When a Billion Chinese Jump (3 page)

Lijiang was a center of Dongba shamanistic culture. Its followers believed the overuse of natural resources would invite the wrath of heaven because man and nature were half brothers. This worship of nature was thought to have its roots in the ancient Bon spiritual tradition that was once the dominant belief system in the Himalayas and gave Tibetan Buddhism its animistic character, notably the worship of mountains and lakes. But those values had been marginalized by an influx of outsiders.

Wandering through the cobbled alleys in the afternoon, I saw flag-waving tour guides steer coachloads of Han—the ethnic majority in China—from trinket shop to trinket shop. In the evening I strolled along the raucous bar street by the canal. The picture-postcard scene of willow trees, limpid waters, and rough-hewn stone was illuminated by hundreds of red lanterns, neon signs, and the flashes of tourist cameras. The traditional wooden structures were packed to the rafters. Tourists joined girls in colorful Naxi costume in singing contests between balconies on either side of the stream. Some of the women claimed to be from the nearby Mosuo matriarchal community, where a tradition of “one-night marriages” has become synonymous with free love. Locals said they were really prostitutes from other parts of China who counterfeited the Mosuo image to lure customers. It was intellectual piracy, brand-name theft.

Sexual freedom was one of many fantasies on sale in Lijiang. The myth of Shangri-La was another. I went in search of the man who has done more than anyone to shape discussion of the lost paradise. Xuan Ke was not hard to find. Almost every night, he leads one of the planet’s most remarkable orchestras. The Naxi Ancient Music Association plays to packed houses at every performance. With bright, flowing robes and wispy white beards, the orchestra members ambled slowly to their antique instruments like a council of wizards preparing to demonstrate their spells.

Xuan was their conductor. He was also a scholar, musician, raconteur, mission-school Christian, former political prisoner, and—according to his enemies—a self-promoting charlatan. He was a man with a story to tell. In 1957, during Mao Zedong’s anti-rightist campaign, Xuan was put in prison
along with his father, who was to die in jail. It was only after Mao’s death that he was pardoned.

Since then, he has become a celebrity. The concert-hall audience lapped up his anecdotes about the hard times of the past. Between each piece, Xuan skillfully harangued Han Chinese and foreign tourists with criticism of contemporary politics sweetened by jokes about his orchestra’s age and infirmity.

“I am seventy-seven years old. I have spent twenty-one of those years in jail. But I shouldn’t talk about this for too long or our elder members might fall asleep at their instruments,” he said, first in Putonghua and then in remarkably good English, to chuckles from the crowd.

After the performance, we waited for half an hour as he signed autographs and posed for photographs with a long line of fans. Over dinner, he told us how he was responsible for the “Shangri-Lazation” of northwest Yunnan.

Xuan’s father was Rock’s guide. Xuan remembered from childhood the eccentric U.S. botanist who traveled through the remotest areas with a full set of cutlery and a plastic bathtub. “Rock was a very hot-tempered man. He was short, with a loud voice and always shouting. I could hear his sopranolike voice at great distance. He used to quarrel about everything,” Xuan recalled.

In 1995, when Xuan first made the link between Rock, Hilton, Shangri-La, and his mother’s home in the neighboring county of Deqin, he was condemned by local officials, who said the idea of an otherworldly Oriental Utopia was a colonial concept. But when the Shangri-La myth started to draw in tourists and money, they quickly changed their tune.

Any community where Joseph Rock might conceivably have plonked his portable bathtub tried to cash in on the fantasy. In Yunnan, rival claims to be the inspiration for Shangri-La were made by Zhongdian and Lijiang. In Sichuan, the candidates were Daocheng, Jiuzhaigou, Xiangcheng, and Derong. In Gansu, it was Xiahe. A community in Pakistan’s Hunza Valley claimed to have directly inspired Hilton on his visit there a few years before he wrote
Lost Horizon.
Others in Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal claimed to be closer to the far older Buddhist concept of “Shambala,” the Sanskrit word for spiritual Utopia, that some believe inspired the name of Hilton’s hidden paradise.

