Out of Eden Walk: Walking through western China

Paul Salopek: This is Mr. Li Gen Fan, a community leader in an ethnic Bai minority village in the province of Yunnan in southwestern China. There are about 2 million Bai. They’re one of 26 different ethnic groups in this province. It’s the most ethnically diverse province in China. It’s kind of a crossroads between Southeast Asia [and] Tibet, in western China. And, this group of people, the Bai, are famous in China for their singing.

You can probably intuit what’s going on between these two songs. So, one was a love song, the first one. The Bai believe that the heart and the liver are kind of love organs. The first one [said], “I love you with all my liver.” And then the second one was basically a song from another partner who sang “Shut Up.” It’s kind of an angry song saying, “Don’t sing to me anymore.” Mr. Li said, “We’re kind of shy, introverted people. We don’t really communicate very well, kind of verbally, you know, but through conversation. But we get our emotions out through song.” And so they have this enormously complex repertoire of songs about culture, songs about personal feelings, songs about work, songs about religion, songs about history. It’s kind of an encyclopedic musical tradition that the Bai have. Very complex.

It’s all of the above. That’s what’s so, kind of, remarkable about it. And, you know, anthropologists have gone there to study Bai singing there. There’s polyphonic singing between men and women that can be flirtatious and actually can be X-rated, which is deeply personal, of course. There’s a kind of ceremonial song done at funerals. There’s songs that kind of celebrate communities. You know, when I was walking through these green hills in southwestern Yunnan and coming into Bai communities, they are kind of quiet. There, people are kind of minding their own business, going up and down the alleyways. But occasionally, you hear these bursts of music coming from people’s lungs. And Mr. Li, when he sings, he would spread his feet wide. He’d throw out his chest, hold his hands down by his hips like a gunslinger, and just extrude this extraordinary human sound that had this enormous range. It really is an amazing thing to see and listen to, and quite beautiful.

Joseph Rock, what a character. Almost lost to history but revived by writers like Bruce Chatwin, who found him fascinating. He’s a cranky, cantankerous botanist born in Austria in the late 19th century to a butler who’s the son of a butler. And he basically escaped a miserable childhood in Europe that had, you know, hierarchical, almost feudal social structures, and ended up in remote, southwestern China collecting plants for the US Agriculture Department. He was originally sent there — self-taught botanist, he had a secondary school education — to find blight-resistant chestnut trees. But what he ended up doing is everything else. He collected thousands of plants, hundreds of animals. He helped identify 700 species of rhododendron. And then, even more extraordinary, is he learned local languages. He became one of the crucial chroniclers of these threatened cultures in southwestern China. He basically spent 30-plus years riding horses and being carried in a litter, turning himself basically from kind of a butler’s son in Europe into kind of a knight or prince in another feudal society, in this time in China, being carried in a litter through these mountain passes and documenting their culture, their religion, their belief systems, their script. And he did this to such a degree that his work was canonical. Anthropologists today even consult Joseph Rock’s work.

He was a strange character. I mean, on the one hand, he was deeply empathetic with the Indigenous people of the mountains of western China. He saw himself as a defender of their culture. On the other hand, he was kind of a man of his time. He had racist attitudes to mainstream Chinese. He didn’t like cities. He hated modern life. He kind of had this romantic Orientalist version of Asia. He hated his botanical competitors. He hated his editors at National Geographic, for whom he wrote articles. He had lots of grudges, Dr. Rock, and he also carried around weapons. At sunset, he would fire his coal pistols into the air, ostensibly, to chase away bandits. But I think it was just a power trip for him — complicated guy.

This corner of the planet, this corner of the world is so extraordinarily beautiful. It’s one of the most physically beautiful landscapes I’ve walked through on this long walking project: 17,000, 18,000-foot peaks covered by snow, the color of lavender in the distance. Spruce and pine forests, you know, bursting with mushrooms and wildflowers and big rivers the color of jade. It’s bewitching. And I think that it even bewitched me a little bit. And it’s no surprise that outside writers, non-Chinese writers and non-Chinese filmmakers used Rock’s work for the basis for the Shangri-La legend. The “Lost Horizon” book that came out in the 1930s, this kind of utopian world of kind of quasi-Tibetan people who live forever. This is where it came from. And Joseph Rock brought it to the outside world, again through this very romantic prism. And so imagine that you’ve passed over this snowy mountain pass; there are Tibetan prayer flags that are crystallized with ice flapping under a pale sun, and the wind is as sharp as razor blades. It’s so cold. And you look down into a sunlit valley, and there are the domes of a Buddhist monastery, kind of shining in the sun. That is Muli, that is the place where Rock’s heart lay. Sadly, for Rock, he had to leave China after the revolution of ‘49. He ended up in Hawaii as kind of a retired scholar, where, according to his obituary, he died alone — he had no family, he never married — far away from this land that he loved so much.