The paper road: archive and experience in the botanical exploration of West China and Tibet 9780520269026, 9780520950498, 9780520269033

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page ix)
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Note on Transliteration (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
PART I
1. The Eyes of Others (page 39)
2. Farmers and Kings (page 61)
3. The Paper Road (page 87)
4. The Golden Mountain Gate (page 118)
PART II
5. Bodies Real and Virtual (page 149)
6. Lost Worlds (page 179)
7. The Mountain (page 211)
8. Adventurers (page 243)
9. The Book of the Earth (page 265)
Notes (page 291)
Bibliography (page 325)
Index (page 341)

Citation preview

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund

of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges

the generous contribution to this book provided by the University of Michigan.

The Paper Road Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet ERIK MUEGGLER

University of California Press BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 2011 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mueggler, Erik, 1962The paper road : archive and experience in the botanical exploration of West China and Tibet / Erik Mueggler. py ae * 5 A a aM >i . vf et

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bound notebooks from Edinburgh in which Old Fu wrote as he traveled, though these days Fu mostly sat in Tengyue waiting for the plants to come to him. For his own daily accounts, Zhao used ordinary, unlined writing paper, which he found in the markets in Tengyue or the city of Lijiang, a month’s walk away. Old Fu also drafted many letters on this paper before

Introduction / 3 making fair copies on imported paper. And he consumed great quantities of photographic paper, which always seemed scarce: he wrote many letters frantically begging his employers to send more. Even that paper, slick and sharp-smelling, was made of plants—bits of the earth’s flesh ground, soaked,

screened, and pressed. Back home, Zhao had seen the old ritualists boil, pound, and screen tree bark to make the narrow chunks of thick, durable paper onto which they copied their ceremonial books. Many of these books, he knew, described journeys in long lists of place names that stretched all the way to this distance place and to the gigantic mountains that lay weeks to the north—mountains he and his companions had explored, enduring immense difficulty. In a funeral ceremony, which he had seen many times, the ritualists moved clay figurines along a long, painted paper road, a narrow map that led north into those ranges. It was 1925. He had been at this since 1906. He walked; he gathered plants; he memorized attributes—numbers of petals, shapes of leaves, types of hairs

and scales on brackets and leaves—and he thought about where he might find species he did not yet know. He learned strings of place names from travelers, listened to their stories, puzzled out new routes. He slept in inns, in village courtyards, on goatskins laid on the ground. He hired many parties of others from his village to make repeated excursions of days or months.

And all this walking, searching, and gathering found its way into piles of paper: names on paper, lists, notes, maps, diaries, letters, accounts, and photographs on paper and, in particular, specimens and seeds folded into paper. For him, this region was made of earth and his experience of the earth. But it was also a thing made of paper, a thing just as real.

He dipped his pen into the ink bottle. Taking care not to tear the sheet with the crude steel nib, he drew eight wavy lines, roughly parallel, from the top edge to the bottom. The four longest were sharply jagged near the top, echoing the great limestone crags of the north. They rounded off near the bottom with the gentler mountains of the south. Between the ranges, he drew parallel, sinuous lines, indicating the great rivers: the Jinsha, or Yangtze; the Lancang, or Mekong; the Nu, or Salween. On the left, the Xiao snaked off into Burma; below that, he traced two branches of the Long, or Shweli. Along the rivers, he wrote the names of villages and mountains in neat Chinese characters. Then he drew another map, and a third, describing a vast, river-shorn region: north up the Nu towards Tibet, west to the Enmai-

kai, or Nmai Kha, and east to the great, rugged bend in the Jinsha, within which lay the city of Lijiang and his own village. Rolled and packed in trunks stacked around the room were other maps of the same region. In the eighteenth century, scholars in Lijiang had com-

4 / Introduction

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piled the reports of traders and soldiers to make a map for an official gazetteer.” It centered on Lijiang, shown nestled within protective canals, but this center was dislocated to the far right-hand side. The map’s left half described the city’s vast northwest hinterland, once its far-flung empire, with the Nu river as its western edge. The far side of the Nu was blank, with a dotted line to mark the “boundary of the Nu barbarians.” Here the great military machine that had swept out of Lijiang during the Ming dynasty had ground toa halt, unable to subdue the Lisu peoples who had taken refuge in the Nu gorge.

Introduction / 5 In 1900, in the service of another empire, the Great Trigonometric Survey of India had published two sheets showing Burma’s Northeast Frontier and including most of Yunnan Province. They were compiled from route surveys drawn by British army officers traveling in secret. Large portions were white space, particularly between the Mekong (Lancang) and Salween (Nu) rivers. Parts of the Salween and the entire Taron (Qiu) were shown as speculative dotted lines. The Survey issued an improved map in 1909, taking into account the travels of Major H. R. Davis, who had marched through Yunnan with fifty men of the Nineteenth Yorkshire Regiment of Light Infantry.’ Botanists had also drawn maps. Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti, professor of botany at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, had wandered Yunnan for five years during the Great War, making a map of his journeys. It included much information not on the India Survey maps, but the place names were written in his own idiosyncratic, sometimes indecipherable, system of romanization.* Zhao Chengzhang had studied all of these maps, tracing his journeys and pointing out to Old Fu where he had found each new specimen. He was also familiar with the most detailed maps of all—map-like texts, really—the long lists of place names drawn in elegant pictographic script in and around his home village of Nvlvk’6, near Lijiang.

