The Emperor Far Away (25 page)

There must have been over fifty people in the house, ranging in age from toddlers to eighty-year-olds. Everyone moved from group to group constantly, toasting each other with beer or rice wine and the inevitable shout of ‘
Shuay! Shuay!
’ In one corner upstairs, where the family slept on mats on the floor, was a makeshift shrine decorated with money and offerings of food and alcohol.

What was going on in Man Sha and in Jinghong at the same time reveals how the Dai are so adroit at maintaining the division between their public and private personas. In Jinghong, the Dai shared the streets with the visiting Han, who were allowed to participate in the water-splashing and made to feel welcome. But the celebration in Man Sha was specifically Dai and took place out of sight of the Han, like their visits to the Buddhist temples on the previous two days. It was far more relaxed too than Chinese New Year, which is principally an event reserved for close family only.

Songkran has a very different purpose. It is an excuse to gather together as many friends and family as possible for a party, a philosophy embodied in the Thai concept of
sanuk
. Literally meaning ‘to have fun’,
sanuk
is about milking any event for as much enjoyment as possible and always with a big group of friends. Sitting with your family watching the Chinese New Year Gala on TV, as much of a ritual for the Han as viewing the Queen’s Christmas Message is for the British on Christmas Day, is the opposite of
sanuk
. For the Dai, celebrating that way is as alien an idea as Chun Jie itself.

Fresh dishes were still arriving on the tables and boxes of beer were stacked up waiting to be drunk when I left. Back in Jinghong, the water battles were still going on, with people opening up the pipes on the streets to find fresh fluids or running into shops to use their taps. As I made my way home, there were shouts of ‘
laowai
’, one of the Mandarin words that means ‘foreigner’, and I was doused almost every step of the way. Everyone grinned at me and I smiled back; it was
sanuk
in action.

If Songkran reveals the duality of the Dai personality, then so does almost everything they do. Dai teenagers listen to the same Taiwanese pop as their Han contemporaries, but they also attend concerts where Dai bands from Banna, and sometimes Myanmar, sing and play in Dai. Some head to Kunming to work; others slip off to northern Thailand where the dialect spoken is almost the same as the Dai language. Most Dai dress like the Han in public, yet the women revert to their traditional dress for family events, festivals and private parties.

Especially essential for the Dai is the need to protect their religious lives from the Han, a vital part of their cross-border identity. The Dai follow the same tradition of Theravada Buddhism as most of the rest of South-east Asia does. Banna’s other minorities are Buddhists as well, apart from some of the hill tribes who have abandoned their animist beliefs and converted to Christianity, a result of extensive missionary activity in the Yunnan borderlands before 1949.

Monks in their bright-orange robes are a familiar sight in Jinghong. A first-time visitor might regard their presence as evidence of the CCP’s tolerance of the Dai’s Buddhist practices. Backing that theory up is the monastery perched on a hillside on the southern outskirts of town overlooked by a giant golden statue forty-five metres high of the Buddha Sakyamuni. It is a reasonable assumption to make, because it is by far Jinghong’s most distinctive landmark and visible for miles around.

Like Jinghong’s jade shops, though, the monastery is just another front. It is a functioning temple, but one that is a Chinese creation, designed as a commercial enterprise to take advantage of Han visitors and populated by a crew of mutinous monks. Even the giant Buddha isn’t what it seems, being made of mundane steel covered in gold leaf rather than solid gold.

Although it is the largest Theravada Buddhist temple in China, the Dai have boycotted it since it opened in late 2007. They continue to attend Wat Pajay, Banna’s most historic and important monastery. Close to the centre of Jinghong, Wat Pajay is known as Zong Fosi, or ‘middle temple’, to the Chinese. But it gets only a passing mention in the Han guides to Jinghong. They direct everyone to the newer monastery, which they call Da Fosi, ‘big temple’, in an attempt to establish its credentials as the principal place of worship in the area.

