The River at the Centre of the World (41 page)

I asked Xuan Ke to explain the rumour that Lijiang was the suicide capital of China. He became immediately animated and cheerful.

‘Yes, yes!’ he said. ‘This is a distinction we do claim. It is all to do with love. I like to think of Lijiang as the love capital, really. The boys and girls here, they fall in love in a most unfortunate way – the morals of the Nakhi people have never been very good. Much promiscuity, I think you would say. And so there is much disappointment, and many couples kill themselves to end their affair. It is a long, long tradition.

‘They have their special places to do the deed – a lake here, a mountain pass there, a riverbank there, a meadow up along the road below the Jade Dragon Mountain, near the American airfield. There is a ritual to it. The youngsters write notes, they call in the wizards to bless the event, and then they drink a mixture of black aconite boiled up with oil. It sounds very disagreeable to me. But it has the advantage of paralysing the larynx. Once they have drunk it they cannot cry out. They die quite quickly and quite peacefully – but totally in silence. No one can come to help them. If they are far away, and no one sees them, then it is all over. They drink the mixture, and they are found dead the next day. The wizards perform another ritual, and it is all over. Joseph Rock was the great expert on it. He knew how they killed themselves, and where, and why. He knew the wizards. He wrote all about it. I have the books.’

Xuan Ke and his father had known Joseph Rock well, and the little museum housed some of the great man's relics – his desk, his bookcases and some of his books, and the enormously wide chair that suggested, wrongly, that Rock had been an unusually portly man. His gold dinner plates and his folding canvas bath from Abercrombie & Fitch were no longer there; but the garden he planted, and his country house a few miles north, also near the American airfield, remained, memorials to a strangely memorable man.

Joseph Rock had been born in Vienna; his father, a melancholy man, was majordomo to a Polish count. He wanted his young son to enter the priesthood. But Joseph, who lost himself in bizarre night-time fantasies that included the learning of thousands of Chinese ideographs by the time he was a teenager, had other plans: he vaulted out of Vienna, signed on as a steward on a transatlantic steamer, arrived in New York in 1905, pawned his clothes, worked as a dishwasher and a waiter and at a score of other menial tasks before arriving, hungry and penniless – but already speaking ten languages, including Arabic and Chinese – in Hawaii.

He had the magical combination of formidable chutzpah and an unquenchable wanderlust. For a while he taught; but soon, surrounded by the delicious greenery of those overfertile islands, he turned to botany as by turns a diversion, a fascination, a hobby and then an obsession. Without either a degree or any formal knowledge of plants, he marched into the Honolulu office of the US Department of Agriculture one day in 1910, insisted that they needed a herbarium and won his way. Within a year, he was teaching botany at the College of Hawaii, and he published papers that are still regarded as classics.

But a craving for travel could not be ignored. He went to Washington and persuaded the Agriculture Department there that he should become an official plant hunter – a paid agricultural explorer, with his nominated territory that part of western China where the rhododendrons, and camellias and the tea varieties were being found in such abundance. He came out first in 1922; and for the next twenty-seven years, until the Chinese Communists dismissed him along with most other foreigners, he lived and explored with memorable energy and acumen, in that vast and tumultuous series of mountain ranges between Dali in the south and the cold deserts of what was then Amdo, and is now called Qinghai, in the north.

He worked first for the government, searching for sources for a substance called chaulmoogra oil, which was then thought to be a treatment for leprosy, and which was used in huge quantities in the great sad lazarettos of Hawaii and Louisiana. Before long, however, he began to chafe under the restriction of government work, even so far from home, and he transferred his professional allegiance to the more liberal board of the National Geographic Society.

He wrote papers and popular articles by the dozen, steadily transferring his affections, as he did so, from the region's plants to the region's people. He sent thousands of specimens home, but he never wrote a single serious paper about the botany of China. Within a few years of his arrival he had taught himself to be the world's greatest expert on the Nakhi people, and a translator of their terrifyingly complex pictographic language. He befriended a colourful figure known as King of Muli, and made similar comradely alliances in principalities called Choni and Yungning. He wrote vast tomes about the Moso – a people, related to the Nakhi, who lived on the northern side of the Yangtze and whose practices are more rigorously matriarchal than their country cousins. (For instance, their family names pass down from mother to daughter.) It was these people who slept and fed on the Boneless Pig, the animal of the mattress and of the slices that are eaten a dozen years later with locally whipped and straw-filled yak-butter and chunks of homemade cheese.

