Poster on preserve the pristine glory of the mountainsides

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Contents

Southwest Nature .................................................................. 8

1 Useless Trees ............................................................... 9

2 Foolish Old Men ............................................................ 21

3 Still Waters, Moving Earth .................................................... 32

4 Fishing with Explosives ...................................................... 43

Southeast Man ................................................................... 54

5 Made in China? ............................................................. 55

6 Gross Domestic Pollution ..................................................... 64

7 From Horizontal Green to Vertical Gray ......................................... 75

8 Shop Till You Drop ......................................................... 82

Northwest Imbalance .............................................................. 94

9 Why Do So Many People Hate Henan? .......................................... 95

10 The Carbon Trap .......................................................... 106

11 Attack the Clouds! Retreat from the Sands! ..................................... 116

12 Flaming Mountain, Melting Heaven .......................................... 126

Northeast Alternatives ............................................................ 136

13 Science versus Math ....................................................... 137

14 Fertility Treatment ........................................................ 151

15 An Odd Sort of Dictatorship ................................................. 163

16 Grass Roots .............................................................. 177

Afterword Peaking Man .......................................................... 191

Acknowledgments ................................................................... 196

Notes ............................................................................. 198

Introduction: Beijing ......................................................... 198

1. Useless Trees: Shangri-La ................................................... 199

2. Foolish Old Men: The Tibetan Plateau ......................................... 202

3. Still Waters, Moving Earth: Sichuan ........................................... 204

4. Fishing with Explosives: Hubei and Guangxi .................................... 208

5. Made in China? Guangdong ................................................. 211

6. Gross Domestic Pollution: Jiangsu and Zhejiang ................................. 214

7. From Horizontal Green to Vertical Gray: Chongqing .............................. 217

8. Shop Till You Drop: Shanghai ............................................... 219

9. Why Do So Many People Hate Henan? Henan ................................... 221

10. The Carbon Trap: Shanxi and Shaanxi ........................................ 225

11. Attack the Clouds! Retreat from the Sands! Gansu and Ningxia .................... 227

12. Flaming Mountain, Melting Heaven: Xinjiang .................................. 228

13. Science versus Math: Tianjin, Hebei, and Liaoning .............................. 232

14. Fertility Treatment: Shandong ............................................... 235

15. An Odd Sort of Dictatorship: Heilongjiang ..................................... 239

16 Grass Roots: Xanadu ...................................................... 247

Afterword: Peaking Man ...................................................... 250

Bibliography ....................................................................... 251

Books ..................................................................... 251

Reports, presentations, and academic papers ...................................... 256

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Index ............................................................................. 260

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Praise for When a Billion Chinese Jump

“This is the book on China and climate change that the West has been waiting for. Watts uses his long

experience of China to track the country’s environmental calamity up close, uncovering its causes, its

contradictions and its shocking human toll. Then he poses perhaps the most seminal question of all—can it

save itself and, by extension, the planet?”

—James Kynge, author of China Shakes the World

“The world’s chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change rests in large part with decisions being made

today in Beijing. If China raises its standard of living to Western standards without controlling the

emissions from industry and power plants, it will wreak havoc with the world’s climate—with

unforeseeable and irreversible consequences. If it takes the road now opening up to a low-carbon economy

and leads the world in developing and deploying clean energy technologies, it can show the way to a

sustainable future for the planet. Jonathan Watts turns a keen eye on China’s choices—previously made

and yet to come—that will affect us all.”

—Timothy E. Wirth, president, United Nations Foundation

and Better World Fund

“Jonathan Watts brings us up to date on China’s economic miracle and the environmental consequences

not only for China but for the entire world. With wonderful travelogue-like writing, Watts takes us on an

incredible journey through today’s China—and our tomorrow.”

—Lester R. Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute and author

of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

“This is the environmental book that I am most looking forward to for 2010. I admire Jonathan Watts for

his rigorous approach to journalism and his devotion to human stories at the grass roots.”

—Ma Jun, founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and author of China’s Water Crisis

“A fascinating, engaging, and beautifully written book. Jonathan Watts shines a light onto an issue that

affects us all but of which we are woefully ignorant. This book succeeds in both informing and

entertaining us. It is a masterpiece.”

—George Monbiot, author of

Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning

“This is a spectacularly important book, superbly researched and engagingly written. Jonathan Watts has

given us a shocking eyewitness account of China’s environmental meltdown. It should be compulsory

reading for all.”

—Rob Gifford, NPR Shanghai correspondent

and author of China Road

“Watts has written a nationwide audit of where China’s environment stands as of the end of the first

decade of the twenty-first century. His eyewitness accounts are the great strength of this important book.”

—Kerry Brown, Times Higher Education (UK)

“An excellent read. A few good gags in it, too, something few writers on China dare ever to try.”

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—Paul French, author of Through the Looking Glass:

China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao

“Meticulously documented, wide-ranging account … this is a revealing and depressing book. There is no

‘middle truth’ in it. During his painstaking investigative journeys, which called on all his powers as a top-

class reporter, Jonathan Watts concluded that ‘China has felt at times like the end of the world.’”

—Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review (UK)

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Introduction

Beijing

As a child, I used to pray for China. It was a profoundly selfish prayer. Lying in bed, fingers clasped

together, I would reel off the same wish list every night: “Dear Father, thank you for all the good things in

my life. Please look after Mum and Dad, Lisa (my sister), Nana, and Papa, Toby (my dog), my friends

(and here I would list whoever I was mates with at the time), and me.” After this roll call, the sign-off was

usually the same. “And please make the world peaceful. Please help all the poor and hungry people, and

please make sure everyone in China doesn’t jump at the same time.”

That last wish was tagged on after I realized the enormousness of the country on the other side of the world.

For a small British boy growing up in a suburb of an island nation in the 1970s, it was not easy to grasp the

scale of China. I was fascinated that the country would soon be home to a billion people. 1 I loved numbers,

especially big ones. But what did a billion mean? An adult explained with a terrifying illustration I have

never forgotten. “If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth off its axis

and kill us all.” 2

I was a born worrier and this made me more anxious than anything I had heard before. For the first time,

my young mind came to grips with the possibility of being killed by people I had never seen, who didn’t

know I existed, and who didn’t even need a gun. I was powerless to do anything about it. This seemed both

unfair and dangerous. It was an accident waiting to happen. Somebody had to do something!

Life suddenly seemed more precarious than I had ever imagined. In variations of my prayer, I asked God

to make sure that if Chinese people had to jump, they only did it alone or in small groups. But in time, my

anxieties faded. With all the extra maturity that comes from turning six years old, I realized it was childish

nonsense.

I did not think about the apocalyptic jump again for almost thirty years. Then, in 2003, I moved to Beijing,

where I discovered it is not only foolish little oiks who fear China leaping and the world shaking. In the

interim, the poverty-stricken nation had transformed into an economic heavyweight and added an extra

400 million citizens. China was undergoing one of the greatest bursts of development in history and I

arrived in the midst of it as Beijing prepared for the 2008 Olympics.

The city’s transformation was vast and fast. Down went old hutong alleyways, courtyard houses, and the

ancient city walls. Up rose futuristic stadiums, TV towers, airport terminals, and other monuments to

modernization. Restaurants and bars one day were piles of rubble the next. Tens of thousands of old walls

were daubed with the Chinese character chai (demolish). The hoardings around a nearby development site

were decorated with giant pictures of the old city and a half-mocking, half-mournful slogan: “Our old town:

Gone with the wind.”

Living amid such a rapidly shifting landscape, it was hard to know whether to celebrate, commiserate, or

simply gaze in awe. The scale and speed of change pushed everything to extremes. On one day, China

looked to be emerging as a new superpower. The next, it appeared to be the blasted center of an

environmental apocalypse. Most of the time, it was simply enshrouded in smog.

Soon after arriving, I walked home before dawn one morning in a haze so thick I felt completely alone in a

city of 17 million people. The milky white air was strangely comforting. Skyscrapers had turned into

thirty-story ghosts. The world seemed to have vanished. Yet it was also being remade. Overhead, cranes

loomed out of the mist like skeletal giants.

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Over the following years, the crane and the smog were to become synonymous in my mind with the two

biggest challenges facing humanity: the rise of China and the damage being wrought on the global

environment. The builders were constructing the most spectacular Olympic city in history. The chimney

emissions and car exhausts were destroying the health of millions and helping to warm the planet as never

before.

The year after my arrival, China’s GDP overtook those of France and Italy. Another year of growth took it

past that of Britain—the goal that Mao Zedong had so disastrously set during the Great Leap Forward fifty

years earlier. From 2003 to 2008, China stopped receiving aid from the World Food Programme and

overtook the World Bank as the biggest investor in Africa. Its foreign-exchange reserves surpassed those

of Japan as the largest in the world. The former basket-case nation completed the world’s highest railway,

the most powerful hydroelectric dam, launched a first manned space mission, and sent a probe to the moon.

