Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  The wood and stone houses of old Lijiang were built by people who knew about earthquakes and how to withstand them. They remain, thanks to UNESCO money, as an example of how to create harmony, line and proportion on a human scale. The result is a labyrinth of cobbled streets and squares, car free, perfect for walking, but also a victim of their own success. Large-scale preservation of the past is so rare in China that Lijiang has become a big draw, pulling upwards of 3 million tourists a year into an old town of 25,000 people.

  It’s around nine o’clock when I set out for breakfast. Wooden shutters are being taken down from shops and cafes. The first tour groups of the day have been disgorged from their coaches and totter awkwardly on the cobblestones behind the upraised yellow flags of their guides. Many of them already wear the dogged, mule-like expressions of those condemned to another day of organized enlightenment.

  The agglomeration of gift shops that always accompanies a tourist boom has hit Lijiang like anywhere else, but the shops are small and well kept and the streets clean and sparkling. Feeling slightly ashamed of myself, I choose a cafe offering ‘England Breakfast’. It’s served with wall to wall Sting.

  Gorged on egg, bacon, fried bread, toast and many other delights denied to me for several weeks, I finish my fresh-ground Yunnan coffee and explore the area around the main Sifang Square. There are no big vistas here. The streets twist and turn on each other, often running alongside or over the streams of clear, cooling water that flow from Black Dragon Pool at the foot of Elephant Mountain. No wonder that one of the most powerful Naxi deities, and the one they pray to for prosperity, is Shu, the water god.

  In this morning of rediscovered pleasures I find a second-hand copy of a classic book on the city, Forgotten Kingdom by Peter Goullart, a Russian-born Frenchman who lived and worked in Lijiang in the 1940s until forced to leave by the zealous xenophobes of the Communist revolution. ‘A book about paradise by a man who lived there for nine years’, says a Times review of 1957.

  It contains tantalizing snippets of information that you never find in the guide books: that the Naxi were born gossips and the despair of missionaries; that their preferred poison was black aconite boiled in oil, which was characterized by a paralysis of the larynx. ‘In convulsions the victim could only stare frantically at his helpless friends without being able to utter a word.’

  Goullart was particularly impressed by the Naxi women, who ‘silently and persistently, like the roots of growing trees…evolved themselves into a powerful race until they utterly enslaved their men. To marry a Naxi woman was to acquire a life insurance and the ability to be idle for the rest of one’s days.’

  Echoes of Namu and the Mosuo women here, and once again evidence that Yunnan’s ethnic minorities have more in common with each other than with the rest of China.

  Day Eighty Five : Lijiang

  I meet the most famous man in Lijiang outside the traditionally decorated, red lacquered portals of the Naxi Music Centre. ‘Naxi Ancient Music’ is written in English above this doorway, at which people are already gathering, asking when the ticket office opens. A man in his seventies, quite trim, whose quick, lively, intelligent eyes dominate his face, is dealing with fans. He’s darker, darker than most Chinese, dark enough to remind me, with his impish smile, of Desmond Tutu. His hair is black (blacker than might be expected in a man of his age) and brushed forward quite self-consciously. He’s dressed in jeans, smart leather shoes, two sweaters and a jacket. His name is Xuan Ke and he is the conductor of the Naxi Music Orchestra.

  Last night he and his orchestra were playing for the Prime Minister of Singapore. In the foyer of the theatre is a photograph of Chinese President Jiang Zemin, with flute, playing with the orchestra on a visit here.

  This morning the great man has agreed to show me Lijiang, but as soon as we start talking I know that his own story will be much more interesting. He was born in 1930 and received an early musical training from American Pentecostal missionaries. In 1949, after the victory of Chairman Mao, which he refers to, wryly, as ‘something called liberation’, he became a conductor in Kunming. He wasn’t a Communist, he says, but in a group allied to the Communists. Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign, eight years later, initially seemed good news for people like himself. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom,’ Mao declared, ‘and a hundred schools of thought contend.’

