Shangri La part 1 - Lou
In the 1930’s the American James Rock wrote a series of articles for National Geographic comparing the Chinese town of Zhongdian and the area around it with the legendary Shangri-la. The articles inspired the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton, which was later made into an Academy Award winning movie by Frank Capra. What impressed James Rock about Zhongdian was its isolation, not just geographically, but culturally and, as a result, its isolation from the violence and corruption of the rest of the world. Its inhabitants, although poor, lived in a state of harmony and contentment.
Just before the beginning of the semester, we took a two day trip that felt similar to some of what James Rock must have experienced in Zhongdian, but which began only 45 minutes by bus from Ya’an. Our friends Dai Ou and Pierre invited us to go with them, Lawrence, and a friend of Dai Ou’s named Deng Juan for two days of hiking and a night at a guest house in the town of Wang Yu. Wang Yu is called an “ancient town” because unlike almost everywhere else in China, the old parts haven’t been torn down and replaced. We got up early on a Saturday morning and walked a few blocks to a little place for breakfast. Then we walked around the corner to get a minibus. Dai Ou talked to a couple of drivers and a dispatcher, evidently negotiating our ride, and we got in an old minibus with lumpy seats and stained upholstery. There were a couple of other passengers.
The minibus took off after about ten minutes. The bus stop was right at the edge of town; we drove around the corner and found ourselves in a narrow river valley on a winding road with steep cliffs on one side and a hundred foot drop off on the other. This was where the adventure started. The driver seemed to know no fear. He drove at what felt like top speed around blind curves, leaning on the horn, crossing the center line whenever he felt like it. We thought we were used to this sort of thing in China, but this ride was a new experience. We passed through a few smallish hamlets, never slowing down except for the occasional stop to pick up or drop off a passenger.
After about thirty minutes, the bus pulled over at a bend in the road where a narrow mud and rock road headed off up a narrow, steep sided ravine with a rushing stream at its bottom. We got out and the bus took off leaving us looking up the ravine. The cliffs on either side of it were covered with lush vegetation and the stream was clear. We started walking. The scenery was beautiful. The only sounds were the stream, the birds, and our quiet conversation. The road went up but the grade was fairly gentle.
Soon after we started, we met three people with baskets full of produce on their backs heading to town to sell the fruit of their labors. They told Dai Ou that the place we were headed was a few kilometers up the valley. We continued walking. After a while we began to notice a large number of butterflies of many different colors, patterns, and sizes. They were all around us, sometimes even landing on us. There was one particularly large black variety that seemed to have tufted wings. We started to notice other insects, even a few lizards. The place was a hive of interesting little creatures.
For a long time the only evidence of humans was the road. We passed a building right next to the road that Dai Ou said was the local Communist Party “clubhouse”, according to the sign in front of it, although where the local Communist Party members lived was a mystery. At one point there was an abandoned mine across the valley. There was no indication of what the miners had dug out of the earth. We passed an especially dramatic place where the sides of the valley became vertical and there was a bridge over the creek with railings in the shape of dragons.
After climbing for a while, the road became a little less steep and we started to pass farm houses. The houses were right up against the road, with narrow little fields on either side on the few patches of land that weren’t almost vertical. The only inhabitants of the houses at that time of day were old people and chickens.
We kept walking, going through short steep spots alternating with more or less level places that had a farm house or two, altogether about six inhabited spots, until we got to a place where the valley started to widen and level out. All along the stream had been full of huge boulders, and as we saw the valley widening ahead of us, we saw a couple of naked little boys playing on the boulders and in a stream. As soon as they saw us, they disappeared.
We came to an old dam that had been burst to let the stream flow through. We found out later that it had been built to flood the broad level place in the valley with the intention of breaking it and farming the land whose fertility was increased and rockiness covered with the river silt. We passed through the break in the dam and came out into a paradise of fertile farm land with three or four homesteads and a few farmers working in the fields. The valley was surrounded by steep mountains covered with a lush growth of bamboo and cedar. Ahead and to our left we could see a tall waterfall, the destination of that day’s hike.
We came to a farmhouse where we asked a woman hanging laundry how to get to the waterfall. She directed us across her yard and through a cornfield. We came out at a small reservoir where a man directed us to continue. We passed through a bamboo grove and came to a stream. At that point, the boys we had seen earlier, three this time, appeared and offered to guide us up to the waterfall. Like everyone we had seen, starting with the minibus driver, they were awed and excited to be so close to a bunch of foreigners. They spoke with Dai Ou and Deng Juan but said not a word to any of us. A couple of times one of us would say something to them in our fractured Chinese, which they seemed to think was the most hilarious thing they had ever heard, but they didn’t dare to actually reply.
The boys led us up through the forest on the side of the mountain on a steep trail that eventually came out at a huge boulder next to the pool at the base of the waterfall. It was an awesome and beautiful sight. While we stood and gawked, the boys ran out onto a gravelly sand bar and started skipping stones on the pool.
The waterfall was about a hundred feet high. It wasn’t a large volume of water, but in dropping that distance it created a strong breeze that carried a cold wet mist across the pond. It was a hot day, so despite the wet breeze, Pierre and Dai Ou changed into their bathing suits right away. I followed suit after a few minutes. Gina, Lawrence, and Deng Juan stayed on the rock and started lunch. The water was extremely cold, but invigorating. As I swam toward the waterfall, I could feel the spray from the water fall from twenty or thirty feet away, and then the water pounding on my head. Behind the waterfall was calm water and a damp, shallow cave.
After a half hour or so, we were joined by an old man, presumably the boys’ grandfather. He said a few words and then settled down on the rock to smoke his pipe, something that most old people in China, male and female, seem to enjoy doing. By then the boys had stopped skipping stones and had settled down on the sand bar to surreptitiously watch the strange foreigners.
Eventually it was time to head back down the mountain. We packed up the remains of our lunch, giving some treats to our guides, and walked back down the mountain. It was still early afternoon, so as we retraced our steps, we took in the view again from the opposite direction. But as we passed through the broken dam to start down the path to the main road, we stopped and spent a few minutes looking back at the little valley which seemed so isolated from modern life.
