Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (18 page)

The Yunnan of old was a Yunnan that looked in different directions for ideas and inspiration, a link between China and the Indian world.

At the Three Pagodas complex, men and women were putting on clothes chosen from a rack of Chinese costumes and then posing for a cameraman, who sold the photos for a few yuan each. The pagodas had been the most important place of worship in the old Dali kingdom. They had been designed in a similar style to their contemporary, the Giant Wild Goose pagoda, built by the Tang emperors, and the Chongsheng monastery next door was once a leading centre of Tantric knowledge.

But now the gates were crowded with costumed people, hoping not for enlightenment but only for a photo with the iconic pagodas in the background. It was a hot late-summer day and many of the families were in shorts, the men and boys in baseball caps. There was a long approach to the pagodas themselves, undulating grassy lawns on each side, a couple of cold drink and ice-cream vendors, and like everywhere in Dali, the constant buzz of happy, holidaying people, the smell of cut fresh grass and the sound of lawnmowers in the distance.

Beyond the Three Pagodas was a newly restored temple with a gargantuan golden statue of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Even here there were little souvenir shops. But compared to the big crowds outside, there were only a few people, families wandering in and out, some offering incense, more it seemed as an amusement than anything else.

There were other choices for the tourist. But I skipped the two main ones. One was Nanzhao-style Island and the other was the Dali Deva Naga Film Studio. Both were big money earners, packaging what was different about Yunnan within the framework of China as one harmonious family.

The creation of amusement parks to represent ethnic traditions is now fairly widespread in China. The most famous such place is the Nationalities Park in Beijing, a combination of museum and fair ground, where Han Chinese dress up in minority outfits. ‘Nationalities Park’ was originally translated into English as ‘Racist Park’, before it was quickly changed. Other similar ventures proliferated and Nanzhao-style Island was established in the mid-1990s, around the same time as the China Folk Culture Villages in Shenzhen (near Hong Kong).

The more recent parks are more interactive. In Burma, Laos and Thailand, people celebrate the new year (in April according to local calendars) by splashing water on one another as part of a several-days-long festival. The Dai people in southern Yunnan have the same tradition, and for years Chinese tourists have gone to the Dai area in growing numbers to see this curious spectacle. But one astute businessman decided what works for a few days a year could work year around, and so created a sort of human reserve, where every day is Dai New Year’s Day. For a fee, tourists can stay in one of four villages (with staff dressed up as Dai), and witness a never-ending new year’s celebration, including constant water splashing and all-round revelry.

Some parks no longer even have an ethnic dimension. While in Dali, I read in a local tourist guide about the Dwarf Empire, located twenty-five miles from Kunming. Part of the Ecological Garden of Butterfly, the Dwarf Empire is a theme park where about eighty or so dwarfs ranging from little over two feet to four feet three inches tall parade around in different costumes (not necessarily ethnic ones) and entertain visitors by singing, playing unusual musical instruments, break-dancing to techno music, and performing various tricks. Closer to Dali, a huge Disneyland-style amusement is planned for the near future. All will be part of Yunnan’s scheme to be the leisure capital of China’s massively growing tourist market.

Seven hundred years before the present wave of tourists was an altogether different wave, of Mongols, Turks and Islam. The Mongol conquest of Yunnan in the thirteenth century brought this hitherto independent kingdom for the first time under Beijing’s control and began a process of integration into ‘China proper’ that has continued to today. The Mongol conquest also brought an astonishingly diverse influx of mainly Muslim peoples, from across their Eurasian domains.

Though the invasion forces were ultimately under Mongol command, many of the officers and most of the soldiers were Turks or people from further west. The force that invaded Burma for example is said to have included no fewer than 14,000 men of the erstwhile Persian Khwarezmid empire, under their own commander Yalu Beg. Others came to garrison the new possession. They included Turks from Samarkand, Bokhara, Merv and Nishpur. They also included tribal peoples like the Kipchaks and even Bulgars from the lower Volga. Yunnan itself had been conquered by the Mongol Prince Uriyangkadai who had also conquered Baghdad, and his forces most likely included captive soldiers from the Abbasid caliphate as well as southern Russia and the Ukraine.

