of warring between the Han Chinese and the Tibetans.
He adds that there was also a much more recent threat
to their survival. On our return drive to the resort, Jack
detours down a long, rough road through a narrow
mountain gorge to show me what he means. We arrive
at the village of Yingxiu, which looks very new and is
nestled within a ring of green mountains. At its centre
is a lively outdoor market where gaily coloured stalls
sell toys, panda souvenirs and bowls of hot noodles.
We pass through them to emerge on a scene of
staggering violence.
I’m looking at a modern middle school, a fi ve-storey
complex. Only, it looks like someone has tipped it over
at one corner and sent it crashing to the ground like a
stack of crockery. Elevated boardwalks circle the entire
upended school building. We peer into classroom fl oors,
steeply angled and littered here and there with the
accoutrements of contemporary secondary education.
At one corner, fi ve fl oors are pancaked into a single
layer. The ruin looks oddly ancient — more ancient than
the upstanding blockhouses I’ve just seen.
“What is this?” I ask, both perplexed and shocked.
“It’s a monument. Yingxiu was the epicentre of the
2008 Wenchuan earthquake.”
In May of that year, Sichuan was hit by a magnitude
7.9 earthquake that was felt as far as Beijing. Around90,000 people died, 350,000 were injured and fi ve
million made homeless. Yingxiu was fl attened; 5,000
people were buried in a pit because the town was cut o
for a week and the survivors feared disease.
When I return to the resort I soon learn that
everyone has a Wenchuan story. Marketing manager
Una Zhang lived with her family in a car for a week,
so fearful were they of a ershocks. Guide Jack Feng
remembers cowering with his school friends in a
stairwell. Fellow guide Olaf Klotzke recalls the shock
of seeing naked people in the street — they’d been
showering when the earthquake struck and had fl ed
for their lives.
My visit to Sichuan lasts only fi ve days, but there’s a
strange intensity to the trip that makes it feel twice as
long. I think it’s down to the fact that I’m constantly
exposed to things that are unfamiliar — the ancient
genius of the irrigation system, the modern genius of
farming river monsters for caviar, the ancient stone
ruins crowned with horns, the contemporary school
ruins hung with sadness, the fi ve-star resort where
wealthy guests bring their own comfort food, the ‘Hero
Father’ panda doing it for China...
I’m le feeling like an acolyte who’s come down out of
the swirling mists of Mount Qingcheng, his eyes just a
little more open.I feel like an acolyte who’s come down out of the
mists of Mount Qingcheng having found answers
FROM LEFT:
Wenchuan Earthquake
Memorial; greengage
season in Taopin Qiang
Minority Village
126 natgeotraveller.co.uk
CHINA