This was a period in which the population increased at the rate of more than 7 million people per year,

when more than 70 million people moved into cities, when GDP, industrial output, and production of cars

doubled, when energy consumption and coal production jumped 50 percent, water use surged by 500

billion tons, and China became the biggest emitter of carbon in the world. 3

As a parent, I worried for my two daughters’ health when the air became so bad that their school would not

let pupils out at break times. I feared too for my lungs. A regular jogger since my teens, I found myself

wheezing and puffing after even a short run. When the coal fires started burning each winter, I suffered a

dry, rasping cough that sometimes left me doubled up. In Beijing I was to suffer two bouts of pneumonia

and, for the first time in my life, I was prescribed a steroid inhaler. The city was choking and so was I.

To be in early twenty-first-century China was to witness the climax of two hundred years of

industrialization and urbanization, in close-up, playing at fast-forward on a continentwide screen. It soon

became clear to me that China was the focal point of the world’s environmental crisis. The decisions taken

in Beijing, more than anywhere else, would determine whether humanity thrived or perished. After I

arrived in Beijing, I was first horrified at the chaos and then excited. No other country was in such a mess.

None had a greater incentive to change.

The environment had become a national security issue and the government started to respond. The

leadership—the hydroengineer Hu Jintao and the geologist Wen Jiabao, or President Water and Premier

Earth, as I came to think of them—started to shift the communist rhetoric from red to green. They wanted

science to save nature. Instead of untrammeled economic expansion, they pledged sustainability. If their

goals were achieved, China could emerge as the world’s first green superpower. Alternatively, if they

failed and the world’s most populous nation continued to leap recklessly onward, our entire species could

tip over the environmental precipice.

These were the extremes. The truth was probably somewhere in between—but where? That became the

biggest question of my time in China. For the first five years as a news correspondent for the Guardian,

the environment was my primary concern. After that it became such an obsession that I took six months

off for private research trips and then returned to a new post as Asia environment specialist. Traveling

more than 100,000 miles from the mountains of Tibet to the deserts of Inner Mongolia, I witnessed

environmental tragedies, consumer excess, and inspiring dedication. I went to Shangri-La and Xanadu,

along the Silk Road, down coal mines, through dump sites, and into numerous cancer villages. I saw the

richest community, the most polluted city, and the foulest sea. On the way I talked to leading

conservationists, politicians, lawyers, authors, and China’s top experts on energy, glaciers, deserts, oceans,

and the climate. Most compelling were the stories of ordinary people affected in extraordinary ways by a

burst of human development and climate change the like of which the world had never seen before.

This, then, is a travelogue through a land obscured by smog and transformed by cranes; one that examines

how rural environments are being affected by mass urban consumption. What are we losing and how?

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Where are the consequences? Can we fix them? It projects mankind’s modern development on a Chinese

screen.

Though the chapters progress through regions and themes, the structure is polemical rather than

geographic. When I had to choose between a strong case study and a line on the map, I opted for the

former even if that occasionally meant leapfrogging provinces, returning to some places twice, and cutting

across boundaries. Lest anyone fear that I am asserting a new territorial claim by Dongbei on Inner

Mongolia, or by the southeast on Chongqing, I should state their place in these pages is determined by the

powerful trends they illustrate. Similarly, my apologies to anyone who feels slighted or frustrated by my

selective approach. Omission of a province is not intended to dismiss its importance any more than

inclusion is meant to indicate a paradigm case.

The choice of location and topics in these pages is determined purely by my own experience. Even over

many years and miles, that is limited. China is simply too vast and changing too fast to capture in its

entirety. Starting from the world’s high, wild places and descending into the crowded polluted plains, the

book tracks mankind’s modern development and my own growing realization: now China has jumped, we

must all rebalance our lives.

Southwest

Nature

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1 Useless Trees

Shangri-La

A man with a beard is respected. The same applies to mountains. A person with a beard and hair is like a

mountain covered with forest and grass. In the same vein, a mountain sheltered in forest and grass is like a

person well clothed. A barren mountain is no different from a naked person, exposing its flesh and bone.

An unsheltered mountain with poor soil painfully resembles a penniless and rugged man.

—Inscription on monument found in Yunnan, dated 1714 1

Paradise is no longer lost. According to the Chinese government, Shangri-La can be found at 28° north

latitude, 99° east longitude, and an elevation of 3,300 meters at the foot of the Himalayas in northwest

Yunnan Province. I started my journey at this self-proclaimed mountain idyll with the intention of working

my way down and across China, tracking the progress of development on the way. Shangri-La seemed a

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fitting place to begin. Environmentalists considered it pristine, economists thought it backward. I planned

to search here for natural and philosophical ideals, for untouched origins. But I may have arrived too late.

Bumping along a dirt road through the mountains, I spied muddy hovels and forests spoiled by the

blackened aftermath of logging teams. Gray drizzle doused a blaze of purple azaleas and white

rhododendron shrubs. A track cut through a field of flowers to an alpine pool scarred on one side by the

stumps of dozens of felled trees. The landscape, once one of the most stunning in China, had been violated.

For millennia, Bigu Lake in the heart of the region was protected by its remoteness. Although worshipped

by local Tibetan communities, it was not mentioned in the extensive canons of Chinese literature.

Government administrators and poetic wanderers rarely made it this far. It was too poor, too little known,

too difficult to exploit.

All that changed in December 2001, when the Chinese authorities found a new way to sell northwest

Yunnan’s beauty: they renamed the region Shangri-La. As well as being a brilliant piece of marketing, the

appropriation of a fictional Utopia dreamed up seventy years earlier on the other side of the world was a

remarkable act of chutzpah for a government that was, in theory at least, communist, atheist, and

scientifically oriented.

The tourist trickle quickly became a flood. Road builders, dam makers, and hotel operators added to the

height of the swell. Beauty was marketed as fantasy, often with disastrous consequences. When the Oscar-

nominated filmmaker Chen Kaige wanted a spectacular location for a new kung fu blockbuster, The

Promise, he came to Bigu Lake and completely reconfigured the idyllic landscape. With the enthusiastic

support of the local government, the director’s team built a road through the field of azaleas, drove 100

piles into the lake for a bridge, and erected a five-story “Flower House” for the love scenes. Nobody took

responsibility for the consequences. 2 After he ended shooting, the concrete-and-timber house was left

dilapidated; the ground was strewn with plastic bags, polystyrene lunch boxes, and wine bottles. The lake

was split in half by a bridge nobody needed. A temporary toilet and road besmirched the landscape, and

locals demanded compensation for sheep that choked to death on the refuse.

I had come with one of the environmental activists who exposed the scandal and forced a cleanup. Zeren

Pingcuo was a thickset Tibetan who worked as a nature photographer and conservationist. He was a man

of few words, but what he said was usually to the point.

“Sacred places are no longer sacred,” he said, showing me before-and-after pictures of development in

which lakesides and pastureland quickly filled with tourists, cars, and hotels.

He showed me older pictures of his Himalayan home: breathtaking scenes of hillsides decked with azaleas

in spring, lush green valleys in summer, a forest in glorious autumn reds and golds, and mountain

snowscapes in winter. There were intimate portraits of Naxi children and Tibetan monks, and lively scenes

from monasteries, markets, and festivals. That idyll had first been disturbed in the eighties and nineties by

logging teams, then by tourism.

As our car climbed the steep mountain road, the destruction became more evident. Vast tracts of spruce

forest were chopped and burned. The hillsides were filled with the blackened, stumpy corpses of trees and

the withered brown saplings that were supposed to replace them but had failed to take.

“This all used to be virgin forest, but now it is an ecological war zone,” said Zeren. “The timber companies

came here and cleared the hillsides.”

His home village of Jisha, which nestled in a high mountain valley, was suffering the results. He explained:

“With less forest cover, there are fewer birds. With fewer birds there are more insects. And more insects

means more damage to the crops.”

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Although many locals believed their home was Shambala—a form of heaven on earth—Zeren was no

romantic about the past. Before development, life for locals was tough and often short. But, even among

his own people, the long-term trends disturbed him.

“Tibetans have lived in harmony with nature for hundreds of years. But now we consume in a decade what

we used to use in a century.”

I too was here to get a taste of Shangri-La, albeit for work. I had come to look at beliefs. At the time,

commentators in China complained their nation was mired in a grimy materialist mind-set that lacked an

ideal of what a better world might look like. I wanted to see the alternatives. In such a diverse nation there

were many: Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, nature worship, romantic escapism, and political

utopianism. Shangri-La seemed as good a place as any to start.

But as I soon came to realize, searching for paradise was a complicated business, particularly when there

were furiously competing claims to be the “real” Shangri-La. The word first appeared in the 1933 fantasy

Lost Horizon by the British novelist James Hilton. After a crash landing on the Tibetan Plateau, the

Western survivors stumble across the idyll of Shangri-La:

A strange and half-incredible sight … It was superb and exquisite. An austere emotion

carried the eye upwards from milk-blue roofs to the gray rock bastion above … Beyond that,

in a dazzling pyramid, soared the snow slopes of Karakal … the loveliest mountain on earth.

