Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (20 page)

The old Naxi kingdom had emerged in a world that no longer exists. It was founded during the time of Byzantium and the Vikings in Europe, the Crusaders and the Baghdad caliphate. To its immediate east were their kinsmen in the kingdom of Dali, ruling over much of today’s Yunnan. A few hundred miles to the south were the ancestors of the first Burmese, a new people who were just establishing a foothold along the Irrawaddy valley. And to the west was the great Tibetan empire that then stretched all the way to the desert cities of Central Asia.

To the north, in the area that is now Gansu province, near Mongolia, was another kingdom, a much bigger one, the kingdom of the Tanguts. The Tanguts spoke a language, like Naxi, that was also related both to Tibetan and to Burmese. A thousand years ago they dominated the overland trade between China proper and Central Asia, over the Silk Road, including trade in the war-horses that were essential to the Chinese as they sought to fend off Mongol attacks. Though heavily drawn to things Chinese, the Tanguts sought as well to maintain a separate identity. Their king in the early eleventh century decreed that all his countrymen had to adopt a new and severe hairstyle, something like a tonsure, to mark themselves as different from the Han Chinese next door. They knew they were coming under Chinese influence, but were keen to keep their independence. They were devout Buddhists and called their kingdom by the wonder fully outlandish name Phiow-bjij-lhjij-lhjij, which translates roughly as ‘The Great State of the White and the Lofty’. Their end came with the Mongols. They had incurred the wrath of Genghis Khan, who then died at a siege of their capital. But the Mongols pressed on, overwhelming the Tanguts and decimating their kingdom so thoroughly, slaughtering untold hundreds of thousands of people, that next to nothing was known of them until Russian and British archaeologists discovered their lost cities, buried deep under the desert sands, in the early twentieth century.

Further back in time, the links between this world of Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples and the Chinese civilization to the east become more tenuous. Two thousand years ago much of what is today Yunnan was the home of a still little-understood Bronze-Age culture known as the Dian, based near modern-day Kunming, where their tombs were first found a hundred years ago. They were known at the time to the Han dynasty and were said by the contemporary Chinese official and court historian Sima Qian to have become willing allies of the Chinese in their campaigns against Vietnam. In the first century
BC
, during the Chinese search for a southwest passage to India, the Dian came under tremendous military pressure, finally allowing China to establish outposts very close to where the Burmese border is today.

Exactly who the Dian were, no one knows as they did not leave any written records. But in their tombs archaeologists have discovered other evidence of their civilization, including magnificent bronze drums, engraved images of war and human sacrifice. On some of these drums, their rivals to the east–the pig-tailed Kunming people–are shown being captured and beheaded by triumphant bun-haired Dians.

Going further back, the nature and fate of local civilizations become more mysterious still. In 1986, construction workers in the village of Sanxingdui, in western Sichuan, not far from Lijiang, accidentally came across burial pits containing thousands of bronze, jade and gold objects of high quality, some of enormous size, together with elephant tusks and stone implements. They include eerie masks with big eyes and long protruding noses. They were remarkable not only for their antiquity (they were dated to around 1200
BC
) but also for their entirely unknown style. According to traditional textbooks, Chinese civilization at that time was confined to the Yellow River basin, a thousand miles northeast. But here in the southwest was another, wholly distinct civilization, seemingly unconnected. Until this discovery, Sichuan, like Yunnan, had been assumed to have been a cultural backwater, the realm of barbarous tribes, like Scandinavia at the time of the Greeks. Some speculate that the people of Sanxingdui were the ancestors of some of today’s Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples, though little is known for certain. Their civilization may have been a direct forerunner of the later Tibeto-Burman-speaking kingdoms, such as Yelang and Dian, which flourished in Guizhou and Yunnan 2,000 years ago. But no written records have been found. It is a lost civilization.

