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Gansu and the Yugurs Pt 2
From the resort area on the top of the mountain we pressed on, winding our way down the backside of the mountain range through narrow two lane roads. The landscape abruptly changed from grassland to dense coniferous forest as we descended from the peaks of the Qilian Mountain Range into a tranquil valley on the western edge of the Hexi Corridor. We raced across a small stream that trickled over the road, shooting water into the air and causing much excited screeching from our young hosts. The trees thinned out in the valley as we approached the Yugur town of Sunan.
Sunan was the first proper “city” that we came across since leaving Zhangye. It was small but felt like an actual town with businesses and school and homes and a “downtown” area, as opposed to just scattering of homes and farms. We didn’t stop however, we instead drove through town and up to a lookout overlooking the city and the snowcapped mountains beyond. We left the doors to the car open and the music cranked as we got out of the car. One other person was at the lookout, sitting shirtless on a bench under the hot sun. Our driver Birdie enthusiastically greeted the old man.
In such a small city out in the middle of nowhere, it is probably not a coincidence for townsfolk to run into people that they know, but it turned out this old man was one of Birdie’s school teachers from a few years back, and the two of them welcomed each other as old friends, smiling and shaking hands and laughing. The old fellow greeted the rest of us in the local dialect, with Jasmine and I nodding politely and smiling while not understanding a single word. After just a few moments more he wandered off down the hill. Maybe he was tired of baking under the summer sun, or perhaps he was annoyed by the blaring music, nevertheless he was gone from our lives just as quickly as he entered.
Shopkeeper in the middle of nowhere, Gansu
We took a few pictures of the idllyic country town as it hugged the natural contours of the valley. From our perch above Sunan it looked like a small slice of heaven with its neatly arranged identical apartment blocks nestled in the green foothills of the snowcapped Qilian Mountains. Before long we set off once again for the open road.
Convenience Store in Gansu
After climbing out of the valley and deeper into the treeless mountains we finally arrived at Birdie and Purp’s hometown. The village had one dirt road that wound its way through a block of about 20 mostly earthen homes. About half of the homes seemed to be abandoned, with their gates chained shut or the doors boarded. Each home had At the highest point in town sat a large metal barnlike structure. The home nearest this “barn” was the only house that appeared to be made with “modern” design techniques and materials. I’m sure the town had a name but as far as I know we never learned it, despite asking at least a few times. A meandering dirt road snaked through town, around one set of homes, crossing a small stream and irrigation ditch before wrapping around another set of homes and off towards the snowy mountain in the distance. A number of small clay brick homes dotted the rolling hills in the horizon. Birdie and Purp were excited to be home. They picked up Jasmine like some kind of emperess and excitedly carried her down the road towards the one modern house. That was Birdie’s home. His family were the leaders of this tiny domain. We set our belongings down in the house and headed back for the car. We had somewhere else we needed to go.
Once again we piled into the sedan. Through the small village, across an irrigation canal, past the handful of homes, and out along the dirt road onward into the mountains. The dirt road slowly disappeared and became lost in the wild grassland. Flattened grass and tire tracks from the few cars that made this journey marked our path. Grazing sheep dotted the hillsides and, from time to time, blocked our forward progress. A well timed honk of the horn made the sheep aware just in time to escape being bumped by our slow moving ride. Eventually we found ourselves standing outside of a mud and brick home, perched alone atop a hill, surrounded by hundreds of sheep and a smattering of cows.
Birdie’s Grandma’s Home Powered by the Sun
Birdie’s dad, aunt, and grandmother, awaited us inside the two room home. His father sat at the foot of the bed chainsmoking cigarettes, while his grandmother laid on the bed, immobile and seemingly incapacitated, covered in blankets and wearing a hat and face mask. Birdie’s aunt fed the fire of an indoor stove. The fuel was dried cow dung that had been collected and was sitting in a box near the door. The aunt brought water to a boil before serving us the local style of milk tea. It was salty and just mildly flavorful. We drank from bowls.
The Second Bedroom and Batteries
The home was spartan. The main room was just a bed and two small sofas. A coffee table and a wardrobe. A dining table. A wood burning oven. A few knick-knacks. A poster of a wolf. Birdie said that the wolf was a representative animal of their family and their local culture. I tried to get more out of him but our ability to communicate on anything more than a superficial level was not quite there. A portrait of Mao hung on the wall. This is typical of many rural homes. And a strange poster of an epic feast was prominintely displayed above the dining table; grapes and wine and cheese and flowers were arranged neatly on the image. It was the kind of spread that had probably never been seen in this part of the world. I asked about the picture. Birdie didn’t have a cultural explanation for this one.
“It looks nice,” he said. Sometimes there is no deeper meaning.
The sun was starting to set so we finished up our milk tea and said our goodbyes. Back to the village we went.
In the village, hundreds of sheep blocked the road, drinking from the irrigation ditch that ran through town. We got out of the car and watched and took pictures. Purp noticed a rabbit bounding through the grass. He pulled a knife from his waist and ran off after it. Needless to say, Jasmine and I followed him. He chased the rabbit for a few minutes, over and through barbed wire fences and through dips and over hills, before giving up his hunt. We were having a good laugh about it when something else caught Purp’s eye. He raced over to a kind of small dirt cliff and thrust his arm into a hole. When his hand emerged he was holding a small bird. The tiny bird flapped its wings and squawked its beak in a desperate attempt to escape. Purp calmly held the bird by its feet, proudly showing me and the camera what he caught. He let the bird fly away. Growing up in this environment seemed to have taught Purp a lot about the natural environment and its native inhabitants.
