China's Yunnan The East's Wild West Discover Yunnan, an uncommon convergence of rushing rivers, ancient villages, and snowy peaks that's fast becoming China's premier adventure playground
By Craig Simons
WHERE GOOD HEARTS AND BIG PEAKS MEET: Mount Balagezong, in Yunnan province's Hengduan mountains; left, a villager from Shangri-La Gorge (Joshua Paul)
SHANGRI-LA AIRPORT, SHANGRI-LA CITY, SHANGRI-LA GORGE: Over the past eight years, the name Shangri-La has been popping up all over China's Yunnan province, making me wonder whether the government has taken a crash course in marketing. They, of course, borrowed the name from British author James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, the story of four plane-crash survivors who stumble into a stunning Tibetan valley capped by the "loveliest mountain on earth." I had read Hilton's tale in the mid-nineties, when, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China's Sichuan province, I was determined to discover his inspiration for paradise. I found it in Yunnan province, in southwestern China.
Before World War II, Yunnan was one of the world's forgotten corners, a kind of Chinese Siberia where emperors banished felons, dissidents, and unwanted officials. It wasn't the sort of place you'd
To appreciate the sense of scale, imagine wedging the Mississippi, Missouri, and Colorado rivers into a space the size of West Virginia, then adding snow leopards, lesser pandas, and black-necked cranes.
take the kids: Tigers and leopards hunted in the southern rainforests; in the north, the Hengduan Mountains, which rise as high as 18,000 feet, were just as fierce, with four of Asia's greatest rivers—the Yangtze, the Salween, the Mekong, and the Irrawaddy—carving through rock to create gorges that plunge more than 10,000 feet in places. To appreciate the sense of scale, imagine wedging the Mississippi, Missouri, and Colorado rivers into a space the size of West Virginia, then adding snow leopards, lesser pandas, and black-necked cranes.
SHANGRI-LA-LA-LA: from left, a farmhand; harvesting rice in the gorge, stepping out at the monastery (Joshua Paul)
During my two-year stint teaching English, a few fellow volunteers and I crisscrossed Yunnan, racking up our best China adventures—mountain-bike rides through thick jungle tucked along the Laotian and Burmese borders in the south and muscle-wearying hikes in the Hengduans, in the eastern Himalayas. Besides the killer scenery, we'd unknowingly signed up for Anthropology 101: Yunnan is home to 25 ethnic minorities, and we mingled with the tribes, dining on coagulated pig's blood, visiting a Tibetan who hadn't left his mountain hermitage for 22 years, and sleeping in monasteries with fluttering tapestries and golden Buddha statues. But it wasn't until March 2003 that I finally pinpointed paradise: northwestern Yunnan, roughly 100 miles east of Burma and a day's drive from Tibet, at 9,000 feet on Mount Balagezong, in the Hengduans. Sharp, snow-
covered mountains rose behind strings of red, green, and blue prayer flags. Brown-and-tawny lammergeiers—one of the world's biggest birds, with a wingspan of up to ten feet—banked overhead through a perfect blue sky. The stillness, the sun, the view, the feeling of reaching a place so remote that locals had never heard of New York, much less 9/11, created a euphoric surge.