There are other mysteries. From Lijiang the pasturelands extend north to western Sichuan, the ancient site of the Sanxingdui, and then to the desert world of what is today Xinjiang or Chinese Turkestan. The people of Xinjiang are now a mix of Uighurs, who speak a Turkish language, and recent Han Chinese immigrants. But until medieval times, the people of this area spoke Tocharian, an Indo-European language, much closer to Iranian and even English than Chinese. Here have been found the mummified remains of people whose physical features and clothes suggest an affinity with (for want of a better word) the ‘Caucasian’ peoples further west. Chinese officialdom are not keen to stress the racial heterogeneity of the region’s past or encourage new theories that there may have been a significant number of Indo-European speakers on the very edges of ancient China, Indo-Europeans who may have brought with them chariot technology, something the Chinese would like to think they developed themselves.

Pliny the Elder records that an embassy from Taprobane (Ceylon) to Emperor Claudius described a place called ‘Seres’, some where in the direction of China, whose inhabitants ‘exceeded the ordinary human height, had flaxen hair, and blue eyes, and made an uncouth sort of noise by way of talking’. Some speculate that this have been a reference to the ancient Caucasian populations of the Tarim Basin. No one knows. Many of today’s Uighurs, though speaking Turkish, carry features that could be the result of an ancient admixture with these long-time inhabitants. Some even suggest that the genetic legacy of these people reaches further south, to Yunnan and the Burma borderlands.

In Tibet, too, there are echoes of prehistoric migrations, dating back millennia. For a long time scholars believed that the Tibetan plateau, so high and inaccessible, was one of the last places to be inhabited by humans. But very recent research is showing something radically different, that parts of Tibet, not far from Lijiang, were places of refuge during the dramatic climate changes of more than 10,000 years ago. Other research suggests that people today speaking Tibetan, Burmese and related languages like Naxi may be connected not only to their neighbours in Asia, but through the Bering Straits to the final wave of Siberians who journeyed to the New World.

Lost races and civilizations would give rise to medieval kingdoms, followed by Mongol domination and, only in modern times, the coming of the Han Chinese.

One evening, I decided to try a ‘must-see’ attraction in Lijiang: the Naxi Orchestra, an orchestra of old men, some Naxi, most well into their eighties. They were advertised as ‘proud guardians of centuries-old ceremonial music that had once flourished through out China’ but now survived only in ‘these isolated foothills of southern China’. I bought a ticket at the entrance and walked past a hall with photographs of the famous people who have heard them perform on tour, from Norway’s King Harald to Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong. The concert hall was large and less than half-full and when I arrived the old men were already gathering on stage. They wore plimsolls with their silk robes and several were wearing ski-jackets as well to protect them from the draught.

One of the musicians spoke in both Chinese and English (there was a scattering of non-Chinese-looking tourists), making jokes and introducing the various pieces. I know little about Chinese music, but the music the Naxi orchestra played did not seem particularly different from classical Chinese music I had heard else where. He explained, however, that they were using special and antique instruments, and that they were part of a tradition that had arrived with the armies of Kublai Khan. They still played songs from medieval times, he said, and were the last in China to do so. During the Cultural Revolution, the performers had to bury their instruments to keep them from being destroyed. By the late 1980s they were performing publicly again, and now were a big draw.

Another attraction was the Dongba Museum on the outskirts of town. The Dongba are the priests and scholars of the Naxi people. The Naxi have their own peculiar tradition, perhaps related to the indigenous Bon religion of Tibet. The Dongba are keepers of traditional knowledge and perform a ritual function, leading important ceremonies. Their scriptures, some over a thousand years old, are written in their hieroglyphic script, and include hundreds of works of history, medicine, astronomy, literature and philosophy, very few of which have been translated into English.

During the Cultural Revolution the Dongba had been persecuted as ‘cow devils and snake spirits’. Now they were propped up as a tourist attraction. There wasn’t much to see at the museum, which seemed a sleepy place (I was there at lunch time), with ‘ritual instruments’ stored behind glass cases. I saw a list of some of their epics and they included ‘The Migration of the Herdsmen’ and ‘The War Between Black and White’. The museum area was said to be a sacred site of Naxi culture, but nothing very sacred seemed to be happening when I was there, only a few Chinese tourists paying Dongba priests in conical hats to write their names or even a funny saying in their hieroglyphic script.

