The Emperor Far Away (23 page)

Officially, Jinghong is the capital of the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, because around a third of its million-odd people are members of the Dai ethnic minority. But Banna is also home to at least twelve other ethnic groups. And what the anthropologists in the 1950s chose to ignore is that most of Banna’s minorities can also be found living in other parts of South-east Asia.

The Dai are spread across the heart of the Golden Triangle, the notoriously anarchic enclave where the borders of Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Xishuangbanna meet, and are especially numerous in Shan State in the far east of Myanmar and in the north-west of Laos. Also present in large numbers in eastern Myanmar are the Wa and Bulang, while the Akha, who the Chinese group with the Hani people, occupy hill regions across Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. They are joined there by the Lahu and Miao, who are known outside China as the Hmong.

Their languages, cultures, traditions and religions overrule the frontiers which were imposed on South-east Asia in the near past. The individual minorities feel a far greater sense of kinship with their cousins across the borders than they do with the Han, or the other ethnic groups who live alongside them. For the many different peoples of Banna, nationality is far less important than ethnicity, and the fact that they are technically Chinese citizens is almost an irrelevance.

Adding to the sense that Banna is a zone where the state is sidelined is the supremely porous nature of the frontiers here. Compared to Xinjiang and Tibet, where the natives are penned in by either the Wu Jing or the landscape itself, Yunnan’s 4,000-kilometre-long boundary with South-east Asia is a mere line on a map. The largely unsecured borders are demarcated by narrow rivers, or run through rainforest, making moving between Banna, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam easy. In some places, it is possible to drift across the frontiers without knowing you have done so.

While it is impossible for an army even the size of China’s to monitor Yunnan’s frontiers, Banna’s near-open borders are in part due to Beijing’s belief that the minorities here pose no threat to its hegemony. Unlike the Uighurs with their stealthy separatist groups, there is no Dai or Akha nationalist movement. And while the Dalai Lama sits across the border from Tibet, along with tens of thousands of exiles, mobilising international support for the Tibetan cause, no single leader could ever unify Banna’s numerous minorities.

So apparently placid and genial are the local ethnic groups that some are held up as so-called ‘model minorities’. They are ideal junior comrades, happy to sing and dance in their colourful costumes for Chinese tourists while Han officials get on with running the show. There is no overbearing security presence anywhere in Banna. On the contrary, when I moved to Jinghong for a few months I visited a succession of empty police stations while vainly trying to register my presence in the city.

Being stateless, though, is a way of life for Banna’s minorities, who for centuries have defied frontiers and moved between countries at will. The name Xishuangbanna itself reveals the Dai’s presence throughout the Golden Triangle. It is the Chinese version of the original Dai name ‘Sipsongpanna’, which translates as ‘twelve rice-growing districts’. Those twelve different areas made up a former Dai kingdom, which ranged across what are now Banna, northern Laos and eastern Myanmar’s Shan State.

No matter how apparently amiable the minorities appear to be, the pan-border ties they maintain have a dark side. With the CCP believing Banna’s ethnic groups to be no challenge to their authority, the combination of those multi-national links and a lack of state supervision render the Yunnan borderlands the most lawless in all China. Beneath the swaying palm trees, drug smuggling, people trafficking, environmental crimes and illicit gambling are rife. More than anywhere else in the country, Yunnan’s frontiers truly are places where the emperor is far away.

On its own that was enough to entice me to the region. But I didn’t want just to investigate Yunnan’s hidden smuggling routes and crime networks. I had a nagging urge to find out whether the accepted view of Banna’s minorities as happy baby brothers to the Han was true. In a land where the concept of Han dominance is such a fundamental element of the Chinese state, I wanted to see if Yunnan is really a place free of ethnic tension.

To do that, I decided to base myself in Jinghong. Once more, I fled the snow and smog of the Beijing winter for Banna, only this time not for a holiday. I have been to countless provincial Chinese towns and cities over the years, but never lived in one. Jinghong, the capital of a frontier region where the Han are outnumbered two to one by other ethnic groups, was to be my introduction to small-town life in China.