(p. 66)

This resonated with visions of an earthly paradise found in other religions. The elements are remarkably

consistent: fertility, diversity, color, tranquillity, and sparse, peaceful populations. These tropes form a

baseline of sorts for man’s ideal view of the world. In economic terms, paradise is a place where natural

supply exceeds human demand, where there is plenty of everything.

Hilton’s interwar fantasy was conceived not in southwest China but in northeast London, in Woodford

Green, a Sunday afternoon’s drive away from my home in Barnet. Hilton never revealed the source of his

inspiration, but the closest the author ever got to the Himalayan or Kunlun ranges was Pakistan. His

descriptions of the mountain Utopia were widely—though probably not accurately—believed to be based

on scientific studies and National Geographic reports about Yunnan by the eccentric U.S. botanist-

adventurer Joseph Rock. 3

The Shangri-La myth of a land that could reseed human civilization after the planet was destroyed by war

struck a chord in the 1930s, when development seemed geared only toward industrial destruction. After the

award-winning Hollywood director Frank Capra released a film version in 1937, it became the ultimate

escapist fantasy for a world on the brink of military conflict. Franklin D. Roosevelt named his newly

converted presidential retreat in Maryland Shangri-La. 4

Hilton’s utopian dream was later transformed into a marketing gimmick. In 1992, Asia’s biggest luxury

hotel group was founded in Hong Kong with the Shangri-La name. Market research suggested that the

majority of Western tourists to Tibet and Nepal came seeking a Shangri-La experience. 5 China’s

communist authorities started to take notice. Although the state had spent years dismissing Hilton’s

fantasies as romantic nonsense, local governments suddenly began competing with one another to be

recognized as Shangri-La. The fiercer the rivalry, the more distorted the utopian ideal became.

I headed to Lijiang, Joseph Rock’s base from 1922 to 1949. Like all of northwest Yunnan, the setting was

idyllic. In the old town, traditional wood buildings sloped up the hillside, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain

towered in the distance, and the streets thronged with a colorful ethnic mix. The city was historically rich.

Kublai Khan’s troops crossed the river here. The Red Army passed through on their Long March. For

decades, the spectacular setting, Naxi-minority architecture, and canal-lined streets attracted artists, writers,

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and adventurers. After 1996, when it was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it became a

fixture on the banana-pancake trail of foreign backpackers. 6 After the rebranding of northwest Yunnan as

Shangri-La, this swelled into a wave of domestic travelers. 7

Lijiang was a center of Dongba shamanistic culture. Its followers believed the overuse of natural resources

would invite the wrath of heaven because man and nature were half brothers. This worship of nature was

thought to have its roots in the ancient Bon spiritual tradition that was once the dominant belief system in

the Himalayas and gave Tibetan Buddhism its animistic character, notably the worship of mountains and

lakes. But those values had been marginalized by an influx of outsiders.

Wandering through the cobbled alleys in the afternoon, I saw flag-waving tour guides steer coachloads of

Han—the ethnic majority in China—from trinket shop to trinket shop. In the evening I strolled along the

raucous bar street by the canal. The picture-postcard scene of willow trees, limpid waters, and rough-hewn

stone was illuminated by hundreds of red lanterns, neon signs, and the flashes of tourist cameras. The

traditional wooden structures were packed to the rafters. Tourists joined girls in colorful Naxi costume in

singing contests between balconies on either side of the stream. Some of the women claimed to be from

the nearby Mosuo matriarchal community, where a tradition of “one-night marriages” has become

synonymous with free love. Locals said they were really prostitutes from other parts of China who

counterfeited the Mosuo image to lure customers. It was intellectual piracy, brand-name theft.

Sexual freedom was one of many fantasies on sale in Lijiang. The myth of Shangri-La was another. I went

in search of the man who has done more than anyone to shape discussion of the lost paradise. Xuan Ke

was not hard to find. Almost every night, he leads one of the planet’s most remarkable orchestras. The

Naxi Ancient Music Association plays to packed houses at every performance. With bright, flowing robes

and wispy white beards, the orchestra members ambled slowly to their antique instruments like a council

of wizards preparing to demonstrate their spells.

Xuan was their conductor. He was also a scholar, musician, raconteur, mission-school Christian, former

political prisoner, and—according to his enemies—a self-promoting charlatan. He was a man with a story

to tell. In 1957, during Mao Zedong’s anti-rightist campaign, Xuan was put in prison along with his father,

who was to die in jail. It was only after Mao’s death that he was pardoned.

Since then, he has become a celebrity. The concert-hall audience lapped up his anecdotes about the hard

times of the past. Between each piece, Xuan skillfully harangued Han Chinese and foreign tourists with

criticism of contemporary politics sweetened by jokes about his orchestra’s age and infirmity.

“I am seventy-seven years old. I have spent twenty-one of those years in jail. But I shouldn’t talk about

this for too long or our elder members might fall asleep at their instruments,” he said, first in Putonghua

and then in remarkably good English, to chuckles from the crowd.

After the performance, we waited for half an hour as he signed autographs and posed for photographs with

a long line of fans. Over dinner, he told us how he was responsible for the “Shangri-Lazation” of northwest

Yunnan.

Xuan’s father was Rock’s guide. Xuan remembered from childhood the eccentric U.S. botanist who

traveled through the remotest areas with a full set of cutlery and a plastic bathtub. “Rock was a very hot-

tempered man. He was short, with a loud voice and always shouting. I could hear his sopranolike voice at

great distance. He used to quarrel about everything,” Xuan recalled.

In 1995, when Xuan first made the link between Rock, Hilton, Shangri-La, and his mother’s home in the

neighboring county of Deqin, he was condemned by local officials, who said the idea of an otherworldly

Oriental Utopia was a colonial concept. But when the Shangri-La myth started to draw in tourists and

money, they quickly changed their tune.

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Any community where Joseph Rock might conceivably have plonked his portable bathtub tried to cash in

on the fantasy. In Yunnan, rival claims to be the inspiration for Shangri-La were made by Zhongdian and

Lijiang. In Sichuan, the candidates were Daocheng, Jiuzhaigou, Xiangcheng, and Derong. In Gansu, it was

Xiahe. A community in Pakistan’s Hunza Valley claimed to have directly inspired Hilton on his visit there

a few years before he wrote Lost Horizon. Others in Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal claimed to be closer to the

far older Buddhist concept of “Shambala,” the Sanskrit word for spiritual Utopia, that some believe

inspired the name of Hilton’s hidden paradise.

In an ideal world, the competition could have been a test of which community was living in closest

harmony with the environment. Reality was rather different. The contest in China was political, driven by

greed and characterized by bribery, dubious academic research, and an overriding desire to attract millions

of big-spending, high-consuming, paradise-seeking tourists. Zhongdian, the main town in Diqing

prefecture, hosted a conference of journalists from all over the country. The reporters were lavishly wined

and dined and, according to Xuan, each given two local beauties as company. 8

“They used the trick of wine, women, and song to make the journalists write that this was Shangri-La,

even though there was no such place. I taught them this strategy,” he boasted proudly.

It got messy after 1997, when Zhongdian—which neither Hilton nor even Rock ever visited—unilaterally

renamed itself Xianggelila, Shangri-La. The Xinhua News Agency wrote of “chaotic” battles between rival

paradises. Xuan was inundated with demands and threats from mayors and governors, who wanted him to

declare Zhongdian a fake.

“I was a little scared,” he recalled. “Because I did not know the real Shangri-La. I had just read Hilton’s

book and watched the film.”

With the contest starting to turn nasty, the central government stepped in. In December 2001, the State

Council, the highest decision-making body in the government, declared the matter settled in a red-

bannered document that ruled Zhongdian is Shangri-La.

Xuan laughed. “The stupid government changed the name into Shangri-La, even though it is only an ideal.

It is not strictly speaking a village, or a county or even a place, but although it is not one hundred percent

true, the renaming is still a good thing because it feeds people’s ideals and dreams.”

When I asked about the environmental impact, Xuan was less confident about the benefits of the renaming.

He claimed logging was halted after Zhongdian became Shangri-La, but the water and air quality have

deteriorated because of the influx of people. 9 The solution, he believed, was to raise the quality of the

visitors. “If we can find such a place where many cultures and traditions can live harmoniously together,

that should be enough. Why should we worry about water and air pollution?”

Such an attitude, I was beginning to realize, was a major challenge to conservation in China. In

mainstream thought, Utopia was not about nature, it was about people.

Xuan was proud of his role. The benefits of Shangri-Lazation could be seen, he said, in the huge crowds

that crushed through the city streets. 10

Business did well but he acknowledged that the town had become a

less pleasant place to live. “It is so crowded and there are so many bars and cafes with loudspeakers

playing music that I cannot sleep. So I made my old home into a hotel and moved my bed into the

countryside.”

