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Rich Pickings, The Red Tour through the ancient towns of northern Yunnan

Beyond the River of Golden Sands, the Long March trail climbs onto the Tibetan Plateau, where there was no warm welcome for Han soldiers of any stripe. The Reds always needed money to support their progress; as they approached the Tibetan lands, the need for cash to buy safe passage became ever more pressing.

It was the Reds’ good luck that a string of prosperous and poorly defended towns stood along their route. The first of these was the great “salt capital” of Heijing, which lies around 100 kilometres northwest of the provincial capital, Kunming. Heijing has produced salt for about 1,000 years, and, at its peak during the Ming Dynasty, the town’s merchants paid 67 percent of all of Yunnan’s salt taxes. By the 1930s, although business was not what it once had been, the 82 merchant families of Heijing still controlled enormous wealth. When the vanguard of Xiao Ke’s 6th Army Group swept down Mount Jingbang and into the town, they made an instant fortune.

Fall and Rise

Heijing went downhill rapidly after the Revolution. Its salt business was no longer competitive, and the merchant families were driven out of town. The richest of them all, Wu Weiyang, was executed in 1949 by the new authorities, unfortunately, three days before a letter arrived, signed by the Red commander-in chief, stating that Wu was a “patriot” and should not be harmed. Thirteen years earlier Wu thought he had bought his own safe passage when he gave the Reds a haul of silver during their three-day stay in Heijing. Other merchants were simply expropriated and the Reds left town with several horse-loads of treasure, plus dozens of bearers and new recruits drawn from the ranks of Heijing’s salt workers.

Wu Weiyang’s magnificent home is now the finest hotel in Heijing, and possibly the classiest on the entire Long March trail. A large part of Heijing’s old town is intact, and for the last five years it has been redeveloped for tourists as one of several “ancient towns” scattered across northern Yunnan. It hasn’t really taken off; few visitors come from further away than Kunming and most are only day-trippers at the weekend. During the week the town retains a genuine feel and slow pace (the railway line that roars through the valley is a mixed blessing, though).

Bad Taste, Good Taste

While Heijing is quite a good example of preservation and thoughtful development, the next “ancient town” on the Reds’ itinerary is quite the opposite. Shiyang advertises itself as an historic attraction, but as we walked through its streets, Yang Xiao kept asking, “Where is the ancient town?” because he couldn’t believe locals when they said, “This is it.” Almost everything was either fake, like an Olde England theme bar, or hidden behind crumbling concrete, while the river was choked with rubbish. Like the Red Army, we marched straight through and on to the town of Zhoucheng, which in the 1930s was the administrative centre for Binchuan County.

The Reds didn’t need to attack Zhoucheng. It was guarded by 1,000 militiamen who had been trained especially for the Red Army’s arrival, not because they wanted to halt the Long March, but simply to prevent the Reds from entering the town and taking the wealthy citizens’ money. When He Long’s 2nd Army Group reached the city wall, they could have just walked around it.

Perhaps mindful of the 6th Army’s windfall in Heijing, instead of moving straight on, the 2nd dispatched a representative to negotiate passage through Zhoucheng itself. Foolishly, the militia refused to negotiate and killed the Red emissary. Enraged, the 2nd Army soldiers fought their way over the Ming Dynasty Nanxun Bridge and into the town, killing 178 militiamen and wounding more than 100, but also losing more than 100 of their own men in the process. It was one of the most costly and pointless engagements of the Long March.

While the city wall was knocked down in the 1950s, Nanxun Bridge still stands at the south entrance to old Zhoucheng. From here it’s a short walk to an enormous temple built in 1494 in honour of traditional heroes Guan Yu and Yue Fei, which is part of a complex that also includes a Confucian temple added in 1662. The whole thing is in a state of disrepair, but fundamentally intact, even down to its original stone carvings. It was used as a grain store after the Revolution. This important function preserved the buildings, while many similar buildings were destroyed. The local cultural bureau officials now occupy a corner of the site and wonder where they can get enough money to restore it. Unlike Shiyang, Zhoucheng has made no effort at all to attract tourists. 

The Tourist Trap

It’s a mere five-day march from Zhoucheng to the Red Army’s final stop before crossing the River of Golden Sands and entering the Tibetan region. General Xiao Ke revisited the ancient town of Lijiang in 1984 and recalled emotionally how his men here received their warmest welcome since leaving their base in Hunan. They also loaded up with even more silver, looted from the town’s wealthy homes, whose owners hid in the mountains.

This is by far the most popular and successful “ancient town” in China, and the first real tourism area we have passed through on the New Long March. It’s a tremendous concentration of contradictions. Almost uniquely in China, a new town has been built to one side of the old one rather than on top of it, such that old Lijiang is still very beautiful. Yet it has been so successful that there is hardly a building that is not geared to the tourist trade. When I first visited it in 1999, only a handful of streets featured shops, restaurants and guesthouses catering to tourists; the rest of the old town was quietly residential and pleasant to wander through. That is emphatically no longer the case. I don’t remember a single bar in 1999; now there is an entire bar street that recalls nowhere as much as the Costa del Sol in its raucous, night-after-night revelry.

We spent this morning strolling around with a retired fellow from the local Party school. He fretted about the dangers of going too far in tourist development: “People like me fear change,” was more-or-less how he put it, but he also recalled the poverty that preceded Lijiang’s popularity, gesturing at a row of shops and saying, “These people can earn maybe 50,000 yuan a year now; before they couldn’t even make 500.” If the Red Army returned today, they would surely gape in wonder at their erstwhile supporters.