Yunnan: A Peak, A Town, and a Forest

Faced with a week of no classes, I made plans to travel to Yunnan. I went alone, which was brave or foolish or both. I flew to the capital city, Kunming, known as the "City of Eternal Spring," and landed in the early afternoon last Monday. One of the reasons I had initially wanted to come here was the central role this place played in World War II and prior to US involvement in the war when the Flying Tigers were doing the most dangerous flight route in all history, called "The Hump." Kunming was the place where pilots would touch down after flying over the Himalayas from Burma (now Myanmar). Any trace of that history here seems to have been erased and forgotten.

I departed from Kunming on Saturday morning so that I could teach my American History class on Saturday afternoon. In the interim, I took a night train to and then from LiJiang, which is famous for its "Old Town(s)" and for being in the shadow of a 5,596 meter or 18,360 foot mountain massif. The far side of the mountain forms one side of Tiger Leaping Gorge (Hutiao Xia), but I did not have time to venture there. As my father is wont to say, "You have to save something for next time."  I did, however, stay in the Old Town at a fun hostel and "climb" the mountain.

玉龙雪山 (Yu Long Xue Shan) or Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is gorgeous, which means that Chinese brides and bridegrooms traipse into off-limits areas with their camera crews and do wedding photo shoots, as is the custom here.

To say that I climbed the mountain is a huge exaggeration, but I sure paid a lot of renminbi. I was not alone, though. It is a week prior to the May holiday--China's Labor Day and five-day mandatory vacation. The tourist attractions and the trains will soon be choked with travelers. To some extent, as you can see from the queue in this picture, the lines are already quite long.

This line is where people wait for the bus to the cable car. There is a counter when you go through the turnstile and more than 2,100 people had been through before me that day. I spotted only three other bai ren (white people) in line--one Russian, one German, and one unidentified alien. There are many tour groups in uniform jackets or matching hats. Some close friends in China just decide to match their clothes or hats to show their closeness. I suspect that is the case with the two blue bonnets.

Fortunately, throughout the trip I was able to join up with kind people who spoke English. On this leg of the expedition, I was taken from my hostel by a girl named Lizzy to an area where parked vans are all waiting to bargain with tourists for a ride to the mountain park. (Lizzy is an "intern," which is to say her room and board at the hostel are free in return for helping out around the place. She plans to go to Tibet in a few weeks.) Here I joined a husband and wife from Guangzhou and we journeyed to the mountain together in a taxi van. We stopped once along the way so that they might buy a can of oxygen since we would be well above 8,000 feet. I opted to be tough (or walk slowly so as to adjust and not get winded).

We shared the cable car on the way down with a group of people who had driven from Beijing. They were on a huge tour.

After the bus drove us from 3356 meters and the cable car dropped us off at 4306 feet, we climbed stairs to 4636 meters. I was proudly wearing my Red Sox hat, which I was given as a keepsake at my good friend's wedding. He and I have climbed many mountains together and were the head of the PEA Outing Club when Bob Bates was still alive and Steve & Mary Gorman were frequent chaperons.

Along the trail were several interesting things. Aside from the maidens in wedding attire, I saw a couple of people with their shirts off (it was 6 degrees Celsius), plenty in high heels and other ridiculous footwear (taking "selfies"), and my new buddies got a picture of a crazy American planting the Chinese flag at the height of the opened section of the observation stairway.

After coming down off the mountain, I went alone to the Black Dragon Pool. Among the things to see was something one of my pals told me is a "mahjong tree"--no matter whether I was being had or not, it was a remarkable specimen. I could not resist shooting a couple pics of the park signage, either.

This is a sacred place to the Naxi People, one of China's 55 ethnic minorities. There are also lost children who come to meditate there, I guess, by the burbling brook. In fact, the whole Old Town is full of people in ethnic dress posing with tourists. I imagine there were people from the East who went West in the US to get their picture taken with Indians before they were totally acculturated. There is an aspect of keeping culture alive akin to the powwows in America, where you can see traditional drumming and dancing, but there is also an LA porn-shoot quality to some of the Chinese men toting around big Canons and telling the girls exactly where to stand. The town is famous for its canals and bridges. All of Yunnan is well-known for its flowers and selling the signature type of tea, puerh, which is grown and picked in the southern parts of the province

A very beautiful tea cabinet for storing discs of puerh tea, my favorite kind of tea.