In an ideal world, the competition could have been a test of which
community was living in closest harmony with the environment. Reality was rather different. The contest in China was political, driven by greed and characterized by bribery, dubious academic research, and an overriding desire to attract millions of big-spending, high-consuming, paradise-seeking tourists. Zhongdian, the main town in Diqing prefecture, hosted a conference of journalists from all over the country. The reporters were lavishly wined and dined and, according to Xuan, each given two local beauties as company.
⁸

“They used the trick of wine, women, and song to make the journalists write that this was Shangri-La, even though there was no such place. I taught them this strategy,” he boasted proudly.

It got messy after 1997, when Zhongdian—which neither Hilton nor even Rock ever visited—unilaterally renamed itself Xianggelila, Shangri-La. The Xinhua News Agency wrote of “chaotic” battles between rival paradises. Xuan was inundated with demands and threats from mayors and governors, who wanted him to declare Zhongdian a fake.

“I was a little scared,” he recalled. “Because I did not know the real Shangri-La. I had just read Hilton’s book and watched the film.”

With the contest starting to turn nasty, the central government stepped in. In December 2001, the State Council, the highest decision-making body in the government, declared the matter settled in a red-bannered document that ruled Zhongdian is Shangri-La.

Xuan laughed. “The stupid government changed the name into Shangri-La, even though it is only an ideal. It is not strictly speaking a village, or a county or even a place, but although it is not one hundred percent true, the renaming is still a good thing because it feeds people’s ideals and dreams.”

When I asked about the environmental impact, Xuan was less confident about the benefits of the renaming. He claimed logging was halted after Zhongdian became Shangri-La, but the water and air quality have deteriorated because of the influx of people.
⁹
The solution, he believed, was to raise the quality of the visitors. “If we can find such a place where many cultures and traditions can live harmoniously together, that should be enough. Why should we worry about water and air pollution?”

Such an attitude, I was beginning to realize, was a major challenge to conservation in China. In mainstream thought, Utopia was not about nature, it was about people.

Xuan was proud of his role. The benefits of Shangri-Lazation could be
seen, he said, in the huge crowds that crushed through the city streets.
¹⁰
Business did well but he acknowledged that the town had become a less pleasant place to live. “It is so crowded and there are so many bars and cafes with loudspeakers playing music that I cannot sleep. So I made my old home into a hotel and moved my bed into the countryside.”

Although the idea of a lost paradise echoes the biblical story of Eden, it’s odd that the location of Shangri-La was so heavily influenced by three Christians: Rock, Hilton, and Xuan. Commentaries in the
People’s Daily,
the Communist Party mouthpiece, routinely castigate Westerners for their dreamy view of Tibet.
¹¹
But not only Westerners look to the Himalayas for ways of life that have been lost elsewhere.
Lost Horizon
became popular in the West during one of the most disruptive and frightening phases of industrialization. Even though he was writing on the other side of the world about a place he had never been, Hilton may have stumbled onto a yearning that is just as keenly felt in modern China as it was among the Western audience he wrote the novel for more than seventy years ago. Zhongdian initially adopted the name Shangri-La to attract wealthy foreigners, but most of the tourists in northwest Yunnan were Han Chinese. They came in search of a pristine environment and culture—an alternative to their homes in the modern megalopolises of Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing. For some, it was a revelation. The Beijing-based activist Hu Jia told me he was inspired by the natural scenery and religious beliefs he found in these forests and mountains.
¹²
Others leave disappointed. “I spent six months meditating in a Tibetan monastery, but all I discovered was that the monks are as corrupt and lecherous as everybody else,” lamented another Beijinger.

China had its own images of a lost paradise. The closest to Shangri-La is probably the myth of the Land of Peach Blossom. Set in the Eastern Jin dynasty (ad 317–420), this is the tale of a humble fisherman who wanders through a narrow cave to discover a hidden mountain-ringed Utopia. The inhabitants are descendants of war refugees from the Qin dynasty, who had lived undisturbed for hundreds of years in perfect harmony with each other and nature. The fisherman returns home to tell the story, but he is never again able to find the idyllic valley. The Land of Peach Blossom has become an ideal of beauty. Images of this land are painted in gorgeous colors on the Long Corridor of the Summer Palace in Beijing. It is also the inspiration for China’s most innovative and influential landscape gardener,
Yu Kongjian, a young professor from Peking University who calls for his countrymen to seek the utility of nature, rather than repeating the mistakes made by emperors over thousands of years in trying to re-create its beauty artificially in decorative gardens.
¹³