A few hours south of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, and I squirmed out of my coat for the last time for months to come. The closer the bus got to Jinghong, the easier it became to forget the winter I was leaving behind. Outside, the air was gloriously warm, sticky with moisture and the fragrant scents of South-east Asia. In Banna, the temperature never dips below 20 degrees Centigrade, and that is considered cold by the locals.

We raced along a fine highway, past tea, banana and rubber plantations. Ahead on the far horizon were the jungle-covered hills through which the frontiers with Laos and Myanmar run. Until the early 1960s, most of Banna was rainforest where tigers roamed and cobras and pythons awaited the unwary. People never worked in the fields alone, lest they encountered wild bears or rogue elephants.

Now, just 12 per cent of Banna is jungle, despite it being the last significant area of tropical rainforest in China. Much of it has been cleared for the rubber plantations that drive the local economy. They are pushing into the upland areas where the hill tribes practise shifting cultivation: moving from plot to plot to preserve the land. The rubber farms are Han-owned and leave a dwindling amount of space for peoples like the Akha, Bulang and Lahu, forcing more and more of them to descend to the towns they have spent their entire history avoiding.

Deforestation has also resulted in the Chinese turning to Myanmar and Laos to supply their timber needs in the south-west. In Myanmar especially much of the logging is unauthorised, done in collusion between Han-run companies and the Myanmar army with the local ethnic groups providing cheap labour. The mines that plunder jade, rubies and sapphires, as well as minerals like bauxite and copper, from Myanmar’s borderlands operate in similar fashion.

But compared to the devastation wrought on much of inland China by unfettered industrialisation, Xishuangbanna still looks like the Promised Land. Shaded in multiple hues of green and irrigated by the Mekong River (which the Chinese call the Lancang) and its tributaries, tropical fruits grow in abundance here, while rice terraces rise up the hillsides in giant fertile steps. Yunnan is the most bio-diverse province in China, home to 150,000 different plant species alone. Banna’s rainforests house many of them, as well as rare animals, even if the encroaching rubber plantations increasingly threaten their existence.

Jinghong was much as I remembered it – an overgrown village cut in half by the Mekong, so laid back it appears to be masquerading as Banna’s capital. In the early 1980s, there were only 30,000 people living here, mostly in the wooden houses on stilts traditionally favoured by the Dai. Jinghong has expanded since then, as the jungle around it has receded. Now the town sprawls down both sides of the Mekong, linked by a couple of bridges, and the wooden homes have been replaced by uniform white buildings with sloping yellow roofs in the South-east Asian style.

Nevertheless, it still takes little more than ten minutes to drive across town, while the names of some of Jinghong’s palm tree-lined streets are those of the villages it has absorbed in recent years. After frenetic Beijing, adapting to Banna’s sluggish pace was a challenge. Jinghong doesn’t really wake up till the late morning, a distinct contrast to the rest of China where the noodle and dumpling shops get going by dawn. And rather than manning their emporiums, many of the store owners sit in chairs on the pavement gossiping with their neighbours.

Only in the evening does Jinghong truly come alive, when the heat of the day diminishes and street-side barbecue stalls appear and stay busy until the early hours. I arrived in Banna’s peak season, the time when Han tour groups visit for the balmy weather. From the Dai New Year in April onwards, the temperature and humidity rise remorselessly, and outbursts of torrential rain punctuate the muggy days. During the summer the locals retreat inside for much of the day, waiting for the sun to go down before emerging.

Increasing numbers of Han have bought holiday homes in Jinghong. New apartment blocks are mushrooming by the banks of the Mekong to house rich retirees from the east and north of China eager to see blue sky and feel a warm sun. China’s colder cities get grimmer by the year when winter arrives, the skies a rancid mix of yellow and grey, as rising numbers of cars vie with coal-fired heating systems to send pollutant-rich smoke and fumes into the air.