There were even more exotic immigrants. They included the Alans–a Sarmatian tribe today known as the Ossetians–who had submitted to the Mongols and had provided a thousand warriors for the personal body guard of the Great Khan. A son of the Alan chief, Nicholas, took part in the conquest of Yunnan, and men from the North Caucasus were posted along the Burmese borderland.

A member of the Mongol imperial clan, Prince Hugeshi, was appointed ‘prince of Yunnan’ whilst the old ruling family, the Duans, were allowed to stay in Dali and keep the title of ‘maharaja’. The Muslim newcomers, based at Dali, became extremely powerful and the most powerful of them all was a native of Bokhara named Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din Omar. He claimed descent from the emir of Bokhara (though some say his family were originally from Cairo) and by the late 1250s he was a rising star in the Mongol establishment. He served in Baghdad and in China and was appointed as the top administrator in Yunnan in the 1270s. Today the Muslims of Yunnan regard him as the founder of their community, a wise and benevolent ruler who ‘pacified and comforted’ the peoples of Yunnan.

Sayyid Ajall was officially the Director of Political Affairs of the Regional Secretariat of Yunnan, about as bureaucratic a title as one can imagine in medieval times. According to Chinese records, he introduced new agricultural technologies, constructed irrigation systems, and tried to raise living standards. Though a Muslim, he built or rebuilt Confucian temples and created a Confucian education system. His contemporary, He Hongzuo, the Regional Superintendent of Confucian Studies, wrote that through his efforts ‘the orang-utans and butcherbirds became unicorns and phoenixes and their felts and furs were exchanged for gowns and caps’. There were many other civilizing missions on China’s periphery but only in Yunnan was one conducted under Muslim (and essentially Turkish Muslim) leadership.

In this way, Yunnan became known to the Islamic world. When Sayyid Ajall died in 1279 he was succeeded by his son Nasir al-Din who governed for five years and led the invasion of Burma. His younger brother became the Transport Commissioner and the entire family entrenched their influence. There were still very few Han Chinese in Yunnan and the growing Muslim community began to excel as long-distance traders as well. In the early fourteenth century, the great Persian Jewish historian Rashid al-Din Hamadani stated that the Dali region had become exclusively Muslim.

This was at a time not only of Islamic expansion but specifically Turkish Islamic expansion worldwide. The Ottomans would capture Constantinople only a hundred years later, but already their distant cousins were sweeping across Central Asia and across the north Indian plains. At a time when Sayyid Ajall and his men were at the pinnacle of their influence in Yunnan, from the other end of the Himalayas Turkish cavalrymen were careering down the Ganges valley, to the very edge of Bengal, just a few hundred miles away. Only Burma separated these two Turkish-speaking worlds.

Burma was then a no-go zone, for all but the most intrepid merchants and adventurers. Some Muslims from Yunnan did travel via Burma to reach the Indian Ocean, mainly pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Marco Polo, who was in Yunnan in the 1280s, never made it further than Dali. He had come to China across the desert wastes of Central Asia. When he returned he went by sea, from southeast China to Java to the Persian Gulf. Even Marco Polo chose not to travel overland across Burma, so forbidding was the landscape between Yunnan and India. This was a fact of geography that would remain for centuries, one that is only changing now.

The faces on the streets of Dali were the faces of southern Chinese, the kind long familiar in southeast Asia and more recently in cities around the world, from Vancouver to Melbourne. But here and there were very different faces, faces of the Tibetan borderlands and upper Burma. They were much darker-skinned and with bonier features and scruffy hair. They wore baggy ill-cut clothes, in faded dark colours. They were not tourists. Instead they looked like time-travellers. They were the people I had seen every where in Dali twenty years ago, but now looked lost in the sea of camera-slinging, T-shirt and trainers-wearing people.

