were Chinese from big cities and unlikely to make such an endeavor.  The geothermal feature more interesting to them was the presence of hot springs.  Several of these lie scattered around the county, but the biggest is Rehai—the Hot Sea—about 20 km south of Tengchong.   

       Visitors here take a leisurely walk through the forest on a trail beside a creek.  The hot springs pop up at frequent intervals, sometimes within the creek, or spewing from a fissure in a rock shaped like a toad’s head, sometimes out of a nearby pool.  A few bubble out of manmade stone cauldrons, decorated with carved animal figures. The most impressive is the Big Boiling Pot, 3 meters wide and 1.5 meters deep, its steam, at 90 degrees C., gushing up into the air several meters.

       The Rehai springs contain many minerals good for the health.  They are effective in the treatment of rheumatism, arthritis and skin diseases.  Near some of the larger hot springs in the 9 km2 park are bath houses and steam beds where guests can indulge in such treatment.

       Tengchong’s other alluring attraction is the presence of the very traditional Hua Lisu ethnic minority, living in the highlands northwest of the city.  Hua means ‘flower’ and this Lisu sub-group is so named for the bright, ‘flowery’ colors of their traditional apparel, especially that of the women.  Lisu tradition claims the Lisu had a kingdom in eastern Tibet before the Tibetans migrated there.  Afterwards they gradually moved south through Sichuan into western Yunnan.

       They are divided into several sub-groups, but share the same language, part of the Yi group of the Tibeto-Burman linguistic group, related to Yi, Hani and Lahu.  They have no written system, but the Lisu preserve their history in songs, which can sometimes take an entire day to sing.  The Hua Lisu, one of the largest sub-groups, moved into the mountains of Tengchong around the beginning of the 16^th century.

      Security was an initial problem, for Ming Dynasty rule had not established control very much beyond the Southwest Silk Road route.  Bandits ruled the rural and remote areas.  Finally, in the early 16^th century the Ming Court dispatched Minister Wang Ji to conduct a pacification campaign in southwest Yunnan.  To augment the forces he brought with him, he recruited local residents who had suffered from cross-border bandit raids, especially the Lisu, and gave them military training.  

       The campaign was a success, though Wang Ji died just before its conclusion, and law and order was established on the frontier.  Other than being conscripted for government labor projects from time to time, the Lisu remained pretty aloof from the plains, practicing swidden agriculture, hunting and gathering and a basically subsistence economy.  Over the centuries some of them moved to lower altitudes, straddling or flanking streams, and raised different crops on fixed fields.  They were also involved in the logging industry in the past. 

 

      The easiest place to meet them is Guyong town, 52 km nw of Tengchong, on market day.  Guyong sits on an elevated plateau a few hundred meters higher than Tengchong.  The town is Han-dominated, as is the immediate rural area, but the hills are just several kilometers away, full of Lisu villages, and some of them show up in Guyong on market day.

       They stand out at once for the attraction of their colorful clothing, both men and particularly women.  Men might wear a turban or a broad-brimmed hat, plus a long jacket, usually white or pinstriped gray, boots and a sash over one shoulder of discs cut from cowry shells.   The women wear long-tailed blue coats with silver clasps in the front and brightly colored flaps at the back, knee-length pants and puttees or black rattan rings around the calves and a belt with embroidered tassels holding a long black apron with colored trimming.

       Their jewelry comprises many strings of beads, a stiff round collar ornamented with silver studs, buttons, shell discs or cowries, with silver pendants suspended from the bottom of the collar, plus other pendants that hang from the belt or apron.  The traditional headgear is a round cap; of a row of cowry shell discs, with colored cloth on top and in flaps over the back.

       The most interesting time to visit Tengchong’s Lisu is during the Sword Ladder Festival, 8^th day of the 2^nd lunar month.  They stage it in honor of Wang Ji, their commander in the pacification campaign.  His soldiers revered him and said he was so brave he could walk across a bed of hot coals and climb a ladder of swords.  This was a way of saying ‘very very brave’ but the Lisu took it literally.  Every year brave volunteers run over a ‘sea of fire’ at night and the next day climb a ladder of 36 machetes, the sharp side up.  Their only reward is the prestige from doing it. 

       Lisu villages have a better material life now, with roads, bridges, schools, easy access to the market and other improvements.  They are more integrated into the modern world, yet the Sword Ladder Festival proves that they cling to certain old traditions, especially those that are so tied up with their history and identity, that are quintessentially Lisu. 

                                                                    * * * 

Imperialist Vestige in Yunnan—the French Railway

                                                           by Jim Goodman
   
    In the last decades of the 19th century the tottering Qing Dynasty regime in China found itself under increasing pressure from Western encroachment.  This was the heyday of imperialism and by a series of military actions and the imposition of the Unequal Treaties, as the Chinese were to call them, Western nations had established themselves with impunity in Macao, Hong Kong, the Shandong Peninsula and portions of Shanghai.  In the late 1880s the country faced threats on a new front—the southwestern province of Yunnan. 
    The most aggressive imperialist powers had just seized the territories of China’s southern neighbors.  The British had grabbed northern Burma and the French had occupied northern Laos and northern Vietnam.  That put the Western powers right next to the ill-defined borders of Yunnan.  The Qing Court first rushed to make boundary agreements with the two powers.  That may have stopped the imperialist appetite for territory, but not their economic ambitions.  The British and French both viewed Yunnan as the gateway to China’s riches and soon began devising ways to penetrate the markets across the border.