When I visited Da Fosi, I was stunned by the extortionate entrance fee: double the price of a ticket to the Forbidden City in Beijing. But there were plenty of Chinese tourists milling around the entrance, perusing the Han-run stalls selling incense, jade and Buddhist icons while they waited to go in. ‘The most expensive incense is 300 yuan [£30]. 300 yuan! But the Chinese will pay, they have money,’ a monk named Zhang Wei told me.

Zhang Wei got me in for free. A mutual friend had arranged for us to meet. He turned up in a new Honda, shaven-headed and incongruous in his robes behind the steering wheel. ‘We need the car so we can visit all the villages,’ he said. ‘Every village has its own temple now.’ Out in rural Dailand, well away from Chinese eyes, there has been a quiet revival in Buddhism over the last thirty years. Fewer than 150 temples in Banna survived the Cultural Revolution. Now, there are close to 600, all administered from Wat Pajay.

We drove up a side road until we reached the four-storey building that houses the monks of Da Fosi. There was a small covered terrace outside, where we sat alongside a couple of novices flirting gently in Dai with two teenage girls. ‘We all speak Dai here. A lot of the young monks are from the countryside and their Chinese is not very good,’ said Zhang Wei. Small and slight, he looked no older than twenty himself, fingering his iPhone like any fidgety teenager enduring an unwelcome chat with a boring adult.

With his latest-model phone, a computer in his room, a car to get him around and, as I learned from subsequent meetings, a taste for coffee and western food, Zhang Wei was considerably more sophisticated than the monks I met in Tibet. But like most of his Tibetan and Dai contemporaries, he was a country boy. The son of farmers from Damenlong, a village on the border with Myanmar, Zhang Wei had joined his local temple aged nine before graduating to Wat Pajay at sixteen.

Now he was twenty-five and a veteran monk. He was more assertive than he appeared to be at first and didn’t pull his punches as he described the dispute between the monks and the company who built and run Da Fosi. ‘We don’t like them and we’re always arguing with them. But they don’t listen to us and they are very close to the local government,’ he explained. ‘We’d all rather be at Wat Pajay instead. We’re trying to expand it so we can move back.’ Banna’s Buddhist resurgence has left Wat Pajay unable to accommodate the growing number of monks, and Zhang Wei was bitter at the way he and others had been duped into moving to Da Fosi.

‘Originally, the company told us they were going to build a new temple and would we like to come and live there. Wat Pajay was already too small for us so we said yes. Then we moved in and they started to charge 120 yuan [£12] for tourists to come here and it became clear it was just about making money for them. We don’t agree with such a high price, or all the stalls that cheat people by over-charging. That’s not the Buddhist way.’

The move to Da Fosi provoked a schism in Jinghong’s monastic community. Around twenty-five of the oldest and most senior monks flatly refused to leave Wat Pajay and still live there, including the Abbot. Zhang Wei showed me the house built for him at Da Fosi, which the Chinese call the ‘Grandmaster Residence’ as if he was a chess superstar. It has never been occupied. But around 100 monks are resident at Da Fosi, including the novices whom Zhang Wei taught Dai to.

‘Many young Dai can’t read our language and don’t really understand our culture or Buddhism. A lot of Dai people can speak Dai, but they don’t teach it in normal school any more so you have to become a monk to learn how to read and write it,’ said Zhang Wei. As in Tibet, the monasteries have become the only place in Banna where locals can get an education in their native language. But unlike Tibet, and in another sign of the Dai’s success in convincing the CCP of their essential affability, novices in Banna are allowed to participate in the regular school system as well.

‘You can study Dai here in the morning and go to normal school in the afternoon,’ said Zhang Wei. He believed that was behind the recent rise in the number of monks. ‘A lot of young Dai were put off becoming monks because they thought it was a hard life and what they learned wasn’t useful in the outside world,’ he told me. ‘Now it’s not as strict a life as before. When I was a young novice, the teachers would beat you if you disobeyed them. But we’re not allowed to do that any more.’

