The town of Lijiang is one of the western China's true gems – one of the very few way stations in the Middle Kingdom on what, archaically perhaps, is still known as the Hippie Trail. Youngsters from around the world come to Lijiang, en route between the equally delightful towns of Dali and Xishuangbanna in Yunnan and Yangshuo in Guangxi province. They are on a circuit – the same people who visit the back streets of Chiang Mai, Kathmandu and Lhasa, or Panajachel, Goa and Trivandrum, end up with equal enthusiasm and curiosity and camaraderie in towns like Lijiang. No matter what regime is in power, nor what rules are in force, there is a universality in the appeal of such places – laid-back, easygoing, with colourful people and cheap and wholesome food. In the normal and depressing order of business, the youngsters come to such a place first as rucksack-carrying pioneers and discoverers; the tour buses come next; and then the airports and the big hotels.
Lijiang is currently poised delicately between the first two phases of this evolution – the youngsters are still making it here, but on buses as well as by hitchhiking (I picked up two young Israelis, taking six months off from their kibbutz, and they were typical of the breed); and the hotel lobbies have notices offering the day's programme to the tour groups of Dutch and Belgians who have found out about the local delights. No groups of Americans or Japanese, nor of Chinese ‘compatriots' from Taiwan and Hong Kong, not yet; no airport yet, either, though one was due to open, imminently; and no Holiday Inns or other chains, although I met an unpleasant Frenchwoman who had plans for a Sofitel, once the airfield opened. The developers are eyeing Lijiang, greedily and warily at the same time.
What tempts them all is a combination of the scenery, the weather and, most notably, the fact that the inhabitants are not Chinese. The dominant population of Lijiang are members of the Nakhi tribe, a people who have created for themselves a small and most unusual paradise. True, there is a Mao Square in Lijiang; and there are dusty and ugly streets lined with the boxy modern buildings that look like anywhere else in post-revolutionary China. Lijiang is run by the Chinese – there are Chinese policemen in their running shoes, and Chinese officials in the various government offices. But theirs is a colonial administration, as it is over most of cis-Himalayan China.
There is a low hill in the centre of town, with a television tower at its summit: this marks the dividing line between the dismal and the delightful. To its west, all is ugly, drab, modern and Chinese; to its east, however, is fussy antiquity – an exquisite collection of old wooden houses, with cobbled streets and tiny canals, high-walled secret courts like Oxford quadrangles, and everywhere the smell of warm pine and wood smoke. Tall men walk by with hunting falcons on their sleeves. Imposing-looking women, who wear blue bodices and trousers and stiff white aprons, and who have T-shaped, star-embroidered padded cotton capes across their backs, stand outside their little homes, minding their children and their most common household pets, parrots. These are the Nakhi, and they have been the object of Chinese disapprobation for hundreds of years, and western fascination for scores.
There are some quarter of a million Nakhi, most of whom live on the Lijiang plan: they are said to be descendants of Tibetans and they were long regarded by the Chinese as utter barbarians. They listen to their wizards, they cling to shamanism and to a Tibetan heterodoxy known as Bon (which is claimed to be far older than the Lamaist Buddhism normally associated with the Tibetans), they have a pictographic script that is unrelated to any other in the world and which is made up of entirely recognizable creatures and objects. And though technically they run their society along conventionally patriarchal lines, there is an odd matriarchal aspect to their lives, which penetrates deeply into even the spoken language. The addition of the feminine suffix to any noun, for example, makes it bigger, more powerful and dominant, while the addition of the masculine denotes weakness, delicacy and submissiveness. A female stone is a cobble or a boulder; a male stone is a pebble, or even gravel or a grain of sand.
To underscore the more conventional aspect of Nakhi life there is one well-known patriarch in town – a bespectacled eccentric ethnomusicologist named Xuan Ke. He is not a man who is overfond of the Han Chinese: during the Cultural Revolution he spent years in prison and forced-labour camps, often tied up with wire,* for the dual crimes of playing Schubert's Marche Militaire as an ironic welcome to a group of revolutionary troops, and for suggesting that Mao's greatness might not outlive that of Jesus Christ, with whom the Great Helmsman almost shared a birthday. Xuan Ke says he has been officially forgiven now, and he brandishes his passport to show he is allowed to leave the country whenever he wants. But Public Security Bureau men keep tabs on him, he says, and they were there, ostentatiously noting our arrival, when we came to call on him at his home.
