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Hezhang County The Lost Kingdom

It’s remarkable how quickly the dirt disappears. The countryside here is among the most beautiful and diverse in Southwest China. Approaching Kele, the valley undulates through gentle hills clad in pine forest, yet just to the north stands a dark wall of 2,000-metre peaks, a reminder that this area belongs to the Wumeng Mountains, a forbidding zone that straddles the borders of Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. In spring, the tilled fields of the valley are a rich ochre colour that warms and reddens in the evening sun. The white blossoms of pear trees illuminate mud-brick hamlets whose satellite dishes are all that speaks of the modern world. It’s pristine, picturesque and…very poor. The Wumeng region is among the least-developed in China and it's worth bearing in mind that travelling here can be as distressing as it is exhilarating.

Kele occupies prime real estate on a broad and fertile plain. It’s this happy location that accounts for the fact that more than 2,000 years ago, Kele was an important centre, possibly even the centre of the mysterious kingdom of Yelang. Today, the town is the smallest in China to have its own permanent archaeological office.

Yelang ruled an indeterminate swathe of southwestern China from the Warring States period in the 5th century BC to the Later Han era. Then, in the first century AD, the kingdom unaccountably vanished. Most Chinese people know it only through an apocryphal tale about the reception of the Han emperor’s emissary by the King of Yelang. The king is alleged to have asked his guest, “Which is bigger, Yelang or the Han Empire?” giving rise to the popular idiom yelang zida to describe people who are too big for their boots.

Several areas in England dispute the right to exploit the legend of Robin Hood; similarly, a number of Chinese tourism bureaux have tried to create Yelang-related attractions. Xinhuang County in Hunan even tried to rename itself Yelang County. But Kele has the strongest claim to this heritage because of the sheer scale of archaeological finds. From weapons to jewellery and household implements of considerable distinction, Kele’s treasures suggest a wealthy and cultivated society whose burial practices also mark it as quite distinct from Han China. Excavated tombs show that certain of Kele’s citizens were buried with a bronze or iron cauldron covering their head. Sometimes another pot covered their feet, as well.

Sadly, the town is too poor and too remote to have held on to such treasures, which have been removed to museums in Guiyang and Beijing. Yet traces of ancient Kele are literally strewn about the place, from fragments of Han pottery in a heap by the government’s storage buildings to the Han-era bricks one old gentleman discovered and used to renovate his home several years ago. As one wit observed, these 2,000-year old bricks still hold up better than the modern ones.

It seems certain that the rulers of Yelang were forerunners of today’s Yi people, who still dominate the area. Most of the town's leadership is Yi, although none but the very old now speak the traditional language, let alone read the ancient Yi texts that also record tales from the history of Yelang. In the surrounding villages, however, many of the inhabitants belong to the Miao people, whose open-hearted culture is another reason to make Kele a base for exploring this part of the Wumeng region.

More than most of China’s minority peoples, the Miao have resisted assimilation into Han culture. Mostly, this is because of their relative poverty and isolation. Traditionally, the Miao have been at or near the bottom of China’s ethnic hierarchy; this made many of them amenable to the message of Christian missionary preachers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. About seven kilometres west of Kele, the Miao village of Gebu is at once strange and yet, to me, deeply familiar, as its most striking feature is a large English country house.

Gebu is home to one of China’s oldest Christian congregations, founded in 1903 after a group of Miao hunters went to the city of Anshun to sell a pig, had their pig stolen and were helped to get restitution by the head of the Anshun mission. A preacher was immediately sent to Gebu, the first in a succession of resident missionaries that lasted until 1949. The country house was built by the last of these in 1946 and now serves as the congregation’s office, but to the villagers the most important memorial sits on a hillside a few minutes’ walk away.

A large group led me to a round headstone inscribed in English and Chinese, which recorded the passing of Ella Winifred Edwards, wife of missionary Cyril Edwards, who died in Gebu in childbirth in 1942. Her memory endures because she created the village’s first school, an institution that endured beyond her death such that even the modern school is seen as its direct successor. As it does once every year, the congregation sang hymns in their own tongue at Ella Winifred's graveside. Still standing over her grave, church elder Zhang Hongde switched into Mandarin to say to me, “Our culture and life are inseparable from her.”