The Mountains Are High And The Emperor Is Far Away

By Amitav Ghosh

This is, to me, one of the most appealing aspects of Xizhou: here history is not yet an inert object of consumption; it will not tamely submit itself to plans and projects. The village’s past is rich and deep and has the resources to push back.

I asked Brian about the difficulties that he himself had had to face: Were licences difficult to get? Did palms have to be greased?

Brian’s answer startled me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would say this part of it was easier than in the States. I used to run a gallery in Wisconsin and it took years to get licences there. The building codes and other regulations made it impossible for the small guy to succeed. It’s like politics in the US -you have to be rich to get ahead. It was different here; I found China so open, so willing to help. I could sit down with the fire brigade and discuss things directly. I don’t want to sound naive–I know that it may be because I’m a foreigner. But there is a tremendous collective pride: people don’t want China to lose face.’ For Brian, the Linden Centre is both a dream and an enormous risk: he has sunk all the money he could raise into it. ‘We are just ordinary people in the States,’ he said of himself and his wife. ‘We don’t have anything to fall back on if this fails. That’s scary to me as a father and a husband.’

For the moment, the problems that Brian has to face are those of success rather than failure. The centre has had a great deal of coverage in the Chinese media and is flooded with visitors. Sometimes Brian and his staff are hard put to cope. The Linden Centre was not conceived 234 as a conventional hotel and it does not offer multi starred comforts Hot water is available only for a few hours each day; mosquitoes are a problem; the kitchen provides excellent food but it shuts down a eight; there are no TVs in the rooms and since Xizhou, like any other farming village, turns in soon after sunset, guests must look inward, for entertainment.

But none of this detracts from the centre’s appeal. Many of the guests are Chinese: prominent artists, affluent young couples and highly placed officials and executives. Some have the courtly manner and meditative bearing of classical scholars; they divide their time between practising Tai Chi and quietly contemplating the surrounding rice fields. They appear to be deeply grateful to Brian for providing an antidote to the frantic pace of China’s cities.

But it isn’t only to those seeking seclusion that Xizhou appeals. My seventeen-year-old son, Nayan, was travelling with me and he loved the Linden Centre. Where else in the world can a teenager go for walks in the clouds and bicycle down to a lake where fishermen use cormorants to catch fish? Where else can he eat spicy pork ribs and tiny whole fresh-water crabs, and, with his saved-up pocket money, buy figurines that date back to the time of Genghis Khan?

Western Yunnan is traversed by four of Asia’s mightiest rivers: the Salween, the Irrawaddy, the Mekong and the Yangtze. In places, the last three run almost parallel to each other, like troughs in a sheet of corrugated iron, except that their gorges are thousands of metres deep.

The road that runs past Xizhou leads to the steep valley carved by the Yangtze: at times it descends right to the bank of the river, which is in its infancy here but is already a broad torrent, flowing at the pace of a rushing mountain stream. Presently the road comes to one of nature’s miracles: the magnificent Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Here the Yangtze, racing to keep pace with the fast-rising mountains, has sliced an almost vertical channel through the upwelling rock.

• Excerpted from Wild Fictions: Essays by Amitav Ghosh, published by Harper Collins India 

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