Over the past ten years the number of tourists visiting Lijiang has increased from fewer than two million a year to nearly five million. It is hard to see how the town can avoid becoming anything other than an amusement park. Overall, the number of tourists arriving in Yunnan is estimated at well into the tens of millions a year (overwhelmingly domestic tourists), and new airports, railways and six-lane high ways are springing up by the month. The tourist industry has become a fifth of the province’s economy. Given the extreme poverty and violent repression of not so long ago, perhaps people don’t mind putting on a show or having their culture made into a lure for money. It was hard to say. One of the Dongba priests who spoke some English smiled when I asked him this. ‘Without the tourists I’ll have no income,’ he said, ‘but I hate writing for them, I feel it’s an insult to our traditions.’

It wasn’t until my second day in Lijiang that I fully emerged from the old town and into ‘the new city’. My first night I had made it as far as the Stone Bridge and the giant watermill. I knew then that I was at the edge of the old town and that a more normal city was just ahead: I could see cars and the lights of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the distance. But I was discouraged by the swarm of people in front of me taking pictures of the watermill and turned around.

On this second day, though, I took a side route out into the ordinary world (I thought of Jim Carrey in
The Truman Show
), and was soon braving traffic, not a single costumed person in sight. The weather was perfect, cool and sunny, and snow swirled around the 17,000-foot Jade Dragon Snow Mountain ahead of me. The new city looked as prosperous as any town in Europe or North America. On the pavement, men and women were selling baked potatoes everywhere and sticks with grilled meat. Some of the sellers were Muslim Uighurs in skullcaps and leather jackets. Everyone seemed to know one another. There was an easy informality. Groups were chatting away, people greeting one another. The faces were different than in the old town, darker and longer and more Tibetan. Many of the people could easily have been Burmese. In a huge car park, Naxi or Tibetan men and women were loading giant lorries with wicker baskets full of vegetables. A shop nearby sold jeans, another sold kitchen appliances. Loud techno music boomed out from a third shop, selling CDs.

The Naxi kingdom was essentially unknown in the West until the early twentieth century, when two men, the American botanist Joseph Rock and the White Russian doctor Peter Goullart, lived and travelled around the area. Rock was the son of an Austrian manservant and from an early age took to a life at sea. He journeyed around the world before winding up in Hawaii, where, without any training, he established himself as the local botanical authority. He wrote three books on local flora and then in the 1920s went to Burma in search of a plant to cure leprosy.

It was during his travels in the Burma–Yunnan borderlands that he ‘discovered’ Lijiang and from Lijiang ventured on to the even more remote and smaller kingdoms of Muli, Choni and Yungning, studying plants and sending off thousands of specimens to European gardens. In 1933, he told a
New York Times
reporter that the Naxi were ‘one of the extraordinary races or tribes surviving in the world today’. An article he wrote around that time in
National Geographic
would inspire the American novelist James Hilton to invent ‘Shangri-la’ for his novel
Lost Horizon
. Rock’s subsequent book
The Ancient Na-Khi Kingdom of South-West China
was perhaps one of the most eccentric ever published by Harvard University Press, with strange digressions and pages of genealogies. Ezra Pound was a fan and drew on Rock’s writings for his Cantos.

A couple of Westerners, despite warnings, ventured ever further, towards the Liangshan Mountains that formed the border between Yunnan and Sichuan, then notorious for its brigands and hostile Yi tribal peoples. They were Teddy and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of the former president, who came on a hunting expedition in 1928. They were amongst the first Westerners ever to see a panda. They also become the first to kill one, an old male who didn’t know that he should fear the Americans and ‘that didn’t even make a sound when it was shot’. The panda was later stuffed and sent to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Part of this countryside north of Lijiang is also home to the closely related but more rustic Mosuo people. The Chinese have long been fascinated by the idea of female warriors and tales of gender equality in these distant southwestern lands, and even more fascinated by accounts of local sexual promiscuity. The Mosuo have a special reputation for sexual promiscuity and this too is now being used to attract the tourist yuan.