The Peace Correspondent

by Garry Marchant

  So I turn away, a hundred steps short of the last overhanging terrace, to retreat past the Tower Which Reaches Heaven, the Cave of the Compassionate Clouds and the Cave of the Splendor of the Clouds. On this busy weekend afternoon, gasping pilgrims squeeze along the slippery-smooth, time-worn marble steps high on the mountain face, peasants picnic in little pagodalike tea gardens and children try to lob coins into a stone phoenix nest high above an altar cut in the wall.

  From 1781 to 1835, impoverished Taoist monk Wu Laiqing and his stone cutters hacked the steps out of this bare rock face. Along the way, they carved gods and grottoes, phoenixes, pavilions and these narrow corridors leading to the deity who helped students pass the Imperial Examinations -- or the current version.

  No, I didn’t touch the great literate’s pen, as advised, but I don’t want to write Chinese anyway, I rationalize. Instead, I pause by rows of snack stands to nibble on pickled turnips and tiny shrimps packed into flat cakes, to gaze at Lake Dianchi far below, and to contemplate the joys of travel way down south in China.

  Climate, geography, distance from the capital and a rich mixture of some 26 minority peoples make Yunnan a unique tourist destination. The province was always removed from the mainstream of Chinese history, largely because it was once a three-month journey there from Peking. Its own rich history and culture provides ample diversion for the tourist wandering so far south.

  This sunny March day, the capital, Kunming, earns its self-styled sobriquet, City of Eternal Spring. While far in the north, frozen tourists huddle along the Great Wall outside Peking, buying bulky fur hats for protection against icy winds, Kunming’s air, scented with burning coal, is as soft and warm as in a tropical garden. Even Siberian seagulls winter in this balmy clime, locals boast.

  Kunming, the former Yunnanfu, 900 kilometers from Burma and only 400 from Vietnam, reflects these Southeast Asian influences. Elephant trunk and bear’s paw still tarnish some menus, but as the government passed a wildlife protection act last year, only simulated versions are now available. Or so we are told.

  Two things bring home how near we are to the southern neighbors. Outside the Green Lake Hotel, minority people costumed like northern Thailand’s hill tribesmen aggressively flog embroidered purses, belts and hats while a central government official looks away at this shameless, free enterprise hustling.

  And a stroll through the municipal museum, with the great Red Soviet star on top, reveals the province’s ethnic mix. There are Miao and Yao living on the border with Vietnam, and Jingbo women who wear heavy coin necklaces -- a coin for each of their past lovers. Some groups nail water buffalo skulls to house fronts, like the Torajahs in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Bao people build stupas like the northern Thais, while the Jao’s musical instruments and water pipes resemble those in Tibet.

  Politically tied to Mother China to the north, Yunnan has had strong connections in modern times with southern neighbors. In 1910, French empire builders completed the Indo-China railway linking Kunming to Haiphong, Vietnam. The infamous 1,000 kilometer Burma Road, a mucky path through rugged mountains from Lashio, Burma, to Kunming along the southern branch of the old Silk Road, opened to motor vehicles in 1939.

  When the Japanese cut off the road in 1942, American General Claire Lee Chennault’s Flying Tigers airlifted supplies to the city over the 5,000 meter mountain passes of the “Hump.” Although the Tigers flew into the city for many years, little American influence is now apparent. All I can find is a nondescript road the American flyers once frequented that an older resident recalls as “Yankee Street.”

  Kunming displays less English than more Westernized Guangzhou or Shanghai; Some street signs in Western script, a sign for a cooking school, and one that says, simply, “store.”

  The entrance to attractive Green Lake Park exhibits modern American influence in the form of large Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck signs. The spacious park, framed with classical, China plate-pattern weeping willows, is modern, urban China at play. Children zip around on the pavement in miniature electric cars that play Happy Birthday to You or on a more traditional dragon boat ride. On the lake, soldiers and young girls play flirtatious tag in rowboats, while all round, family groups and flocks of school girls admire the “Four Celebrated Blossoms” (camellia, magnolia, azalea and primrose) and soak in the warm spring sun.

