Middle Kingdom Journeys

Tufeng Project was a grassroots NGO founded six years ago by a Chinese musician - Chen Zhe, who had written many popular songs in the 1980’s. Since 1992, Chen Zhe turned to the southwestern China, researching the music heritage of different minority groups, and among them, he focused on the Pumi people.

After studying and writing mainly western style lyrics for years, Chen Zhe was totally thrilled to find himself in the treasure house of traditional Chinese music. Every village has its own folk song guru, and every man can sing a song of his own. At the beginning, he spent a lot of time busy recording folk songs, including love songs, work songs, ceremonial songs, until one day he learned that one old granny passed away a few weeks after his visit, and no one else in the village could sing those songs she had not had a chance to sing for him. All of a sudden, he realized that there are more important things to do, other than just recording them. If the younger generation is not interested in learning all the music heritage, all the songs he had recorded can only be part of museum collection.

On this trip, we plan to visit two of the most representative Pumi villages; one of them is called Shangshuifeng, and the other Yushichang.

Shangshuifeng locates lower in altitude, and closer to the city. It is affected by the Bai minority, which is a larger ethnic group in the region, so the folk songs and dances are a bit different from the traditional forms. The first Tufeng local team was founded in Shangshuifeng village, and now the girls and boys are playing very important roles in organizing Tufeng activities in the region. The Pumi Lover’s Day annual celebration is also held in Shangshuifeng village, and on that day, thousands of villagers come to Shangshuifeng from neighboring villages to join this second most important day of the Pumi people.

Yushichang, on the other hand, locates on a higher altitude (2,300 – 2,400 meters above sea level) and is the most traditional Pumi village in the whole county. It is believed that Yushichang is among the first few villages set up by the Pumi people in the region about 800 years ago. The language and customs of Yushichang is considered the most indigenous. But what makes the Yushichang people special is their strong belief in preserving the thousand-year-old prime forest right behind the village. Traditionally, Pumi people worship the god of mountain, as they believe in a harmonious relationship with the nature will bring them good luck. Many villagers believe that the reason why there had never been any landslide happening to this village is because of the protection of the forest they revered. And the water resource exists also in abundance while many other villages run short of water after they logged all their trees. To prevent the threat to their trees, the Yushichang people had done a courageous thing in the 1980’s by blocking a road construction team into the village. Now this is perhaps the only village in Yunnan not connected by a paved road, and the nearest village is two hours’ hiking away.

Of course, the villagers do desire to live a more comfortable modern life, with better facilities and increased annual income, and that’s why they support us to organize this kind of eco-tourism.

There are two reasons why MKJ would like to recommend this tour to you:

To help you understand the second point, here is a bit more background information: As we all understand, the Chinese economic reform had swept through every corner of country, and these Pumi villages are no exception. Many village youth drop off the school and go to the cities to work as a restaurant waiter or waitress. As a result, most of them are totally overwhelmed by the mainstream pop culture, and gave up effort in succeeding, even respecting their own culture. Very few people still care about the festival traditions, the childhood melodies taught by their grandparents, and many intangible cultural heritage of the Pumi people were threatened or lost.

What Tufeng Project has achieved is to convince these villagers that their own cultural heritage is very respected by the city people, so many village girls and boys came back to the village to learn their own songs with the village elderly in the past few years. But now Tufeng is facing another big challenge, as the villagers are thirsty of some more practical financial support, so that the returned village youth could have found a “job” in the village, by utilizing what they have learned in the past.

Tufeng was successful in holding quite a few music concerts in universities, theaters, and even TV live show programs, but the total fund raised was hardly enough to cover the high expenses of transportation and accommodation for the village youth to travel to Beijing or other big cities. So an outsourced eco & ethno tourism is perhaps a much more efficient and effective way to create more “job opportunities” in the village, and in turn to support the sustainable growth of the preservation efforts of the project.