A Dreamland in Southwest China

By WU MEILING

    I visited Tiandong lured by a photo, a song and a poem.

    The photo shows an 800,000-year-old stone axe in the shape of mango from the Paleolithic Period on the cover of the U.S. magazine Science. This discovery silenced Western voices that had argued Asia in ancient times was behind other continents in cultural progress. No such stone axes have ever been found in Europe.

    The song is a Zhuang folk song I heard at a gathering of my friends. The Zhuang ethnic minority made their notch in the hall of history as early as the Three Kingdoms Period (AD 220-280). Children grow up amid the songs.

    The poem is one published in Ethnic Literature magazine. One line of the poem reads: Passing through millennia-old beauty, let's meet at charming Tiandong.

    Tiandong County, resembling a mango on a map, is just an hour away by car from Nanning Airport. It so happens that the county produces a lot of mangoes. As far back as the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) this place was an important stopover on the road to Nanning. Later, during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), this place was a famous market for the horse trade. With the passing of time, this place evolved into a town for tea and horse transactions. Today railways, highways and water transportation routes crisscross the area, providing easy access to Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Chongqing and Guangdong.

A sea of clouds around Motian Mountain in Tiandong County.

Hengshan Village

    By the time we arrived at Tiandong it was already late afternoon and the evening glow had begun to appear in the sky. Before we had a chance to take the place in, Wang Xiji, the county party secretary, unraveled a series of fascinating stories of local history. For example, in AD 622, this place became an administration of county level under the name of Hengshan, a name suggesting a hill running across the local river valley plain.

    In 1126, with the downfall of the Northern Song Dynasty, its last emperor fled across the Yangtze to Hangzhou, where he established the Southern Song. Due to the enemy's occupation of China's north, the traditional Silk Road was cut. The Southern Song Empire had no means to get war supplies like horses from traditional sources in Xinjiang and Mongolia, so it had to turn to China's southwest. Every year, history books say, the Southern Song obtained between 1,500 and 3,500 horses from the southwest for its armies. Most of the horses came from the then Dali and Luodian areas, and were traded for tea, salt, porcelain and silk, along a road that extended to Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Myanmar, India, and even further to places in West Asia. This road was the Silk Road in China's southwest.