Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [96]
Lakes, I discovered, are the cure for hangovers. There was a freshness to Erhai Hu, a pristineness that soon purged the lingering effects of last night’s revelry. It was blue. It was cleanish. There were fishermen plying the waters, and in the near distance rippling hills, and beyond that the Jade Green Mountains that rose to a lofty 12,000 feet. We took a tour boat across the pleasant expanse, and soon I began to feel better.
We were let off below a temple, which like those on Putuoshan was devoted to the worship of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. There was a graceful pagoda on a promontory overlooking the lake, and we stepped in to pray for some compassion. Or rather, I prayed. Jack doesn’t pray to bodhisattvas. I, however, was willing to seek help for my hangover wherever I could find it. Then the boat took us onward from the temple to a small fishing village on an island in the center of the lake. On its banks were nets full of tiny fish drying in the sun. There wasn’t much to see save for a small outdoor market. Still, it was pleasant, quiet. We sat around a tree stump for tea. Nearby, on the shores of the lake, women were washing clothes by hand. Soon, we were joined by the villagers. We couldn’t understand a word, of course, but they were very friendly. A fresh breeze blew and an elderly woman offered us a plate of tomatoes.
“You know what?” I said to Jack. “I’m actually feeling kind of content right now. It’s not often that you feel the love in China. China, as you’ve probably noticed, isn’t the warmest place on Earth. And so to be here, in some village in the middle of a lake in Yunnan Province on a clear day, and to be offered a plate of tomatoes, gratis, just as a kindly gesture to a visitor…it makes me happy.”
“Well, good,” Jack said. “It’s about fricken time.”
15
There are many places in the world I wished I’d seen thirty years earlier, but none more so than the town of Lijiang, nestled in the shadow of the Himalayas, in a lush valley beneath the looming majesty of Jade Dragon Mountain. It was here, in the 1920s and ’30s, that the idiosyncratic Dr. Joseph Rock, a brilliant botanist, established his well-stocked base. He was born in Vienna but had moved to Honolulu in 1907, where he had found his calling in the study of plants. Possibly suffering from island fatigue (something I could totally understand), Dr. Rock made his way to Yunnan Province and arrived in Lijiang in 1922. He was no mere backpacker, however. He had taught himself Chinese at the age of thirteen, and brought gold plates to dine upon, opera records, and a bathtub that he insisted porters carry over mountain passes. His perambulations in the region around Lijiang, under the auspices of his nemesis, the National Geographic Society, led to his magnum opus, The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of South-West China, memorably described by the travel writer Bruce Chatwin as perhaps the most eccentric publication ever produced by Harvard University Press.
It was, in fact, Bruce Chatwin who had put Lijiang on my mental map. He is sometimes described as a travel writer; at other times, more unkindly, as a fabulist. When I read his work, back in my teens, I didn’t care to make the distinction. Perhaps he wrote about a world as he wished it to be, but what a world. His essay about finding himself caught up in a coup in Africa remains for me the ultimate evocation of cool sangfroid. In the 1980s, he visited Lijiang and wrote a memorable essay about Dr. Ho, a Taoist healer, spinning a tale of love and magic and a history that never ends. So it was with uncommon enthusiasm that I boarded the bus for the journey into the high hills of Yunnan and the fabled town that some believe was the inspiration