  It turned out to be a trap. Having encouraged intellectuals and artists to come out and help the party, Mao, fearing their criticism, turned on them and ordered them to undergo ‘re-education’. Xuan Ke was sent, at the age of 28, to forced labour in a tin mine.

  ‘Animal living,’ he says, unemotionally. ‘No human rights at all. Animal food, animal living and working a lot, from daybreak to the midnight.’

  He was nearly 50 when he was released.

  With Deng Xiaoping as leader of China, tradition was no longer seen as a threat, and, while working as an English teacher in a local school, Xuan Ke slowly began to pick up the pieces of his musical career. Many of his friends had died and the most precious of their antique instruments had been hidden, some embedded in walls to prevent them being found and destroyed by the Red Guards.

  In 1986 Lijiang was opened to foreigners for the first time since the revolution and, as the years went by, traditional Naxi music became a big draw. Now the rump of the old orchestra, invigorated by younger singers and musicians, plays every night, and the top people come along to hear them.

  As we walk through Lijiang, Xuan Ke is frequently recognized and breaks off from his story to shake hands, exchange greetings, pose for photographs and tell jokes.

  He takes it all in his stride, a man seemingly completely at ease with it all.

  ‘This must be the best time of your life,’ I ask him.

  He smiles and shakes his head.

  ‘Not yet.’

  He has a big garden to look after in his house outside Lijiang, and an autobiography to complete. Most of all, I suspect, he relishes his role as satirist, court jester, respected subversive. All the things he was sent to the tin mines for are now not only expected of him, but officially sanctioned.

  He chuckles as he tells me that he had 22 American congressmen at the show the other night. After the orchestra had played a particularly quiet and soothing number, he asked the audience if they’d thought that was peaceful.

  There was general agreement and appreciative applause, to which he responded, ‘Then why not play it on the border with Israel and Palestine?’

  ‘Very big applause,’ he says, ‘but not from the congressmen.’

  Before going to see his show in the evening, Basil and I eat a bowl of delicious pork crackling washed down with Mekong River Beer beneath the bending, canal-side willows at our new favourite eatery, Old Stone Bridge Snacks (Basil admits it loses a bit in translation). Tour groups are still out, plodding submissively over the bridge, eyes glazed and heads lolling. After we’ve eaten, I buy a collection of old photographs of Lijiang from a stall opposite and notice four of Namu’s books on a lower shelf.

  From the heroine of the Mosuo, to the hero of the Naxi. Xuan Ke and the orchestra are performing at eight and the queues are already forming. The narrow entrance of the Concert Hall leads to a courtyard converted into a galleried auditorium. Cherry-red lacquer dominates and Chinese lanterns are hung about. Baskets of carnations, dahlias and roses are set out along the front of the stage, and on the back wall there is a colourful mural of black-necked cranes in flight. Above the stage, and in sharp contrast to the swirls of red and gold decoration, is a sombre display of black and white photographs of faces, some blurred, some blank and expressionless like prison photos or police IDs.

  Which is probably what they are, for these are all members of the original Naxi orchestra, who have either died or disappeared.

  The present orchestra take their places, with the most elderly members, venerable and white-bearded like a troupe of former emperors, being led on by young women in Naxi costume. Xuan Ke makes an inconspicu
ous entrance, slipping quietly on from the wings to stand at a microphone at stage right. He’s wearing a long blue robe, like a priest’s soutane, whose simplicity makes him stand out from the dazzling brocades and silks of the older musicians behind him.

  He clearly enjoys being at the microphone and addresses the audience in a mixture of Mandarin, Naxi and English, milking the laughs skilfully, in all three languages. I can see the schoolteacher in him as the orchestra sit patiently through a leisurely monologue that touches on all sorts of pet peeves. He makes sure we know that the Naxi Orchestra still needs help. It receives no financial support from the government. And he sounds a warning. Here on the Chinese borderlands, where Han and Tibetan meet, ‘the music and musicians are in big danger.’

  Young people change their minds faster and faster, going for Karaoke, rock ‘n’ roll and what he calls ‘nonsense lyrics’.

