What It Felt Like to Go Deep into Daliangshan for the First Time

Yi Script

Yesterday morning at six, I left my home in Chengdu and set off.

Two things stand out most about autumn in Chengdu. One is that it's colder, and you can't wear short sleeves and shorts anymore. The other is that dawn comes later and dusk comes earlier.

I set out at six. In summer, the sky would already be getting light by then. I felt a faint chill in the air, and luckily I'd worn a slightly thicker jacket on purpose.

It suddenly struck me that it was already late autumn. But autumn in Chengdu doesn't seem to leave any especially striking memories. Most of the time the sky is gray and hazy, and that's about it.

Where I was going this time is at the very edge of Sichuan, separated from Yunnan only by the Jinsha River. In a way, I probably can't set foot in a spot closer to the corner of Sichuan than this.

It's Jinyang County, in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan.

To get to Jinyang County, I first had to take a train to Xichang, then a coach from Xichang to Jinyang's county seat.

I took train C755 from Chengdu South Station to Xichang West Station. Funnily enough, although I've worked in Sichuan for almost three years, I'd never been to the Liangshan Prefecture in southern Sichuan. Probably because geography limits the economy here compared with the area around Chengdu, and our business doesn't reach this far.

To people in Chengdu, Xichang is a tourist city, with the beautiful Qionghai Lake and its famous charcoal-pot barbecue. But from the moment I boarded, I could tell that most people on this train weren't traveling for fun. From their clothes, accents, and language, most were locals from Liangshan. On the train, I didn't yet know that most of them were Yi people.

The ride took three hours to Xichang. As time went on, the scenery outside changed from plains to rolling hills. The railway I rode is the new Chengdu–Kunming line, opened in 2022. The old Chengdu–Kunming line opened in 1970. The old line was called a "geological museum," because the geology along it is extremely complex, with landslides and mudslides common. Back then, some foreign experts even thought this was a forbidden zone for railways.

Only by actually riding it can you appreciate how remarkable this railway is.

When I arrived at Xichang West Station, the scene around me surprised me. Around the high-speed rail station I couldn't see any dense apartment blocks, only detached rural houses with ethnic character.

By rights, Xichang shouldn't look like this. It should have well-developed city blocks. Later, at Xichang East Bus Station, I learned it's true: the West Station is some distance from the urban area, though not too far.

Worth mentioning: after getting off the train, I saw a kind of writing I'd never seen on the platform signs. I asked AI and learned it's Yi script. It was my first time seeing this remarkable script at a high-speed rail station, and it told me that Daliangshan is the home of the Yi people. Most of those traveling the high-speed line between Chengdu and Liangshan were Yi.

Yi script on a platform sign

At Xichang East Bus Station, I believed it even more. Almost everyone I saw was Yi. There were many shops around selling traditional Yi clothing, and lots of people were chatting in the Yi language.

Many motorcycles were parked in front of the bus station. Most of the riders make a living carrying passengers. As I walked past, they said something to me. I could tell it was Sichuanese, but I couldn't understand what they were saying.

Jinyang County, where I was going, is known as the heartland of Daliangshan. Nearby Zhaojue, Meigu, and Butuo are also mostly places where Yi people live together. I think this bus station is where the whole heartland of Daliangshan connects.

The Shortcut

Before long after the coach left the station, it got onto the national highway, which really meant the mountain road. It was a true mountain road, winding through nine bends and eighteen turns, climbing steadily. The altitude wasn't that high overall, but I soon felt I was far from the city.

Once in the mountains, I found that the four seasons there are so distinct. Autumn is autumn, and winter is winter.

From a distance, the leaves covering the mountainsides looked like layer upon layer of golden waves. It was gorgeous.

Sometimes a bit of green mixed in, adding a light afterglow to the deep autumn.

Deep blue sky, deep autumn on the land.

I suddenly realized it's in the mountains that you truly get autumn.

The turning of the seasons is really nature breathing in and out, leaves falling, life going round again. In the city, we live in a jungle of steel and concrete, and our view of nature is limited. We can feel the temperature drop, and we can feel dawn and dusk, but it's hard to feel nature's changes in finer detail. Even the fallen leaves are swept away early by the cleaners.

The coach ride to Jinyang County takes over six hours. Along the way we passed Zhaojue, a fairly well-known stop, because tourism is very well developed there. All along the road I saw many tourism projects, like some tastefully built guesthouses. Zhaojue's county seat is also the newest and most modern place on the route. After we left it and went deeper into Daliangshan, the feel of going back to a simpler life grew stronger.

For example, I've seen cattle and sheep wandering onto the road in western Sichuan, but this was my first time seeing villagers let their pigs roam free. Several times I saw a few black pigs strolling along the road, but the moment they heard the car horn, they obediently made way.

