When a Billion Chinese Jump

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Historical documents show that the province had a system of elected forest guardians and logging quotas as far back as the Qing dynasty.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.

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.

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,