The Hidden Lakes of Medicine Mountain

                                                  by Jim Goodman

the highway through Ninglang County

       Like most places in northwest Yunnan, mountains dominate the landscapes of Ninglang County.  Called Xiaoliangshan, the Lesser Cool Mountains, to distinguish them from Daliangshan, the Greater Cool Mountains across the border in Sichuan, they rise on either side of the main north-south highway, sometimes reaching over 4000 meters altitude, blanketed in snow after a late autumn rain, a gleaming white mantle that persists until the warmth of May.  The county’s towns lie in separate valleys along the highway, with mild ascents over the hills between them.

        As with any mountainous area, the higher you hike the greater the view.  But Ninglang County is not noted for its trekking routes.  Visitors to the county almost all head straight for Lugu Lake in the far north and rarely attempt to appreciate anything anywhere else.  As for the mountain scenery, one could argue that it is better and easier to appreciate in Diqing, upper Nujiang or Tiger Leaping Gorge.  Good mountain vistas in Ninglang require strenuous hikes up some rather steep slopes.  And the shapes of the peaks on the far horizons will not rival the higher, more jagged summits of the mountains in the Three Rivers area.

the view north from Yangpinzi in November

      What drew me to these mountains, however, was not the possibility of discovering hitherto unknown scenic panoramas.  Ninglang is a Yi Autonomous County, where the Yi comprise a majority of the population.  And the bulk of them live in the mountains.  Since my purpose in Ninglang was to do research on the Yi, that was going to require some long excursions up the slopes of the Cool Mountains.

       The Yi minority nationality dominates the population of Ninglang city and other county towns.  Visitors will hear more of the Yi language, a member of the Tibeto-Burman linguistic group, than Chinese spoken in the markets and restaurants.  I could find and befriend Yi men who could fill me in on Yi history and mythology, customs and taboos.  Though they were comfortably ensconced in the modern accoutrements of urban Ninglang, they were ethnically conscious Yi, proud of their customs and traditions and I learned much from them.  Their wives were usually from the mountains, their in-laws still lived there, and they themselves made occasional visits as part of keeping in touch with their Yi village roots.

Yo woman, NInglang County

Yi man in the northeastern hills

       Still, there was a limit to what I could learn in Ninglang city, for that was not a traditional environment.  I had to visit the villages and that was going to be physically demanding .  The first village I visited, Yangpinzi, the nearest to Ninglang, took at least an hour and a half of uphill hiking to reach.  But the exertion was worth it.  The people were surprised, but quite hospitable, and the result encouraged me to venture further into the mountains in the future.

       To see the Torch Festival in a rural environment meant hiking uphill all day to a village high up in the mountains northeast of Ninglang.  To visit Bainiuchang, site of a school with bi-lingual education and a special class teaching the written Yi language, I had to endure another steep climb up the slopes east of Ninglang.  In both cases the journeys were worth the effort, of course, just for the cultural experience.  As for the views, they were splendid, yes, but merely as a setting for the encounter, a bonus of a backdrop.

turnip harvest in a Yi hamlet

       Yet on one autumn excursion scenery would prove to be as significant a feature as culture when my Yi friends in Ninglang suggested I should take a hike to the near-legendary lakes of Yaoshan—Medicine Mountain—northwest of the city.  I say ‘near-legendary’ because it seemed many Yi people knew about them but hardly anyone had actually seen them.  And who lived up there?  Yi yak herders. 

       Well, I’d visited a few mountain villages by then and had met Yi barley and buckwheat farmers, turnip and potato gardeners, goatherds and shepherds.  Didn’t know there were any Yi yak herders.  Always thought that was a Tibetan thing.  So when my Yi friend said he could arrange a guide I agreed to go.  The guide was a young man named Jikeu, who worked in the city but came from Jinzigou, a Yi village at the southern foot of the mountain.

Jinzigou village

       We set out along a creek northwest of the city and then had to climb up a steep hill through a thick forest, here and there speckled with blue, white and yellow flowers and piles of fallen russet or yellow leaves.  At the crest of this ridge was a Yi hamlet of about ten houses, with most of the people outside threshing barley or harvesting turnips.  One family called us over for tea and gave us a large radish for us to consume during breaks climbing over the next ridge ahead.