Some people in the mountains keep horses too. I was born in the Year of the Horse, so I notice horses especially. Sometimes I saw a few horses grazing at leisure in a wide field with no saddles on them. Other times I saw villagers using horses to carry goods. Honestly, seeing this way of moving things today feels fascinating.

And this way of transport, which looks fun and old-fashioned now, was the only link between Jinyang County and the outside world in the early 1950s. Back then Jinyang had only three horse caravan trails. A horse caravan trail is a mountain path where people drive horses or mules carrying goods. Jinyang relied on these three trails to send grain, salt, and all kinds of goods in and out.

Only in the early 1960s did Jinyang get its first highway. They say the whole county beat gongs and drums on the day it opened. And until a dozen or so years ago, driving from Xichang to Jinyang still took 12 hours, and sometimes you had to spend the night in the mountains.

When I learned it was a 6-hour coach ride to Jinyang, I was shocked, because I hadn't been on a coach that long in ages. I'd sat on that coach for so long and already found it unbearable. But a dozen years ago, this road took twelve hours, and before that there wasn't even a proper road here.

This road that I found so long was, for the people in the mountains, already a shortcut.

There was a small incident on the way. A landslide seemed to have hit one stretch of the road, and we ran into a crew at work. An excavator was clearing and repairing the slope. We waited about 40 minutes before we could pass. In places like this, landslides and all sorts of small accidents are common, which made me feel even more that such roads don't come easily.

So with the delay, I spent nearly seven hours on the coach, and it was seven in the evening when I reached Jinyang's county seat.

Liangfen

Jinyang's county seat felt different from what I'd imagined. If you stand on a street in Jinyang, you wouldn't feel you're in the mountains, because tall buildings line both sides of the road. Only at certain intersections, or along the main roads, do you realize you're in a valley.

Most of Jinyang's residents are Yi people, and an outside worker like me is obviously from somewhere else.

Last night I went out to find something to eat and found a local kind of liangfen, cold jelly noodles, that's gray overall. When I walked up to the shop, the woman inside kindly asked if I wanted liangfen. I said yes. Then she asked if I wanted it "thin" or "dry."

I froze, because my research beforehand hadn't turned up this way of ordering. She explained that thin liangfen is hot and dry liangfen is cold, so I chose dry. She filled a bowl for me, and I stood there holding it until she told me you season it yourself.

Just as I was at a loss, a woman standing next to me said, very naturally, on my behalf: "He doesn't know how."

I laughed and said right, I don't, it's my first time here. Then the woman in the shop mixed the seasoning for me, and in the end it tasted pretty good.

Jinyang liangfen

In my two days in the county, another thing surprised me: there are a lot of students in Jinyang. I first noticed it when I walked onto the street at school's end. Groups after groups of students poured out of the schools, carrying backpacks in twos and threes, chatting and laughing as they walked, and the whole street was suddenly lively.

I wondered why a place like this has so many students. The number of students is falling quickly across the country now, and many primary schools in many places are being closed or merged because there aren't enough students. Why is Jinyang like this?

It turns out Jinyang has an especially high share of children. Out of every 100 people, nearly 40 are children, more than double the national share. The reason there are so many students in the county seat is that many of the children's homes were originally up in the mountains and only moved to the county seat in recent years. The children whose homes are still in the mountains live at school and go home on weekends.

Then I thought that among these boarding children, many must have parents working away from home. Jinyang has a registered population of over 200,000, but only about 170,000 live there. The tens of thousands in between mostly make a living elsewhere. So that children can talk to their parents, the boarding schools here have installed "family phones" and video equipment.

The street was so lively at the end of school, but all I saw was liveliness. What those children think about in their dorms every night, I, a passerby, don't actually know.

A Hundred Years of Electricity Bills

On the way to Jinyang, I passed several village schools. Most weren't big, built beside the road or in the middle of a village, a few buildings and a playground standing out in a landscape of mountains and farmland. Every time the coach passed the gate of a school like this, I looked twice.

Honestly, seeing these schools moved me a little. In mountains like these, to build a school, someone has to build roads to bring in building materials, teachers have to be willing to come teach, and someone has to go from house to house persuading children back into the classroom. None of that gets done by one person or one village alone.

In recent years, Jinyang has merged many village primary schools that were too small and too scattered, while also building and expanding quite a few schools, adding over 8,000 places and 6,000 beds. In these years, more and more Jinyang Middle School students have been getting into university.

I feel that the more basic the place, the more you can sense the good in the country and society. In Chengdu, schools are right next to residential compounds, and we rarely think about how a school came to be. Here, every school looks like it was forced up out of the mountain. It was in a place like this that I truly grasped the weight of the saying "education changes lives." For a child in the mountains, studying may be another road, one that leads somewhere farther away.