The maps Zhao now drew were different from any of these. He drafted them freehand from memory, rather than from route surveys, with no attempt to mark latitude or longitude, and little concern for accuracy of scale.

Still, in many respects they were more comprehensive than the other maps, describing in more detail the most remote and difficult parts of the region. In style, they drew from the tradition represented by the eighteenthcentury map from Lijiang. But they were not contributions to cartographic knowledge in any tradition. They were not guides to travelers nor aides to administration. They were records of experience. Some lines condensed memories of hundreds of days of arduous travel in the shadows of snowy peaks; others were records of a single glimpse, from a distance, of a range of peaks trending off to the north or west. Some place names were as familiar to him as his own name, part of his world since birth; others were rumors, heard once or twice from the lips of other travelers, tentative transcriptions of sounds in tongues foreign to him. The maps’ casual, freehand style, combined with their careful descriptions of relationships between ranges, rivers, villages, and roads, trace, with some precision, a lengthy process of gathering disparate experiences into an imagined abstraction.

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Figure 4. West Yunnan, by Zhao Chengzhang with additions by George Forrest, 1925. Courtesy of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

upright as the pillars behind him. He is neatly dressed in the tunic, sash, turban, and trousers characteristic of the Lijiang area. His feet rest lightly on the flagstones, but it is also as though they are gripping those stones through the straw of his sandals. (Zhao and his colleagues from Nvlvk’6 wore

only straw sandals as they wandered some of the roughest mountain country in the world: photographs taken decades later show them at rest on the road, sprawled amongst their plant presses, still in sandals). Zhao stands comfortably balanced, hands on hips, face sober. He radiates a formidable air of poised self-assurance. [also like these maps because they record a dialog. The conversation centers on two parallel valleys, north of Tengyue and west of the Salween (Lu and Nuzi on the maps), through which two branches of the river Long flow.

Zhao initiated the dialog by giving his sense of these valleys’ location and orientation in relation to the region as a whole. Forrest then read and deci-

Introduction / 11 phered the maps, working two of them over with pens and pencils. The map in figure 4 bears evidence of at least three stages of translation. On what was probably a first pass, Forrest used a black pen, romanizing the names of a few key places: Ching-mu-liin the north, Imaw Bum in the far west. Could that be a crude attempt at the Chinese character shan (mountain) beneath Ching-mu-li? The emphasis on this place is evidence that the maps belong to the same conversation as Zhao’s 1925 ledger pages, with which they were preserved. On the latter, Forrest used what seems to be the same black pen to circle Ching-mu (Qingmu), a briefer name for this mountain. His letters home were full of enthusiasm for Zhao’s finds there.’ In a second pass, Forrest went over figure 4 in gray pencil, transliterating a few more place names in the west, sketching in a watershed in the northwest margin, and num-

bering village and mountain names in and around the two focal valleys. Many names and some numbers in gray pencil appear to have been erased, a sign that this was a stage in a longer process of translation. Finally, Forrest went over the maps with a blue pencil, with more assurance. He marked up the map in figure 5 in detail, writing in all the names for which he gave numbers in figure 4. These contributions reveal his discomfort with Chinese characters even after four lengthy expeditions in Yunnan. One imagines that Zhao sat by his side reading off the names as he transcribed the sounds with the Roman alphabet. That he often wrote the same name differently supports this conjecture: thus “Ching-mu-li” on figure 4 is “Chimili” on figure 5, an inconsistency it is difficult to imagine the botanist committing could he read these very simple characters. The dialog has another dimension too. Zhao’s maps were preserved with a much smaller sketch of the two focal valleys in Forrest’s hand. This map is cramped and hesitant, a dramatic contrast to Zhao’s exact, fluid drawings. Mountain ranges appear to be represented by diagonal slashes, routes by solid black lines, rivers by light sketchy lines. The drawing is tightly focused on the two valleys, with none of Zhao’s sweeping regional coverage. Its uncertainty and limited scope likely derive from its place in this cartographic conversation: it was an attempt to translate Zhao’s knowledge into Forrest’s vernacular—to understand what he was being told rather than to demonstrate his own knowledge. When one places the sketch beside Zhao’s maps, one notices immediately that the latter do not show routes. This is remarkable, for the expertise they demonstrate was all gained by walking, and one would think that the lie of paths through this deeply scored country would be the most important form of knowledge they had to offer. But perhaps the routes were too obvious to note explicitly. They are implicit in the long valleys and strings of village names: drawing them may have been as unnecessary

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