Minority Report

The Lonely Planet guidebook states that if you only have time to visit one province in China, it should be Yunnan.  Those are strong words, considering the number of attractive and famous provinces there are in this country.  So Di and I made it our next stop after Guangxi to see what all the fuss was about.  As China’s most south-westerly province, Yunnan borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.  The terrain by those countries is therefore more Southeast Asian-like; it’s mainly tropical rainforests and jungle.  In contrast Yunnan’s northern border is shared with Tibet, giving this part of the province snowy mountains and emerald coloured lakes which is a far cry from its southern parts.  However what draws most people to this province is not its varied landscapes, it’s its varied people.  Of China’s 55 registered minorities (non-Han Chinese, as the Han are by far the largest ethnic group in China), 25 live in Yunnan.

We took a flight from Guilin to Kunming, as Di wasn’t too keen on taking another overnight train.  We were planning to go visit Shilin (which literally means stone forest) about 90 mins out of town but after doing some research we decided not to.  The reason being it was their big national holiday in China, with everyone having time off between Oct 1- 7.  The tourist sites here are already overcrowded, and travellers put Shilin as one of the places that was insanely so.  We could only imagine how bad it would be with the whole country being on holiday, so we just hung around the modern city of Kunming for a couple of uneventful yet relaxing days instead.

Afterwards, we took a bus to Dali, which lies on the western edge of Erhai lake.  Dali is an old walled city whose inhabitants are mostly of the Bai minority ethnic group.  They don’t have a written language but their spoken one is alive and strong.  Dali’s layout sort of reminded us of a lot of the Middle Eastern cities we visited, with an old walled city surrounded by a new town.  The old city here though was extremely navigable with wide, clean cobblestone roads in a grid pattern and nicely restored buildings, unlike the maze of dusty alleyways in the Arab medinas.  Though done nicely, it was quite touristy here, with all the shops and restaurants completely catering to visitors, especially with it being the national holiday.  So the next day we hired a driver to take us village to village around Erhai lake instead to get away from the chaos.  He told us the beautiful lake had a 45 km circumference, and on it he took us to 4 Bai villages: Xizhou, Shaping, Shuanglang and Wase.  Both Xizhou and Shaping had very lively morning markets taking place, with all the buyers being locals and virtually no tourists around, which was a nice change from Dali’s scene.  It was cool to see the Bai ladies wearing traditional clothing, each with a straw basket strapped onto their backs and colourful wraps on their heads, buying food for the week.  They would buy their vegetables or whatever, and then turn their back toward the vendor who would then fill their basket; kinda neat.  Shuanglang was near the northern end of the lake and you could tell that it’s poised to become a more touristy destination.  The first few backpacker cafes serving lattes have opened up with French dudes manning them, and the town is starting to slowly renovate its properties on the water to be more traveller friendly (ie make them souvenir shops).  The above picture is from this region of the lake.

The next day we took another bus to the town of Lijiang, a UNESCO world heritage site just a few hours north of Dali. Lijiang is home to the Naxi people, descendants of Tibetan nomads who decided to settle in this region of Yunnan.  They, like the Yao peoples we met in Guangxi, are also matrilineal with children living with their mothers and all property being inherited by women.  The man in the relationship would spend nights at the woman’s house, but in the daytime he would return home to his mother’s to live and work.  The Naxi are also the last people on Earth to use a hieroglyphic writing system.  The pictographs they use are pretty wild; you can check them out on our flickr site to see what I mean.  It would take years for me to write anything with their system of pictographs, especially a love letter, since the ones I write Di are so long and poetic and heartfelt and sweet and sensitive and emotional.  Anyways, back to Lijiang, it also has a very pretty and picturesque old-town like Dali, surrounded by a new and modern city.  In fact, it might be a little too pretty and look a little too perfect to feel really authentic.  However I can’t really blame the town for this as an earthquake in 1996 measuring over 7 on the Richter scale knocked down much of the Lijiang, killing more than 300 and injuring over 16000 in the process.  Thus the rebuilt structures are no more than 14 years old instead of a few hundred.  However the rows of stores selling tourist kitsch don’t help the overly commercial atmosphere, especially during holiday season.  So what Di and I did instead was wake up really early one morning to wander around town before the first tour bus arrived or many travellers awoke.  What we found was a beautiful scene, full of inviting alleyways, clean canals, stone bridges and pretty parks.  It’s nice to see some attempts of preserving ‘old China’.  However once the shopkeepers opened their doors, the alleyways began to fill with hungry consumers, not unlike the old cities of Rhodes in Greece or Marrakesh in Morocco.  That was our cue to head out of town, so we went north about 10 km to a village called Baisha, where the famous Dr. Ho of The Clinic of Chinese Herbs in the Jade Dragon Mountains of Lijiang was still practicing.  We actually went to check out the village, only realizing later that this 87 year old Taoist physician was here, complete with the white Fu Man Chu beard and all.  He’s actually pretty famous, with documentaries on the BBC and National Geographic being done about him, and authors like Bruce Chatwin writing about him.  His office is lined with newspaper articles from all over the world about him and his knowledge of curative herbs, many of which he grows in his own clinic.  Others he actually handpicks from the slopes of the Jade Dragon Mountains.  What’s even more awesome is that he practices for free, only accepting donations if you are so inclined.  Oh and he speaks perfect English as well.  There were stacks of guestbooks full of appreciative and thankful comments from his many international patients, and even American and European doctors who thanked him for curing their patients’ leukemias and such.  We were going to ask for some of his practitioner advice, but I was sure he didn’t have any herbs to cure ugly so I really had nothing to ask for myself.  Di also was in good health so she just asked to take a quick picture with him and we left, leaving him to mix some herbs for a village woman who was complaining of a cough.  Supposedly Di had heard of Dr. Ho’s teacher, as he wrote the definitive book on Chinese herbal medicine.  In hindsight I really should have asked him a question, like if he had a herb mix that could help me grow some facial hair, specifically a goatee.  Dammit, next time.