Ancient Chinese art and literature contains numerous other paeans to nature. As early as the Eastern Zhou period (700–256
BC
), there was a saying: “People who are of ruling quality but are not able to respectfully preserve the forests, rivers, and marshes are not fit to become rulers.”
¹⁴

But more dominant philosophies have tended to stress the importance of ordering humanity and taming the wild. Under Confucianism, humanity’s relationship was filial—man should honor nature as he respects a parent or a ruler. In this hierarchy, even the emperor was subservient and obliged to pay homage to the natural order at the temples of heaven, sun, moon, and earth. The fourth-century
BC
Confucian philosopher Mencius equated moral advancement with a better understanding of nature. But most Confucians emphasized society rather than the environment. Legalism, also known as Realism, took an even more hard-boiled approach. Its advocates believed the primary concern of a leader was to maximize the power of the state. The environment, like everything else, was sacrificed for this goal. Buddhism introduced the idea of reincarnation and respect for all living creatures. There is no duality between man and nature—they are one. But many believers also revere holy lakes and mountains, particularly in Tibet, where Buddhism is mixed with ancient Dongba traditions.

Taoists took an altogether more relaxed and anarchic approach that dismissed mankind’s attempts to impose order on all-encompassing, endlessly mutable cosmos. The Tao is what changes rather than what man thinks it should be. Believers aim to get as close as possible to the natural world, to balance with it rather than to worship or rearrange it. Their closest term for nature was
ziran
, which conveys a sense of “spontaneous unfurling in which the earth is seen as a boundless generative organism”—a concept that has come to appeal in the modern age to the “deep green” eco-movement.
¹⁵
Its nonmaterialist outlook was best illustrated by the story of the Taoist sage Zhuangzi, who was dozing in the shade of a gnarled tree when a rival took the opportunity to pour scorn on his philosophy.

“Your teachings are as useless as this tree. None of its branches will produce a single straight plank. Nothing can be carved from its knotted grain,” sneered the worldly critic.

Zhuangzi giggled. “Useless? Oh yes. I certainly hope so. You could plant this tree in a wasteland and still rest in its shadow, still eat its fruit. No axe will ever be sharpened to chop its trunk, no saw will ever trim its branches. If your teachings are more useful, you are the one who should worry.”
¹⁶

In ancient literature, Taoists envisaged a lost Utopia where everything had been in harmony. According to the Book of the Prince of Huainan, this cornucopia was made possible by the wisdom of the Three Emperors, who—according to myth—ruled 5,000 years ago at the dawn of Chinese civilization.
¹⁷
They were depicted as masters of restraint:

The laws of the former kings did not permit the extermination of the whole herd or flock or the trapping of the young. They did not allow the draining of ponds to fish, the burning of woods to hunt, the spreading of nets in the wild prior to the autumn’s wild dog sacrifice, the setting of nets in the water prior to the spring’s otter sacrifice, the stretching of bird nets in valleys and river gorges before the autumn falconry, the logging of hill forests before the autumn shedding of leaves, the burning off of fields before the hibernating of the insects. They did not allow the killing of pregnant animals, the collecting of fledglings and bird eggs, the taking of fish less than a foot in length, or the consumption of piglets less than a year old. Thus grasses and trees billowed forth like rising steam, birds and animals rushed to their domains like a flowing spring, and birds of the air warmed to them like clouds of smoke because they had that which brought all this about.
¹⁸

This expression of an ideal balance between man and nature was part of an ultimately unsuccessful polemic in a political battle. The Book of the Prince of Huainan was written at an intellectual turning point in China’s history around 150
BC
. The golden age of philosophy, which had produced Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi, and Lao-Tzu, had come to an end and the ideas of the greats were literally being fought over. The book, thought to have been compiled by the Taoist naturalist Liu An,
¹⁹
challenged many of the prevailing beliefs of the age. Liu advocated a rational, activist naturalism, a search for harmonious balance—or what we might today call sustainability. He redefined the central Taoist concept of
wuwei
from “no inteference” to “no interference contrary to nature.”