Although the idea of a lost paradise echoes the biblical story of Eden, it’s odd that the location of Shangri-

La was so heavily influenced by three Christians: Rock, Hilton, and Xuan. Commentaries in the People’s

Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, routinely castigate Westerners for their dreamy view of Tibet. 11

But not only Westerners look to the Himalayas for ways of life that have been lost elsewhere. Lost Horizon

- 14 -

became popular in the West during one of the most disruptive and frightening phases of industrialization.

Even though he was writing on the other side of the world about a place he had never been, Hilton may

have stumbled onto a yearning that is just as keenly felt in modern China as it was among the Western

audience he wrote the novel for more than seventy years ago. Zhongdian initially adopted the name

Shangri-La to attract wealthy foreigners, but most of the tourists in northwest Yunnan were Han Chinese.

They came in search of a pristine environment and culture—an alternative to their homes in the modern

megalopolises of Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing. For some, it was a revelation. The Beijing-based

activist Hu Jia told me he was inspired by the natural scenery and religious beliefs he found in these forests

and mountains. 12

Others leave disappointed. “I spent six months meditating in a Tibetan monastery, but all

I discovered was that the monks are as corrupt and lecherous as everybody else,” lamented another

Beijinger.

China had its own images of a lost paradise. The closest to Shangri-La is probably the myth of the Land of

Peach Blossom. Set in the Eastern Jin dynasty (ad 317–420), this is the tale of a humble fisherman who

wanders through a narrow cave to discover a hidden mountain-ringed Utopia. The inhabitants are

descendants of war refugees from the Qin dynasty, who had lived undisturbed for hundreds of years in

perfect harmony with each other and nature. The fisherman returns home to tell the story, but he is never

again able to find the idyllic valley. The Land of Peach Blossom has become an ideal of beauty. Images of

this land are painted in gorgeous colors on the Long Corridor of the Summer Palace in Beijing. It is also

the inspiration for China’s most innovative and influential landscape gardener, Yu Kongjian, a young

professor from Peking University who calls for his countrymen to seek the utility of nature, rather than

repeating the mistakes made by emperors over thousands of years in trying to re-create its beauty

artificially in decorative gardens. 13

Ancient Chinese art and literature contains numerous other paeans to nature. As early as the Eastern Zhou

period (700–256 BC), there was a saying: “People who are of ruling quality but are not able to respectfully

preserve the forests, rivers, and marshes are not fit to become rulers.” 14

But more dominant philosophies have tended to stress the importance of ordering humanity and taming the

wild. Under Confucianism, humanity’s relationship was filial—man should honor nature as he respects a

parent or a ruler. In this hierarchy, even the emperor was subservient and obliged to pay homage to the

natural order at the temples of heaven, sun, moon, and earth. The fourth-century BC Confucian philosopher

Mencius equated moral advancement with a better understanding of nature. But most Confucians

emphasized society rather than the environment. Legalism, also known as Realism, took an even more

hard-boiled approach. Its advocates believed the primary concern of a leader was to maximize the power

of the state. The environment, like everything else, was sacrificed for this goal. Buddhism introduced the

idea of reincarnation and respect for all living creatures. There is no duality between man and nature—they

are one. But many believers also revere holy lakes and mountains, particularly in Tibet, where Buddhism

is mixed with ancient Dongba traditions.

Taoists took an altogether more relaxed and anarchic approach that dismissed mankind’s attempts to

impose order on all-encompassing, endlessly mutable cosmos. The Tao is what changes rather than what

man thinks it should be. Believers aim to get as close as possible to the natural world, to balance with it

rather than to worship or rearrange it. Their closest term for nature was ziran, which conveys a sense of

“spontaneous unfurling in which the earth is seen as a boundless generative organism”—a concept that has

come to appeal in the modern age to the “deep green” eco-movement. 15

Its nonmaterialist outlook was best

illustrated by the story of the Taoist sage Zhuangzi, who was dozing in the shade of a gnarled tree when a

rival took the opportunity to pour scorn on his philosophy.

“Your teachings are as useless as this tree. None of its branches will produce a single straight plank.

Nothing can be carved from its knotted grain,” sneered the worldly critic.

- 15 -

Zhuangzi giggled. “Useless? Oh yes. I certainly hope so. You could plant this tree in a wasteland and still

rest in its shadow, still eat its fruit. No axe will ever be sharpened to chop its trunk, no saw will ever trim

its branches. If your teachings are more useful, you are the one who should worry.” 16

In ancient literature, Taoists envisaged a lost Utopia where everything had been in harmony. According to

the Book of the Prince of Huainan, this cornucopia was made possible by the wisdom of the Three

Emperors, who—according to myth—ruled 5,000 years ago at the dawn of Chinese civilization. 17

They

were depicted as masters of restraint:

The laws of the former kings did not permit the extermination of the whole herd or flock or

the trapping of the young. They did not allow the draining of ponds to fish, the burning of

woods to hunt, the spreading of nets in the wild prior to the autumn’s wild dog sacrifice, the

setting of nets in the water prior to the spring’s otter sacrifice, the stretching of bird nets in

valleys and river gorges before the autumn falconry, the logging of hill forests before the

autumn shedding of leaves, the burning off of fields before the hibernating of the insects.

They did not allow the killing of pregnant animals, the collecting of fledglings and bird

eggs, the taking of fish less than a foot in length, or the consumption of piglets less than a

year old. Thus grasses and trees billowed forth like rising steam, birds and animals rushed

to their domains like a flowing spring, and birds of the air warmed to them like clouds of

smoke because they had that which brought all this about. 18

This expression of an ideal balance between man and nature was part of an ultimately unsuccessful

polemic in a political battle. The Book of the Prince of Huainan was written at an intellectual turning point

in China’s history around 150 BC. The golden age of philosophy, which had produced Confucius, Mencius,

Zhuangzi, and Lao-Tzu, had come to an end and the ideas of the greats were literally being fought over.

The book, thought to have been compiled by the Taoist naturalist Liu An, 19

challenged many of the

prevailing beliefs of the age. Liu advocated a rational, activist naturalism, a search for harmonious

balance—or what we might today call sustainability. He redefined the central Taoist concept of wuwei

from “no inteference” to “no interference contrary to nature.”

But this led him into conflict with schools of Confucianism and Legalism, for whom the organization of

human society took precedence. 20

Liu An rose up in rebellion against his nephew, the Wu emperor, in 122

BC. When his army was crushed, so was the concept of Taoism he espoused. 21

This changed everything. If

Liu An’s rebellion had succeeded and he practiced as a ruler what he preached as a rebel, China might

have had an ancient model of sustainability and a deeper reverence for nature. Instead, Confucianism,

which is primarily a human-ordered view of society and nature, has dominated decision making ever since.

The tendency to control nature is pithily summed up by the environmental historian Mark Elvin, who

writes: “Classical Chinese tradition is as hostile to forests as it is fond of trees.” 22

In Retreat of the

Elephants, Elvin traces how forests, wildlife, and ethnic minorities have been steadily pushed to mountain

peripheries in China by what he calls 3,000 years of unsustainable development by the Han ethnic majority.

In ancient times, he says, China had abundant forests and wildlife, including elephants as far north as

Beijing, but relentless deforestation has followed the Han push to the south and west. 23

Until the late 1990s, Yunnan contained many of nature’s last great holdouts against human development.

The province’s name, which means South of the Clouds, encapsulates its remoteness. Historically, it has

been a refuge. During the last ice age, the mountain gorges were among the few geological channels on

earth where temperate animals and plants could survive, while most animals in Europe were wiped out. 24

Its remoteness kept it from the worst ravages of human development during the past two centuries. For

novelists and filmmakers it became “The Land That Time Forgot.” For conservationists and ethnologists it

was, and still is, an ecological treasure house for species wiped out elsewhere.

- 16 -

The range of natural and human life in Yunnan is greater than anywhere else in China. The province

covers 4 percent of the nation’s land area, but it is home to more half of the country’s vertebrates, higher

plant species, and orchids as well as 72 percent of the country’s endangered animals, many of which

cannot be found anywhere else in the world. 25

Almost a third of the 42 million population are from ethnic

minorities, including Tibetans, Naxi, Bai, and Miao. Ethnic and biological diversity were vital elements in

any Shangri-La worthy of the name.

As the car carrying my assistant and me wound through the misty mountain road from Lijiang to Shangri-

La, I saw why this area might be considered paradise on earth. Looking up, I could see the misty slopes of

holy mountains that soar over 6,700 meters. Down below, I saw perilously deep ravines including the

churning waters at Tiger Leaping Gorge. This was the gateway to the Three Parallel Rivers National Park,

where three of Asia’s great waterways—the Yangtze, Lancang (better known outside China as the

Mekong), and the Nu (Salween)—run within fifty miles of each other. As they descend through mountains

and foothills, these rivers had carved out spectacular canyons teeming with life. More than three-quarters

of the area was carpeted with dense forest. Occasionally the wood gave way to precariously cultivated

terraces, grassy plains, crystal streams or vast lakes. It was a spectacular land, sparsely peopled by farmers

and monks.