  A roadside “sugar artist” engenders early gambling habits in candy-craving children. They spin a roulette wheel to select the animal from the Chinese zodiac he will create for them. The lucky ones get a dragon, five times the size of others. For a few fen, the man dips a spoon into the molten, colored toffee, twirls it quickly around on his table as it cools to fashion the flat, skeletal outline of the chosen animal. Just as he hands over his creation, a gust of wind shatters the delicate dragon, scattering the pieces, tinkling like little temple bells.

  The bells at the crowded Buddhist Bamboo Temple tinkle not just for the tourist but for the worshippers, mostly the elderly, bowing, lighting incense and praying. Despite the “No photography” signs, everyone inside is shooting posed family pictures, including commercial photographers with booths. A cheerful trio of gold-toothed, joss-waving ladies I photograph descends on me, demanding in harsh Yunnanese dialect that I send them copies. When some young soldiers pose atop a fence post, a screaming, indignant monk in mufti dashes from the temple to scatter the irreverent but sheepish PLA group.

  Inside the temple, with its three fine gold Buddhas, stand the Five Hundred Lohans, “A pearl in the treasure house of Oriental sculpture.” The story has it that in 1884, the abbot hired sculptor De Shen to adorn the temple. His amusing, nontraditional figures, drawn from local notables, are early Tiger Balm Gardens-style. The caricatures, somewhat like political cartoons, were perhaps too accurate. When the tableau was completed and revealed to the public, the artist disappeared forever.

  If the economic health of a community can be judged by its marketplace, Yunnan is prosperous. In the thriving Muslim Market, men with faces brown and wrinkled as Yunnan’s famous walnuts puff bamboo water pipes before heaps of dark local tobacco, slabs of dried beef, chickens in huge baskets and trussed-up turkeys. Country folk in baggy blue and brown, here to sell their produce, wander the narrow, cobbled streets wondering at big city life.

  A woman squats on the ground wrapping duck eggs in brown mud and straw to make 100-year-old eggs. In the bird market, a patient vendor teaches her caged parrot to say “ni hao” (hello). Chefs cheerfully invite us into odoriferous, open-air cafes to lunch on bubbling soups and crackling gyoza-style dumplings. A showy noodle maker stretches, twirls and boils the white dough into long white strands, grandstanding for his foreign audience. In a nearby square, masseurs and masseuses in white coats and white, broad-brimmed hats, many of them blind, perform gentle massages, twisting limbs and kneading muscles in full public view.

  Despite Kunming’s appeal, some of Yunnan’s greatest attractions are outside the capital. In the past two years, 10 regions have been opened to tourists, some on the international borders. But China is just too big, time does not allow for more adventurous exploration this time. With only a few days, I head to the prime tourist spot, the Lunan Stone Forest of bizarre but bewitching rock “trees” 120 kilometers to the southwest.

  From the air, the dry countryside outside Kunming looks swollen like a fresh blood blister surrounded with bruise-colored greens and yellows. As our bus leaves the city and surrounding flooded rice paddies behind, we climb into red-dirt hills and fields of yellow rapeseed, green wheat and broadbeans.

  This is rural, story-book China. Peasants work the fields with ancient hoes. The blazing holes in the ground we see from afar are kilns firing red bricks. Traditional, upcurving tile roofs top adobe or thatch and wattle huts. Boys chewing sugar cane drive horse carts or “walking tractors,” and everywhere, there is road building, Chinese-style. Workers painstakingly, arduously break and fit together rocks. Even where it is prosperous, China has the enduring shabbiness of Mexico, wi
th rubble and bricks and pipes and construction material all around. It is not all traditional, though. Japanese tourists in modern air-conditioned Hino buses race us for the Stone Forest.

  Wavering, too-loud Taiwanese love songs -- another surprise to one still not accustomed to the “new” China -- float back from the tape deck, followed by a medley of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina and The Mexican Hat Dance. Our guide, with a unique sense of humor, cackles cheerfully about the tiger that came into Kunming, just last year -- from where nobody knows -- killing two people and injuring three. He also entertains us with English jokes. Why does a bicycle need a kick stand? Because it is two tired. English is fast catching on in China.