       Though it was just as steep as the first ascent, fortunately the ordeal was over after an hour.  We now gazed down at the sprawling village of Jinzigou in the valley below, with around a hundred buildings, all except the middle school typical traditional Yi log cabins.  Judging by the very friendly encounter we’d just had in the hamlet, I anticipated a warm reception.

Shàhma Lake on Yaoshan

       But things started off awkwardly.  There were stares but no smiles as Jikeu led the stranger through the lanes to his family’s house.  Even there everyone seemed hesitant to greet me.  A short discussion ensued between father and son.  Then the mood suddenly changed and I was welcomed with the same warmth I had experienced in other Yi villages.  Familiar with the custom of compensating the family for their hospitality, I gave out the gifts I’d brought for the hosts; liquor for the father, cowry shells from Thailand for the women to embellish their clothing accessories and a pound of sweets for the children.   And as we settled in for our stay and sipped tea, Jikeu revealed what the discussion had been about.

       Recently there had been reports of strangers going to remote villages in the county to preach the imminence of the end of the world and urge people to join their religion to assure their salvation.  Jinzigou residents hadn’t seen any yet, but some of their relatives in other villages had.  Was I one of those Doomsday prophets?  If so, they really didn’t want to hear that kind of talk.  Assured that I was not, they were pleased to meet and welcome the first foreigner to Jinzigou.

Zhihu Lake

       After a hearty morning meal and a photo session of the family dressed in their best Yi apparel, we commenced our hike to the summit of mighty Medicine Mountain.  We crossed the creek at the edge of the village and the trail almost immediately began zigzagging up a 70-degree gradient.  Much of it went through thick forests of pine, fir, rhododendron and poplar, with moss hanging from the branches, lichens covering fallen logs and bighorn sheep sharing the trail.

       I learned all about false summits that day:  seeing an end to the uphill trail, discovering the level walk only continues five minutes and then another steep ascent begins.  Two Yi herders joined us for the last stretch of the journey, carrying my shoulder bags and cutting a staff from a tree branch for me.  But when we finally arrived at the broad plain lying next to the steeply sided granite rocks on the summit, all the pain of getting there was soon forgotten.  

yaks on the summit of Medicine Mountain

      It was mid-afternoon and our first stop was a hut belonging to an older Tibetan woman, who lived there with her two grandchildren.  She prepared buttered tea for us while Jikeu heated the buckwheat bread his family had given us.  After our refreshment (including a cup of precious corn liquor for the foreigner guest) we headed for a Yi herder’s cabin a short distance away, where we would stay the night.

       This cabin was close to one of the lakes, so after making arrangements for the night we all headed, along with the Tibetan girl, to the lake the Yi call Shàhma.  This small and shallow lake lies in the lap of a steeply wooded slope.  The view from here encompasses the stark cliffs along the summit to the west and out across the wrinkled horizon of the Lesser Cool Mountains.

       We joined our companions as they went up the slopes to fetch their yaks down to the cabin area for the night.  I found these animals very curious about the stranger alongside them.  They often sidled up to me, but whenever I reached out to touch one, the yak backed off.  Still, they were a lot less skittish than their lowlands cousin the water buffalo.  

milking a yak

churning yak butter for Tibetan-style tea

       Yaks rise at dawn and head for their favorite pastures.  Around an hour after sunrise the herders go up to bring them down again.  Then they take one cow, tie it to three stakes and get a calf to start the cow’s udders working.  Then the man kicks away the calf and milks the cow for about twenty minutes.  Much of this will be turned into curd and some processed into cheese and butter.

       Less than ten people seemed to live up here, their economy centered mostly on their yaks.  In the valley markets at that time yak butter sold for 50 yuan a kilo, cheese for a bit more and a fully grown yak fetched 1000 yuan, somewhat higher than a water buffalo or ox of the same size.  While tending yaks, goats and sheep was not physically demanding, their lifestyle was necessarily austere and simple.  For every essential except water, meat and firewood they had to make the long trek down the mountain to Hongqiao, the nearest town, and back up again, their ponies loaded with buckwheat flour, rice, potatoes, salt, oil, tobacco, soap and liquor.

Yawshalavoe Lake

       After a breakfast of buckwheat bread, potatoes, buttered tea and curd, we set out to see the other Yaoshan lakes.  This proved to be almost as grueling an exercise as getting to the summit the previous day.  To get to the second lake we had to hike up above the yak pastures, cross the ridge and descend through a thick rhododendron forest with no clear trail.   This was Jikeu’s first trip here as well.  I had no idea what kind of directions he’d been given, but as I searched the slope for footholds and slid under thick fallen tree branches, I was sure we were lost.     