I didn’t need to be a botanist to see why conservationists get hot flashes about this place. A single gorge

can be home to more varieties of life than are found in entire countries. The steep slopes that rise up from

the Gangqu River are particularly abundant, ranging through six climatic zones from the subtropical in the

moist, warm valley to the alpine in the cool and craggy peaks.

It is a living museum of biological history, a glorious reminder of what nature was capable of.

Rhododendrons—ornamental garden shrubs else-where—grow here into gnarled Tolkienesque trees.

Twelve percent of the animals, reptiles, and fish in Shangri-La are found nowhere else in the world. Thirty

mammal species are “protected,” including the musk deer, the Chinese screw mole, the black-necked crane,

and the Yunnan Golden Monkey—until recently presumed extinct. Today, there are thought to be about

1,500 in the wild, roaming in a narrow strip of land between the Mekong and the Yangtze, mostly in

Shangri-La. To satisfy tourists’ hunger for novelty, locals reportedly drive these endangered animals from

their mountain forest homes to the valley resorts below almost every day. So much for “protection.”

The value of biodiversity is yet to be fully understood. There are at least 7,000 known plant species in this

region, and many more as yet unidentified. Yunnan’s forests have proved to be a medicinal gold mine. The

Himalayan yew is important in the production of artemisinin, the drug identified by the World Health

Organization as the best treatment for cerebral malaria, though Tibetans have known for centuries of the

plant’s healing power. Such “discoveries” were bad news for the forest. Two Himalayan yews had to be

felled for each patient given a course of Taxol, one of the most effective treatments for breast and ovarian

cancer. Villagers tried to stop the unsustainable plunder of their forest, but they were powerless against

local businessmen and officials who worked on behalf of suppliers to the big pharmaceutical companies.

By the time we reached the Shangri-La tollbooth, dusk was already gathering in the mountain valley. My

assistant was sleeping. I was groggy. We had been driving all day on Route 204 and the view was not

always utopian, electricity pylons vying with the breathtaking gorges for dominance. I also spied a

hydroelectric dam and the wreckage of three recent accidents, including a bus that had slipped into a ravine

during the previous day’s rains, killing the driver and more than a dozen passengers.

I had not expected paradise and tranquillity, but the first impression of Shangri-La was disappointing. No

sooner had we passed through the giant red ornamental pillars of the tollbooth than we hit a construction

site. A short drive on, Zhongdian was even less dreamlike. Like almost every other county town in China,

it was filled with square buildings decorated with white tiles and tinted windows. The crowds and traffic

seemed as far from nirvana as the signs for the Shangri-La branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank

of China and the Shangri-La headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party.

- 17 -

We checked into the Paradise Hotel, which was decorated with plastic azaleas. Its main feature was a pool

that was rarely used because exercise is not recommended for visitors to an altitude of 3,300 meters.

Nearby, an “old town” was being built almost from scratch. Carpenters were busy hewing timber beams

and erecting curved roofs and tapering balustrades. Their work was part of a 300-million-yuan makeover

aimed at making the town look less like Zhongdian and more like Shangri-La. The faux-antique decoration

was the epitome of modernity. Some of the elegantly carved wooden buildings were already completed

and full of trinket sellers offering fluffy yaks, prayer beads, and ceremonial daggers. On the new cobbled

streets, black-market hawkers touted fake Rolex watches and Ray-Ban sunglasses.

We entered a Tibetan restaurant and ordered tsampa. Two beggars wandered from table to table asking for

money. They got short shrift from the only other customers, a group of soldiers, who were reluctant to

interrupt a drinking game that had one of them throwing up beside the table. “Don’t bother us. Go and ask

the foreigner for money,” they said as they shooed the beggars away. Tired and grumpy after the long

drive, I couldn’t help feeling that the closer you got to Shangri-La, the farther away it seemed from Utopia.

I returned to the hotel dispirited, but other hotels guests were in a party mood. Next to my room, flashing

red neon tubes illuminated the way to the Paradise karaoke bar, where hostesses were on offer for a fee:

100 yuan to sing together for an hour, 200 yuan for a shared dance, more for something extra. Shangri-

La’s attractions came in many forms.

At a hot-pot lunch the next day with A Wa, the chief of the local tourist bureau, I got a clear idea of the

government’s priorities: “We have two targets: promoting economic development and raising people’s

incomes, both of which we hope to achieve through tourism.”

Between tasty bites of yak meat and mountain vegetables I had never seen before, A told me money and

class would solve Zhongdian’s environmental problems. The region aimed to attract more middle- and

high-end tourists because they spend and consume more, yet waste and pollute less. This was the same

environmental compromise sought by growth-obsessed governments across the world: it was the essence

of the “pollute first, clear up later” outlook on development. But, I wondered aloud, didn’t this still lead to

the clearance of forests and grassland, the drawing of more water, and increased demand for timber,

concrete, and other building materials? How could it be called a formula for sustainability? A answered

that people’s welfare was the priority.

Until recently, trees had taken the brunt of developmental stress. Yunnan’s forest cover had halved since

1950. 26

Although the government introduced tight logging restrictions in 1998, just a few years later

timber companies were felling 40 million square meters of forest, almost fifty times the permitted limit. 27

Since then, efforts to reverse the destruction had been compromised by Yunnan’s shift toward cash crops.

By the Burmese border, the ecologically rich tropical rain forests of Xishuangbanna—one of the last

homes of elephants in China—were steadily being replaced by rubber and sugarcane plantations. 28

In

Simao, ancient pines were felled for a project to convert 1.8 million hectares of land for fast-growing

eucalyptus cultivation by Asia Pulp & Paper, the region’s biggest tree chomper.

It was a poor long-term investment. Old forests were filled with life accumulated over thousands of years.

Their biodiversity and vitality enabled them to cope with invasive species just as a body on a balanced diet

is better able to withstand illness. The rows of new monoculture trees, however, were felled every ten

years or so. Little life could be nourished beneath their temporary canopy and the trees often succumbed to

the invading competitors. Not for nothing were these plantations called “green deserts.”

Environmentalists believe we need to look back to move forward. Bob Moseley, an expert in alpine

ecology who set up the Nature Conservancy’s Yunnan programs, sees traditional beliefs and customs as

the best hope for the sustainable management of the land and forests. This runs contrary to the prevailing

wisdom in top-down, technocratic China, where poor, uneducated villagers are often blamed for gathering

so much firewood that forests are depleted. Moseley has used repeat photography to back his

- 18 -

counterargument. He collected more than a thousand old photographs of northwest Yunnan spanning 100

years and commissioned new pictures to be taken at the same spots. The comparisons suggest forest cover

around indigenous communities has been constant—and in many cases increased—as a result of sensible

limits on wood gathering and tree felling. In contrast, government-backed programs of old-growth cutting,

clearance for rubber plantations, and forest conversion to monoculture have taken a heavy toll. His

conclusion is that “millennia of accumulated ecological knowledge among local people has a lot to tell us

about how to manage for biodiversity in the future.” 29

Chinese scholars recognize that indigenous groups have a better appreciation of “useless trees.” Botanists

and forestry experts at the Kunming Institute of Botany see the worship of holy mountains and trees as a

means by which locals promote sustainability. From a study of Yunnan, they conclude that minorities take

better care of nature than majorities. 30

Historical documents show that the province had a system of elected forest guardians and logging quotas

as far back as the Qing dynasty. The epigraph at the start of this chapter was inscribed on a monument in

Yunnan from 1714. It appeals for the preservation of forest ecosystems in terms that sound very similar to

those used by green activists today. 31

Everyone understands that only healthy green forests and fertile soil can nurture ever-

flowing springs. None doubts the significance of those fundamental elements of nature,

such as soil, water, and fire. Yet, do we know it is the root of trees and forest that bring us

water? It is for our benefit and fortune.

The mountains I saw in Yunnan were being stripped bare, but this time it was ice rather than forest cover

that was disappearing. Glaciers were melting and retreating so fast that local monks blamed themselves for

being insufficiently pious. 32

The forest and grasslands are also being overexploited for mushrooms. I had

never imagined how huge this fungal industry was until I set out from Zhongdian to see another of the

candidates that had fought the Shangri-La contest.

Yading, a few hundred kilometers north across the border with Sichuan Province, was the most remote yet.

After we left the resort areas, the clouds lifted, the forest thickened, and the valley road climbed past

brightly colored Tibetan farmhouses. People here were clearly making money. Many of the huge homes

were newly built. Shafts of sunlight made the bare timber shine almost as brightly as the fresh paint.