French Consulate in Mengzi

    They began by pressing the Qing government to establish trade relations and in 1887 succeeded in securing permission to open consulates in Yunnan.  The British opened theirs in Tengchong in the southwest, the French chose Mengzi, halfway to Kunming from their border.  It was a small but prosperous city, close to tin mines, lying in a broad plain of 1500 meters altitude.  The city’s central attraction was South Lake, featuring many Ming and Qing Dynasty temples and pavilions, to where scholars would retreat in order to prepare for the state’s examinations.
    The French built a consulate near the lake and a small customs house beside the water.  Their presence was rather small in the beginning.  And the city was hard to get to when coming from Vietnam.  In 1895 an expedition led by the Prince D’Orléans stopped in Mengzi on its way through Yunnan to the sources of the Irrawadddy in Upper Burma.  They had to take a boat from Hekou to Manhao up the Red River, then hike over 80 km up to Mengzi.  And this was just a small group of explorers, not a big trading expedition.  Clearly, communication lines into Yunnan had to improve dramatically for commerce to succeed.   A railroad seemed to be the answer.

French customs house, Mengzi

    The French plan was for a line from the port of Haiphong through Hanoi all the way to Kunming.  The French completed the line to Lào Cai in 1906, spanned the Nanxi River with a bridge to Hekou on the Chinese side and commenced constructing the track to Kunming.  This section of the line proved to be far more difficult to build than the relatively flat route along the Red River in Vietnam.  The 464 km-long route rises from Hekou, at 78 meters above sea level, to Kunming, at 1900 meters.  It required 107 viaducts and 155 tunnels.
    The route ran alongside the west bank of the Nanxi River, crossing it at the end of the county’s boundaries and running on the east bank through Pingbian County.  Workers had to cut through thick jungle in the mostly uninhabited, malaria-infested lowlands of Hekou County, then blast tunnels through the mountains of Pingbian County and further on and haul heavy steel beams, made in France, to the sites requiring bridges or viaducts. Between kilometers 104 and 127 in Pingbian County the track gradient rises from 500 to 1100 meters and the line passes through 59 tunnels.

Renzi Bridge, the "bridge over the crossbowmen"

                 

     railway work in Pingbian County

    Altogether it was quite an engineering feat, particularly the two famous spectacular bridges—the curved bridge on pyramidal piers at kilometer 83, called “le pont en dentelles”  (bridge in lace) and “le pont sur arbalètriers” (the bridge on the crossbowmen) at kilometer 111, between the tunnels of two sheer cliffs 100 meters above the river.  Besides the railway line, workers also had to construct buildings for the 34 stations from Hekou to Kunming.

railway work in Mengzi County

    Financially, the Hekou-Kunming line cost France 167 million francs, but the human costs were even more staggering.  Of the 60,000 “coolies” hired or impressed through corvée labor to work on the project at least 12,000 died, mostly in the Nanxi River Valley, while around 80 French and Italian contractors also died.  Malaria was the biggest killer.  Other causes included landslides, accidents and various diseases.  French overseers became notorious for their brutality towards the workers and their haughty attitude towards the native population, treating them like the subjects of a conquered country.
    In 1910 workers laid the last railroad tracks to Kunming, then called Yunnanfu, and train service all the way to Haiphong opened at the end of the year.  For all the violence, misery, deaths and extra taxes associated with its construction, though, it was not an outstanding commercial success.  Trade between Yunnan and Vietnam largely consisted of opium and tin sent down to Vietnam and cotton textiles and tobacco sent up to Yunnan.  Anticipating an expansion of trade, hoping the railroad link to China’s interior would draw business away from Shanghai and go through Haiphong instead, the French built a bigger consulate and customs post near Green Lake in Kunming.

French Consulate in Kunming

    In 1915 the French constructed a branch line from near Mengzi to the tin mines near Gejiu.  Eventually this line was extended west all the way to Shiping.  Until the end of the last century this line was a kind of market train.  It made stops at every big village on the route and people brought farm products and animals on board to sell, got off several stops down the line and later boarded the return trip home.
    The volume of goods traveling by train remained modest though, until the Sino-Japanese War broke out and the Chinese government moved to Chongqing.  Now the French railway was a main supply route to the Chinese and suffered heavy Japanese bombing.   When the war concluded international service had halted and in 1951 the new government in Beijing closed down the French Consulate in Kunming and expelled its officials.
    The line eventually re-opened on the Chinese side, though only as far as Hekou.  The Vietnam side suffered extensive bombing during the war with the United States and in the border war with China in 1979 the bridge over the Nanxi was destroyed.  A decade later relations between the two sides were normalized and people could buy a ticket from Hanoi to Kunming again.  The bridge had been rebuilt, and until the end of the century was the only crossing point between Lào Cai and Hekou, but ticket-holders had to disembark at Lào Cai, walk over the bridge and hop the train to Kunming at the Hekou station.