       Jikeu’s internal compass, however,  functioned brilliantly that day and steered us to an opening on a ridge overlooking Zhihu, the second lake, which also lay in the lap of a steeply wooded cliff.  From here we descended eastwards through another trackless forest, following the trails that martens and rabbits take.  Eventually we arrived at the shore of Vahlilu, the prettiest of the lakes.   A thick rhododendron forest backed its northern shore, with small, partly iced, yellow clumps of grass lying just off the shores of the other sides.  

       We rounded the lake, climbed the ridge behind it and slid down through a forest to the fourth lake, Yawshalavoe, which also lay in the lap of high, forested slopes.  The trees on its eastern slope, though, had all been cut, and big logs lay drying out on the ground.  Someday these would have to be hauled by hand all the way down the mountain. 

Vahlilu Lake

       After a short break here we climbed back over the ridge above the yak pastures and descended to the Tibetan cabin for a meal of buckwheat bread and yak cheese, washed down with buttered tea and, in my case, a final cup of corn liquor.  As it was not yet four o’clock and we were now fully nourished, we bade farewell to our hosts, and their yaks outside the cabin, and descended down the same trail back to Jinzigou, arriving just at dark.  

       Now I was back in the familiar conviviality of a Yi village community, where people interact more often, do many things collectively, celebrate festivals and so on.  How different it was from the lifestyle I had just observed on top of the mountain.  The Yi yak herders reminded me of backwoodsmen in 19^th century America, who built a cabin in the forest and, except for provisions trips to town, in the course of the day were more likely to meet a bear than another human.  Yet American culture reveres them as representatives of a fiercely independent spirit.

       Could that not be said for the Yi I met on the mountaintop?  They opted for the solitary life over the community one.  They chose immersion in nature instead of participation in society.  For their occasional pleasures they rely on things like unexpected warm breezes in cold months, an especially brilliant sunrise and the birth of healthy animal.  And for faith, it’s their own proud, independent spirit.

the cabin and yaks of our Yaoshan host

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            for more on theYi of Xiaoliangshan, see my e-book Children of the Jade Dragon

From Zhongdian to Shangrila

      
                                                                 by Jim Goodman
   

Shangrila's old town, before the fire

    Shangrila’s old town burned down last week.  A ten-hour fire consumed most of the buildings.  Fortunately, no one died, but it was still a tragedy for those whose possessions the flames consumed, as well a blow to its booming tourist industry.  Yet the destruction of the old town is a bit misleading, for scarcely a handful of truly old buildings were left at the time of the blaze.  These were new or reconstructed buildings catering to the tourist industry—guesthouses, restaurants, bars and (high-priced) souvenir shops.  The original inhabitants had nearly all moved out.  The authentic old town had already been replaced and the new buildings outfitted with fancier wood-carved decorations and very non-traditional picture windows facing the street.  The only parts still authentic, like in Lijiang’s old town Dayan, were the paving stones.

butchering a yak in the old town, 1993

    I was among the first foreigners to visit there in early 1993, just after the county officially opened the doors and it still evoked the atmosphere of a remote frontier outpost.  Only a couple of hotels stood on the outskirts of the old town then, which was entirely a residential area, a few small shops catering to locals.  The people lived in sturdy, two-story houses of timber and rammed earth on stone foundations, a balcony on the second floor, a small yard in front or to the side.  People did domestic work here, like carpentry, chopping wood or skinning yaks and might hang hunting trophies or yak skulls on the second floor balcony rafters.
    This was the first time local Tibetans had met Westerners and the encounters were always so friendly I began to think of Zhongdian as Hello City, after the word I heard a hundred times a day.  On return visits over the next few years I learned some of the local dialect, enabling me to arouse curiosity in the monasteries and invitations to stay overnight in the villages.  Tibetans there were just as curious about me as I was about them.  With a combination of Chinese and Tibetan, we talked about my experiences in Nepal and with other peoples in the area, even the Akha I worked with in Thailand. 