He runs a small Nakhi museum in the upper floors of his old family house. It holds clothes, paintings, old musical instruments. For the last decade he has also led a small orchestra of elderly men, who play Tang dynasty Tao temple music. On our first evening, we went to listen: the concert seemed to be for the benefit of an obnoxiously Brylcreemed lounge lizard from Kuala Lumpur who claimed to be a Taoist master and was filming everything with one of those video cameras that have a large screen instead of a viewfinder: he held it in front of him and all of us behind could see the orchestra twice, once full-sized and real, and again on the four-inch screen.
There was also a group of geologists from Kunming – they were drilling test holes, they said, close to the Tiger Leaping Gorge. There was a possibility that a dam might be built below the Gorge in due course. ‘We have a duty to exploit the water resources of our rivers,’ said the group's leader, as the musicians were tuning up. I asked him if perhaps the Gorge was sacred, too beautiful to change. ‘There is too much beauty in these parts. A little less will not be a major loss.’
But now the musicians were ready, and this promising conversation had to come to an end. All the men in the orchestra, Xuan Ke explained, were Nakhi. Most were very old – five were more than eighty, three more than seventy. The five who were in their mid-sixties Xuan Ke called ‘my boy musicians’.
The oldest man of all, Sun Ziming, was eighty-three, and he had a long white beard that smelled of mint and tobacco. He had a gentle expression that belied the fierceness of his musical task, which involved thumping a large brass gong at the kind of irregular intervals that are said to be peculiar to Tang temple music. Old Mr Sun told me proudly that during the war he had been a caravan driver on the Burma Road, and that he would walk to Calcutta, taking four months. He would occasionally also walk to Lhasa, but all the other roads out of China in those days had been cut by the Japanese.
Another old-timer used a Persian lute, said to date from the fourteenth century and to be a relic from the Nakhi royal court, back when there was one. There was a frame of ten cloud gongs, a bamboo flute as small as a chopstick, a fish-shaped temple block that sounded if beaten with a mallet. Jew's harps are part of the local musical scene, too, and a man at the front played one, though with less of a role than the er-hu and pi-pa players, for the orchestra was geared this evening to playing Chinese music and did not bother itself with the decidedly odd sounds of the Nakhi themselves. They were taking the Nakhi music to London later in the year, they said. It was their first foreign journey, and probably also the first time that Londoners had been able to hear the sounds of what was billed as ‘The Land Beyond the Clouds’.
‘I think we are the only orchestra in China that plays good classical seventh-century music,’ said the director after a concert of two hours of ethereal, strangely blissful sounds. He grinned. ‘The Chinese must think it rather ironic that it is a minority people who have preserved it, and not the Chinese themselves.’
After the concert, and after we had shaken off the importunate Malay, Xuan Ke and I went down the road to the Din-Din Café, one of the myriad of small restaurants that are favoured by the young backpackers. We had banana pancakes and homemade granola, fresh orange juice and Italian coffee, so-calle
d. The one supposedly local dish was Nakhi cheese, fried with sugar, which was none too exciting. A hand-chalked sign read, ‘Please accept our apologies if your preference is not available due to previous passenger selection.’ ‘Yes,’ said the owner, when I asked her if she had ever travelled by plane. ‘How did you guess? Bangkok. My only time.’ She had spent 20,000 renminbi decorating her restaurant, and she now made 4000 a month, clear profit. ‘Soon I will have chain,’ she said. ‘Like your Kentucky Fried, yes?’
I asked Xuan Ke to explain the rumour that Lijiang was the suicide capital of China. He became immediately animated and cheerful.