Less welcome has been the diminishing of Banna’s role as a key centre of Buddhist learning for Dai people across South-east Asia, a result of the devastation wrought on Banna’s monasteries during the Cultural Revolution. Large numbers of monks fled across the frontiers, while villagers buried scriptures and icons in the jungle so the Red Guards couldn’t destroy them. Many of the temples have since been restored, but Wat Pajay’s status as a spiritual university has been superseded by monasteries outside Banna.

‘Before the Cultural Revolution, Thai and Burmese and Lao monks came to Wat Pajay to study. Now, we go to Thailand and other places. It’s a complete change,’ said Zhang Wei. Fluid borders mean Banna’s monks can visit monasteries in Myanmar and Laos unofficially. But the Dai’s position as a model minority makes getting permission to go abroad far easier than it is for Tibetans or Uighurs. Zhang Wei had already spent a year in Yangon, as well as three in Singapore.

Wat Pajay’s links with overseas monasteries are a crucial element of the cultural and religious networks that tie the Dai of different countries to each other. Da Fosi is an irrelevance in that scheme; its imposition on Jinghong just another instance of Dai culture being appropriated by the Han for the purposes of tourism. And, inevitably, pretty Dai women act as the guides there. But out in greater Dailand, in Banna’s villages and across the borders, the Dai are quietly getting on with worshipping their way, while keeping their language and traditions alive.

17

Down the Mekong

South of Jinghong, Banna’s hills grow steeper as they roll towards Laos and Myanmar. Although the rubber plantations are increasingly infiltrating here, much of the area is still thick jungle. A highway runs to the frontier with Laos, but otherwise just a few roads cut through the rainforest. Parts of it bear the telltale signs of the slash-and-burn agriculture practised by the hill tribes – blackened land where the trees and vegetation have been burned off so the ash will fertilise the soil. Hidden tracks known only to the locals lead across the borders.

Beijing has grandiose plans to link Banna with the rest of South-east Asia via high-speed trains which will depart Kunming, reach Jinghong in an hour and then speed on to Singapore via Vientiane, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Other branches will reach into Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia. It is not a new notion; both the British and French proposed a Kunming–Singapore line as far back as 1900. Yet only Laos’s leaders, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party – an organisation even more opaque than the CCP and less tolerant of dissent – have truly embraced the idea.

Rather than roads or railways, the Mekong remains South-east Asia’s main transport artery for now. Rising in Tibet, the Mekong runs south for 4,300 kilometres, first through Yunnan and then acting as the border between Myanmar’s Shan State and Laos, before it arrives at a junction where the frontiers of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet. From there, it changes course, veering east and then south again to flow through Laos and into Cambodia and Vietnam, where it empties into the South China Sea.

Long before there were roads in Banna, the Mekong was the means by which its peoples moved around; travelling by water was easier than hacking your way through the jungle. The Mekong was the lifeblood for the minorities. It was both a source of food and the means by which they traded with the rest of South-east Asia, exchanging cotton, tea, salt and opium for betel nut, silver and pepper. Above all, it was the Mekong which facilitated the cross-border ties that link Banna’s ethnic groups to the rest of the region.

Even now, the Mekong remains vital to trade between Yunnan and the neighbouring countries. Around 300,000 tonnes of cargo moves to and from China along the Mekong each year, and that is just the legal shipments. Utilising the river was the logical way for me to explore greater Dailand. I wanted to travel south down the Mekong to Thailand and then venture north to Kengtung in Shan State, before crossing the Mekong to Laos and returning to Banna by land.

It would be a journey through the heart of the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s most lawless zones and the last great gathering place for the minorities of South-east Asia who still resist the concept of statehood. Technically, the Golden Triangle refers to the junction on the Mekong where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand converge. In reality, it spreads much further. Greater Dailand stretches deep into the Golden Triangle and it has always been a place of refuge for those who have rejected Chinese rule.

To travel the Mekong, I needed to find a ride on a cargo boat. In the past, Jinghong was the starting point for the maritime traders going south. The city is divided by the river and it took only a walk to its banks to find transport. Now the river has been dammed upstream. The Mekong’s muddy waters still run wide and slow through Jinghong, but much of the time it is far too shallow for anything more than a small craft to navigate it.