Tibetan girl near Napahai

    Zhongdian’s Tibetans not only were friendly to foreigners. They also got along well with their Han neighbors.  There is a very good historical reason for this.  The county sits on a high plateau of about 3300 meters and features big barley farms.  Harvesting these fields requires two or three families working together a couple of days before it’s completed.  And the annual yield from this and their other agricultural and pastoral activities makes the county’s Tibetans rather well off.
    Further north, in Diqing County, the land is much more rugged, dominated by steep mountains, with much less flat farming land.  Here a single family can harvest its field unaided in less than a day.  People are more dependent on animal husbandry and live in smaller, less-endowed houses.  In the past, whenever particularly hard times or animal epidemics hit the Tibetans here they formed armed parties that raided the plains of Zhongdian.
    Chinese administration in this corner of the southwest did not commence until the Ming Dynasty.  Initially it was not direct, either, but through the Mu family rulers of Lijiang until the early 18th century.  Thus, Naxi soldiers defended Zhongdian’s Tibetans from their wilder cousins from further north.  Some of

Tibetan man in popular fur hat

them stayed on in Zhongdian and the old town in the 90s had a Naxi quarter of several houses in the red wood style of Lijiang, in contrast to the whitewashed walls of Tibetan homes.

   Later the Chinese army took over the task of protecting Zhongdian’s Tibetans and wound up especially active in the turbulent waning years of the Qing Dynasty.  This basically accounts for the friendly relations between Zhongdian’s Tibetans and the Han community.  They attend each other’s festivals and intermarriage is not unusual.
    Besides its agriculture Zhongdian was also an important post on the ancient Tea and Horses Road that ran from southern Yunnan all the way to Lhasa.  Tibetan ponies were prized by other communities in Yunnan’s mountains, but also by the Song Dynasty armies, who faced threats from mounted warriors on the northern frontier.  Pu’er tea from Yunnan was popular in Lhasa.  The traditional caravan route became suddenly important strategically during the Sino-Japanese War, when supplies from India went by caravan from Kalimpong, next to Sikkim, through eastern Tibet, then Zhongdian, Lijiang and Xiaguan.  
    Some Tibetan merchants from Zhongdian moved to Lijiang during the war, putting up in houses near Dayan’s Old Stone Bridge.  They helped defend the city against an attack by a brigand gang from Heqing.  But when the war ended so did the lucrative caravan trade and the Tibetans returned to Zhongdian.
    The old town didn’t have its own market, for residents only had to walk a few blocks to the central open-air market in the city. Even the new town looked fairly quaint in the early 90s. Most of the buildings were single story, the tallest being those government offices with Tibetan-style facades. Restaurants were small and had names like The State Guest House Trade Union Dining Room and Apart From The State Guest House Dining Room. Shops along the main street included several, since relocated, catering to the local Tibetans, selling bolts of wool and brocaded silk, fur hats, wool carpets in Han or Tibetan designs, and clothing in both the local and Lhasa styles.

selling yak cheese in Zhongdian's old market

    In the center of town was the open-air market, where Tibetans hawked fruits, snacks, vegetables, lumps of yak cheese, cups and bowls, butter churners, robes and headgear, meat and daggers. Bai people ran a corner offering copper and brass pots, cauldrons, bells, horse trappings and utensils. The stalls were always full and the range of fruits and vegetables surpassed that in Lijiang.  Customers included local Han and Tibetan, plus a few resident Bai and occasional Yi and Naxi from the southern part of the county.
    Other than a few small shops offering barley spirits, the town didn’t offer any nightlife and mostly closed up after 8 p.m.  When the nights were warm enough, some of the old town residents, especially the youth, gathered in the old town’s central square for an hour or so of ring dances.  This changed during the early summer, when it was mushroom season and villagers brought in their haul for sale in markets that stayed open, along with refreshment stalls, until past midnight.

temple mural--Tibetans welcome Long March soldiers

    Besides wandering around the old town, markets in the new town and the nearest villages, visitors always toured the temples.  Just outside the southwest quarter of the old town stands the hill called Zhushan, with a small shrine on top that afforded a good view of the old town east and the plains west and a large temple at its base.  It had some interesting wall frescoes back then, since replaced, including a fresco of local Tibetans and lamas greeting He Long’s Red Army forces on the Long March, one of the mythical hero Gesar astride his war horse, one of Chinese ladies in late Qing Dynasty gowns and one of a pussycat.  The other temple, on a hill in the southern part of the old town, was less interesting, though the view from the top of the old town was better since you could see the lanes between the houses.
    From the old town it was about an hour’s pleasant walk or more to Songzhanlin and the biggest monastery in the prefecture, dating from the 17th century.  Or one could rent a bicycle, though the pebbly roads made it difficult to pedal. I wandered freely throughout the monastery, alone or accompanied, often stopped by monks who wanted a chat with a foreigner or wanted me to photograph them, even when they were doing their recitations or performing a ritual.  This was the pre-digital camera era and I was not able to show then the results.  But they were more interested in the camera itself and wanted to look through it, especially when I attached the telephoto lens.   And after the session concluded they invited me to have buttered tea with them.