‘Yes, yes!’ he said. ‘This is a distinction we do claim. It is all to do with love. I like to think of Lijiang as the love capital, really. The boys and girls here, they fall in love in a most unfortunate way – the morals of the Nakhi people have never been very good. Much promiscuity, I think you would say. And so there is much disappointment, and many couples kill themselves to end their affair. It is a long, long tradition.
‘They have their special places to do the deed – a lake here, a mountain pass there, a riverbank there, a meadow up along the road below the Jade Dragon Mountain, near the American airfield. There is a ritual to it. The youngsters write notes, they call in the wizards to bless the event, and then they drink a mixture of black aconite boiled up with oil. It sounds very disagreeable to me. But it has the advantage of paralysing the larynx. Once they have drunk it they cannot cry out. They die quite quickly and quite peacefully – but totally in silence. No one can come to help them. If they are far away, and no one sees them, then it is all over. They drink the mixture, and they are found dead the next day. The wizards perform another ritual, and it is all over. Joseph Rock was the great expert on it. He knew how they killed themselves, and where, and why. He knew the wizards. He wrote all about it. I have the books.’
Xuan Ke and his father had known Joseph Rock well, and the little museum housed some of the great man's relics – his desk, his bookcases and some of his books, and the enormously wide chair that suggested, wrongly, that Rock had been an unusually portly man. His gold dinner plates and his folding canvas bath from Abercrombie & Fitch were no longer there; but the garden he planted, and his country house a few miles north, also near the American airfield, remained, memorials to a strangely memorable man.
Joseph Rock had been born in Vienna; his father, a melancholy man, was majordomo to a Polish count. He wanted his young son to enter the priesthood. But Joseph, who lost himself in bizarre night-time fantasies that included the learning of thousands of Chinese ideographs by the time he was a teenager, had other plans: he vaulted out of Vienna, signed on as a steward on a transatlantic steamer, arrived in New York in 1905, pawned his clothes, worked as a dishwasher and a waiter and at a score of other menial tasks before arriving, hungry and penniless – but already speaking ten languages, including Arabic and Chinese – in Hawaii.
He had the magical combination of formidable chutzpah and an unquenchable wanderlust. For a while he taught; but soon, surrounded by the delicious greenery of those overfertile islands, he turned to botany as by turns a diversion, a fascination, a hobby and then an obsession. Without either a degree or any formal knowledge of plants, he marched into the Honolulu office of the US Department of Agriculture one day in 1910, insisted that they needed a herbarium and won his way. Within a year, he was teaching botany at the College of Hawaii, and he published papers that are still regarded as classics.
But a craving for travel could not be ignored. He went to Washington and persuaded the Agriculture Department there that he should become an official plant hunter – a paid agricultural explorer, with his nominated territory that part of western China where the rhododendrons, and camellias and the tea varieties were being found in such abundance. He came out first in 1922; and for the next twenty-seven years, until the Chinese Communists dismissed him along with most other foreigners, he lived and explored with memorable energy and acumen, in that vast and tumultuous series of mountain ranges between Dali in the south and the cold deserts of what was then Amdo, and is now called Qinghai, in the north.
He worked first for the government, searching for sources for a substance called chaulmoogra oil, which was then thought to be a treatment for leprosy, and which was used in huge quantities in the great sad lazarettos of Hawaii and Louisiana. Before long, however, he began to chafe under the restriction of government work, even so far from home, and he transferred his professional allegiance to the more liberal board of the National Geographic Society.
He wrote papers and popular articles by the dozen, steadily transferring his affections, as he did so, from the region's plants to the region's people. He sent thousands of specimens home, but he never wrote a single serious paper about the botany of China. Within a few years of his arrival he had taught himself to be the world's greatest expert on the Nakhi people, and a translator of their terrifyingly complex pictographic language. He befriended a colourful figure known as King of Muli, and made similar comradely alliances in principalities called Choni and Yungning. He wrote vast tomes about the Moso – a people, related to the Nakhi, who lived on the northern side of the Yangtze and whose practices are more rigorously matriarchal than their country cousins. (For instance, their family names pass down from mother to daughter.) It was these people who slept and fed on the Boneless Pig, the animal of the mattress and of the slices that are eaten a dozen years later with locally whipped and straw-filled yak-butter and chunks of homemade cheese.