Han immigration has caused both house prices and rents to spiral in Jinghong. I was taken around a number of uninspiring apartments by local estate agents, none able to comprehend that my idea of a shower didn’t involve a rusty pipe. Then a friend suggested I try asking her landlady, a woman named Xiao Yu. I was still thinking like a Beijinger. In Jinghong, as in all small Chinese towns, almost everything is achieved through personal connections.

Xiao Yu, ‘Little Yu’, was a pretty, plump thirty-year-old Bulang woman with a squeaky voice. Later, I discovered that all Dai and Bulang women have the character for jade, or ‘Yu’, as a surname. Xiao Yu had grown up a couple of hours from Jinghong in one of the hill villages near the Myanmar border populated by the 90,000 or so Bulang in Yunnan. More of them live across the frontier, or work as migrant labour in northern Thailand.

In the 1950s classification of Banna’s ethnic groups, the Bulang came out badly. Their isolated existence in the hills and belief in polytheism led to them being categorised as ‘aborigines’ and so ranked near the bottom of the Han hierarchy of minorities. Not only that, but the different Bulang clans were all grouped together as one minority, despite the fact that they regard themselves as individual entities and sometimes speak a completely separate dialect.

They are easy to spot in Jinghong, being darker-skinned and shorter than the Dai, and remain one of the poorest of China’s ethnic groups. Xiao Yu’s early life had not promised much. Married at fifteen to an older Han man, she gave birth to a daughter a year later but that didn’t stop her husband from bringing his girlfriends home. Xiao Yu divorced him, before finding a much more suitable spouse: a French designer holidaying in Jinghong. Now she owned three apartments, one of which she agreed to rent to me, and commuted between Banna and Paris.

Other minority women in Jinghong, and some Chinese, were keen to follow Xiao Yu’s example and land themselves a western man. In 2008, there were just a handful of foreign residents in Jinghong, all old China hands burned out by big-city life. Now the expatriate community in Jinghong has grown, in part because the reputation the local ladies have for being beautiful and accommodating has spread beyond the Han.

Around thirty or forty westerners were living in Jinghong when I arrived and they were mostly middle-aged men. All of them claimed it was the weather which had brought them to Banna. Sometimes, they said it was the last undiscovered corner of South-east Asia, a refuge from the masses that rampage through Thailand’s islands each winter. But they were all single. Most spent their evenings flirting with the waitresses in the couple of restaurants that cater to foreign tourists, or visiting the karaoke bars and nightclubs in search of female company.

It is all very tame compared to the industrial nature of sex tourism in Thailand, and few of Jinghong’s women were fooled. Most were like Xiao Yu, sweet and sensible people looking for proper relationships, as opposed to being the plaything of a fat European for the winter months. I did wonder, though, if the presence of libidinous foreigners was an omen of the future, like the golf courses and five-star hotels being constructed on the outskirts of town. Almost everyone in Jinghong believes it is on the verge of a boom, that the Han tour groups are just the advance party of the holiday hordes set to descend on sleepy Banna.

Western lotharios are still far outnumbered by the Burmese in Jinghong. On almost every street there is at least one Burmese-run jade or teak shop selling jewellery and elaborate wooden statues. There are so many that they defy economics: there simply aren’t enough passing tourists to support them. Most of the time they are empty, apart from the staff lounging around in their
longyi
, Myanmar’s version of the sarong, watching TV.

Locals whisper that the shops exist only to launder the proceeds of the various smuggling operations between Banna and Myanmar. There is a lot of idle chitchat in Jinghong, much of it malicious. It is a small enough place for people to know your business, or to speculate about it. Coming from Beijing, it was a shock to pass the same people in the street all the time and to realise they knew who I was without us ever having spoken.

Despite the gossips, Jinghong is a far more friendly and open place than Xinjiang and Tibet, where the overwhelming presence of China’s security apparatus means the natives are often too scared to speak frankly to westerners, if at all. It was easy to get to know people and they were nearly always from the minorities. Within weeks, I had undergone a crash course in the different ethnic groups and began to gauge something of their different personalities and lifestyles.