Besides schools, what I saw most on the way was power grid equipment.

The coach wound around the mountain road, and nearly every bend showed steel towers standing on the ridges, with power lines stretching from one mountain to the next and on down to villages in the hollows. At first I didn't think much of it. After seeing so many, I started to wonder how much effort it must take to set these towers up on such tall, steep mountains.

In 2012, more than three million people across China still had no electricity, over 80% of them from ethnic minorities, and Sichuan was one of the key areas. It was only by the end of 2015 that everyone in China had power. And in some remote places, connecting one household cost about 40,000 yuan, which, at a normal household's electricity use, would pay for a hundred years of electricity bills.

A hundred years. That's obviously not a good deal, but in the end, the lines still reached every home.

Another thing struck me as remarkable. Between Jinyang and Yongshan in Yunnan on the opposite bank, the Xiluodu Hydropower Station sits on the Jinsha River, one of the largest hydropower stations in China. The huge power station is right at their doorstep and sends electricity endlessly to faraway places, yet people in the mountains have only had stable power for the past ten or so years.

Something to Look Forward To

This evening I stood on a hillside at the edge of the county seat and saw this bridge. It spans a very deep river valley, with several piers rising straight up from the valley floor, holding the deck high in midair. At the other end of the bridge is a stretch of newly built apartment blocks on the opposite slope. The sun was about to set. The valley had already gone dark, and only the far mountaintops were still lit golden by the sunset. On a ridge further off stood a row of wind turbines, probably generating power too.

The bridge Back where I'm staying, I looked it up and learned it's called the Jinyang River Grand Bridge. The tallest pier is 196 meters, about the height of a 65-story building. The straight-line distance between Jinyang's new and old county seats is only a little over a kilometer, but they're separated by the Jinyang River Valley, several hundred meters deep. To get across, you used to go down to the river on one side and wind up the mountain road to the other, which took over an hour by car. Since the bridge opened in 2022, it takes just a dozen minutes. They say that on opening day, locals from nearby, old and young, brought dry food and water and made a special trip to see it.

I also read a report from a few years ago. While the bridge was still being built, Erku Xiaohong, a villager from Mayizu Township, stood on the riverbank and took a photo of it with her phone. She said that when she was little, it took three or four hours to walk from the village entrance to the county seat. Later, after a road was built, it took forty minutes. Back then everyone was hoping the bridge would be finished soon, so they could sell Sichuan pepper more easily.

A few years ago she stood by the river and photographed this bridge. A few years later I stood on a hillside and photographed it. She photographed something to look forward to. I photographed a view.

In fact, even as I rode the coach down that old road, a new road was nearly finished in the mountains.

That road is the Xi-Zhao Expressway. It starts from Xichang, passes through Zhaojue, Butuo, and Jinyang, crosses the Jinsha River, and runs all the way to Zhaotong in Yunnan on the other bank. Just a week before I set out, on October 20, the longest tunnel on this expressway, the Jinyang Tunnel, over 12,000 meters long, was fully opened through. As planned, the Xi-Zhao Expressway will fully open to traffic by the end of this year, and then it will take only about an hour from Xichang to Zhaojue.

In the news I read about an electric welder working in the Jinyang Tunnel, named Qumu Zhiji. His home is in a township not far from the work site, but he rarely goes back. When someone asked why, he said the villagers are all hoping the tunnel opens soon so they can get out and see the world, and he's embarrassed to go home often while it isn't finished.

I thought of those forty minutes stuck on the road. While I sat in the coach getting a bit impatient, there were many people like him, deep in the mountains, working hard to turn a natural barrier into an open road.

Autumn

I'm writing this on my second night in Jinyang. Tomorrow I'll go back the way I came, on the old road. Thinking about it, this trip may have been one of the last few autumns for this old road. Next year, when someone comes from Xichang to Jinyang, they may not have to wind around mountain roads for seven hours, and the golden slopes I saw from the coach window may be hidden by tunnel after tunnel.

But I think autumn will still be in the mountains.

It's always been here, yellow from the foot of the mountain to the summit, year after year. It's just that in the past few people could get in, and people in the mountains found it hard to get out. It was the highway opened over sixty years ago with gongs and drums, the steel towers on the ridges, and the tunnels in the mountains that let someone like me, from Chengdu, see these autumn mountains through a coach window on a late autumn afternoon.

They also mean that one day the children in the mountains can follow these roads out and see the autumn outside the mountains.

Though the autumn outside the mountains may not be as beautiful as here.

Some of the material in this article comes from public reports by Xinhua, China News Service, and other outlets.