Shangri-La (Zhongdian County in Yunnan Province)

http://www.pbase.com/mreichel/image/40593225

Is it utopia or a tourist destination moving towards irreversible environmental and culture destruction?

We will debate this question from three perspectives. The class will be divided into three groups as follows:

a) The Chinese Government b) The local population c) Tourism operators

Definitions:

Shangri-La - A fictional paradise where people live without care and never age. Used to describe any especially beautiful vacation destination. (definition as used in the tourism industry)

Utopia - was coined by Sir Thomas More as the name of an imaginary, idealistic island where society lives in harmony with government and everyone is free from poverty, tyranny and war, in his Latin book De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia (circa 1516).

Modernity - Modernity is simply the sense or the idea that the present is discontinuous with the past, that through a process of social and cultural change (either through improvement, that is, progress, or through decline) life in the present is fundamentally different from life in the past. This sense or idea as a world view contrasts with what I will call tradition, which is simply the sense that the present is continuous with the past, that the present in some way repeats the forms, behavior, and events of the past. (http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GLOSSARY/MODERN.HTM) Through the following sources and your own research, prepare an argument on behalf of your group to be presented in class next week. Your presentation can include any or all of the following presentation techniques:

1. Presentation of facts supporting your group with overheads, PowerPoint or orally. 2. Role play (with costumes and props) your group’s “actions” in presenting their view.

Sources of Information:

a) Video – China for background information on the country, its culture, landscape and tourism industry.

b) The following websites:  http://www.chinatour.com/attraction/shangri-la.htm  http://www.china.org.cn/english/travel/151058.htm  http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-06/07/content_3054054.htm  http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=7386  http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=1949  http://www.wwfchina.org/english/loca.php?loca=143  http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/1278.html  http://www.yunnantourism.net/  http://www.pbase.com/mreichel/yunnan  http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GLOSSARY/MODERN.HTM

c) Article – Shangri-La Found and Lost

d) Definition of Tourism - Quotes from “Travels in Paradox – Remapping Tourism” (Minca, Oakes 2006)

e) Handout – The Responsible Tourist

f) Hidden china article by Bill Taylor

g) Other sources that you research.

Be sure to collect all sources cited to include in your bibliography at the end of your report. Your group will present this issue to the class. Hidden China By Bill Taylor

Remote? You want remote? How about a place where the buck stops someplace else?

The people in this little known, but ravishingly lovely chunk of Sichuan province haven’t a clue what American money is. If you offer a US dollar, instead of Chinese yuan, they’ll take it, pass it around in laughing puzzlement, and then hand it back.

Accept it fro goods or services (including a photo-op sitting on a yak)? Don’t be silly.

It’s both satisfying and, let’s be honest, a bit frustrating to find that hitherto almighty greenback (the American dollar) doesn’t smooth the way at all.

Some 95 percent of the visitors to Juizhaigou … (a World Heritage site) are Chinese. Your credit card is not much good here, nor are your travelers’ cheques. English-speakers are few and far between.

And although an airfield is being built, it’s a couple of years from completion. You come by roads, an arduous, uncomfortable, even risky day-long trip from the nearest major city, Chengdu.

No one in my group has any real idea what we are getting into, but we do fine. Except for one guy who can’t hack it (simply climbing to the fourth floor of a hotel without elevators does him in) and misses some of the most spectacular spots.

What do the rest of us see? A landscape out of a Chinese painting. Richly forested – reforested in some cases to repair the damage caused by earlier logging – mountains, in the Min Shan range, their highest peaks tipped with snow, ghostly in the mist of early morning. Fast-flowing rivers like jade shattering on the rocks into a whitewater rafter’s paradise (one day, alas, that’s surely what it’ll become). Lake after transparent, blue- green lake. It’s a shame “azure” is such an overused word. There are 114 in all that legend says were created when the goddess Wunsemo dropped her mirror.

And loveliest of all, water a few centimeters deep, but a hundred metres wide chuckling through trees over broad expanses of rock and collapsing into feathery waterfalls.

Pure enchantment. But to reach this piece of heaven some 400 km northwest of Chengdu and a 12-hour bus ride (waved out of the city by a traffic policewoman wearing wedge- soled boots that would outdo a Spice Girl), you have to pass through a little piece of Hell…

The bus carries you past farms with thatched roofs and hundreds of conical rice hay- stacks in the fields. They cultivate the fields with water buffalo, and as we get higher into the mountains, yak a humped ox.

A river, the Min, which seems to be all rapids, races alongside the road. There are crude suspension bridges, nothing but ropes and planks. One, more ambitious than the rest, is big enough for heavier traffic. A van is stuck halfway across, a wheel off the edge.

Now it’s raining. There are no road signs, no directions, no distances posted. Long- distance buses trundle through, their roofs piled high with…stuff under blue plastic tarps.

The hills are terraced with precarious bits of farmland, growing corn. And there are wooden beehives all along the road. You pass people in old-style peasant dress, high baskets on their backs.

And, in the middle of nowhere, trudging through the downpour comes a funeral procession. The mourners, the coffin bedecked with colors, everything drenched. Where can they be going?

Then, in the midst of this … wilderness, huge factories with smokestacks vomiting filth into the sky. Across the river, the fires of a foundry glow through the haze of a medieval painting of punishment to come.

And you notice then that the houses, thatched roofs or not, all have satellite dishes.

Still, you’re on your way to a magical land. Forget the bruises you’ve picked up from being jolted about in the bus. Forget the near-crashes the driver’s had, the two trucks wrecked against the cliff face.

Forget the washrooms you’ve seen, when you’ve been able to get the bus to stop. Pit stops don’t always occur to the people who drive this road as a matter of routine. Toilets can be of very mixed quality, from just okay to “do what you have to do, don’t breathe, don’t look down.”

But finally, in a place without a name, the bus stops outside a pink building with a golden sign: Travel WC. It’s really quite nice. And the rain has stopped…

We stay at the New Juizhai hotel in what is called the Juizhaigou Scenery Region of Sichuan. Juizhaigou means “nine–village valley” and six of the original Tibetan villages remain.

Tibetan culture is predominant here - traditional yak rather than dragon dances - and we’re greeted with ha-ha, white prayer scarves. Sort of like Hawaii. Entry to the park is 100 yuan, about $20…

On to one of the Tibetan villages. Prayer flags flap, faded and tattered, inscribed with sutras and Buddhist scriptures.

You can visit one of the houses, walking past gift shops (yak skulls are a popular item), food stalls selling yak kabobs, and an artist doing traditional script and also caricatures. From one of the houses, ABBA blasts from a boom box.

Inside the home, prayers hang everywhere. There are prayer wheels and scrolls, religious icons. Some indefinable meat, probably yak, dries in the smoke from the central cooking fire. In one corner is a TV…

We drive out of town the next morning past strings of packhorses. Halfway through the mountains the bus gets a flat. We examine the spare tire carefully as the driver puts it on. It’s a long way down if we go off the road.

Someone passes around a packet of cookies. Oreos, Chinese Oreos. Really. Even out here.

Source: Bill Taylor, “Hidden China” from The Toronto Star, 19 February 2000