31/08/09

Back in Yunnan, following the tea road. After a couple of days in the capital, Kunming, I drive to Dali, which is well-established on the tourist map. So much so that, despite having been an important stop on the Tea-Horse Road from the tea mountains in the south of Yunnan up towards Tibet, it’s not at all an easy place to photograph. Comfortable enough in a Lonely Planet sort of way, and architecturally still intact, but awash with tourists, mainly Chinese, and an abundance of trinket shops. Still, I worked at it and came up with some good and useful shots. This below has nothing to do with tea, but one morning at the market yielded the pork trading, lively, messy and good-natured. One pig per iron basket, as you can see here….

A porter at Dali’s market; he gets one RMB per trip (around 10p), which although short is pretty tough.

But the surprise of last week was a town further south, Weishan, another important staging post for the tea caravans. This came about with the help of a respected professor of archaeology, Zhang Laoshi, in nearby Xiaguan (the modern city to Dali’s preserved old town). An expert on the Southern Silk Road and the Tea-Horse Road, he arranged for local officials to show us this exceptional and little-visited town. Oddly, the drivers in Dali said the road needed a 4WD to negotiate it, but in the end, a perfectly ordinary saloon rolled up and drove us in the evening along a perfectly ordinary road up and over the mountains. Well, that’s tourist towns for you. Weishan, however, is anything but, and while a modern town has extended beyond the city walls, inside it’s like a ….. well, time-warp would be the clichéd description…

Evening in Weishan.

And almost as soon as we began to walk around, accompanied by Ma Xun Pu of the town’s tourist office, we passed this impromptu recital going on in a local tea shop…

A tea-shop in Weishan late in the evening. The Chinese character on the wall is ‘tea’.

A friendly place, and a friendly town. We just walked in and introduced ourselves (the professor knows everyone here), and they went back to the recital, happy to be photographed. Then on down the lane, by now after ten at night, and the town beginning to close. But here, a cobbler I suppose you’d call him, but working in cloth, still making the traditional Chinese black soft shoes. Amazing that this kind of craft continues…

Cutting the patterns for black cotton shoes. This scene, like the previous two, is what modern digital cameras have made possible to shoot, without the cursed flash that destroys atmosphere!

The next morning, another walk around the old town. This couple are Buddhists — the doorstep offerings are for some family matter; we didn’t stop to ask…

Offerings at the front door, early in the morning.

Here are more traditional crafts and trades. A real surprise, particularly the saddle-maker…

Mr Li is the third generation in making the wooden saddles and other horse tackle for the pack trains.

Rice noodles being hung to dry. They will then be transferred upstairs to a room with a fan, and dry for the rest of the day, until ready to be packed.

From the headscarf, you can see that this lady is Muslim, and the valley has a notable Muslim population. These are the descendants of the the colonists who followed Kublai Khan’s conquest of Yunnan in the 13th century (and the surname Ma, meaning ‘horse’, is a common one, appropriately enough for the Mongols). The nearby village of Dong Lian Hua is completely Muslim…

Saturday afternoon prayers at the mosque.

Remember this...

Hide Sites

Tags: China