| Where Beijing was lots of big city bright lights, traffic, development and preserved history, and Wolong was about the environment and Pandas, Danba is our exposure to one of the many long-lived cultures of China. The Jiarong people are a part of the extensive Tibetan diaspora. They inhabit the many subroutes of the Tea-Horse Trail, the paths, fording points, and mountain passes used to trade horses of the Himalayas for the teas of China. Danba County is a level of mountains farther in from the southerly winds that hit the Tibetan Plateau, and therefore a bit less rainy and forested. It sits in view of the impressive Four Sisters Mountain Range. Tibetan families moved here thousands of years ago, some because of their allegiance to a renegade Tibetan queen. In various valleys and settlements, they built impressive towers to serve as both lookouts and escapes as various invaders threatened. Hundreds of these towers still stand in good condition due to the impressive stone-laying skills. Some are the center structure of family homes that are still occupied by descendants of the original builders. The towers are one of the features that allow consideration of Danba as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Despite these interesting cultural items, Danba County has not yet been "discovered" in the way that some other parts of China are. In the populated provincial capital a hundred miles to the east, a posted travelers' list of "things to see" does not include Danba. The town of Danba and the surrounding communities are still primarily an agricultural economy. We're off the beaten path. Five rivers join right at Danba and the valleys associated with all of those rivers host hundreds of small villages that are primarily agricultural. For visitors, there are numerous opportunities to visit villages that still functional very traditionally despite the solar water heaters and satellite bowls. Or you can stay in town and watch the centered agricultural commerce as products arrive in baskets, on backs, on horses, in tractors, or on the back of hand-built motorcycle trailers. Ingenuity is a prime characteristic of Danba commerce. / Besides the stone towers, there are many other distinct architectural and cultural styles. A tribal chief with a position of power invited us to his Zhonglu villa way up a winding road on the side of a mountain where he has collected hundreds of artifacts representing Sichuan Tibetan culture. The house, like many, shares distinct building and color styles. The winding stone alleyways between the houses, often filled with livestock, make the various small communities into intricate labyrinths of plantings, stone, and intricate handmade wooden fixtures. And the people are very friendly. Everywhere we go we are invited in. A family who lives at a tower site gave us a tour of their home and led students up into the tower (via a series of log ladders that are made for small feet!) for a look out over the countryside. We could marvel for hours at the handmade fixtures and latticework around the colorful windows. The houses include livestock on the bottom floor with the floors above arranged for crop drying and family living. We got a good hint to not approach the top of the house because that is solely for family member visit to a temple that hosts the souls of ancestors. Gazing from that high overlook across the valley to see other similar enclaves, one is struck by the fact that ancestors of the people we are meeting in these homes have stood here and had this same view (minus the trickle of traffic on the road that winds through the bottom of the valley and the satellite dish on the roof next to us) for thousands of years. It's hard to imagine what it is like to live in a culture where one can have that time-spanning perspective. It';s as hard for us to imagine that prospect as it is for the Sichuanese of Danba County to imagine our culture. Travel to Danba is still not all that commonplace. In over two days spent in Danba and it's vicinity, we saw no other western faces and many seemed curious about our travel group. Three young girls who worked at a shop that sells the traditional clothes that many of Danba's residents (especially women) still wear could not be convinced that the array of skin tones represented in our group were "American." The best response we can provide is that we all look American because anyone can look American, that is the nature of our country. Those young vendors were inclined to take some of our students and dress them in some of those clothes to see what they looked like. Two brave students stood there while a large crowd gathered (a common phenomenon on Chinese streets) to watch the style show. It was a very touching moment that was one of the rewards for traveling off the beaten path. It is at journey points like these that one can start to have a sense of the question about the impact of travel on the traveler and the locale. We had traveled from the metropolis of Beijing where history is slowly being enshrined and surrounded by McDonalds and Starbucks. We moved on to Wolong which is being prepared as a "next place to go" with the consequences of development and change at an earlier stage. And here we are in a place that is just beyond that reach. There are lessons about the need to develop smartly, bringing the advantages of modernization, trade, and tourism in a way that benefits local people. There are also lessons about the rewards of taking the harder road. I have to stop for a moment and repeat a comment from the earlier Wolong article. To get here to this place where we could learn these important lessons our students came a long way. Struggling with long flights and drives and high altitude and different restroom facilities and diets and making sure to be respectful and open to people who might have different expectations -- all that can be challenging work. I am thankful for having traveled with such flexible companions and was impressed by their abilities to put up with some of the conditions we met as well as their inclination to connect with Chinese people. We live in a time when we need to make the extra effort to connect to other cultures in other parts of the world. As we drove back over Balang Pass and back to Wolong for a night before our return to Chengdu (and a homestay with Chinese high school students!) someone in our van was playing a Jiarong (Tibetan Sichuanese) ballad on the laptop, Qinghai Tibetan Plateau. We all had a sense that we had been somewhere that we would remember for a long time. |
| Danba: A long-living culture by Nick Berrigan |
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| (Nine Chinese Language students and six adults traveled to China to spend time in Beijing, rural Sichuan county, and Chengdu. Following is the second part of an account of our time spent in rural Sichuan County. Besides these rural experiences, students also had a chance to live with host families and connect with high school students in the Sichuan capitol, Chengdu. The trip is connected to the Memorial High school Mandarin Chinese program.) by Nick Berigan Part 2 of 2 We're standing at a wayside just below the 14000- foot Balang Pass we crossed to go from Wolong to Danba County, 100 miles west of Chengdu and over a thousand miles from Beijing. We're about to encounter our third of four completely different views of China in three weeks. |
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