The Moso are a people who also have a highly libidinous reputation across China – whose reported eagerness for sex rivals that of the Trobriand Islanders, far away in the western Pacific. Moso women lead the charge here: they can take as many lovers as they like, and those drawn into these brief relationships are known as
azhu
, good friends. A survey carried out in 1983 found that of 1878 mature Moso women, no fewer than 393 carried on
azhu
relationships. The men invariably returned to their own homes when the night was over: if any children resulted from the mingling, the woman – who might begin her sexual activity as a young teenager – was allowed to keep them.

Not surprisingly the rate of sexually transmitted illness among the Moso has been staggering. Peter Goullart, a Russian-born Frenchman who came to know the area well and who wrote a biography of Joseph Rock, recalled a conversation with a Tibetan trader he met coming down from Moso country. Goullart, who was called on to treat occasional sickness, examined the man and discovered that he had indeed contracted a case of what one might call Moso Rose.

‘No! No!’ the man protested. ‘It is only a cold.’

‘How did you get it?’ Goullart asked.

‘I caught it when riding a horse,’ the trader replied.

‘Well,’ said Goullart, ‘it was the wrong kind of horse.’

Joseph Rock, who was not drawn to this kind of activity, instead drew maps, keenly but not very well. He surveyed mountains (managing on one occasion to make an absolute ass of himself by claiming in a telegram to Washington that a peak called Minya Konka was the world's highest, at 30,250 feet – his amateur use of the theodolite having misled him, it later transpired, by almost a mile). But wherever he went, he travelled in the grandest style, like a Victorian in Africa. Porters carried him everywhere in a palanquin, often trembling under the lash of his formidable temper. When it came time to halt, there was always a cook, an assistant cook, a folding table, starched napery, table silver, a leopard skin to sit upon and from which he would contemplate the view he always had his bearers select for him. There were bottles of well-travelled wine, no matter how far into the wilderness he had penetrated; there were Viennese dishes he had taught his staff to prepare; and after dining there was tea and a selection of liqueurs.

Then he would set off once again for more discovery and amusement – and glancing around happily, he would note in his diaries how his column of hired men stretched half a mile into the distance and how any village chief would regard him as a potentate from some fabulous kingdom and treat him accordingly. As well as his folding bath and his gold dishes, which impressed all who saw him, he invariably took a wind-up gramophone, and he would regale the villagers he met with scratchy Caruso arias played full-blast.

He remained in Lijiang throughout most of the anti-Japanese war, to the irritation of the authorities in Chongqing: he raised vegetables and listened to advice from his sorcerer friends, and to the news on his short-wave radio. When, on one occasion close to the war's end, he travelled back to America, he fell almost insane with grief on learning that his collections, which had followed him home on a ship, had been torpedoed in the Arabian Sea.

‘Followed him home' is perhaps an inappropriate phrase. Joseph Rock never had a real home, nor did he ever settle with any particular person, male or female; only in Lijiang was he content, and he said he wanted to be interred there, under the towering range of the Jade Dragon Mountain. We visited the house and the garden where he had wanted to be buried, in a village an hour north of town: it is cool, among the foothill pines, and there are meadows and crystal springs. A family of Nakhi live there now, and there was a cow in Rock's study, which is now used as a byre. A beautiful young Nakhi woman, her hair covered in a white bandeau, was nursing her baby in the room that Rock had used as his library: perhaps he would have been content to see that at least his house was being used by his beloved Nakhi, and not by the Chinese.

