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.
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 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.
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