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the tragedy of tiger leaping gorge
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T H I S+W E E K School trip!
>Tiger Leaping Gorge
D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
Mondo Weirdo
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Chinese greed menaces another natural treasure. BY SIMON WINCHESTER | YUNNAN, CHINA -- this is the story of an impending tragedy. Only a small tragedy, it is true, when set against other great sadnesses of the world, but a melancholy event nonetheless -- and particularly so since it is one that, were it not for the fact of human greed, might well be avoided. It concerns a pretty little Chinese village called Walnut Grove, and a stupendous piece of Miocene creation and Carboniferous geology called the Tiger Leaping Gorge. Both village and gorge lie in Yunnan Province, deep in China's western mountains. This is land unlike anywhere else in the world: soaring snow-capped ranges, immense and unimaginably wild rivers, valleys crammed with the flowers -- rhododendrons, camellias -- that captivated the great Victorian collectors and that now grace formal gardens and herbaceous borders around the world. It is a country of steep cliffs and hidden Shangri-Las, and of secret temples that hum with monkish mantras and the eldritch creak of prayer-wheels. Until quite lately it was a land little-known to all but the most intrepid explorers. Today -- and in this lies the roots of the new sadness -- it is being opened to that most democratically empowered example of modern man, the international tourist. So where once there was wilderness, there is now an airport; where once a peaceful meadow grazed by yaks, now there are plans for a course for playing that most land-hungry of pursuits: golf. I first went to Tiger Leaping Gorge three years ago. It is said to be the deepest river-gorge on the surface of the planet, an almost unimaginably deep declivity formed where the Jinsha-Jiang, the River of Golden Sand, has forced its way between two 18,000-foot peaks, the Dragon Snow Mountain and the Jade Snow Mountain. Miocene uplifting forced them up, the river cut them down. The combination of 5 million years' worth of thrusting and slicing has produced something stupendous indeed. The walk through the gorge takes someone who is reasonably fit two days. The only drawback is the route. You have to take an old miners' track, a path that is so steep and precipitous and dangerous that you wonder how even goats, let alone miners, were ever brave enough to pass along it. I can't ever forget the first time I did it. A couple of miles from the village of Qiatou, where one starts, the path began to narrow -- first to a yard, then to a foot, then to almost nothing. And at the same time the cliffs closed in -- 5,000 feet of vertical blackness above my head, 1,000 of vertical terror below me and the foaming river roaring menacingly at the bottom. A single misstep -- or a rock dislodged from above -- and I would be dashed off the path, headlong into the maelstrom. Six people had been killed the week before I went. Their bodies had been found 20 miles downstream, smashed beyond recognition. But though the path is thrillingly dangerous -- "airy" is how one mountaineers' guide described it, laconically -- the rewards of being there are incalculable. And none more so than the moment of arrival at the midway point, the village of Walnut Grove. You round a bend, hugging the safety of the cliffside, daring not to look down -- and then suddenly ahead, so very welcoming because it is, at long last, something safely horizontal, is a mile of shining rice paddies and vivid green fields. Above these fields, were their appearance not reward enough, is a huddle of tiny Chinese houses, all grace and upswept tiled eaves, and with blue smoke curling from a score of chimneys. The villagers are always happy to see outsiders. They cluck and fuss over anyone who has dared make the journey. You eat and drink deep and well, you sleep peacefully to the steady roar of the river below, and if you are lucky, you wake to crystal-clear skies, sheer cloud-swirling cliffs and one of the greatest spectacles on the face of the earth. And all the sweeter because you had walked it -- anyone with enough fortitude and energy and luck could stride out from Qiatou and make it to Walnut Grove in a day; another day spent walking out to a tiny village called Daju, and the whole of Tiger Leaping Gorge could be accomplished, a memorable two days of personal achievement. That truly was central to the pleasure: personal demons conquered, fitness rewarded, sights of unimagined beauty offered in recompense. No money, privilege or rank was needed, merely a desire to go, to stride out, to triumph and to get there. Carving a golf course and a base |
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