Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest, where you can have an unforgettable experience of great natural beauty.
Get off the beaten track and hire a guide to take you through the pristine, old growth rainforest of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, Simon Lewis, says

Darkness was falling, we were alone in the forest and the fallen tree that served as a bridge over the swollen river had been swept away. We couldn’t go back – we’d already walked 20 km through dense jungle – and going forward appeared to be a dubious proposition.

But Mr Rush, my indomitable guide, didn’t give it a second thought.

“Just take off your shoes and jump,” he said and dived in. The water foamed around his thighs as he waded ahead. I followed tentatively with shoes held above my head, shivering at the cold water and feeling the mud squelch between my toes. I tried not to think about the leeches and snakes we’d seen earlier.

“This is nothing,” Rush said. “One time I came with two Dutch girls. The stream was so high we had to wait for some villagers to come along, and they pulled us all across with ropes.”

This, I believed, was a cunning tactic. Whenever it looked like I might complain, he’d bring up some other tourist who had it worse. And I had no right to grumble, I had got what I had asked for – a real warts and all trip into China’s biggest rainforest.

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest; but you have to get out of the sleepy capital, Jinghong, and away from the touristy “forest parks” before you can really see it. And for that you’ll need a guide.

Mr Rush really loves the forest. In his previous job as a beekeeper he had traveled with his hives to every province in China, and he had finally settled in Xishuangbanna because it had “the most magic”.

Though he said he was given his English name because of his eagerness to learn the language in class, it seemed particularly appropriate as he sped down the narrow, overgrown forest trails, swinging a machete to clear the path.

Being inside the forest was a sublime experience. Every moment I was overwhelmed by a glut of visual detail, millions of leaves and tree trunks, all in the narrowest of palettes, green and brown.

Dazzling touches of color were provided by the iridescent wings of butterflies, which seemed to taunt and flirt, by staying just out of reach. The buzz of insects sounded like incessant ring tones. Exotic birds flashed by as the trees above cast shadows and pressed in from each side, as if to repair the red earth scar of our trail.

For hours, the only other sign of human activity was the occasional hole hacked into the bamboo, made by locals looking for tasty grubs to eat. It was only after fording the stream that we began to see signs of civilization.

We passed through a rubber plantation – narrow trees planted in rows – and there were bowls or broken bottles that collected the white sap.

Farming rubber is hard work – every day the trees have to be cut at 3 am. The locals don’t like to do it and employ Sichuanese laborers. They peered out at us from simple bamboo huts. Here there were no birds, or butterflies and the only animals were long, bright red centipedes. Rubber trees take up so much water that nothing else grows around them.

Here Mr Rush seemed to walk even faster, it was obvious that he didn’t like this monoculture. With the price of rubber rising, in recent years a lot of forest has been cleared for plantations. Fortunately, much of what remains is now protected.

“There is something very precious here and it needs to be protected. But the people also need to make a living. The challenge for China is to develop without destruction,” Mr Rush said.

Finally, we arrived, in darkness, at a village. With no light pollution the stars shone brightly, seemingly close enough to touch. The locals walked around with torches strapped to their heads, resembling giant fireflies. They were chopping vegetables, cooking, putting children to sleep.

I had a cold shower then settled down to a simple meal around a hearth. I was so hungry that even a bowl of the aforementioned grubs was welcome. Actually, they were pretty tasty, a good meat substitute when fried in chili oil.

Lubricated with home-made baijiu, our host opened up. He said that in his younger days he would go hunting for wild pigs in the forest with a home-made gun. He told a story about a villager who, angry with an elephant for eating his rice, shot its calf. The angry elephant, so the story goes, charged the man’s house and killed his wife.

Today there are few wild elephants left in the forest, in a nearby forest park.

My hosts were Jino, one of China’s smallest ethnic groups, with only 20,000 members. You can distinguish them by the white headdresses of the women and the rising sun painted, for protection, on the eaves of their houses. Not far away were the jungle villages of Blang people, famous for their elaborate black headdresses; and Wa, whose women were easy to distinguish by their long hair.

