Out of Eden Walk: Walking through western China

In China’s southern province of Yunnan, a community known as the Bai expresses itself mostly by singing. And they have a song for everything: from history lessons to mourning to flirting. Host Marco Werman speaks with National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek, who also discusses the early 20th century Austrian-American botanist and explorer Joseph Rock, who traveled through this same region of western China.

The World

National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has been walking around the world since 2013 as part of a project known as Out of Eden Walk

He’s been following the pathways of our ancestors who fanned out across the globe from Africa during the Stone Age, from Ethiopia to the Middle East, through Turkey into Asia, across India and Myanmar and on to Paul’s most recent walking journey through China. 

For the past 11 years, Salopek has been posting about his experiences meeting people, taking photos, and making videos while traveling the world by foot. As he trekked through China, Salopek encountered a group communicating through song.

Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.

Salopek joined The World’s Host Marco Werman to discuss this community and his time in Yunnan, China.

Marco Werman: So once again, there’s an experience you can really have only by traveling at the speed of one step, as you are. You gave this video a title: “A ‘king of song’ in southwestern China offers a musical tour of his village and culture.” Tell us about the singer and what he’s singing about here.
Paul Salopek: This is Mr. Li Gen Fan, a community leader in an ethnic Bai minority village in the province of Yunnan in southwestern China. There are about 2 million Bai. They’re one of 26 different ethnic groups in this province. It’s the most ethnically diverse province in China. It’s kind of a crossroads between Southeast Asia [and] Tibet, in western China. And, this group of people, the Bai, are famous in China for their singing.
Li Gen Fan, a Bai community leader from Shilong Village, wants to save his minority ethnic group’s vast, expressive, but vanishing song repertoires. Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
Yeah, and that relationship of the Bai people to song and the range of emotions they express in the music, I’d like us to hear another example. This is also Li Gen Fan singing a very different kind of song. What’s going on there?
You can probably intuit what’s going on between these two songs. So, one was a love song, the first one. The Bai believe that the heart and the liver are kind of love organs. The first one [said], “I love you with all my liver.” And then the second one was basically a song from another partner who sang “Shut Up.” It’s kind of an angry song saying, “Don’t sing to me anymore.” Mr. Li said, “We’re kind of shy, introverted people. We don’t really communicate very well, kind of verbally, you know, but through conversation. But we get our emotions out through song.” And so they have this enormously complex repertoire of songs about culture, songs about personal feelings, songs about work, songs about religion, songs about history. It’s kind of an encyclopedic musical tradition that the Bai have. Very complex.
So, how much of the Bai people’s singing is performance, and how much is personal and even maybe practical communication?
It’s all of the above. That’s what’s so, kind of, remarkable about it. And, you know, anthropologists have gone there to study Bai singing there. There’s polyphonic singing between men and women that can be flirtatious and actually can be X-rated, which is deeply personal, of course. There’s a kind of ceremonial song done at funerals. There’s songs that kind of celebrate communities. You know, when I was walking through these green hills in southwestern Yunnan and coming into Bai communities, they are kind of quiet. There, people are kind of minding their own business, going up and down the alleyways. But occasionally, you hear these bursts of music coming from people’s lungs. And Mr. Li, when he sings, he would spread his feet wide. He’d throw out his chest, hold his hands down by his hips like a gunslinger, and just extrude this extraordinary human sound that had this enormous range. It really is an amazing thing to see and listen to, and quite beautiful.
Baoxiang Temple, in Yunnan Province, is the site of an annual song festival that strives to preserve the Bai ethnic group’s complex and threatened singing culture. Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
Another subject you wrote about, Paul: a westerner who traveled the same mountain paths a century ago, a self-trained botanist and anthropologist named Joseph Rock. Who was he?
Joseph Rock, what a character. Almost lost to history but revived by writers like Bruce Chatwin, who found him fascinating. He’s a cranky, cantankerous botanist born in Austria in the late 19th century to a butler who’s the son of a butler. And he basically escaped a miserable childhood in Europe that had, you know, hierarchical, almost feudal social structures, and ended up in remote, southwestern China collecting plants for the US Agriculture Department. He was originally sent there — self-taught botanist, he had a secondary school education — to find blight-resistant chestnut trees. But what he ended up doing is everything else. He collected thousands of plants, hundreds of animals. He helped identify 700 species of rhododendron. And then, even more extraordinary, is he learned local languages. He became one of the crucial chroniclers of these threatened cultures in southwestern China. He basically spent 30-plus years riding horses and being carried in a litter, turning himself basically from kind of a butler’s son in Europe into kind of a knight or prince in another feudal society, in this time in China, being carried in a litter through these mountain passes and documenting their culture, their religion, their belief systems, their script. And he did this to such a degree that his work was canonical. Anthropologists today even consult Joseph Rock’s work.
Joseph Rock (left) and an expedition member sit with the xenophobic “king of Muli,” a goliath Rock called Chote Chaba. Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.Joseph Rock
And getting carried around like that, as you were saying, that’s like in those old sedans like Marie Antoinette would have been carried around in, right?
He was a strange character. I mean, on the one hand, he was deeply empathetic with the Indigenous people of the mountains of western China. He saw himself as a defender of their culture. On the other hand, he was kind of a man of his time. He had racist attitudes to mainstream Chinese. He didn’t like cities. He hated modern life. He kind of had this romantic Orientalist version of Asia. He hated his botanical competitors. He hated his editors at National Geographic, for whom he wrote articles. He had lots of grudges, Dr. Rock, and he also carried around weapons. He would fire his Colt pistols into the air, ostensibly, to chase away bandits. But I think it was just a power trip for him — complicated guy.
The infamous king of Muli photographed by the eccentric explorer Joseph Rock in the 1920s. Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.Joseph Rock
As you point out, he also wrote for National Geographic, clearly taking a very different approach from yours to telling people’s stories. What’s interesting is that you mentioned Rock in several of your articles. It’s like you kept crossing paths with this guy from a century ago. What did it feel like to be visiting some of the same places and meeting people who could have been the great-grandchildren of people Rock wrote about?
This corner of the planet, this corner of the world is so extraordinarily beautiful. It’s one of the most physically beautiful landscapes I’ve walked through on this long walking project: 17,000, 18,000-foot peaks covered by snow, the color of lavender in the distance. Spruce and pine forests, you know, bursting with mushrooms and wildflowers and big rivers the color of jade. It’s bewitching. And I think that it even bewitched me a little bit. And it’s no surprise that outside writers, non-Chinese writers and non-Chinese filmmakers used Rock’s work for the basis for the Shangri-La legend. The “Lost Horizon” book that came out in the 1930s, this kind of utopian world of kind of quasi-Tibetan people who live forever. This is where it came from. And Joseph Rock brought it to the outside world, again through this very romantic prism. And so imagine that you’ve passed over this snowy mountain pass; there are Tibetan prayer flags that are crystallized with ice flapping under a pale sun, and the wind is as sharp as razor blades. It’s so cold. And you look down into a sunlit valley, and there are the domes of a Buddhist monastery, kind of shining in the sun. That is Muli, that is the place where Rock’s heart lay. Sadly, for Rock, he had to leave China after the revolution of ‘49. He ended up in Hawaii as kind of a retired scholar, where, according to his obituary, he died alone — he had no family, he never married — far away from this land that he loved so much.

Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk and also at @InsideNatGeo.

Tell us about your experience accessing The World

We want to hear your feedback so we can keep improving our website, theworld.org. Please fill out this quick survey and let us know your thoughts (your answers will be anonymous). Thanks for your time!