railway bridge connecting Hekou with Lào Cai

    The train was still primarily a cargo train, but as in pre-war days it had several passenger compartments.  Tourists began taking the ride in the 90s as both Yunnan and Vietnam opened their doors to foreigners.  The line was narrow-gauge, one meter wide, which meant compartments that were rather cramped compared with those of more modern trains on wide-gauge tracks.   Hot meals were available on the journey and the train had sleepers for the ride from Kunming to Hekou, which departed in the evening and arrived next morning. 
    The best way to see the scenery, though, was to board the morning train at Hekou, leaving at 7:30 a.m. and arriving in Kunming early evening.  For the first couple of hours the train moves through dense jungle on the west bank of the Nanxi River.  At the southwest tip of Pingbian County it begins a slow ascent into the hills, hugging slopes high above the river, riding over the “bridge in lace’ and passing through many tunnels.  Eight of these lie between Baihe and Wankang and from there, for the next hour, too many to count.

the "bridge on lace"

entering a tunnel

   The scenery on this stretch, roughly five hours from the starting point at Hekou, is the best on the route—Miao villages on the gentler, lower slopes, their terraced fields sprawling below them, backed by steep, craggy limestone peaks.  With all the tunnel passages, though, the traveler gets only quick glimpses of these landscapes before entering darkness again.   North of Wankang the tunnels become more frequent, especially after the track suddenly veers northeast along the Sicha River for a spell, crosses it over the “bridge on the crossbowmen” and turns southeast along that river until just before its confluence with the Nanxi.  Then it turns northwest in the direction of Mengzi. 
    A quick glimpse of this bridge is all a passenger could get.  To get a full and dramatic view of it one has to proceed there by road from Heping further north, or by the longer route from Wankang, and then take a back country road that turns off the main road to the Sicha River.  The view is amazing, the bridge spanning the gap between two tall cliffs, the left one slanting 70 degrees, the right one nearly perpendicular to the river way down below.  About bridges and viaducts the French knew what they were doing.  Sometimes they picked the wrong places to lay the track on the slopes, leading to landslides in the rainy season that halted traffic for various lengths of time.  But no bridge or viaduct ever suffered damage.

French clock at a station near Mengzi

    After turning northwest again, the line continues through rugged hills with their lower slopes covered in terraces, though the peaks are less jagged.   By the time the train enters Mengzi County the hills become rounder, bereft of farms or villages, and gradually smaller and so freckled with big boulders that scarcely any grass can grow on them.  The track gradually descends to the Mengzi plain, though it does not actually pass through the city itself, the nearest station being several kilometers away. 
    Mengzi became the Honghe Prefecture capital several years ago and has a whole new section of fancy apartment blocks, wide avenues and government buildings.  The old city is still a rather sleepy place, its main attractions being beautiful South Lake and the surviving French buildings, including the prison they built in the early 20th century.  The city hosts market day on Sundays, when the streets are filled with ethnic minority women in colorful, handmade clothing.  Many are Miao, related to those who live along the tracks in Pingbian County.  An even larger portion are Yi and various sub-groups of Yi will dominate the ethnic minority populations in the vicinity of the railway line from Mengzi to Kunming.

South Lake, Mengzi

    After Mengzi the scenery is pleasant, though less rugged, consisting of rolling hills and open pastures.  The line passes through Kaiyuan and then veers almost due north along the Nanpan River until it reaches Yiliang, just west of the Stone Forest and famous for its roast duck.  From here the line turns west to its final terminus in Kunming. 
    The train ride was a pleasant traveling experience.  Besides the scenery, foreigners could observe activities at the numerous stations, see Miao women in their distinctive clothing, and chat with Chinese villagers making short journeys of one or two stops.  The only problem was landslides, which could cause long delays.  By 2003 such incidents happened so frequently the government closed the line for passenger services.  After renovation of the tracks the line reopened, but only for cargo.  And if landslides still happened and delayed the delivery of cargo, that was less of a problem than stranded passengers.
    Nowadays a railway museum in Kunming occupies the site of the former northern station.  Yunnan has other railway lines now and the stories of these are part of the museum’s display, too.  But such lines were all Chinese government-sponsored and part of the propaganda of the nation’s progress.  The attitude towards the French railway is different.  It may grudgingly acknowledge the technological achievement, but more apt to focus on the horrific human cost of the project, something that never bothered the French in their manic attempt to “open up” the interior of China and get rich. 
    They didn’t accomplish that.  The railway line never generated enough commerce to justify the expenditure.  Even today, though the line is still open for cargo, most goods moving between Kunming and Hekou go by truck on new super-highways.  So even the cargo service is probably on its way out.  The last cars will go into the museum, along with other paraphernalia from the 34 stations, and farmers will rip up the track to use as fences for their fields and pastures.

French postcard of the train at the station in Kunming (Yunnanfu)

                    
                                                                       * * *