Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

During the two-month season in early summer, more than a million people comb the alpine hillsides for the “Himalayan Viagra,” which could earn an adept picker more than most Chinese villagers earn in a year. 36Mycologists warn that the fungus is threatened by massive, unsustainable harvesting. The grasslands are being trampled into dust. Scarcity has even led to gun battles and killings over prime fungal turf. 37Parasite hunting is a hard and destructive way to make a living.

As the road climbed, the views became more spectacular, the people looked poorer, and the going got harder. Tarmac gave way to gravel, gravel to mud. The gradients got steeper and the roadside drops more perilous. Here and there we navigated the debris of recent landslides. Small puddles became extended stretches of mud. In most cars this would be the point to either turn back or get stuck. But our four-wheel drive ground onward and upward, skidding and squelching through the sludge.

Delays on these treacherous narrow roads sometimes lasted days when big vehicles broke down, causing backups for tens of miles. You could tell when a traffic jam was serious because drivers left their cabs and played cards at the side of the road. When it was really bad they gave up waiting altogether and returned to their cabs to sleep.

We stopped to try to help a bus that had been marooned all day on the steep, slippery mountain road. We towed and pushed and shoveled for more than an hour, but it would not budge. The passengers faced a night stuck on a hellish road while we headed off in search of another paradise. The rough going continued for several hours until the provincial boundary, where asphalt marked our transition from dirt-poor Yunnan to upwardly mobile Sichuan. Instead of bumping along at 15 kilometers per hour, we could cruise at 50.

The muzzy feeling in my temples told me we were picking up altitude as well as speed. We left the forests behind and the landscape grew bleaker and the air thinner. Just outside Sangdui Village we stopped to take in the view from a Tibetan stupa at a mountain pass. A sign said we had hit 4,500 meters. The wind blew hard and cold, the clouds looked close enough to touch, and the only sound was the tolling of yak bells. The desolate landscape of barren hills, rocky plains, and the odd patch of snow appeared unwelcoming, but it seemed closer than anywhere on our trip to Hilton’s description of the Tibetan Plateau: “The loftiest and least hospitable part of the earth’s surface … two miles high even in its lowest valleys, a vast, uninhabited and largely unexplored region of windswept upland.”

After ten hours on the road, we hit Daocheng, a traditional Tibetan town. Monasteries and stupa dotted the bleak landscape, the words of a Buddhist incantation were written in giant stone characters on the hills, and every home had a shrine with a picture of the tenth Panchen Lama. The people here were obviously poor: their brightly colored clothes were ragged and many of the buildings looked as if they would provide little shelter against the cold of winter, when temperatures can plunge below minus 20°C.

We spent the night at the best hotel in town, which had no heating in the rooms and provided hot water only from 7 p.m. to midnight. The next morning my assistant greeted me with a wheeze and a raspy hello. She couldn’t sleep well because of the thin air. The only vehicle we could hire was an old minivan. The suspension was so bad that we bumped and bounced even on good roads. On the dirt tracks, our teeth rattled and I had to grip a handle to stop my head from being jolted against the roof. At the first tollbooth, the battery died and I had to push-start the van.

Soon after, we neared our destination. The approach to this Shangri-La was similar to that described by Conway, the world-weary narrator of Lost Horizon :

The mountain wall continued to drop nearly perpendicularly, into a cleft that could only have been the result of some cataclysm in the far past. The floor of the valley, hazily distant, welcomed the eye with greenness, sheltered from the winds and surveyed rather than dominated by the lamasery. It looked to Conway a delightfully favoured place.

The road plunged into a previously hidden gorge, and the landscape underwent a sudden, spectacular transformation. Bleak mountain slopes gave way to forest, fertile terracing, and a community of Tibetan homes and temples. Again, it was just as in the novel:

The valley was nothing less than an enclosed paradise of amazing fertility, in which the vertical difference of a few thousand feet spanned the whole gulf between temperate and tropical.

Yading was not mentioned in any of my English guidebooks. Compared with Zhongdian and Lijiang, it was remote, spiritual, and—because of the altitude—disorienting. But this pilgrims’ route was in the early stages of being harnessed to the tourist trail. New hotels were under construction. Women were arriving from faraway villages to work as waitresses, masseuses, and prostitutes. The local government planned to build a cable car up to one of the sacred sites. The party secretary of Yading, A Wangsiliang, a cheerful fellow with straggly, matted hair and a beaming smile, was optimistic. As well as being a communist, he was a Tibetan, a Buddhist, a caterpillar fungus collector, and a cautious convert to development.

“Our biggest source of happiness is the increase in tourists. Although their rubbish hurts the environment, they bring money,” he said with an infectious grin. Even when I asked what the downside might be, he did not stop smiling. “Our main worry is that the authorities will seize our land to build hotels, just as they did in the other Shangri-La.”

The town had just started a new pony-trekking business. We saddled up for a one-hour ride along the pilgrims’ trail. It felt a little sacrilegious. This was a holy place. The trees were draped with scarves, the roadsides lined with cairns, and every few hundred meters there was a stack of slate etched with scriptures. Farther on we dismounted and climbed a steep slope to a jade-colored tarn. It was utterly tranquil. The only sound was the distant thunder of avalanches caused by melting snow on Xiannairi Mountain. Apart from a herder, who looked at me curiously as he passed by with a yak, and my interpreter, there was not a soul around. There was nothing to worry about, nothing to hurry toward. In this environment, even my Barnet cynicism seemed to fade. Shangri-La was not so daft after all. Imagining or chasing after a lost ideal was surely a positive human instinct. Hilton evoked the mood perfectly:

There came over him, too, as he stared at that superb mountain, a glow of satisfaction that there were such places still left on earth, distant, inaccessible, as yet unhumanised.

I took a deep breath of the thin mountain air. I wanted to absorb the moment. It felt sublime, close to paradise. But my reverie was cut short when my assistant threw up. The altitude was taking its toll. She apologized, but I was the one who felt guilty. I had been too self-absorbed to notice the symptoms of mountain sickness. It was time to get back down to earth.

We drove down from the peaks as a thunderstorm ripped open the sky above the bleak Tibetan Plateau. After it passed, we hit Kangding, where work was under way on the world’s second-highest airport, sited well above the snow line at 4,000 meters. This was not just south of the clouds, it was above them. Even on the runway, the planes would be halfway to their final cruising altitude. The airport was part of a huge new transport network that the Chinese government and neighboring states were putting in place to develop the entire Mekong region, encompassing Yunnan, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma. With the construction of roads and railways, asphalt and iron were piercing their way through mountains and forests. China’s thirst for hydropower was driving developers into ever more remote areas of Yunnan. 38The Mekong was being widened for container ships. With Yunnan’s rivers marked out as a base for hydropower development, half a million people were due to be relocated over the following ten years, and ancient valley refuges for biodiversity were threatened with flooding. 39Shangri-La was undergoing a transformation.