Recently, and controversially, the Chinese authorities moved a lot of the stones to build lavatories, but I’m told there was such an outcry that the ground was reconsecrated after the work was done. This morning a regular stream of pilgrims walks, and in some cases crawls, around the temple, each circumambulation guaranteeing more merit points in the next life.
I buy a stone, make my prayer and place it in a wall.
Time to say farewell to Duker, a helpful and patient guide with a good sense of humour. He’s a true Tibetan. His father is a nomadic farmer 60 miles from here. An aunt helped educate him at a monastery school and as soon as he learnt English he knew he would never return to the nomad’s life. He fled to India for a while and learnt more about Tibetan tradition and culture in Dharamsala then he ever did in Tibet. Now he recognizes the importance of learning Chinese and his great hope for his son is that he will be truly international.
‘At home in Lhasa or Oxford or Beijing.’
The road accompanies a meandering stream through a pleasant tree-lined valley. About 20 miles (32 km) from Yushu, the bubbling, fresh flow is swept into a faster, darker river, which will carry it 3500 miles (5600 km) from here to the shores of the East China Sea. It will also take us back into the Himalaya. Its name here is Tongtian He, the ‘River to Heaven’, but we know it as the Yangtze-Kiang, the longest river in Asia.
Yunnan, China
Day Seventy Six : Shigu to the Tiger Leaping Gorge
In eastern Tibet and western Yunnan something quite dramatic happens to the Himalaya. They change direction. Crushed up against two unyielding plateaux, the world’s mightiest mountain range meets its match and is turned inexorably southwards. The meltwaters of the Tibetan plateau, gratefully unleashed, pour south through a series of plunging, often impenetrable gorges, to spill into the Bay of Bengal or the South China Sea.
All except one.
At a small town called Shigu, some 100 miles into Yunnan, the Yangtze, like the Himalaya, changes direction, a quirk of geography that Simon Winchester, in his book The River at the Centre of the World, regards as being responsible for the very existence of what we know as China.
Having carved its way off the plateau and running hard alongside the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawaddy, the Yangtze-Kiang, now called the Jinsha Jiang, River of Golden Sand, meets an obstruction. A thousand miles of tumbling water heading for Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin is, within a few hundred yards, spun round to the north and, though it twists and turns and tries to find its way south again, it is now effectively a Chinese river, heading east to create the enormous bowl of fertility and prosperity that is the heart and soul of the Middle Kingdom.
Such is the fame of the Great Bend at Shigu that I expect to see a battleground of the elements, some evidence of a cataclysmic confrontation between rock and water; but the Yangtze goes meekly, and Cloud Mountain, which blocks its way, is little more than a large hill. Sandbanks rise from the river and Shigu itself is a warm, sleepy little backwater.
Maybe it’s worn out by its history. Shigu means ‘Stone Drum’, which refers to a marble tablet commemorating the epic defeat of Tibetan invaders that took place here in 1548. It describes ‘heads heaped like grave mounds’, ‘blood like rain’ and ‘dykes choked with armour’. Another memorial reminds us that Mao’s famous Long Marchers, pursued by the Nationalist army, crossed the Yangtze at Shigu in 1936. It took four days and nights to get all 18,000 of them across.
Popular legend believes that the limestone buttress of Cloud Mountain that turned the Yangtze north was put there by the Emperor Da Yu, with precisely that intention, some 4000 years ago.
There’s a huge tourist car park by the river with restaurant attached. Early on this Monday morning it’s quiet and there’s only one bus parked up, but I’m told that the rest of the time Shigu makes a very good living from Da Yu and China’s most famous U-turn.
No sooner has Da Yu’s carefully placed mountain done its work than the river is flung into the thrashing, frothing, unbelievably turbulent passage of a 13,000-foot (3960 m) ravine known as Tiger Leaping Gorge. Despite the fact that the escaping tiger that gave it its name would have had to leap a half-mile or more to cross it, legend is as important as fact in China and this is the name by which it is known, loved and increasingly visited.
At Quiaotou, a few miles downstream from Shigu, they’re pushing an ambitious new road through the gorge. This will be the easy option: the Low Road, but we’re going to walk the High Road, a trekker’s trail that clings to the sheer side of the mountain. Our guide, Li Yuan, is a tall, stooped figure with close-cropped, greying hair and a livid scar running down one side of his face. He has six horses to carry our equipment. They’re waiting patiently on the edge of town, tiny specks beside an army of bulldozers and earth movers. Adding a touch of surreality, women of the local Yi minority step daintily through the rubble on their way to market, dressed in sweepingly long, bright dresses, huge silver earrings and square, black hats, perched, like mortarboards, on the back of their heads.
We purchase tickets for the two-day walk from a small tourist centre beside which is a map of where we’re going and a warning in English that ‘Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the most dangerous gorges in the world which is not convenient to sail’, before concluding poetically, ‘However there is a kind of beauty making of magnificence tugging of people’s heartstrings’.
Before we can have our heartstrings tugged, we have to survive a mile-long walk along the road out of town, as coaches swish by, stirring up clouds of dust. As we cough our way along in their wake, we can at least feel morally superior to the bus-bound tourist and soon we can feel physically superior as well, as our track winds up the hillside and the road slips out of sight below. We climb steadily upwards through scrubby woodland with big views of the southern end of the gorge unrolling below. Following a stone-built irrigation channel, we arrive at a farmhouse, in whose courtyard we loosen our boots and sit down at a table set with bowls of walnuts, sunflower seeds and crisp, delicious pears as round as apples.
The farm also has rooms and is run by Li Yuan’s wife. Like him she is quietly efficient, attentive and smiles a lot. She’s also a fine cook, providing us with a sumptuous lunch of rice, fresh mushrooms, liver and green chillies, kidney, pork, tomato and egg and a bowl full of quivering grey tubes that no-one touches.
They’re both from the Naxi (pronounced Na-hee) people, one of the rich mix of ethnic minorities in Yunnan.
Lunch is easily walked off on a thigh-stretchingly steep climb known as the 28 Bends. Trudging upwards in a tight zigzag, I count off each one carefully and still find another 20 left at the end. The reward is a long, level pathway following an old trade route along which horses from Tibet were exchanged for tea from Yunnan. It leads through warm slopes of camphor, bamboo and pine, across a stream, then downhill through a grove of walnut trees. By now the valley has become a gorge, and I have to concentrate carefully on the increasingly narrow and precipitous trail. It’s narrow and the drop precipitous. Far below are the angry, white-whipped waters of the Yangtze, dropping 700 feet (213 m) in a dozen miles. A lethal series of 21 rapids took many lives before two Chinese made the first passage of the river in 1986, entirely encased in a sealed rubber capsule. Sometimes the water is so far away and so hemmed in by mountainside that we can only guess at its ferocity from the distant roar.