Light disappeared fast and the temperature dropped even faster. From a blistering hot morning at Danxia Mountains, to a cool afternoon in the Yugur Village, to near freezing temperatures as night fell, this part of the world seemed to be a punishing place. It took a strong and smart people to populate this part of the earth.
Sheep Drinking at the Irrigation Ditch
We went inside and cracked open a case of beer while Birdie went into the kitchen to make dinner. He cooked up some “big plate chicken” aka 大盘鸡, a famous, but simple, Xinjiang dish whose main ingredients are chicken, bell peppers, and potatoes. The four of us drank and ate, played cards and sang songs, well into the night. Around midnight Birdie’s 18 year old “brother” (cousin) showed up with a bottle of local baijiu. The alcohol was flowing and the three young men sang us songs. Local Yugur traditional songs, Chinese classic and modern pop songs, you name it, they sang it. It appeared that drinking and singing was one of the ways they found to entertain themselves, with no cell phone signal, no internet, no TV and unstable at best electricity supply.
Around 3 in the morning as we were starting to wind down, we heard the distinct “clop clop” sounds of a horse approaching. The front door of the house swung open, and in stumbled a drunken uncle, carrying another bottle of baijiu. He could barely formulate a coherent sentence, but we cracked open the bottle and went to work anyway. According to Birdie, his uncle lives off in the hills on his little farm somewhere. News traveled fast through the countryside and so he rode his horse on down to the village to see the foreigner and have a toast. We wrapped up the bottle around 4 am, everyone drunk and happy, and headed to bed. The locals had to be up early as the whole village needed to gather in the big barn to shear the sheep. After the amount that we drank I didn’t believe they’d be able to get up and work in just a few short hours, but since they planned to be up just past 7, I set my alarm for 730 as well. If they could do it, I could do it.
Nightsky in Yugur Country
The alarm seemed to go off just moments after I set it. My head throbbed from the alcohol induced headache and lack of sleep. I checked on Jasmine to make sure she was ok. She was passed out. I chose to let her sleep while I ventured out into the village.
Uncle Sharpening his Shears
Outside the crisp morning air gave me a jolt of energy. I stumbled over to the barn where the first thing I noticed was the uncle and cousin both hunched over their respective sheep, efficiently shearing wool with electric trimmers that hung from the ceiling. They worked without a trace of drunkenness or hangover symptoms (besides bloodshot eyes) somehow. I was impressed. I felt like garbage, and the last thing that I think I could do while hungover is to be hunched over smelly farm animals in a crowded barn. The whole village was working. Young, healthy and strong men sheared the sheep. Women picked up the wool and helped bundle it in large sacks, along with other young men. Women also constantly swept up the poop and fluff and blood and other mess that came along with shearing sheep hundreds of sheep all day in an enclosed space. Older men had less labor intensive jobs. For example, one old man sat in the corner and handed one token to each young man for every sheep he sheared.
The old token man told me that they get 8 RMB for every sheep they shear. The fastest shearers could finish upwards of 40 sheep in a day. That’s up to about 320 RMB for one day, nearly 50 USD, which doesn’t sound like much but is really quite a lot of money in this part of the world. The work looked tiresome and hard on the body, and they don’t shear sheep every day of the year, so they must get income from other places as well.
They said much of that extra income comes from selling the sheep for slaughter. They told me that most of the sheep goes to Xinjiang Province for meat, though they are willing to sell it anywhere, to anyone, for the right price. Just so happens that the market is in Xinjiang. Lamb is a staple meat in many Xinjiang dishes, and Xinjiang style lamb skewers are famous across China, so it’s no surprise that the sheep get shipped off to Xinjiang when they are ready to be harvested. The entire economy of the village was based around this animal. There was no convenience store, no shops selling clothes, nothing but farms and sheep. It was quite special to see the entire village, along with this animal, working together to maintain their lifestyle and keep their culture and town alive.
As the morning gave way to midday Jasmine woke up and came down to check on the sheep shearing situation. The process consisted of putting the wool into a huge bag that was propped up by inside a large box with a door on it. A person climbed into the bag with the wool and continuously stamped down the wool, packing it as tight as possible. A rope dangled from the ceiling above the sack, for the stomper to hang on to and keep his balance and safely work. We were both feeling pretty good and took turns helping the locals bundle the wool, jumping up and down in the bag. When the sacks were full the workers would open the door and pull the huge bundle to the scale. They’d weigh it, mark down the number with a permanent marker on the bag itself, as well as in the ledger, and then a team of men would lift the heavy bag on to the stack. The whole operation was incredibly efficient and well run. Everyone had a job to do. At noon lunch was ready for the entire village. Other women and young kids had been preparing it in a kitchen on the other side of the barn. Soup, bread, rice and some hot dishes kept the laborers full and ready to work for the rest of the day.
In the afternoon Birdie and Purp told us it was time to go. We drove directly back to Zhangye. We took a much more efficient route, straight down the mountain and to the highway. What was an all day trip on the way to the village was just a little over 3 hours on the way back. They dropped us off at Zhangye Railway Station and we posed for a picture together. We shook their hands, thanked them, handed Birdie a few hundred RMB for gas and food and just to show we were appreciative of his time and giving us the experience, and then we said goodbye.
It was a really remarkable experience. I don’t know if I conveyed it well enough with my words. It was just a couple of days. But it was the kind of surreal and fun adventure that I hoped to stumble into when I initially set off across China. Birdie and Purp, if you ever somehow see this, thank you so much those days.
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