Songzhanlin in the early 90a

    Almost as soon as Zhongdian opened for foreign tourists local agencies began promoting the place as a Shangrila for visitors, in the symbolic sense of a kind of paradise in the mountains.  Besides the county’s natural and cultural attractions, they also offered treks along He Long’s Long March route and the road taken by the Tang Dynasty Princess Wencheng when she journeyed to Lhasa to wed the Tibetan King Srongtsan Gampo.    These were obviously directed at Chinese tourists with a sense of their country’s history.

    The use of the Shangrila themesoon graduated into claims that Zhongdian was the actual Shangrila of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon.  So-called pundits from Kunming and even Beijing claimed their “investigations” proved James Hilton modeled his Shangrila on Zhongdian.   Apparently they hadn’t read the book, for Hilton’s Shangrila lies in a forested valley, not a flat plain like Zhongdian.  The triangular snow peak visible from the fictional Shangrila does resemble the shape of Meili Snow Mountain, but Meili is only visible several hours’ drive north of Zhongdian. 
    Never mind.  The purpose of the Shangrila hype wasn’t to prove anything, but to give the county a shining, exotic tourist image.  Other places in the Himalaya region made the same claim, such as Bhutan towards the end of the century, but not so vociferously.  In 2001 the city officially changed its name from Zhongdian to Shangrila, which comes out in the Chinese pinyin form as Shangelila.   But the old town had already been altering its look and its character since Zhongdian got its airport in 1996.  Flights from Kunming rose, in season, from three or four per week, depending on weather and demand, to several per day at the summer peak.

early 90s view of Shangrila plain

    From then on Zhongdian underwent rapid development.  The new town expanded east and north, practically filling up the plain north to the hillock approaching Songzhanlin.  Tibetans in the old town began moving out, selling off or renting out their houses to aggressive tourist industry businesses.  Within a few years virtually every old house had been replaced by a tourist-oriented establishment, with their signs lining the lanes.  Ticket booths went up on the approach to Songzhanlin, where the monastery got new gilded roofs, and even at the best vantage point to photograph Napa Lake further north.
    Old town businesses began calling the place Dukezong, a name I hadn’t heard in the 90s.  Tibetans I spoke with then referred to it as Jèdâw, the last syllable nasalized, and used that word when they sang songs about it.  It sounded like a corruption of the Chinese name Zhongdian, or perhaps of the original Tibetan name of the town--Gyalthang.  At any rate, on my last visits in 2008 it was clear that Dukezong was something quite different from the Jèdâw I had known.   No evidence of

drawing water at the village well

traditional Tibetan life here anymore.  To see that again I had to return to villages I knew around Napa Lake.

    No tourism industry influence had penetrated these villages.  New homes had arisen since my first visits, but in the traditional style.  The people still lived the same way, did their daily and seasonal chores as before, still wore the local Tibetan clothing, and were just as warm and hospitable as ever.  About the only change I noticed was that they had cell phones, which they used to call in old acquaintances to meet me again.   
    Back in the old town for a last stroll, my happy experience in the Napahai villages

a happy mood at harvest time

tempered my feelings of regret for its total transformation.  The old way here has gone forever and I’m quite sure that when reconstruction begins it will seek to replicate exactly the theme park sort of place it had become.  But the fire was not a blow to Shangrila’s indigenous Tibetan culture.  That was unscathed and persists alive and flourishing in the plateau’s villages.  Before James Hilton used the word, Shangrila was a traditional Tibetan concept of an idyllic place where people lived in harmony with their environment, their gods and each other.  In that sense, in view of the lifestyle and manners of the people, to call the place Shangrila is not out of line.  One could argue it’s even appropriate.   

the northeast corner of Napahai

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                        for more on Yunnan's Tibetans, see my s-book Living in Shangrila