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.
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.
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 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