They were paid for by the global mushroom economy. We saw our first roadside fungus hawkers an hour

outside of Zhongdian. It was grueling work for the collectors: twelve hours a day scouring the hillsides for

the slim, 2-centimeter stemlike protuberance that is all of the fruit that sticks out of the earth. On a good

day, they said they could find five fungi that they could sell for about 15 yuan each.

Yunnan is home to 87 percent of all the fungi found in China. 33

With strong demand from overseas and

more Chinese able to afford such exotica, northwest Yunnan and other Tibetan areas are in the midst of a

fungal gold rush. The province’s most lucrative agricultural export market was Matsutake pine mushrooms,

prized in Japan for their fragrance and taste. Consumers in Tokyo and Kyoto were willing to pay up to

10,000 yen (US$110) for the best specimens. 34

Chinese consumers preferred the caterpillar fungus

Cordyceps sinensis, which consumed its host, the ghost moth caterpillar, from inside out as it hibernated

on the mountain grasslands. But rising demand and intense competition is driving foragers to collect earlier

in the year, sometimes before the fungus has had time to release spores. This means it has no way to

reproduce. Production has plummeted over the past twenty years, driving up the price of the fungus to

almost twice the price of gold, gram for gram. 35

Many Chinese believe this ghoulish parasite, known in

Tibetan as yartsa gunbu, or bu, is variously a cure for cancer, an aphrodisiac, and a tonic for long-distance

runners.

- 19 -

During the two-month season in early summer, more than a million people comb the alpine hillsides for

the “Himalayan Viagra,” which could earn an adept picker more than most Chinese villagers earn in a

year. 36

Mycologists warn that the fungus is threatened by massive, unsustainable harvesting. The

grasslands are being trampled into dust. Scarcity has even led to gun battles and killings over prime fungal

turf. 37

Parasite hunting is a hard and destructive way to make a living.

As the road climbed, the views became more spectacular, the people looked poorer, and the going got

harder. Tarmac gave way to gravel, gravel to mud. The gradients got steeper and the roadside drops more

perilous. Here and there we navigated the debris of recent landslides. Small puddles became extended

stretches of mud. In most cars this would be the point to either turn back or get stuck. But our four-wheel

drive ground onward and upward, skidding and squelching through the sludge.

Delays on these treacherous narrow roads sometimes lasted days when big vehicles broke down, causing

backups for tens of miles. You could tell when a traffic jam was serious because drivers left their cabs and

played cards at the side of the road. When it was really bad they gave up waiting altogether and returned to

their cabs to sleep.

We stopped to try to help a bus that had been marooned all day on the steep, slippery mountain road. We

towed and pushed and shoveled for more than an hour, but it would not budge. The passengers faced a

night stuck on a hellish road while we headed off in search of another paradise. The rough going continued

for several hours until the provincial boundary, where asphalt marked our transition from dirt-poor Yunnan

to upwardly mobile Sichuan. Instead of bumping along at 15 kilometers per hour, we could cruise at 50.

The muzzy feeling in my temples told me we were picking up altitude as well as speed. We left the forests

behind and the landscape grew bleaker and the air thinner. Just outside Sangdui Village we stopped to take

in the view from a Tibetan stupa at a mountain pass. A sign said we had hit 4,500 meters. The wind blew

hard and cold, the clouds looked close enough to touch, and the only sound was the tolling of yak bells.

The desolate landscape of barren hills, rocky plains, and the odd patch of snow appeared unwelcoming, but

it seemed closer than anywhere on our trip to Hilton’s description of the Tibetan Plateau: “The loftiest and

least hospitable part of the earth’s surface … two miles high even in its lowest valleys, a vast, uninhabited

and largely unexplored region of windswept upland.”

After ten hours on the road, we hit Daocheng, a traditional Tibetan town. Monasteries and stupa dotted the

bleak landscape, the words of a Buddhist incantation were written in giant stone characters on the hills,

and every home had a shrine with a picture of the tenth Panchen Lama. The people here were obviously

poor: their brightly colored clothes were ragged and many of the buildings looked as if they would provide

little shelter against the cold of winter, when temperatures can plunge below minus 20°C.

We spent the night at the best hotel in town, which had no heating in the rooms and provided hot water

only from 7 p.m. to midnight. The next morning my assistant greeted me with a wheeze and a raspy hello.

She couldn’t sleep well because of the thin air. The only vehicle we could hire was an old minivan. The

suspension was so bad that we bumped and bounced even on good roads. On the dirt tracks, our teeth

rattled and I had to grip a handle to stop my head from being jolted against the roof. At the first tollbooth,

the battery died and I had to push-start the van.

Soon after, we neared our destination. The approach to this Shangri-La was similar to that described by

Conway, the world-weary narrator of Lost Horizon:

The mountain wall continued to drop nearly perpendicularly, into a cleft that could only

have been the result of some cataclysm in the far past. The floor of the valley, hazily distant,

welcomed the eye with greenness, sheltered from the winds and surveyed rather than

dominated by the lamasery. It looked to Conway a delightfully favoured place.

- 20 -

The road plunged into a previously hidden gorge, and the landscape underwent a sudden, spectacular

transformation. Bleak mountain slopes gave way to forest, fertile terracing, and a community of Tibetan

homes and temples. Again, it was just as in the novel:

The valley was nothing less than an enclosed paradise of amazing fertility, in which the

vertical difference of a few thousand feet spanned the whole gulf between temperate and

tropical.

Yading was not mentioned in any of my English guidebooks. Compared with Zhongdian and Lijiang, it

was remote, spiritual, and—because of the altitude—disorienting. But this pilgrims’ route was in the early

stages of being harnessed to the tourist trail. New hotels were under construction. Women were arriving

from faraway villages to work as waitresses, masseuses, and prostitutes. The local government planned to

build a cable car up to one of the sacred sites. The party secretary of Yading, A Wangsiliang, a cheerful

fellow with straggly, matted hair and a beaming smile, was optimistic. As well as being a communist, he

was a Tibetan, a Buddhist, a caterpillar fungus collector, and a cautious convert to development.

“Our biggest source of happiness is the increase in tourists. Although their rubbish hurts the environment,

they bring money,” he said with an infectious grin. Even when I asked what the downside might be, he did

not stop smiling. “Our main worry is that the authorities will seize our land to build hotels, just as they did

in the other Shangri-La.”

The town had just started a new pony-trekking business. We saddled up for a one-hour ride along the

pilgrims’ trail. It felt a little sacrilegious. This was a holy place. The trees were draped with scarves, the

roadsides lined with cairns, and every few hundred meters there was a stack of slate etched with scriptures.

Farther on we dismounted and climbed a steep slope to a jade-colored tarn. It was utterly tranquil. The

only sound was the distant thunder of avalanches caused by melting snow on Xiannairi Mountain. Apart

from a herder, who looked at me curiously as he passed by with a yak, and my interpreter, there was not a

soul around. There was nothing to worry about, nothing to hurry toward. In this environment, even my

Barnet cynicism seemed to fade. Shangri-La was not so daft after all. Imagining or chasing after a lost

ideal was surely a positive human instinct. Hilton evoked the mood perfectly:

There came over him, too, as he stared at that superb mountain, a glow of satisfaction that

there were such places still left on earth, distant, inaccessible, as yet unhumanised.

I took a deep breath of the thin mountain air. I wanted to absorb the moment. It felt sublime, close to

paradise. But my reverie was cut short when my assistant threw up. The altitude was taking its toll. She

apologized, but I was the one who felt guilty. I had been too self-absorbed to notice the symptoms of

mountain sickness. It was time to get back down to earth.

We drove down from the peaks as a thunderstorm ripped open the sky above the bleak Tibetan Plateau.

After it passed, we hit Kangding, where work was under way on the world’s second-highest airport, sited

well above the snow line at 4,000 meters. This was not just south of the clouds, it was above them. Even

on the runway, the planes would be halfway to their final cruising altitude. The airport was part of a huge

new transport network that the Chinese government and neighboring states were putting in place to

develop the entire Mekong region, encompassing Yunnan, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma. With

the construction of roads and railways, asphalt and iron were piercing their way through mountains and

forests. China’s thirst for hydropower was driving developers into ever more remote areas of Yunnan. 38

The Mekong was being widened for container ships. With Yunnan’s rivers marked out as a base for

hydropower development, half a million people were due to be relocated over the following ten years, and

ancient valley refuges for biodiversity were threatened with flooding. 39

Shangri-La was undergoing a

transformation.

- 21 -

On our last day, we picked up a hitchhiker. Yezong Zuomu was a wrinkled, weatherbeaten Tibetan pilgrim

who visited Yading each year to walk around the three sacred mountains in the hope that it would bring

good fortune to her family. At sixty-seven, she had never talked to a foreigner before. I needed double

interpretation—the driver from her Tibetan into Mandarin, and my assistant from Mandarin into English.