“The cultures here are worth every effort to preserve,” Mr Rush said.

As I lay down to sleep on a mat on the floor I thought about this unique face of China that Mr Rush had shown me. I promised myself I would return, though next time I’d bring some wellies.

Simon Lewis is the author of Rough Guide to China
China Daily Updated: 2010-01-07 10:22

The last time I was in Jinghong it had a thriving backpacker culture – banana pancake cafes and cheap guesthouses. The backpackers had been drawn by culture and nature; now there was less of both, and the backpackers had largely gone, to be replaced by high rolling Chinese tourists, who generally are happy to be given a packaged experience – an ethnic dancing show, a visit to a nature reserve, maybe some illicit gambling.

Where once there were twenty guides to take roughing it types into the jungle, today there are only three.

My guide was called Mister Rush. His nickname might was from his eagerness to ask questions in English class, but it seemed an appropraite moniker when I was following him through the rainforest, as he set a hell of a pace. He was a compact, slim man from Hubei, precise in his gestures and clipped in his diction, and like all the guides and trekkers I’ve known, had an independent minded and philosophical bent. He had five years spent working as a beekeeper, travelling with his bees up and down the country.

He bemoaned the contemporary Chinese obsession with money but still, spent a lot of time talking about it – what is the average salary in your country, why does a nurse get less than a banker, what difference a welfare system makes, and so on.

We walked to a Hani village. The Hani until recently had lived in the mountains until the government asked them to come down.

The village was the usual scruffy collection of buuildings – chickens pecking, dogs barking, the smell of shit, plastic scattered everywhere. The wooden huts where they dried the crops were much more appealing, to my eyes, than the crudely built houses. One dwelling at the top of the village was markedly better than the others, with shining blue roof tiles and a neat yard. This guy had made it rich as a middle man and rather than move away he had stayed with his neighbours to lord it over them.

The walls were painted with big character slogans about aids, or building socialism. One read ‘boys and girls are equal’. This hints at a big problem in the Chinese countryside; smaller families and the wish for a male heir means that there is now a big gender imbalance – lots more men than girls. Which has led to the practise of bride buying; really poor families sell their girls to men who can’t find wives. A girl costs about twelve thousand yuan, apparently – just over a grand. And with girls suddenly so lucrative, kidnapping has become a problem too.

From there it was a short hike to a tea factory. Here the tea leaves were dried in the open air, then fermented – left basically – before being pressed between heavy stone blocks into bricks. The point being that these are stable (unlike green tea, which spoils), and easy to transport. This ‘black pu’er cha’ was once sent from here on the tough trek to Tibet.

It was a great location, with beautiful views of the forest; if I had to work in a factory, I would choose this one. The staff were locals but the boss was from Hong Kong. As ever, it was noticeable that even in minority areas, the entrepeneurs and money makers – like my guide – were Han.

Then we hit the forest. The trail was barely discernible, and often Rush had to hack the foliage back with a machete. Inevitably perhaps to a westerner of my generation, it brought memories of Vietnam war films. The butterflies were lovely, but there wasn’t much wildlife to be! seen, as it was all in the bush. Heard lots of birds though, above the buzz of insects which was so incessant it was like tinnitus. The bamboo clumps were huge, sometimes twenty metres, and grew in clumps. Sometimes holes had been hacked into the hollow interior, made by locals picking out grubs to eat. A sense of profligacy, lushness, thick meaty leaves everywhere, tremendous agglomeration of visual detail but all in only one colour, green.

We arrived after dark in a Jinuo village, and ate a meal (including some of the aforementioned grubs, fried in chilli oil) with a local family. The head of the house went hunting at night with a homemade gun – the animals would not run from light at night. He talked about how a decade ago a group of hunters in his village had been shot by the government for killing an elephant. And he told an apocrychal story about a villager who, angry with an elephant for eating his rice, shot the elephant’s kid. The angry elephant, so ! the story goes, went to the guy’s house and killed his wife.