The Moso are a people who also have a highly libidinous reputation across China – whose reported eagerness for sex rivals that of the Trobriand Islanders, far away in the western Pacific. Moso women lead the charge here: they can take as many lovers as they like, and those drawn into these brief relationships are known as azhu, good friends. A survey carried out in 1983 found that of 1878 mature Moso women, no fewer than 393 carried on azhu relationships. The men invariably returned to their own homes when the night was over: if any children resulted from the mingling, the woman – who might begin her sexual activity as a young teenager – was allowed to keep them.
Not surprisingly the rate of sexually transmitted illness among the Moso has been staggering. Peter Goullart, a Russian-born Frenchman who came to know the area well and who wrote a biography of Joseph Rock, recalled a conversation with a Tibetan trader he met coming down from Moso country. Goullart, who was called on to treat occasional sickness, examined the man and discovered that he had indeed contracted a case of what one might call Moso Rose.
‘No! No!’ the man protested. ‘It is only a cold.’
‘How did you get it?’ Goullart asked.
‘I caught it when riding a horse,’ the trader replied.
‘Well,’ said Goullart, ‘it was the wrong kind of horse.’
Joseph Rock, who was not drawn to this kind of activity, instead drew maps, keenly but not very well. He surveyed mountains (managing on one occasion to make an absolute ass of himself by claiming in a telegram to Washington that a peak called Minya Konka was the world's highest, at 30,250 feet – his amateur use of the theodolite having misled him, it later transpired, by almost a mile). But wherever he went, he travelled in the grandest style, like a Victorian in Africa. Porters carried him everywhere in a palanquin, often trembling under the lash of his formidable temper. When it came time to halt, there was always a cook, an assistant cook, a folding table, starched napery, table silver, a leopard skin to sit upon and from which he would contemplate the view he always had his bearers select for him. There were bottles of well-travelled wine, no matter how far into the wilderness he had penetrated; there were Viennese dishes he had taught his staff to prepare; and after dining there was tea and a selection of liqueurs.
Then he would set off once again for more discovery and amusement – and glancing around happily, he would note in his diaries how his column of hired men stretched half a mile into the distance and how any village chief would regard him as a potenta
te from some fabulous kingdom and treat him accordingly. As well as his folding bath and his gold dishes, which impressed all who saw him, he invariably took a wind-up gramophone, and he would regale the villagers he met with scratchy Caruso arias played full-blast.
He remained in Lijiang throughout most of the anti-Japanese war, to the irritation of the authorities in Chongqing: he raised vegetables and listened to advice from his sorcerer friends, and to the news on his short-wave radio. When, on one occasion close to the war's end, he travelled back to America, he fell almost insane with grief on learning that his collections, which had followed him home on a ship, had been torpedoed in the Arabian Sea.
‘Followed him home' is perhaps an inappropriate phrase. Joseph Rock never had a real home, nor did he ever settle with any particular person, male or female; only in Lijiang was he content, and he said he wanted to be interred there, under the towering range of the Jade Dragon Mountain. We visited the house and the garden where he had wanted to be buried, in a village an hour north of town: it is cool, among the foothill pines, and there are meadows and crystal springs. A family of Nakhi live there now, and there was a cow in Rock's study, which is now used as a byre. A beautiful young Nakhi woman, her hair covered in a white bandeau, was nursing her baby in the room that Rock had used as his library: perhaps he would have been content to see that at least his house was being used by his beloved Nakhi, and not by the Chinese.
The latter threw him out in the end. The Communists distrusted those they regarded as barbarian priests and wizards and sorcerers, and they killed scores of them, and sent others off to be re-educated. Rock left finally in August 1949, two months before Mao Zedong declared the formation of the People's Republic. By then it was all over, so far as fun was concerned, up in the wilds of the west. He wrote to a friend: ‘If all is OK I will go back – I want to die among those beautiful mountains rather than in a bleak hospital bed all alone.’