Her story had to be repeated again and again because of the noise of the rattling van and the language

problems, but it left me with a clear picture of the harshness of life at 3,500 meters, the old spirituality of

the Tibetans, and the modern lure of material development.

Yezong’s annual pilgrimage took weeks, but she carried no possessions apart from her prayer beads and a

little food. The rest of the time she relied on the comfort of strangers. Every day, just before nightfall, she

sought the charity of caterpillar fungus diggers, whose mountain shacks offered respite from the bitter

winds that sliced across the Himalayan plains. Each dawn she set off again, chanting scriptures, fingering

her prayer beads, and slowly trekking around the sacred mountain Xiannairi. The 6,032-meter peak was

said to represent the closest Tibet had to a patron saint, Avalokiteshvara the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

Buddhists believed a circuit of this mountain was worth chanting a hundred million scriptures.

For almost all of her life it had been thus for Yezong—living close to nature, close to the spiritual, and

precariously close to starvation. Despite her poverty, such was the beauty of the landscape and the power

of her belief that she, like many local people, felt she lived in Shambala, a spiritual paradise.

One of the fastest changes in world history had started to intrude. First came the new road, then the first

cars. Homes were hooked up to the electricity grid. TV antennas were erected on the mountains, and the

mobile phone network had expanded toward the peaks. Tourists began to appear in increasing numbers.

The start of the commune’s pony-trekking business gave Yezong’s family an income for the first time in

her life. Shambala had become Shangri-La. All within ten years.

It transformed her values. On her latest pilgrimage, Yezong said, she prayed as usual for a good harvest,

her family’s health, and peace. But when we set her down, Yezong revealed a new set of priorities as she

bid us farewell.

“I will pray for all of you because you gave me a ride,” she said. “And I will pray for more money. Money

brings happiness.”

I waved good-bye, grateful for the prayer and the company, but also wondering whether Yezong realized

the impact that modernity would have on her, her community, and their way of life as development

advanced into the world’s formerly remote highlands. The protection of inaccessibility was disappearing.

The baselines of beauty and diversity were shifting as migrants moved in and a young generation grew up

unaware of the former wealth within the forests. Traditional values of sustainability were coming under

new pressures. Man was crowding into almost every corner of the world. In ancient times, the poet Li Bai

called the journey to the southwest “harder than the road to heaven.” For me, the climb up to the world’s

roof had simply been a long, long drive. It would soon become even easier than that.

2 Foolish Old Men

The Tibetan Plateau

The strong moral conviction is growing up that in these days of overcrowding the resources of the rich

portions of the earth cannot be allowed to run to waste in the hands of semi-civilised peoples who will not

develop them.

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—Francis Younghusband, British imperialist 1

There was once a foolish old man who could not bear the sight of two mountains blocking the view outside

his home. With the help of his two sons, the old man started trying to move them. Every day, they took

rocks and pebbles from the slopes with the intention of dumping them in the sea far away.

This astonishing sight caught the attention of a wise man, who laughed scornfully, “You silly old fool!

You are so decrepit that you can barely climb to the peak, how do you imagine you can ever shift two huge

mountains?”

Undaunted, the foolish old man replied, “After I die, my sons will carry on. When they die, my

grandchildren will keep up the work. My family will grow and grow and the peak will get lower and lower.

Why can’t we move the mountains?”

Having put the wise man in his place, the foolish old man returned to his task, moving rocks through the

hot summer and the cold winter with his sons. God was so impressed by his determination that he sent two

angels down to carry away the mountains.

Every schoolchild in China is taught a version of this fable, known as Yugong Yishan or “The Foolish Old

Man Who Moved the Mountains.” Written more than 400 years ago by the philosopher Li Yukou (also

known as Liezi), the moral is that man can achieve anything with determination, time, and sufficient male

offspring.

Mao Zedong loved the story and reinterpreted it to justify a war on nature and China’s colonial enemies.

For him, the two mountains were imperialism and feudalism:

The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must

persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart. Our God is none other

than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t

these two mountains be cleared away? 2

For much of the past sixty years, the Chinese politburo has been trying to do just that. The ideological

children and grandchildren of Mao are reengineering nature just as the Great Helmsman planned to build a

stronger nation and liberate the population from supposedly backward traditions and foreign threats.

It required a very different way of thinking from that espoused by the philosopher dozing under a “useless

tree” noted in the last chapter. But the mountain-moving mind-set has prevailed. I saw this on the Tibetan

Plateau, where mankind’s ambitions were pushed to the earth’s limits.

“Aren’t we Chinese great? They said it couldn’t be done. And yet, we’ve not only done it, we’ve done it

ahead of plan. No other country in the world could do this. Chinese people are so clever.”

We were two hours, several beers, and half a roasted duck into a journey along the world’s highest railway,

the 1,900-kilometer line from Xining to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. But my patriotic conversation partner,

Wang Qiang, was just warming up on his favorite subject: China’s engineering prowess.

“The new track follows the highway built by our soldiers in the 1950s. The terrain is so harsh that three of

them died for every kilometer of road. You have to admire their spirit. But now, we’ve built the railway

without the loss of a single life. Isn’t China great?”

Wang, a stout and ruddy power-plant worker from Hunan, was in the bunk two below mine. He was as

keen to demonstrate the conviviality of China as he was to wax lyrical about the country’s strength. As

well as cracking open a bottle of beer and sharing his food, he offered a packet of Dongfanghong

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cigarettes—”I smoke these because it was Mao’s favorite brand”—and travel advice about the province we

were passing through. “Actually there isn’t much trouble in Qinghai. It’s full of police and soldiers, but we

have very good public order.”

Wang was one of about sixty passengers squeezed into a “hard sleeper” carriage as our overnight train

rattled toward the sunset, passing a half-visible rainbow, the world’s largest saltwater lake, hillsides quilted

with yellow rapeseed and the occasional white Tibetan yurt.

With a couple of hours left until lights out, my fellow travelers were looking for ways to kill time and

forget the cramped and smoky conditions of our shared compartment. Some played cards, others sang with

their children, a curious few chatted with a Tibetan monk. And when that entertainment ran out, several

attempted to talk to me, the only Western face in the carriage.

They were engagingly friendly. A family from Xining poured a pot of instant noodles and offered

sightseeing tips. A policeman who often traveled the route explained why the door to the “hard-seating-

class carriage” was kept locked. Two young sightseers from Hong Kong shared their herbal remedies for

altitude sickness and talked enviously about the pioneering character of the mainland.

“There is an amazing can-do spirit in China these days,” said Susan Hong, a math teacher from the former

British colony. “We used to have a bit of that in Hong Kong. But now we are so conservative compared to

the mainland. Anything seems possible in China these days. It’s very exciting.”

But there was a dark side. As I got ready to turn in, Wang qualified the level of his friendliness. “I am

happy to share food and drink with you. We are friends with all countries now, except Japan. If you were

Japanese I would not share my food with you. And I would not let you sleep in the bunk above me.”

A little drunk, he repeated the threat for the third time as I clambered up to my bed. It was almost the

highest I had ever slept—both from the floor, which was about two meters below my third-tier bunk, and

from sea level.

Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen or the frequent patrols by ticket inspectors, but I had trouble getting to

sleep. My mind raced back across the contrasting impressions of the previous few hours: the warmth of my

fellow passengers, the sometimes alarming nationalism of Wang, and the can-do spirit that had impressed

the tourists from Hong Kong. Behind was Han China, the materialistic, modernizing, go-getting world of

Wang. Ahead was Lhasa, the capital of what was once arguably the most spiritual, traditional, and remote

land on the planet. In the former, nature was there to be conquered. In the latter, it was there to be

worshipped. In my muzzy-headed state, the journey started to feel like something more than a simple ride

along a track. It was a trip back in time, tracing human development in reverse. Or so it felt.

Brits should be cautious about high places. We are not used to them. Ben Nevis, at 1,433 meters the tallest

mountain in Britain, would be a minor foothill in the Himalayas. Up on the roof of the world, it is all too

easy to misjudge scale, to forget the sudden changes in the weather that occur that close to the clouds, and

to be confused by the tricks that the mind and the body play when deprived of the usual amount of oxygen.

