The jagged beauty of Sichuan's national park echoes the relationship between Chinese and Tibetans who live there, the Irish park ranger tells Clifford Coonan
As mist descends on Wogu village in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, Andrew Scanlon gestures towards the prayer flags flapping in the wind, the Tibetan houses perched on the hills and the Western Himalayas, which are so close you can almost touch them.
"It's paradise here, with fresh water, horses, nature. You can drink the water here, it's been filtered through 108 lakes, it's the cleanest water in all of China," says the man from Wicklow town, who is a ranger in the adjoining national park.
Later that day, Tibetan music carries across the Zhongzhagou valley to Baijie Shuji's house, where we stay. Despite the din from the local dance, there is a real peace that feels a million miles away from the burgeoning China of the east coast. It's not that Wogu is untouched - modernity is everywhere in the form of satellite dishes and mobile phones. It just seems intact.
At a meeting beneath a canopy of prayer flags, villagers debate whether to allow a tarmac road to come here and give tourists access to Wogu, or to preserve the ancient lifestyle of their home. The local men arrive on motorbikes and tractors, proceedings are photographed with Motorola phones, and Snow beer bottles and plastic fuel bottles full of Maotai liquor are the tipples of choice.
Since 1998, Tibetans are not allowed grow crops commercially because of reafforestation, so the people need something to do and some way of earning money beyond the subsidies they receive from local government.
Wearing traditional costumes, which include a red hat lined with white fur which look slightly like a Santa Claus hat, women watch from the sidelines, preferring yak butter tea to liquor, while children rev up the motorbikes, watch the foreigners and hugging their elders around the neck. Tradition is evident in the Tibetan reds and yellows of the clothes, the harsh tobacco smoked in old-fashioned pipes, the peanuts shelled and eaten during the conversation, the knives the men wear on their hips or across their chests. The red flag of China flaps among the prayer flags - this is a diverse area.
Driving along hair-raising dirt tracks in this natural park area, Scanlon (29) explains how his job is to manage paradise. "People here in the valley have no access to tourism but have to conserve the environment so they want to develop. We're looking at high-end tourism, rich Chinese from Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as Europe and the US, to a lesser extent."
"The master plan is the development of eco-tourism, which includes training staff, and introducing systems such as building routes like you see in Switzerland in the Alps, with standardised route-signing," says Scanlon.
Scanlon has been in the area for nearly two years. After studying geology at Trinity College Dublin, he did post-graduate work in Bern in Switzerland and then spent a year studying Chinese in Chengdu, well as working on conservation projects for the World Wildlife Fund.
His current position is a project funded by the German state-funded development agency GTZ and the German labour ministry. He works with three parks in Sichuan, including the Wolong park, home to many pandas.
He also helps co-ordinate Irish investment in local projects. At the Mingde school, built with Taiwanese money, scores of children are getting ready for Children's Day. Around 20 of the students here are from a satellite school five kilometres away and they are involved in Project Hope, which is funded by the Irish embassy in faraway Beijing.
"The embassy is funding a biodiversity garden, which will teach people all about honey, with paths to form a learning journey, an area for kids' games. The school is wind- and solar-powered, with an eco-toilet. The kids learn Tibetan and Chinese names for everything. We're hoping to twin with the gaelscoil in Wicklow town," says Scanlon.
Their teacher's name is Wang Xuhong, or Yang Jingzhouma in Tibetan, and she described how the children had walked five kilometres down the hills to get to the main school, where the preparations are taking place. Marching along, blowing trumpets and bashing cymbals, the children are having a great time. They are all Tibetan children from schools in the locality, a scruffy bunch of scamps who stand to attention but who occasionally break ranks when there is a bit of horseplay in the line.
The schoolchildren learn Chinese, Tibetan and English from a special language teacher, and then they have a regular primary teacher who covers the other subjects such as maths. In Yang's class, the children are mostly between three and six years old, with some older kids.
They line up in rows, waiting for the dance to begin, shouting "okay" at the foreign visitors and smiling the broadest of grins. A round of applause greets the dance, which starts off with some Tibetan droning, but soon kicks into techno, and everyone is in great form.
Behind the school, the Western Himalayas loom over the valley. There are more than 300 animal species in these hills, including black bears, golden monkeys, pit vipers, Tibetan cobras. In the higher areas there are big cats, Tibetan lynx, snow leopards, Bharal or blue sheep and Tibetan antelopes.
The next morning in Wogu, during a two-hour walk through the mountains, at every turn the Tibetans invite us into their homes.