  Just outside the city, a small, roadside stone marks kilometer 0 of the Burma Road slanting off to the right, 1,000 kilometers to the border. A major WWII battle along this road that left hundreds of Imperial Japanese troops dead is now a pilgrimage spot for their descendants, but foreigners are only allowed to go as far as the ancient city of Dali.

  Mid afternoon, we stop for tea and a saucer of the region’s famous walnuts on a hill overlooking a small lake inhabited by a dragon. No one fishes there now, especially since the dragon ate six Americans from the Flying Tigers who were boating there many years ago.

  Three hours out of Kunming, the approach to the Stone Forest has a festive, carnival air with colorful minority peoples crowding the road, decorated horses and buggies for hire and Bactrian camels on hand to pose for tourist photographs. It is at once both exotic and a Chinese Coney Island, Niagara Falls or Brighton. These geographical oddities have been amply commercialized; there is a Stone Forest Post and Telecommunications Building, Stone Forest Dining Room and a Stone Forest Store selling Stone Forest souvenirs.

  Outside the Stone Forest Hotel compound, Sani minority women press cheap chinoiserie on all who wander out: pandas on velveteen pillows, deer-in-the-forest school of art bedspreads, and matched, black-velvet paintings to grace suburban American bungalows. A flock of flirtatious minority maidens follows us through the streets, pestering us in a strange tongue, proffering tea towels “two for one” and demanding “how much?” They offer to escort us through the forest, and duck playfully, squealing “no pic, no pic,” when we try to photograph them. A particularly fair and flighty girl points at a pile of fresh horse dung on the ground, saying “pic, pic,” and they scatter, bright and noisy as jungle birds.

  In the fantastic limestone forest, we are like two-legged ants crawling though an immense, petrified sponge cake, through caves and up the twisted stone “trees.” But the imaginative Chinese see more than sponge here. To them, the shapes are warriors and maidens, peacocks, mushrooms and bamboo shoots. Even with the noisy Chinese families and intense Japanese, it is an eerie piece of aberrant nature, with a sense of both remoteness and the tourist bubble.

  The forest caters to the Chinese love of posing for family snapshots in famous settings -- or at least aboard a Bactrian camel. Commercial photographers here provide period costumes (Ming, Ching, Ping?) for formal souvenir pictures, much like the “roaring twenties” and “gay nineties” outfits available in booths in North American fairs and festivals.

  At sunset, we slip into part of the forest not yet opened to visitors, to catch the faint red glow of light on the fantastic rock shapes. In this light, it is like a badlands setting for a cowboy movie. The sun dies quickly, plunging the petrified forest into darkness. A silvery full moon hanging over a pagoda atop a tall rock “tree” sets a classic Chinese scene. Only one who has touched the great scribe’s pen of could adequately describe its compelling beauty.

  HONG KONG to SHANGHAI

  Hogs on the Road

  Spring, 1992

  IT begins as a distant rumble, like rolling thunder from somewhere over the hills. The din grows to a threatening, deep-throated, hide-your-women-and-children roar, and a pack of leather-clad bikers comes raging through, like an invading horde on glittering metal steeds.

  Chopsticks stop between bowl and mouth, hoes halt in mid swing, children run from schoolhouses, thousands stop along the road to stare at this strange, clamorous sight. The Hong Kong Harley-Davidson motorcycle club is on the road, and it is the strangest thing anyone has seen along the China coast since “foreign devils” were let into the country.

  These are not the bad-ass outlaw bikers of legend, the “one percenters,” as glamorized by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones or Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels, “The strange and terrible saga of outlaw gangs.” This is the new Malcolm Forbes breed of bikers; executives, company directors, financial consultants and lawyers as at home at a seat in a boardroom as slouched low in the saddle of a raging, thundering Harley-Davidson.

  The Harley Owners Group (HOG) is an organization of like-minded bikers, dedicated to Milwaukee iron. The Hong Kong branch is a cosmopolitan collection of bikers affluent enough to spend from $90,000 to $160,000 (US$12,000 to $21,000) for machines not built for the confines of city roads.

  They hunger for the highway where these big bikes belong, to get out and ride free. So, after months of negotiating with Guangdong International Sports Tours, the HOGs have organized the first ever Hong Kong to Shanghai rally, eight days and 2,300 kilometers through northeast China over roads that probably haven’t seen a foreign vehicle since before World War II.