My background reading suggested that the rarefied air could go even further to a man’s head when it was

mixed with a desire for power. In 1903–4, Major Francis Younghusband, one of the most intriguing and

ignominious figures in British imperial history, led a military mission into Tibet that turned into an

invasion. Based in India, he was supposed to settle a border dispute near Sikkim. Instead, he marched

2,200 troops all the way to Lhasa, crushing any sign of opposition on the way. A museum in Gyantse

depicts the massacre that took place there when Younghusband’s Maxim guns and cavalry mowed down

700 monks in four minutes. The Tibetans, who were armed with nothing more than muskets and boulders,

were cut down by bullets and swords even after they turned their backs and attempted to flee. 3 Even for

imperial-era London, Younghusband’s actions were considered excessive, as was the harsh indemnity that

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he imposed on the Dalai Lama. The terms were eased, but Britain maintained a presence in Tibet until

1947. Younghusband’s “invasion” was to be Britain’s last colonial adventure in Asia.

For the forty-year-old major, it was a turning point. The awe-inspiring sight of the Potala Palace, temples,

and monasteries in Lhasa mixed with remorse in his oxygen-starved brain and set him suddenly on a

spiritual quest. The experience, he wrote, “thrilled through me with overpowering intensity … Never again

could I think evil, or ever be at enmity with any man. That single hour on leaving Lhasa was worth all the

rest of a lifetime.” After a period wandering the mountains and leading an ascetic life, he returned to

Britain, helped found the World Council of Faiths, espoused the creation of a new religion, and advocated

a doctrine of mystical beliefs and free love. 4

Younghusband fascinated and appalled me. In conquering Tibet with a tiny army, he reached the peak of

the British Empire and his own military career. On the way up, he was a hero; on the way down, a villain.

Little wonder that he looked for an alternative direction with esoteric mysticism. The more I read about

him, the more compelling was his story. A classically repressed Victorian with an imperial superiority

complex as full as his walrus mustache, he was at various times a journalist, a guru, a war criminal, and a

Great Game spy.

He was also a British version of the indomitable old man in Yugong Yishan. In his youth, Younghusband

was the first European to travel overland from Beijing to India, en route crossing the Gobi Desert and the

Himalayas. Toward the end of his life, he organized some of the first expeditions up Mount Everest. In

between he attempted to explore the psychic realm, claimed there were extraterrestrial beings on a planet

called Altair, and heretically called for a replacement religion for “puny and childish Christianity.”

Judged by today’s standards, Younghusband was an arrogant jingoist, who wrote in 1898 of “John

Chinaman” failing to be a “perfect animal” and Indian Baltis as “a patient, docile, good-natured race whom

one can hardly respect, but whom one cannot help liking in a compassionate, pitying way.” 5

His value system was based upon power: Superior races exploited nature. Inferior ones were condemned

by their failure to do the same.

It was a common view at the height of the British Empire, where like all colonialists of the era and many

Chinese today, the justification for conquest was civilization: the living standards of “less advanced”

people would be raised slightly as partial compensation for stealing their natural resources. In

Younghusband’s philosophy this was an ethical imperative, as the epigraph to this chapter attests.

The self-righteousness of those who plunder resources continues today.

*

When it opened in 2006, the railway across the roof of the world was hailed by China as a means of

improving the living standards of remote, undeveloped Tibet. Supporters of the Dalai Lama, the exiled

spiritual leader of the region, condemned it as a political tool, a weapon of cultural genocide, and a means

to suck natural resources from the Himalayas. 6

The Sky Train is indisputably a triumph of engineering. At its maximum altitude in the Tanggula Pass, the

track runs 5,072 meters above sea level, higher than Europe’s greatest peak, Mont Blanc, and more than

200 meters above the Peruvian railway in the Andes, which was previously the world’s most elevated track.

Building a railway through this terrain required the blasting and building of seven tunnels and 286 bridges.

China’s statistics are always mind-boggling and often unreliable, but they serve as the scripture of China’s

materialism, evidence of the powerful gospel of “Scientific Development.” So was the speed at which the

- 25 -

track was laid, three years ahead of the original seven-year schedule. For the disciples of the economic

miracle, it was proof that China was overtaking the United States.

Like many other Chinese modern megaprojects, the Golmud-Lhasa railway is a realization of the dream of

the ultimate mountain-moving man, Mao Zedong. As early as 1950, the chairman sent engineers to Tibet

to look into the construction of a railway, and in 1973 he announced the project to the outside world. 7

Construction began the following year on the first part of the route from Xining, the provincial capital of

Qinghai Province, to Golmud, the garrison town in China’s wild west. After it was completed in 1984, the

engineers were stuck. For the next twenty years, this was the route to nowhere. Flanked by mountains,

Golmud appeared as much of a dead end as the ocean.

It had been thought that no one could build a line any farther across the Tibetan Plateau, certainly not all

the way to Tibet. It was too bleak, too cold, too high, too oxygen-starved. Even the best Swiss tunneling

engineers concluded that it was impossible to bore through the rock and ice of the Kunlun mountain range.

And if that was not impassable enough, even the flats were filled with perils. A meter or so below the

surface was a layer of permafrost. Above that, a layer of ice that expanded or melted according to the

season and time of day. How could tracks be laid on such an unstable surface? And how could a regular

service be run in an area plagued by sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter?

As the great train traveler and writer Paul Theroux notes in Riding the Iron Rooster, these obstacles

protected the former Himalayan kingdom of Tibet from modernity:

The main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese—and so thoroughly old-fangled

and pleasant—is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached. The

Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa. That is probably a

good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked

wilderness much more. 8

That was written in 1988. Less than two decades later those protective barriers were falling, though Tibet

was still more inaccessible than almost anywhere else on earth. A World Bank study located the planet’s

most remote place in Tibet. The region was also home to much of the last 10 percent of the planet that was

not within a 48-hour car, train, or speedboat ride of a city. The advent of the Sky Train will change that. 9

The railway was a meeting of opposites. On one side was the heir of Mao’s legacy, Hu Jintao, the

engineer-president who preached a philosophy of “Scientific Development.” When he opened the track, he

celebrated it as a symbol of national progress and unity that would help to improve life in Tibet and draw it

closer to the rest of China. On the other was the Dalai Lama, the political monk who advocated a

philosophy of compassion and conservation. He warned that Tibet was threatened by cultural genocide as

the railway brought more Han settlers, tourists, and businessmen. His support for development was

tempered by his Buddhist concerns about the natural environment: “The world grows smaller and smaller,

more and more interdependent … today more than ever before life must be characterised by a sense of

universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of

life.” 10

In the Western world, the train has been the subject of much hypocrisy. The British in India, the French in

Africa, and the European settlers in North America built railway lines to subjugate indigenous populations,

but when China did the same thing in Tibet, it was pilloried. This may be because of the strategic

importance of the Himalayas. As early as 1889, another mustached British colonial, the writer Rudyard

Kipling, noted with alarm: “What will happen when China really wakes up, runs a line from Shanghai to

Lhasa … and really works and controls her own gun-factories and arsenals?” 11

The fact that Beijing has

now done exactly that shows how global power has shifted.

- 26 -

Orientalist fantasies often reached absurd levels in Tibet. Adolf Hitler sent an expedition there in search of

paranormal powers to strengthen the Third Reich and to make contact with the mythical kingdom of

Shambala. More recently, a host of Hollywood stars have seen in Tibet the spiritual core missing from

their homes in California. Steven Seagal was named a reincarnated lama, but he is far from alone in being

mocked for an obsession with “Shangri-La-La Land.”

Tibet has not always been associated with peace, spirituality, and remoteness. It once boasted an extensive

empire that stretched through much of central Asia. At other times, it was invaded by Mongols, Manchus,

Dzungars from Xinjiang, and Gurkhas from Nepal, and its leaders built alliances with Arabs, Turks,

Indians, and Chinese. The first Europeans, a group of Portuguese missionaries, arrived in 1624. Buddhism

was not native to the region; it was introduced either via China or Nepal or directly from India. Neither

were monks necessarily peace-loving—the “Dobdobs” were the most famous of many bands of warriors

based in monasteries that once fought for control of territory—nor are they necessarily any less tempted by

money and power. Before 1959, 95 percent of the land was concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of the

theocracy. Tibetan scholars have never claimed their land was Shangri-La. 12

Chinese rule has brought very real economic and health benefits even as it has curtailed religious and

political freedom. 13

The Xinhua News Agency, China Central TV, and the other organs of state

propaganda insist Beijing’s rule is not just benign, it is altruistic. Less often stated, but more crucial, is the

strategic importance of the world’s peaks and the mineral wealth they contain. Tibet covers an eighth of

China’s landmass and contains an abundance of valuable ores, including gold, lithium, copper, magnetite,

uranium, borax, and lead. More important still, it is also the source of Asia’s biggest rivers.

We were woken just before dawn as the train approached Golmud, from where we were to continue by car

for a closer look at the plateau. I was prepared for the worst. My Lonely Planet guidebook warned that this

“forlorn outpost in the oblivion end of China” was set amid an eerie and inhospitable moonscape at 2,800

meters. Golmud did not disappoint. Desolate in the early morning gloom, this was clearly a frontier town

for Han materialism. There were few signs of the indigenous Tibetan population and a high concentration

of soldiers, miners, and police. Formerly a small trading post, this city of 200,000 had become a key

supply point for the People’s Liberation Army in Tibet. With the addition of potash production and oil

drilling, Golmud had expanded rapidly to become the second-biggest city in Qinghai Province.

And with the railway, it was expected to grow further and faster. Development was evident everywhere.