Yunnan and the People of the Mountains
How do you fall in love, in three days, with a place you've been before? — Travel with someone who truly loves this land.
I've been to Yunnan many times. In my mind, it was the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain at three thousand meters, Shangri-La's "Potala Palace," a string of somewhat over-commercialized old towns, the singing of Lijiang's Xiaoqian, the hot springs of Tengchong, and arty guesthouses beside Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake.
The Yunnan of the past was beautiful, but it wasn't a spiritual home; it was more like a spiritual faraway.
But the Yunnan of this past week was different. I saw and heard many stories here that made this border province in China's southwest corner — a foreign land home to nearly half of China's ethnic minorities — resonate with my soul. Here I went to the museum in Shiping to see the continuity of Chinese civilization; watched the dust thrown up by our car on dirt roads through steep mountains; heard stories of smuggling and drug trafficking on the border; listened to a man who came out of the mountains go from bloody fights and a hard-scrabble existence to becoming a tea fanatic; and saw the simple, sincere greetings of old people. It is still spring all year round here, but it's no longer only flowers; it also has those stories — poor, simple, bloody, romantic, savage, primal, long and lingering, light and quick.
Shiping County
Setting out from Kunming and driving south for two hours, you enter the Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture. A little over a hundred kilometers from the prefecture seat, Mengzi, is a county town called Shiping, our base before heading into the mountains to visit the elderly people living alone.
It's a slightly magical county town: 95% of its 3,042 square kilometers is mountains, yet its buildings have a strong southern, Hui-style character.
(This isn't a cultural heritage building; it's just a well-preserved building in the village)
(The little town has a burly city gate tower, a sizeable Confucian temple and many old academies.)
The Ming and Qing buildings here are preserved so densely and so completely that I was in a daze — how could this be a remote frontier town in southern Yunnan? Later I heard that during the Ming and Qing dynasties Shiping produced 638 juren, 77 jinshi, 15 Hanlin academicians and Yunnan's only zhuangyuan (top imperial scholar), Yuan Jiagu — hence the saying "three jinshi within five paces, two Hanlin academicians across the street." Even today Shiping's schools still rank near the top in the province, quite out of keeping with its location and economic standing. A local friend told me he was amazed that children elsewhere aren't tested on calligraphy when moving from primary to middle school. Here, every student has to practice brush calligraphy, a tradition that survives to this day.
The old people in the mountains
From Shiping County we drove more than 4 hours into endless mountains, and before we knew it the asphalt had disappeared. Dust flew wherever the wheels rolled; on either side were primeval rock faces and cliffs and mountains linked to mountains as far as the eye could see. The villages here have very few people left — as few as four or five households, at most a dozen or so. Going from one village to the next means going from one mountaintop to another; it feels as if you can see the cooking smoke curling up on the opposite side, but driving there takes four or five hours.
One village has a lovely name: Mile Village (named after the Maitreya Buddha). Here lives an uncle surnamed Xu (after some thought, since the public account is a public space, I won't post anyone's photos). He lost both eyes at three, lost his only son in a mining accident in his forties, and then lost his partner... so now, at 78, he lives alone. Yet he has a radiant smile and a "superpower" — he can tell a banknote's denomination just by touching it; there's absolutely no way you could pass off a 50-yuan note as 100. He does his own laundry, cooking and housework, and keeps a pig behind the house.
(When we arrived, a fire was going in the kitchen with a big pot of vegetables cooking — food Uncle Xu had prepared for the pig.)
Uncle Xu even taught himself the erhu. He said that when he thinks of his wife and child he still feels low, and then he plays a sad tune to work through it... He also said: "You are good people; you've all studied Chairman Xi's thought."
Another village is called Renshou Village (the village names here are all so stylish — Shazui Village, for instance, very Hong Kong). There lives an old man, Uncle Wang, who lost both legs as a child. He lives in a tent that looks like a rubbish heap, and in that rubbish heap there turned out to be some treasures.