  It is a multinational biker gang of Hong Kong Chinese and American, German, British, Canadian, Swiss, Swedish, Dutch and Malaysian expatriates. Riders have come from Europe, the U.S. and South Africa. Two bikes have been air-freighted from the U.S. and one from Holland for this historic run.

  At dawn, midweek in early October, the riders are out in an Esso service station near Hong Kong’s Western District polishing the chrome, checking their machines and slapping on stickers from Esso, the trip sponsor. The smell of oil and exhaust and hot metal smothers the reek of Fragrant Harbor, and this could be a gas station in Middle Town America, with a bike gang gathering for a weekend run. Connie, the only woman rider, a Harley dealer who flew her Softail from Los Angeles for the run, is dabbing on lipstick before pulling on her helmet. Steve, Asia’s Harley representative, is showing off the police bike complete with siren and flashing red and blue pursuit lights that he brought from Milwaukee to demonstrate to the Hong Kong police.

  For executives and financiers, they are a bulky bunch. Peter is a six-foot-six German outfitted all in black, from boots to T-shirt to fringed leather jacket. Reed, the safety officer and lead rider, chapter chairman George, Peter, an aircraft engineer acting as the volunteer mechanic, and most of the other riders are above average size, especially for Asia. While corporate Hong Kong strides purposefully to work, the HOG riders blast out of the Esso station with roaring engines and squealing tires, bound for China and the free, ride-like-the wind adventure of the open road.

  Not exactly. Within sight of China, they face their first obstacle. The Hong Kong driver of the support truck carrying the bags, compressor, tools, spare parts and tires doesn’t have a permit to enter China. The assemblage of 24 bikers, a half dozen riders, support cars, van and truck grinds to a halt, while the organizers sort out the bureaucratic problem. Finally, the truck is allowed to back up to the middle of the bridge and the Chinese truck that is to accompany them from here backs up to meet it, and they transfer all the gear across.

  While the Hong Kong border guards are tense and officious, panicking at the sight of a camera, the mood changes across the border. It is like the circus had rolled into town, with friendly Chinese officials gawking at the bikes and posing next to them for photographs while the bikers cool off with Budweiser beer from a duty-free shack. One uniformed soldier asks the typical Chinese question, “How much do they cost?”

  Now the born-to-ride-free bikers face an unpleasant reality. The Chinese will only let them ride in a convoy, with a police escort. Much later, only a few renegades will get to ride solo. The police hold back all the traffic through town while they assemble the convoy, with much shouting and instructions. Lea
d biker Reed blows his whistle so often, the other riders joke that he will start blowing the whistle to announce that he is blowing the whistle. After much confusion and shouting in English and Cantonese, the cavalcade departs.

  For the entire length of China, the convoy screams through towns and villages with a wedge of police motorcyclists in front, then police a car with screaming sirens and flashing lights, followed by Harleys in full, window-rattling roar. These aren’t just motorcycles, they’re American Harley-Davidsons, the ultimate macho machines, bikes with soul and style. There are a dozen different models, Softails, Sportsters, Fat Boys and Electra Glide Classics, bikes more expensive, with bigger engines, than most Japanese family cars. The big, classic 80-cubic-inch V-twin engines give the bikes that power and the distinctive Harley roar, so different from the agitated sewing machine whine of lesser bikes. Although once disparaged as Hardly-Go Davidsons, these are HOGs, not rice burners (Japanese motorcycles). “I’d rather see my sister in a brothel than my brother on a Honda,” says a diehard Harley slogan.

  There is no thrill quite like the surge of power that comes from the slight twist of the hand throttle, and 700 pounds of menacing machinery almost lunging from under you and thundering away, with the satisfying rumble like a jet launched from an aircraft carrier. The club’s stylists ride in the Harley highway slouch, copied from Marlon Brando or Lee Marvin in The Wild Ones, or maybe Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, depending on their age. They sit low in the saddle, arms loose and relaxed on those wide handlebars, legs forward, pointy-toed boots stretched way out resting on the highway pegs, giving a relaxed, ice-cool posture.