I must admit that there is an extra element of confusion, which is nothing to do with the Dongba, for at precisely the same time that devils are being cast out in Yunnan, England are contesting the Rugby Union World Cup Final in Sydney. While working flat out to set up equipment, change film, filters and lights when necessary, Peter has his mobile phone on and progress of the game is being texted through to him from a pub in England.
Meanwhile, we turn our attention to the Dongba’s young assistants, who are preparing to sacrifice two chickens.
The birds have their legs trussed and, after being anointed with water, their necks are cut and the blood drained into a bowl.
‘14-5, England,’ hisses Pete.
The chickens are dangled over the fire and the air fills with the smell of scorched feathers. The two assistants, one boy and one girl, seem uncertain what to do next and they lay down the blackened chickens and wait for the Dongba to help them out. Their confusion is hardly surprising. Tradition dictates that ancient scriptures are only communicated to males, and then not until the Dongba who communicates them is over 75 years old. So the chicken’s fate is currently in the hands of a girl who can’t know what to do, and a boy who won’t know what to do for another ten years.
The ceremony now shifts inside to a room with a fire and a candle-lit altar. As he makes various moves, the Dongba peers closely at an old book of pictographic texts, rather like someone following the instructions on a new video.
At one point he lays the book down and fumbles around. We watch in some suspense, as he reaches deep into his robes, only to produce a cigarette, which he lights up before carrying on reading.
For what seems like an interminable time he moves around the fire, passing chickens over the flame, before indicating to his assistants to fetch him a big black cooking bowl. The bowl is filled with water and the hapless, still-feathered chickens (which some of us think are not absolutely dead) are dropped in and imprecations muttered. At the edge of the firelight, behind the crouching Dongba, I can see Peter, face pale and eyes round as saucers.
As we come to the end of a roll of film he has time to get the news out.
‘14-all! Extra time.’
What follows, as events in Lijiang and Sydney become inextricably entwined, are 20 of the more bizarre minutes of my life. Two rituals on continents thousands of miles from each other are approaching their climax, and as the Dongba becomes more agitated, Peter veers between ecstasy and anguish.
‘17-14!’
It must be all over.
‘17-17!’
It clearly isn’t.
All I know is that the night air has turned very cold and the shaman, lit by a flickering firelight, is whirling around like a madman, eyes staring, sword in one hand and finger-cymbals in the other, as the news comes through.
‘20-17! Whistle’s gone!’
Our reactions have necessarily had to be whispered, like partisans in an occupied country, but now it’s impossible not to let out a whoop of joy.
The Dongba, finishing his dance, leaps in the air with the athleticism of a much younger man and comes to a standstill, acknowledging our appreciation with a broad smile.
Intense as the ceremony has been (for many reasons), I don’t think any of us felt the sensation of the supernatural presence that Peter Goullart had described so vividly. But a week or so after we got back, Basil called me with his usual report on the photos he’d taken. No problems, except for all those taken with a flash at the Dongba’s ceremony. Despite his camera being fully charged up, all the prints came back over-exposed and burnt out. It has happened to him once before, when photographing the Ghost Festival in Penang. All his shots were fine except those taken when the shaman entered a trance.
What’s more, he knows colleagues who’ve experienced the same thing. Everything seems to point to some powerful force or energy current being emitted on the same frequency as the strobe of the flashlight.
Back in Lijiang, Nina, our hardworking Chinese assistant, orders the meal tonight. Something a bit different she says. I’m not so sure. One of the dishes, a chicken stew, has a claw rising from the middle of it.
Day Eighty Seven : Lijiang to Kunming
Goodbye to the friendly Qian Xue Lou Hotel, though I never found out what its name means. In Lijiang New Town, by contrast, English signs are quite prevalent. So it’s farewell to the Finance Hotel, the Education Hotel, the Greatness Drugstore, the Belief Supermarket and a menswear store called ‘Clench’. All slip away behind us as we head to the new highway that will convey us smoothly to the new airport.
The casualties of this rush to modernize are the remnants of old Lijiang. Those traditional wood and mud-brick houses that have the misfortune to lie outside UNESCO’s protection can be seen like fish left behind by the tide, circled by the diggers and graders, waiting to be swept away.
Kunming, with a population just short of 4 million, is the biggest city we’ve seen since leaving Lahore. Armies of bicycles, traffic lights with numerical count-downs and paradoxical reminders everywhere that this burgeoning expanse of glass and concrete is a garden city, boasting one of the most generous climates in China.
For us, the City of Eternal Spring is another welcome step down from the high plateau. At a little over 6000 feet (1830 m), it’s half as high as Lhasa and a third the height of Everest Base Camp. The air is positively balmy and a premature holiday mood grips us all as we put some distance between ourselves and the high mountains.
We lunch at a restaurant that serves Kunming’s speciality, Across the Bridge Noodles. The story behind the name is both romantic and utilitarian. A scholar seeking peace and quiet retires to a cottage on an island. His wife brings him his food, but the bridge is so long it’s cold by the time she gets across. She discovers one day that by pouring a layer of oil on top of the broth it would stay hot. So she poured on the oil, took the broth over the bridge, put in the various cuts of meat when she got there and a new dish was born. (I think the story says a lot about the importance of food to the Chinese. In England he’d have been lucky to get a sandwich.)
So we have set in front of us a bowl of very hot soup flavoured with chicken stock, duck and spare ribs and arrayed round it, with no regard for the size of the table, a multitude of side dishes including raw chicken and Yunnan ham, liver, fish, pork, spinach, onions and all sorts of other vegetables as well as chilli pepper to add to the fun.
It’s a huge but quite delicate meal, with impeccably fresh ingredients.
Kunming is not only a floral showplace, still basking in the glow of having hosted Expo ‘99 Flower and Plant Festival, but the capital of a province with more ethnic minorities than any other. Gardens and ethnic diversity meet in a landscaped, 90-hectare site on the shores of Lake Dian, south of the city. Called the Yunnan Nationalities Villages, in essence it’s an ethnic minorities theme park.
I’m taken round on a white golf buggy by an obliging, if a little brisk guide called Ms Mi, who is herself in minority national costume.
Rather like feeding times at the zoo, there is a strict schedule of which minority is ‘performing’ when, and we’re swiftly off to the Dai village, where, in front of a tall, white, instant pagoda, men and women dance, the women conspicuous by dainty scarlet straps over their red schoolgirl shoes. Along with light blue and orange tunics they look rather odd, like a tribe of air hostesses. Then we’re off to the Tibetans, who dance in front of an impressive reproduction of the Jokhang in Lhasa, incongruously set against a backdrop of banana trees and bougainvillea. A small crowd, watching without any apparent engagement, becomes even smaller as the show goes on, leaving only ourselves and an old sick man in a wheelchair, who stares mutely ahead, his grandson perched on his lap.