There were a few other remnants of old Dali. One afternoon, I turned off one of the main pedestrian avenues into a side lane and then an old courtyard, shaded by the branches of big trees. Here were old grey- and white-haired men and women, playing mah-jong and drinking tea, most in washed out navy-blue Mao suits and black cloth shoes. Some sat in beach chairs, enjoying long drags on cigarettes or reading little paperback books. On the far side of the courtyard was a community centre, there since before the tourist rush and still shielded from it, with a billiards room, unused, and a reading room, with a few books and an ancient computer and a framed portrait of Albert Einstein.

Further along, inside a narrower alley, was a simple run-down guest-house that could have been the one I stayed in seventeen years before. Then it was winter and I had been offered a choice of People’s Guest House Number 1 or Number 2. Back then, everyone was in Mao suits or second-hand army clothes. It was in Dali that I bought a Chinese PLA overcoat and hat for my further adventures, pleased to be fitting in. The nearby mountains were then covered in snow, like a little town in the Rockies, wonderfully peaceful and secluded.

My nostalgia trip didn’t last long. I turned another corner and was back amongst another mighty throng of pedestrians, hundreds of them shouting cheerfully at each other, yelling into their mobile phones, eating ice cream, smoking, holding hands, and every few steps pausing for a picture. I slipped into a café, with posters of Che Guevara and Bob Marley on the wall, and ordered an outrageously expensive cup of coffee. Dali was rich; its past was forgotten.

When a new Chinese dynasty, the Ming, overthrew the Mongols in 1368, the Mongols retreated north to their grassy homeland, but also tried for a while to keep their hold over Dali and the rest of Yunnan. The new Ming rulers, however, would have none of it and sent envoys to Yunnan to demand that these renegade Mongols surrender, dispatching five embassies altogether between 1369 and 1375. The Mongols refused, even killing some of the envoys, until an enormous expedition of over 300,000 men was sent to annex Yunnan by force.

The Mongols were soon defeated. The once ruling Duan family, who had maintained a sort of ceremonial position during Mongol rule, now requested autonomy, but this too was turned down by the Ming generals. The head of the Duan family and his two sons were captured and taken to the Chinese city of Nanjing. One son was sent to a frontier station along the Great Wall; the other was assigned as an official at a port city along the Yangtze. This was the end of the royal lineage that had ruled Nanzhao in the tenth century and had maintained Dali as a beacon of Buddhism for nearly 400 years.

In their place, the Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang appointed Mu Ying as the ‘duke of Yunnan’. Mu Ying was a distinguished general and had helped lead the campaign against the remnant Mongol forces. He was also Zhu Yuanzhang’s adopted son and before Zhu Yuanzhang’s rise to power, the two men had been poor together. Mu Ying was now trusted to govern this distant but important frontier and placed above the normal military and civilian administrators. It was to be an hereditary position, and in the decades to come the Mu family would become enormously wealthy and powerful landowners throughout the province.

As in Mongol times, immigration followed conquest, but now, rather than Persians, Turks and Central Asians, an immense wave of Han Chinese arrived in Yunnan for the first time. They were a motley bunch. Nearly 300,000 were soldiers who had come with the Ming invasion, only to be left behind to garrison the southwest, together with their wives and children. Other immigrants included farmers in search of land, merchants, political exiles and criminals. This colonization under the Ming may have brought over a million settlers in total, which made it one of the largest and most sustained official migrations in Chinese history. Migration would only intensify under the Manchu dynasty that succeeded the Ming, as people poured in to take advantage of new economic opportunities, in particular in the mining industry and trade with Burma. They brought with them their northern speech, and today the main dialect spoken in Yunnan is a variant of Mandarin, as in Beijing. Many were brash and aggressive, appropriating land and mining rights. They were egged on by imperial agents, and between 1775 and 1850, Yunnan’s population ballooned from approximately four million people to ten million. By then Yunnan was home to three very different communities: the new Han Chinese settlers, the descendants of earlier Muslim immigrants, and the different native peoples. In the late 1850s, there would be an explosion of inter-ethnic violence.