“China has continued to provide preferential policies for ethnic minorities, and made sure they can enjoy and exercise their rights according to law. China has also accelerated the comprehensive development of various social, economic and human rights protection undertakings in regions inhabited by ethnic minorities, including the Xinjiang Uygur and Tibet autonomous regions” (Progress in China's Human Rights in 2013: Government Publication)”.
In October we visited one of these regions inhabited by ethnic minorities. Yunnan Province, southwest China is a two and a half hour flight from Nanjing and close to the Myanmar and Laos border. The city is booming with forests of skyscrapers and has massively increased in area since 2002, the time of the last visit. It’s on the route of the “New Silk Road” linking China to India in the ‘Go West’ policy of China’s development: the concrete supports for the half built new high speed rail link are visible from the motorways which have replaced the winding roads of 10 years ago. The five star hotel in Kunming had thirty tables of gourmet food of the best quality I’ve ever seen, albeit with the worst translations – multidimensional toast and sod bacteria (mushroom I think) were available for our delectation.
Yunnan is not an ‘autonomous region’ like Tibet, but it is inhabited by a large number of ethnic minorities including the Bei, the Muxi and the Baxi who enjoyed benefits such as exemption from the one child policy – and indeed in Shanxi village nearly every woman of childbearing age appeared to be pregnant. However, on the downside, rural southwestern China is economically disadvantaged compared to the rich eastern cities, though they are not particularly poor. Here settlement is human in scale - villages of 2 storey buildings in grey and white with tiled roofs and bright yellow maize cobs tied up to dry on sunny balconies. The farmers on the tiny intensive plots are mainly women with help from children. Hand ploughing with a water buffalo is common, or if they are lucky, a small motorised tractor. Sheaves of rice stooks stand in the fields as in a Constable painting, maize waste is being moved by motorised tricycles, and the lively markets where people trade food and animals, shop, talk, laugh, eat and even play the pipes in the street for their own and other’s amusement.
We arrive at Lake Erhai, near Dali, around 5pm; the warm afternoon is perfect – crystal clear air, blue skies, calm lake, blue layered mountains. Being close to the Himalayan foothills, the climate of subtropical Yunnan, is one of the best in China - cooler because of its altitude - and is particularly lovely in autumn. We stop at the field station at the crossroads of ‘White Horse Villages’, a rented house where the students are cutting lake cores for analysis. A Muslim woman sells sweet flat bread at the side of the road for 2 yuan. The sunken patchwork of fields is filled with farmworkers in family or cooperative groups, weeding, spraying and planting vegetables and rice. The tracks between the fields are busy with them walking or riding home in their little motorised tricycle trucks. A complete difference to the relative rural desolation of Warwickshire and much of agricultural England.
Bei women wear traditional dress, - blue/red headscarves, and apron, thickly embroidered cummerbunds in blue, black and red. Song our driver (dressed in a Mao suit bought from a tourist shop) cynically says they used to dress in a variety of ethnic styles but now wear the same ‘for the tourists’. Muslim women pass by in plain grey dresses and white headscarves, the men in white round hats. Schoolchildren are texting and pointing their iPads at themselves for selfies as they walk or cycle in small groups home after school. None was in traditional dress, just their ordinary school tracksuits. Walking to the lake peninsula is nigh impossible when Song our driver is about – but it’s essential to view scenes impossible by car: fisherwomen drying out their fresh water shrimps, carp, roach, and whitebait at the side of the road, a father and son kicking a cow into a van, a kingfisher and roller type bird on the lakeshore. Blue hyacinths grow in profusion, there are huge butterflies and a diversity of other unnameable lakeside plants and roots grow which we were to eat later at dinner.
Song is as good a driver as you can expect, and is employed by the Yunnan Institute of Botany. At dinner, he kindly helps with food, attempts a few words of English, which improve with the number of toasts, and somehow we communicate. He knows of George Forrester (died 1937) the plant collector responsible for the ‘Sinesis’ plants in our gardens -rhododendrons, camellias - who is buried somewhere in the hills. Song drives the world’s botanists around to look for his grave though the locals don’t know where. Song gives possible reasons for this: all non-Chinese people look much the same and they can’t remember which one he was, or the Japanese destroyed the graveyard. We choose our lake carp from a clean, steel bowl and see it killed on the floor a few metres away. It is descaled live, gutted, then cooked in a soup of stock, lake plants and tofu to be eaten with broad and other fat green beans, giant mange tout, tarot (a type of tropical potato), a variety of fresh plump green hot chillies plus the dried, thin beef strips, three colour pork tomato and Sichuan pepper branches. All washed down with a tumbler or three of rice wine, drunk in a series of merry toasts to everyone.
The next morning reveals scenes as close to picture postcard as I’ll ever see. A walk to the lake through the souk-like narrow streets takes us to the lovely lakeside scene of fishermen and women casting off in their green sheet metal boats. Caicun is not yet in the Lonely Planet (the Spanish Bar and two hotels are still being built) so you’ll need to be quick. Looking at the masses of duckweed, indicator of high nutrient waters, we talk with Rong about the merits or not of dredging the lake to prevent further eutrophication of the lake. After a breakfast of Cross Bridge Noodles in a Dali road cafe we drive through Dali Xiaguan ‘new town’ where the landscape is being carved out with ruthless efficiency. Houses on the top of slopes with rapid gullying below, flattened areas to be turned into a “Gold International Community” with a massive cement works at the side. The airport being built in the barren outskirts of the city is the size of terminal 5. The scale of development is awesome and unbelievably fast; the Chinese are truly masters of their universe.
Our trip ends with a stark reminder of this country’s remoteness and scale and is something of an ordeal as Song, without map or satnav, asks no fewer than 4 people for directions to cross the watershed to Erhai Lake in the gathering dark. We climb the Himalayan foothills as far as the tree line at 3200 metres. Near the summit there’s a sea of black plastic agricultural frames growing heaven knows what: “for Chinese medicine” says Cheng. It is cold dusk, the roads are bad, but being “on top to of the World” viewing the blue overlapping mountaintops is an experience not to be forgotten.