October 07, 2005 Shangri-la, Yunnan, China
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I successfully took the “back door to Yunnan.” Sane people take a train from Chengdu to Kunming. It was hard work, and I am exhausted. I managed to sleep until 10 this morning, a feat that is only possible in China with earplugs and a sleep mask. My goal was to a) not take any bus rides and b) not see any sites. I needed a Day of Rest.
But a Day of Rest meant doing laundry, which meant it started to rain right after I hung it out to dry, which has happened every time I’ve done laundry on this trip. It was also my first chance to do email since I left Chengdu.
I went for dinner in the old town. Just as I was thinking it was a charming but artificial tourist attraction, I saw that hundreds of local people were dancing in a big circle to some interesting music, many of the women wearing colorful costumes, with orange scarves in their heads. They danced for hours in the cold. Even after it started raining many still danced. Each song had its own moves, all perfectly synchronized.
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The people weren’t Tibetan. Shangri-la is the end of the Tibetan world for me. There are Tibetan monasteries here, but I haven’t seen any women wearing chubas. Yunnan is famous for all its minority people, and the dancers came from another group, but I don’t know which.
Yunnan should be interesting, since it’s China’s most colorful province, with a higher percentage of minority people than Han Chinese. It had always enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, even independence, from the Empire. It broke away from China after the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early twentieth century, but the Communists brought it firmly into the Chinese fold. Despite this, its history and people make a trip to Yunnan similar to visiting another country, a fact that makes it popular with cowboy hat wearing Chinese tourists.