the tragedy of tiger leaping gorge, 2

T H I S+W E E K School trip! On the road with 60 fifth-graders By Don George, Editor >Tiger Leaping Gorge By Simon Winchester Greed menaces a Chinese treasure -Books on China D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer An all-star meal for your sports-loving papa Mondo Weirdo Strange foods around the world Postmark Seattle: The Liquid City By Jenn Shreve Passages: "Trout Fisher's Almanac" Trout-fishing: The art of the unexpected Readers' Tips and Tales The eruption of Paricutín - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, June 3 Cuba libre! By Mark Schapiro A hot art scene brings the world to Havana's door A full list of all Wanderlust articles

but now, sad to say, it is all to change. For reasons of short-term profit and long-term madness, the authorities -- and this basically means the bosses of one of the local counties -- are now driving a road, a paved and metaled two-lane road, along what used to be the miners' path. When I walked along the track this past month there were gangs of Szechuanese miners dynamiting the rocks -- no Yunnanese, it was said, would stoop to do the task and so ruin what they proudly felt to be a legendary and a special place. The road will be halfway along by the end of this year. It will stretch all of the 30 miles from Qiatou to Daju by the middle of next. Already the benefits, so called, of progress have reached Walnut Grove. There is electricity. There is talk of telephones. I saw a satellite dish. And this year when I tried to sleep to the ceaseless rumble of the river, I was interrupted instead by the thump of explosions. The road was coming closer, a few yards every day, a creeping reminder of the encroachment of something that no one in the village, and no one who has ever been there, wants to see. Soon, said one of the villagers (a kindly man whom passers-by had once named Woody), there will be no more walkers -- only cars that will speed through the gorge in a matter of minutes. There will probably before long be a proper hotel in Walnut Grove -- not the cozy inn that exists today -- and it will no doubt take credit cards, and in its rooms will be color televisions that show CNN and Rupert Murdoch's Star TV. Worse is to come. Down the road a millionaire from Thailand is said to be carving a golf course and a base for ski slopes into the meadows at the foot of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The airport at Lijiang has just been finished, and there are flights in and out four times a week. Where five years ago there were horse-drawn buggies on the lanes, last week I saw air-conditioned buses, hauling around people from Holland and Israel, their cameras clicking like cicadas. The Chinese government, or the Yunnan provincial government, could have stopped all this. It could have declared Tiger Leaping Gorge a national park, it could have made Walnut Grove a national treasure, it could have named Jade Dragon Snow Mountain a sacred piece of the nation's heritage. The Americans protected the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, after all, and the British protected Dartmoor. Nations can protect themselves from the mulishness and rapacity of their peoples. But in China different dynamics operate these days. Long-term thinking has little relevance in a state that, for all of its recent existence, has been mired in the valueless idealism and wasted energies of a succession of Five-Year Plans. And since the county bosses want their money now, or soon, and since no law and no one in authority stands in their way, so the dynamite explodes, the road goes in, the electric power goes on and the tourists and their buses grind noisily and inexorably into Shangri-La. But we all know the truth. In a few years other sites in China, or in the East, will have caught the popular mood, tourists will have wearied of this part of the planet, will have sought out still more difficult and pretty places. The world's traveling classes are, above all, a capricious mob, given to whims of geography that are every bit as lunatic as the whims of the clothing trade. And in their caprices, and from the wishes of a few greedy men to make money from them, so the damage -- to this lovely place in Yunnan as to a score of others elsewhere -- will have been done. Much has been written already about what terrible damage is about to be wrought 1,000 miles downstream: A huge dam is being built at a place called Sandouping, which will forever ruin the wonders of the Three Gorges, a far larger and better-known wonder of the natural world. The 100 miles of stunning cliffs and rapids and overfalls will soon be flooded and silenced; where once there were rushing waters and the drama of raw nature, there will soon be a vast sewage-filled lake, dead and stagnant. Hundreds of archaeological sites will be inundated, temples drowned, whole villages forced to move. And the Chinese authorities, despite a threnody of opposition, care not one whit. Would that the ruin of their country were confined to just these Yangtze gorges, but one only has to look at the polluted air in Beijing, the crushing of the narrow-street hutongs and their replacement by freeways, the jostling of the hawkers on the paths to the Great Wall, the crass and the crude commercialization of a place like Guilin, or where the terra-cotta armies are near Xi'an, to know that the Chinese government of today cares precious little about the beauties of the treasure over which it presides. The pleasure that one took particularly in Tiger Leaping Gorge, by virtue of its peace, its isolation and its beauty will now soon have gone forever. By tarmac and pollution and crowding, it will have been utterly and comprehensively ruined. The village of Walnut Grove will, in a way, have lost its soul. Somewhere special will have become merely commonplace, and worse. And that really is a tragedy. The more so because we are able to see it while it is in the making, and to hear it happening, dynamite-blast by dynamite-blast. Yet we are powerless to do anything to stop it. It is not our country, all say: We on the outside must restrain our eagerness to interfere. Yet unless small crimes like this are stopped from happening, one reality is clear: that China, which possesses such world-class wonders within its vast frontiers, risks in the future becoming an unlovely place indeed. And for always. That is a concern that the whole world must surely share -- which is why it is right, surely, for the outside world to wonder at what China is currently doing to itself, all in the name of profit and greed. June 10, 1997 Take a train ride through China with Paul Theroux or read about the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprising by looking at our China booklist. Do you have an old haunt that has been altered in the name of progress? Are the people in Yunnan better off reaping the benefits of tourism or having an unscathed gorge in their backyard? Join the discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To find out how to get to China and what the weather conditions are like at Beijing's airport, check out Wanderslust Marketplace.

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