The latter threw him out in the end. The Communists distrusted those they regarded as barbarian priests and wizards and sorcerers, and they killed scores of them, and sent others off to be re-educated. Rock left finally in August 1949, two months before Mao Zedong declared the formation of the People's Republic. By then it was all over, so far as fun was concerned, up in the wilds of the west. He wrote to a friend: ‘If all is OK I will go back – I want to die among those beautiful mountains rather than in a bleak hospital bed all alone.’

But China never did let him return. He stayed in America, working in solitary misery, and he died in a Honolulu hospital in 1962. His books remain, and an Italian publisher brought out his definitive study of the Nakhi pictographs, completing the work in 1972. They remain as Joseph Rock's memorial – his books, his remarkable photographs – and three species of flowers:
Rhododendron rockii, Primula rockii and Omphalog-ramma rockii
. Considering that this son of a dreary Viennese manservant never took a degree in botany, or in anything else, and that he achieved all he did by an unquenchable combination of courage and barefaced cheek, the flower memorials seem touchingly appropriate.

Although he was memorialized by the names of plants, there were others who tramped these same hills and who made a great deal more of the region's extraordinary botany than Rock ever did. There was, for instance, Augustine Henry, a medical officer with the Imperial Maritime Customs and a colleague of the very unbotanical but properly named Cornell Plant. Henry, who found expatriate life tedious, explored in great detail the mess of vegetation zones that Yunnan's precipitous mountains piled on top of one another. He, like other plant hunters, would travel uncomfortably in a
huagan
, a chair, slung from the shoulders of local bearers. The work was dangerous and difficult, but well seasoned with rewards: Henry had numerous flowers named after him – a rhododendron, a viburnum – and he was one of the first westerners to sight the famously beautiful dove tree, which grows wild in western China, and nowhere else.

More famous still were the French missionaries Père David and Jean André Soulié, whose decades spent in the isolation of the western Chinese hills were amply rewarded by the discoveries of scores of splendid specimens. It fell to Père David actually to find the first dove tree – a delight that offers the illusion, created by paired white bracts that sprout beneath each flower, that scores of doves with outstretched wings have alighted on the branches and are waiting to fly away. The Linnaean Society gave it the name
Davidia involucrata
, and seeds from it were brought back to London by another hunter, the Royal Horticultural Society's great Ernest Wilson, a few years later.

Seeds from countless plants that were first found by these brave and inquiring men came pouring into Britain and America during Victorian and Edwardian times. Today, the fact that gardens and hillsides in the West are coloured by tea roses and peonies, by azaleas, camellias, chrysanthemums and rhododendrons is owed almost exclusively to the efforts of these men. Christian converts in western China remain something of a rarity: botanical converts in western gardens, however, suggest that the missionaries and their friends performed memorable tasks – even if, like Joseph Rock, they were not quite the tasks to which they were first assigned.

I had one more task before leaving Lijiang, and I was prompted to undertake it by a newspaper article that Bruce Chatwin had written of a trip in 1986 – three years before his early death of what those who cared for him said was an illness that he had contracted in China, and perhaps even on this trip. Ironically the man about whom he had written then, and who I was now coming to see a decade later, was a healer, a herbalist. He was a man whom Bruce Chatwin has made almost famous.

He is named Ho Shi-xiu, and he lives still as he did then, in a small Nakhi village called Baisha, halfway between Lijiang and the hamlet where Joseph Rock kept his country villa. Lily and I drove the six miles there, parked the Jeep in the grounds of a school, walked to the main street and turned south. Farmers and housewives and children were busying themselves on all sides – threshing grain, washing clothes, noisily spilling in and out of classes. Where would we find Dr Ho? Lily asked. I told her not to worry: Dr Ho was such an avid self-publicist that it would only be a matter of moments before he found us.

Turning south was in fact a mistake. We walked for more than a mile, pleasurably but pointlessly, drinking in the mountain air, peering up cross-streets, asking questions. The street was lined with willows, and a bright stream tumbled between the flagstones. A teacher asked me to spend a few minutes telling her class of ten-year-olds exactly where I was from; an old Nakhi woman asked me to help her untie the bridle of her donkey, which had become snarled on a tree; another woman, her daughter, showed me how to shave garlic to the thinness of gold leaf.