  At this point his voice rises and the teacher becomes preacher.

  ‘The music,’ he declaims, with arm raised heavenwards, ‘is disappearing in the shadow of the Himalaya!’

  By now, I’m sure I’m not the only one in the audience thinking that the chief threat to Naxi music might be Xuan Ke’s monologues. It’s at least 15 minutes into the programme before bow is laid to string or stick to drum but, when it comes, the music, a piece written by the Tang Dynasty Emperor Li Hu over 1000 years ago, is fascinating and unusual, featuring early versions of familiar instruments, lutes, three-string violins and cymbals, accompanied by high soprano vocals.

  The only wrong note is the jarring ring of a mobile behind me. Not only is it not turned off but the man proceeds to have a series of long conversations into it, quite oblivious to whatever’s happening on stage.

  The next song is 750 years old and was written, as Xuan Ke announces cheerfully, ‘to express hatred of Kublai Khan’.

  After this, he does a whacky impression of Pavarotti jerking manically about to reinforce a point about how even serious music in China has become infected with insidious pop star mannerisms.

  The concert is brought to an end with a spare and soulful, if a little anti-climactic, bamboo flute solo, played by one of four young women who have also sung quite exquisitely.

  At the end I try to get to Xuan Ke to congratulate him and thank him for our day together, but he’s almost invisible between a wall of young female fans. And smiling happily.

  Day Eighty Six : Lijiang

  Our hotel is impressively located high up on the cusp of the new and old towns, a short, energetic walk from Lion Hill, which is considered the highest point in Lijiang. This is not strictly correct, as on the top of the hill stands a pagoda over 100 feet high, which claims to be the tallest wooden building in China. It’s not old and has been put up to pull in the tourists, who, like us, feel duty-bound to walk up every one of the steps that climb steeply through five spacious floors. The view you expect to be rewarded with is quite disappointing, as someone’s planted a girdle of conifers near the base of the pagoda that successfully masks much of the ink-black tiled rooftops of old Lijiang.

  The designers have attempted to decorate the interior of the pagoda in local style, which includes several symbols in dongba, the old language of the Naxi.

  Despite the best efforts to introduce a pan-Chinese orthodoxy during Mao’s years, a rich and diverse cultural life has survived in the mountains of Yunnan. The Dongba, a Naxi word meaning not just ‘the scriptures’ but those who interpret them, are important guardians of the old traditions. They have their own cultural centre in Lijiang, where the 30 of them still alive work on translation of the old Naxi texts. Part shaman, part priest, the Dongbas also perform ceremonies and rituals based on the Bon religion, which pre-dated Buddhism in Tibet. In Forgotten Kingdom Peter Goullart describes his horrified fascination as he watched Dongbas dancing themselves into a semi-trance to reawaken the spirits of two young lovers who had killed themselves in a suicide pact.

  ‘Just for an instant…we all felt that the lovers had returned… I thought at first the impression was entirely mine: but with a burst of weeping the two families prostrated themselves as one man before the little altar. The guests looked startled. Nothing was seen and the impression was gone in a flash. But they had been there and everyone knew it.’

  Later in the day, we witness a Dongba at work a few miles outside Lijiang. When the last light of day has faded on the ice turrets of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain behind him, he begins the ceremony. He’s a sprightly old man, who I’m alarmed to find is only five years older than me, dressed in a long, mandarin-style, red robe and embroidered waistcoat with an amulet hanging from a cord around his neck. Wound round his head is a red cap with a headdress of five pointed leaves. He holds a drum in one hand and cymbals in the other, and, after striking the drum, he sets about purifying the area where the ceremony is to take place, which is unclean because of our presence here. With a handful of burning branches he moves around the courtyard and then the garden, chanting and passing the smoking branches over arches, walls and, finally, over all our equipment. Then, with ever-accelerating speed and more frenetic chanting, he races to the door of the building, runs out and with shouted imprecations hurls the branches away, casting out all the bad spirits he’s collected from within the compound.

  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.