Back in Baijie Shuji's house, he produces breakfast of whirls of pastry and hard-boiled eggs, inevitably served with yak butter tea. It tastes better than it smells, and the foreigner's tentative tasting is a source of much hilarity. The woman who serves the food laughs constantly, and runs out after each serving to give the latest update on how the foreigners are reacting to the strange food. We are watching Seinfeld, in English - and the juxtaposition of the US sitcom with the rustic setting, combined with the 4,000-metre altitude, makes for a queasy mix.
Another surreal juxtaposition is the national park itself. One of the great natural wonders of the world, it's around 450 kilometres north of the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu, and it's a holy valley to the Tibetans. According to the legend, a mountain deity named Dago had a crush on the goddess Semo, and he gave her a mirror made of wind and cloud. However, the devil appeared and the goddess dropped the mirror, which broke into 108 pieces, which fell to earth as 108 lakes. They have wonderful names - Double-Dragon Lake, Tiger Lake and Rhinoceros Lake - and many are dreamy azure pools, served by beautiful waterfalls such as Shuzheng Waterfall and Nuorilang Waterfall.
While the valley is beautiful, it's been developed since 1978 and is in sharp contrast to the peace of the valley just at the edge of the park. Dozens of modern hotels line the streets, emblazoned with monstrous Tibetan kitsch, including giant prayer wheels and massive swastikas, an ancient symbol of peace brutally reversed by the Nazis.
The park receives three million visitors a year and is packed with tour groups. A guide waving a flag shouts "Pengyoumen" (friends) through a megaphone and we storm the shuttle bus. It's a remarkable experience. On board, a guide wearing dark purple Tibetan robes conducts proceedings. One passenger spends the entire journey on the mobile phone discussing the cost of some commodity. He is wearing a Decathlon hiker's hat, Merrell shoes, a Timberland shirt and occasionally sucks from a portable oxygen container.
As we drive along the valley we see huge Tibetan-style construction going on, houses covered with the ubiquitous swastikas. The Taiwanese pop music in the bus is incredibly loud, making it difficult to enjoy some of the most remarkable sights in the world.
A lot has been done to preserve the valley - boardwalks have been laid to allow people to walk without damaging the earth, no private cars are permitted and there are programmes to try and develop the conservation side of the park. The challenge is balancing tourism and the local community.
"Since 1984, tourism has been developing at a rapid pace. We had the road in 1997 and the airport in 2003 and now we're seeing direct flights from Beijing and Shanghai," says Li Shaojian, one of the directors of the park.
"We are looking at sustainable development of the park, other activities other than just visiting the park, such as things to do at night and improving service to make things work better," he says.
He wants to develop the international side of the tourism business here. "The park is a window for people to see China, not just a nature reserve. You know, 80 per cent of foreign tourists who come to China have a university degree or higher. We're very interested in this," says Li.
The next day we attend a ceremony at a temple known in Tibetan as the Zarusi. This is a very active, participative kind of religion, where older people in traditional dress and shiny new trainers mingle with young people wearing small tokens of their Tibetan heritage - a tiger skin, a shawl - with high heels walk past the prayer wheels, spinning them around and looking for absolution. The temple was burned down during the Cultural Revolution, but rebuilt following the opening up of China by the Ministry of Tourism.
Inside the temples, the monks incant in deep tones to ensure that there will be a good harvest. This is the 15th day of the agricultural year and it's the most auspicious time to carry out such a ceremony.
The monks make a circle, banging sticks, while the Han teenagers, children of people forced into Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution, take pictures of each other and ignore the backdrop.
This region is a testing ground for Han-Tibetan relations. It is a long way from the tensions of Lhasa, in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, which was annexed by China in 1951 and where there is local resentment to intrusion by the Han Chinese, who are the dominant ethnic group in China and whose numbers are growing in all parts of China.
Sichuan is China, it's not an autonomous region, and the two cultures have interacted here for thousands of years, not always peacefully. The local Public Security Bureau officer is unhappy about the presence of westerners at the event. Tibetans and Han Chinese seem indifferent to each other at the gathering.
We walk back down the valley along a boardwalk through stunning forest. A committed conservationist and passionate about the area, Scanlon is nevertheless realistic about what needs to be done if the area is to survive as a natural wonder while encouraging tourism.
"You need a central point like Jiuzhaigou for the eco-tourism to work. Back-packing is not eco-tourism. The Chinese have the capacity to do a good thing on a massive scale. If they co-operate with the locals, and do it properly, this could be a wild but well-managed area with biodiversity," he says.
"The Tibetans are really different. Not just in terms of language and culture, but mentally and psychologically. There's a darkness here with the Himalayan nomadic people. Sometimes it's like a small village in Ireland," says Scanlon.
