Dr Ho joins us and I learn a little more about him.
Though he was always fascinated by herbal medicine, he was reviled by the Red Guards, who smashed his place up, and he was unable to get back his licence to practise until the start of the ‘Open-Door’ policy in 1985. Even then, he could practise only at public hospitals. Nowadays he will see anyone and only asks people to pay what they can afford.
He was clearly inspired by the work of Dr Joseph Rock, an irascible, dedicated Austro-American botanist who lived and worked in southwest China for 27 years, until forced to leave after the Revolution in 1949. He admired the ethnic minorities and was apprehensive of their domination by the Han Chinese. He compiled an English-Naxi dictionary and sent back to the West a collection of 80,000 botanical specimens.
It was ‘Rock’s Kingdom’, Bruce Chatwin’s report for the New York Times in 1986, that brought Dr Ho to a world audience.
Which is why we’re here today. And as far as everyone at Dr Ho’s is concerned, I’m a regular visitor.
Day Eighty Three : Lijiang
From my hotel window two things compete for space in an otherwise clear blue sky. One is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the other is the great glass and steel tower of the China Construction Bank.
Lijiang is a tale of two cities: one a modern concoction of business district office blocks and shopping malls, the other an immaculately kept old town, with clay-tiled roofs, cobbled streets and a canal system that evokes Venice, Amsterdam or Bruges. Lijiang became rich and famous because of its key position on the Tea-Horse Route from Tibet into China, but its idyllic situation, set comfortably in a shallow bowl of hills, is deceptive. A fault line at the edge of the Tibetan plateau runs below and the ripple effect of the tectonic collision that created the Himalaya has been responsible for over 50 strong earthquakes here in the last 130 years. The most recent, which registered over seven on the Richter scale, hit Lijiang in 1996, killing 300 and injuring 16,000. Many buildings were damaged or destroyed. The majority of them were in the new city.
The wood and stone houses of old Lijiang were built by people who knew about earthquakes and how to withstand them. They remain, thanks to UNESCO money, as an example of how to create harmony, line and proportion on a human scale. The result is a labyrinth of cobbled streets and squares, car free, perfect for walking, but also a victim of their own success. Large-scale preservation of the past is so rare in China that Lijiang has become a big draw, pulling upwards of 3 million tourists a year into an old town of 25,000 people.
It’s around nine o’clock when I set out for breakfast. Wooden shutters are being taken down from shops and cafes. The first tour groups of the day have been disgorged from their coaches and totter awkwardly on the cobblestones behind the upraised yellow flags of their guides. Many of them already wear the dogged, mule-like expressions of those condemned to another day of organized enlightenment.
The agglomeration of gift shops that always accompanies a tourist boom has hit Lijiang like anywhere else, but the shops are small and well kept and the streets clean and sparkling. Feeling slightly ashamed of myself, I choose a cafe offering ‘England Breakfast’. It’s served with wall to wall Sting.
Gorged on egg, bacon, fried bread, toast and many other delights denied to me for several weeks, I finish my fresh-ground Yunnan coffee and explore the area around the main Sifang Square. There are no big vistas here. The streets twist and turn on each other, often running alongside or over the streams of clear, cooling water that flow from Black Dragon Pool at the foot of Elephant Mountain. No wonder that one of the most powerful Naxi deities, and the one they pray to for prosperity, is Shu, the water god.
In this morning of rediscovered pleasures I find a second-hand copy of a classic book on the city, Forgotten Kingdom by Peter Goullart, a Russian-born Frenchman who lived and worked in Lijiang in the 1940s until forced to leave by the zealous xenophobes of the Communist revolution. ‘A book about paradise by a man who lived there for nine years’, says a Times review of 1957.
It contains tantalizing snippets of information that you never find in the guide books: that the Naxi were born gossips and the despair of missionaries; that their preferred poison was black aconite boiled in oil, which was characterized by a paralysis of the larynx. ‘In convulsions the victim could only stare frantically at his helpless friends without being able to utter a word.’
Goullart was particularly impressed by the Naxi women, who ‘silently and persistently, like the roots of growing trees…evolved themselves into a powerful race until they utterly enslaved their men. To marry a Naxi woman was to acquire a life insurance and the ability to be idle for the rest of one’s days.’
Echoes of Namu and the Mosuo women here, and once again evidence that Yunnan’s ethnic minorities have more in common with each other than with the rest of China.
Day Eighty Five : Lijiang
I meet the most famous man in Lijiang outside the traditionally decorated, red lacquered portals of the Naxi Music Centre. ‘Naxi Ancient Music’ is written in English above this doorway, at which people are already gathering, asking when the ticket office opens. A man in his seventies, quite trim, whose quick, lively, intelligent eyes dominate his face, is dealing with fans. He’s darker, darker than most Chinese, dark enough to remind me, with his impish smile, of Desmond Tutu. His hair is black (blacker than might be expected in a man of his age) and brushed forward quite self-consciously. He’s dressed in jeans, smart leather shoes, two sweaters and a jacket. His name is Xuan Ke and he is the conductor of the Naxi Music Orchestra.
Last night he and his orchestra were playing for the Prime Minister of Singapore. In the foyer of the theatre is a photograph of Chinese President Jiang Zemin, with flute, playing with the orchestra on a visit here.
This morning the great man has agreed to show me Lijiang, but as soon as we start talking I know that his own story will be much more interesting. He was born in 1930 and received an early musical training from American Pentecostal missionaries. In 1949, after the victory of Chairman Mao, which he refers to, wryly, as ‘something called liberation’, he became a conductor in Kunming. He wasn’t a Communist, he says, but in a group allied to the Communists. Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign, eight years later, initially seemed good news for people like himself. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom,’ Mao declared, ‘and a hundred schools of thought contend.’
It turned out to be a trap. Having encouraged intellectuals and artists to come out and help the party, Mao, fearing their criticism, turned on them and ordered them to undergo ‘re-education’. Xuan Ke was sent, at the age of 28, to forced labour in a tin mine.
‘Animal living,’ he says, unemotionally. ‘No human rights at all. Animal food, animal living and working a lot, from daybreak to the midnight.’
He was nearly 50 when he was released.
With Deng Xiaoping as leader of China, tradition was no longer seen as a threat, and, while working as an English teacher in a local school, Xuan Ke slowly began to pick up the pieces of his musical career. Many of his friends had died and the most precious of their antique instruments had been hidden, some embedded in walls to prevent them being found and destroyed by the Red Guards.
In 1986 Lijiang was opened to foreigners for the first time since the revolution and, as the years went by, traditional Naxi music became a big draw. Now the rump of the old orchestra, invigorated by younger singers and musicians, plays every night, and the top people come along to hear them.
As we walk through Lijiang, Xuan Ke is frequently recognized and breaks off from his story to shake hands, exchange greetings, pose for photographs and tell jokes.