After befriending a NaXi girl who worked at a tea place, who said that I could come play in the mountains with her family if I was ever back in Yunnan; nibbling on some yak meat; and eating twice at a restaurant featuring Naxi traditional snacks, I took the train back to Kunming. It left at 9:30 PM and brought me to Kunming's bustling train station at 5:30 AM. By the time I had taken the wrong bus twice and gotten myself to the East Bus Station, it was nearly 9 AM. Another one hour and a half bus ride to the Stone Forest (Shilin) was made bearable, because an architecture student sat down next to me and we conversed for the rest of the trip there. Her father is a chief planner in Xi'an. She and her mother were on a vacation together, the mother having just retired from her professorship a few days prior. She will go to St. Louis, MO, next year to continue her architectural studies. I spent the next several hours with her and her mother, who also spoke passable English.

These are my pictures from the Stone Forest, a karst topography. Again, I had to take a photo of a couple signs. One indicates that smoking is permitted and the other, though hard to read, ends the English version of its text mid-sentence.

The Real Ghost Street: A Trail of Dry Tears

Imagine that President Andrew Jackson, in preparation for a bid to get the Olympics to come to the United States, constructed a museum of Native American cultures. Summoning every hand available, every coolie he can find, he erects a park of 50 hectares. The Summer Olympics of 1840 come and go. Jackson is no longer President (his term having ended in 1837), a Civil War looms, and it will be another 40-60 years before the end of the Indian wars. The park falls into ruin. There is not enough money for programming, except a couple girls dressed in feathers who offer you a slab of buffalo meat, and a few Sioux dancers strutting about in an empty square.

Most of the wickiups, wigwams, longhouses, pueblos, and tipis are padlocked shut, but the signage indicates that for a year or two this place was a restaurant serving Inuit whale meat soaked in seal oil and that place was a Mahican grocery; this place was a drum circle with live Lakota drummers and that place was a Three Sisters demonstration project, where kids could plant beans, corn, and squash.

Has Andrew Jackson's Injun Park dilapidated because the white people don't like museums about the red people that they are still trying to subdue? Was this a case of bad central planning and the Jackson Administration should have considered what would happen after 1840? Is it sort of a national embarrassment now for people from other countries to visit this place. What do you think they say to each other when they leave?

Now, let's go to the China Nationalities Museum and the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park. For 90 RMB, you can enter the northern gate into the North Park and traipse along a cement path with 27 ethnic landscapes and 36 scenic views. Almost the only human contact you have is with a Korean, or somebody pretending to be a Korean. She asks you in Mandarin to take off your shoes to see the exhibit, but you decide not to, because you can see almost everything from where you are standing. You cross over bridges that span the fake river, but these bridges give you the true-to-life feeling that they might collapse and deposit you into the "river" below.

The flowers are beautiful, though, because it is Beijing and it is springtime. The most beautiful time of year there.

Eventually, you take a pedestrian bridge across the highway--a very special bridge, labeled the National Bridge, to which nearly all signs point--and you enter the South Park with its 30 ethnic landscapes and 24 scenic vistas.

You read the "English" brochure more closely, which optimistically declares:

• 100 scenic views
• 200 ethnic buildings
• 100,000 pieces of historic and cultural relics
• 200 subject exhibits for ethnic groups
• 1,000 kinds of ethnic commodities
• 200 kinds of ethnic food
• 800 staff members of national minority origin

You realize that the employment numbers are still probably correct, but the only place you saw any food was in "Inner Mongolia."  In "Inner Mongolia", there were five or so brightly-dressed, early 20-something docents sitting around, only one of whom took an interest in you when you stepped into the yurt. She offered you a menu of five different kinds of Mongolian food. You chose the horse milk liquor, which refluxed for the next hour or so, as you continued to trot (and then canter) around the grounds.

Tibet had more people than anywhere else. In the shadow of a faux lamasery, people were dancing. Almost all onlookers appeared to be staff or friends/family.

In a dimly lit room there was an exquisite exhibit of 80 to 150 lamps spanning more than a thousand years of Chinese history, but who's counting? You wonder where the other 999,850 relics were hiding. Then you remember the big room, called the Main Exhibition Hall. A whole room of trunks. A row of sedan chairs in different styles. "Windmills" for separating the wheat from the chaff. Some of the rooms in this part full of "treasures" were closed, but you could have helped yourself to some of the farm implements. There was one other family there and only a handful of docents. 

Sign after sign declares, in passable Chinglish, something to the effect of, "These people believe in the primitive religion" or "These people believe in ghosts and gods."

The brochure, also in passable Chinglish, says in 6-point font:

The China Nationalities Museum, as the first project completed in the National Olympic Park, is a crucial venue to honor the spirit of "New Beijing, Great Olympics" and display the theme of "Green, High-tech and People's Olympic Games". ...The museum promotes the new concept of "going into daily life, history, culture and nature', to guide the museum's future development and explore the new way of exhibition.

You want to ask: how is that working out? You came to learn about the 少数民族 in Yunnan because you will go there for six days. You come up pretty much empty.