(Uncle Wang's painting 1)
(Uncle Wang's painting 2)
The relative who looks after him said that the old man usually does nothing, doesn't talk to anyone and has never left the village; he just paints on scraps of cardboard, and no one can understand what he's painting. To me, these paintings have a very Art Deco feel, with a touch of mystery.
In the mountains I learned a local phrase, "bu xiao le, bu xiao le," which roughly means "no need, please don't trouble yourself." It's really useful, because every old person you meet here will warmly invite you to stay and eat, whether it's 8 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon 😂. One old man insisted on catching chickens for us to take away, even though his home was bare to the walls, he had lost most of his sight, he was himself receiving aid, and those few chickens might have been among the few assets he had.
The amazing Brother Gao
We didn't support the old people through a charity, but through a local friend — let's call him Brother Gao. Brother Gao is a Shiping local. Back then it was he who, through introductions from friends around him, helped us find, one by one, the old people who needed help, and twice a year he drives into the mountains to deliver money and daily supplies to them. Visiting all of them takes four or five days, leaving at 7 every morning and getting home at midnight.
Brother Gao is a big, dark-skinned man, but he is also a tea fanatic who listens to the I Ching on long drives, and a philosopher who speaks in golden lines.
During the days we visited the old people, "My Second Uncle cured my mental exhaustion" was going viral online. Seeing the optimism of Uncle Xu and so many other old people, I remarked that these were real-life "Third Uncles" — life had thrown these old people to rock bottom, yet they still lived optimistically. Brother Gao listened to me in silence and said softly, "It's the only way they can live." — That sentence filled me with deep shame, and in one stroke pierced my childish melancholy.
Looking at Uncle Wang's paintings, he said: "There's no such thing as mad or not mad, only understood or not understood."
Talking about the old people who had already passed away, Brother Gao said that each time he drives several hours to deliver money for the funeral. I said, why not just transfer it to someone else in the village, so you don't have to go to all that trouble. He said that besides making sure the money was used properly, he also wanted to go and kowtow a few times for those old people who had no children. He said: "When you've seen a lot of life and death, you treasure the people you meet more and respect life more."
Along the way he talked about his maternal grandfather, who in his day had to carry 18 pairs of shoes for a single trip along the Ancient Tea Horse Road. He said that the lives of their descendants today were walked out by people like them, who opened up so many cities and mines for Honghe Prefecture.
Through the stories he told, I understood what made him willing to spend time and energy helping us support the old people. He said that when he first went out into the world, his mother told him, "If you see a banana peel on the road, pick it up, because just because you won't slip doesn't mean others won't." He said that as a child he watched how the elders in his family did things — they lived at the foot of a mountain, on the path every villager had to take to go up and cut firewood, so many people would sit on the stone blocks at their door to rest, and his grandmother would tell his uncle to fill the water vat beside the stones so everyone could have a drink. He said he didn't want to let down the spirit of those who came before him.
He said that after the pandemic he would definitely take his son, who's in third grade, to see more of the world. But when I asked which city he liked best, he still chose his hometown. Speaking of Pu'er, where he lives now, he said: "The people there have very dark skin but they're very clean, their smiles are healing, their hearts are simple, and there's no scheming. When you drink with them, no one pushes you to drink, but you just want to lose yourself in that moment."
Looking at Brother Gao, with so much awareness of life and so much love and gratitude toward others, I find it hard to imagine that in primary school he hardly had shoes to wear, that he dropped out in the second year of middle school, and that he was once someone who, just to survive, ended up at the police station three or four times a week for fighting. Life must have left many scars on him, yet here and now he exists in such a peaceful, gentle way. People like Bill Gates and Rockefeller, who left immortal names in the history of human philanthropy, certainly deserve to be learned from and admired; but just as an ant can carry 5,000 times its own weight, meeting Brother Gao showed me those people in countless corners of the world who are not rich at all, yet are already giving, again and again.
I've been back in the city for a week, and I still often think of the land south of the colorful clouds — its clear blue sky, those people, those stories. These stories flow like blood into the heart, building a mountain stronghold in some corner of my soul, carrying the romantic and primal spirit of Yunnan's mountains. They changed how I feel about that land and its people, and along the way changed my heart just a tiny bit.