Spectacle amid the spectacular:
Lijiang’s Old Town attracts crowds of Han Chinesetourists. Scott Law

On one of my last days in China, I woke to the sounds of marching feet and singing—loud, staccato, martial in tone. I lay in bed trying to imagine who could be outside my hotel window. Chanting monks? The government had paid handsomely to rebuild the nearby Buddhist monastery, trashed during the Cultural Revolution. Its entrance halls are once again watched over by shiny, 20-foot-tall guardian spirits, intricately painted in primary colors. Officials also renamed the city “Shangri-La” to attract tourists, who visit the restored temple after lining up for photos sitting atop a white yak on a multi-colored saddle. Although formally in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan, the city is culturally Tibetan.

Or perhaps it was a political demonstration? I’d seen little evidence of the old-style revolutionary pageantry, just piles of sad silver Mao buttons in the antique shops. Even the army presence was low-key save for dust-covered olive-drab trucks with red stars that were parked at the ubiquitous construction sites. Huge banners for commercial and housing developments—“Live Grand on Wealth Boulevard!” read one—had replaced political ones.

Cal Discoveries offers these trips to China in 2008:

Apr 8-24:
The Essence of China

Jul 22-Aug 12:
Total Solar Eclipse

The hard mountain air felt dry in my mouth. We were at 10,500 feet. I’d adapted well to the thin air, but just in case, there was a bright green plastic bottle of oxygen ($10 per dose) strapped to the wall next to a glass cabinet holding free tea and condoms. I got out of bed, ambled to the window, and looked out. Across the street, men were clearing the ground with shovels and pickaxes for a new project adjacent to a small river. Monks in maroon and saffron robes stopped to talk on the bridge. On the horizon the morning sky layered into shades of gray haze against the sandy high-desert mountains. White tour busses lined up smartly in the parking lot below.

From around the corner, the singers popped into view, marching four abreast, and clad not in olive and red, but in white—starched white. Several wore high French-style chef’s hats. Still not fully awake, it took a few moments to dawn on me that the singing marchers were the hotel’s staff, out for their early morning ... what? Like many things I’d seen in Yunnan, the march seemed to combine elements of old China (such as the rows of elders practicing Tai Chi in an ancient city square), the revolutionary China of orchestrated rallies and slogans (now employed for capitalist ends), and the new China eager to adopt certain cultural styles of the once-forbidden West—in this case what could be taken for a corporate team-building exercise.

Yunnan’s patchwork of terraced fields
Scott Law

Such cultural eclecticism is to be expected among people who have absorbed waves of conquering armies and five-year plans, and whose rooftops now sport satellite dishes. But this relatively rural and relatively poor province is also home to roughly half of China’s 56 recognized ethnic minorities, many of whom still speak their ancient languages and hoe their terraced fields in traditional dress. Only 40 years ago, the Cultural Revolution tried to suppress these peasant farmers’ religions and traditions, even as urban intellectuals were sent for “reeducation” among them.

Today, the directions are reversed. Millions leave their villages to find better paying work in the cities, an exodus that poses as great a challenge to ancient traditions as the Red Guards once did. At the same time, tourism has become so lucrative that temples are being repainted and traditional towns restored, or even built from scratch. This switchback history creates interesting anomalies. One musician from Lijiang, a city dominated by the Naxi people, was sent to prison as a rightist (his German nanny had nursed him on Beethoven), but later returned to create a Naxi orchestra, now a must-see attraction. The switchbacks also make this province a unique place to experience the transformation of the world’s most populous land. In Yunnan, cultural time moves at variable speeds, making the region’s history as visibly cross-sectioned as its dramatic geography.

Three weeks before the chef-and-maids march, I’d arrived in Kunming, a 1,500-year-old city of roughly 5 million, with a 30-person tour group organized through two American scientific organizations. Directly adjacent to our hotel were the Thai embassy and a Korean restaurant whose lobby featured a couple dozen tanks of live fish and lobsters (claws tied with ribbon bows) opposite an entire wall shelved with Cordon Bleu cognac. Next to the restaurant, a multistoried, all-purpose entertainment center and disco displayed a large collection of neon signs of various sizes, styles, and languages, advertising a “European Performing Hall,” bowling (with flashing pins), and tennis, among other recreations. That night, young women in mink coats formed an honor guard for guests arriving in black luxury cars. They were greeted at the entrance, which was crowned with a colossal painting of picnicking courtesans in the 18th-century French academic style, by a real woman wearing a gold-buttoned blue waistcoat and white breeches.

From the hotel, I took an evening stroll to an enormous public square also lit up in neon. At one corner, a 40-foot-high European model caressed the side of a fashionable department store. Across the street, the city had planted the main square with thousands of red and yellow flowers, one of Kunming’s principal exports. Several stories above the flowers, a giant painted bull charged across a block-long billboard advertising cigarettes, another major export.

Neon eclecticism in Kunming
Elizabeth Mitchell

Global travelers have grown accustomed to mixed-culture mega-cities where the latest building style adjoins the last one. But the pace of change in China requires Kunming to decide more quickly than most cities what to keep and what to toss. For tourists, the city has restored a neighborhood of two-story wooden buildings with pagoda-style tile roofs and busy tea and craft shops. On one border is a rare statue of Mao, and on another a park scattered with disarmingly realistic sculptures of People’s Liberation Army soldiers. On the day I visited, a teenager twirled a hula-hoop next to bronze soldiers. All around, high-rise office buildings and banks towered over the neighborhood. Peeking through a wall, I saw bulldozers toppling other old buildings for new construction.

Yunnan comprises a series of plateaus that, as you travel north and west, are separated by steadily higher mountains that become craggier and snowcapped as you near Tibet. Fifty-five million years ago, the Indian subcontinent crashed into southern Asia, giving violent birth to the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas. The tectonic collision bent the area’s three major rivers, the Yangtze (or Jinsha as it flows through Yunnan), the Salween, and the Mekong, right-angling them into some of the deepest gorges in the world.

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