These mountain people were small, wiry and taciturn. They weren’t particularly welcoming or interested in us, they just got on with their business. They worhsipped the sun, and every house had a painting of a sunrise on the roof eaves.

The next day we hiked through a rubber plantation. It was boring – rubber is non native, and takes up so much water that nothing else grows around it. Bowls or broken bottles collected the white sap. Farming rubber is hard work – every day the trees have to be cut at three in the morning. The locals don’t like to do it and employ even poorer people from elsewhere in China. The labourers lived in bamboo huts inside the plantation. The price of rubber has increased in recent years, everyone is busy trying to get rich, and little of the forest is now left. The only animals I saw now were six inch long, bright red poisonous centipedes. The track was busy with guys on motorbikes bearing plastic vats full of raw rubber, which rather resembles tofu.

We came down to the plains and a prosperous, neat Dai village. Some guys were betting on fighting cocks. It’s kind of like acrobatic sumo, with the birds jumping at each other, diving and pivoting as they look for advantage. It was impressive to watch one bird launch itself feet first in a big attack and see the other duck right under the aggressor, turn and attack from behind.

These people were much friendlier – we were given water chestnuts, some ladies invited us to hang out with them on hammocks slung between the stilts that hold their buildings up. Dai men all have tattoos – the older ones have abstract designs of dots but the younger guys sport snakes and dragons. The Dai language has its own script, unlike other minority languages and Dai people are said to look down on their less cultured mountain neighbours. They have certainly adapted to modern China better than most minorities.

And that was my jungle trek. It left me with the desire to see more of the real thing. Apparently it’s possible not far from here to arrange to be slipped over the border into northern Burma – opium factories, tribal militias, head hunters – now that would be an adventure.

There are almost a hundred dwarves living in Dwarf Kingdom, a theme park attraction outside Kunming. Every morning they put on a show for visitors.

The compere is a midget, about two foot tall – he looks like a child but he has an adult’s confidence and economy of movement. He explains that he is 38 years old and the audience gasps. Then he introduces all the dwarves, who emerge from out of hobbit hole style buildings with little round doors and assemble on stepped platforms. They are all in costume: dwarf guards with swords and shields, girls dressed as fairies with little wings. Last to emerge is the dwarf king, wearing a yellow cloak and carrying a sceptre.

Then the show starts: a trendily dressed dwarf with bleached hair breakdances, a dwarf boy band mimes to a pop song, a dwarf tranny prances in a bikini and a wig, a troupe of girls dance with umbrellas, and so on. I was called up on stage to help with one act. The midget compere had me check that two little metal ballbearings were real. I was asked to put one in a strongman dwarf’s mouth. His face contorted grotesquely, and, with the aid of a metal chopstick, he made the ball come out of the side of his eye. Then the other ball. It was gross. Perhaps it was a trick.

After the show the dwarves hung around playing cards, eating lunch, or making trinkets to sell, so I got a chance to chat to them. The youngest dwarf in the community is 18, the oldest is 55. They come from all over China, having heard about the kingdom off the internet or from friends. The place was the singular vision of a Sichuan businessman, a ‘big person’. They do not really live in the hobbit holes, but they do all live together in a dormitory nearby. They are paid 1300Y a month, about 130 quid – not a bad wage for China, especially considering they get free food and accommodation.

The ones I talked to were very happy to be there. As well as getting a livelihood they felt part of a warm and close-knit community. Relationships had started there, there had already been two marriages, and another one was happening later this year. They had chosen their ‘king’ themselves, by election, and it seemed that he did really wield some authority – in that sense at least it was a real kingdom.

I had gone there sceptical, with a prurient desire to see a freak show and at the same time criticise it. But honestly, after meeting the charming, confident dwarves, I felt my cynicism evaporate. These people were going to get gawped at whatever they did – why not make a living at it? It was typical Chinese pragmatism – I was reminded of the way blind people are trained to become masseurs. And they really did think of the place as theirs, and to derive strength from numbers. So it was a surprisingly touching experience.