weishan Archives - Holachina.com

Weishan 巍山

Weishan Home of the Yi Minority
Yi Minority Man near Weishan — Yi Minority Man near Weishan

Weishan; home of the Yi Minority in China’s Yunnan province, on a mid-summer’s afternoon is a sleepy place where nothing much happens.

Card Playing Yi Weishan

This is small town China

This is small town China, where pipe smoking, card playing men squat on small bamboo stools that spill out onto the pavement and street, and while away their days in the teahouses.

Drying Noddles in Weishan

Women sit by the roadside, grilling vegetables, or tend to their small shops. Long strings of drying noodles sway in the gentle breeze and baskets of freshly picked boletus, neatly arranged in wicker baskets, wait for buyers.

Drying Noodles Weishan

Local transport is equally divided between the motorized and the equine, with trishaws and horse carts vying for right of way in the narrow streets. The peace is only broken by the antics of the local madman who runs up and down the street, naked apart from something resembling a Polynesian skirt, and provides the principal entertainment of the day.

An Eventful Trip: Landslides, mudslides, traffic accidents, then more landslides, rock falls and even more traffic accidents. Every journey we made this summer in Yunnan seemed to involve at least one of those mishaps and sometimes several of them.

From landslides to floods, earthquakes to collapsing bridges

Watching the news in China during the rainy and typhoon season can be like watching a disaster movie that never ends. From landslides to floods, earthquakes to collapsing bridges, the whole country seems immersed in an ongoing state of calamities that sometimes verge on biblical proportions. Yet, until this year, we had always been lucky. We were either somewhere completely different, we had already been and gone, or we were about to go, but we were never actually there, on the spot. We were quite used to watching all those disasters from the comfort of our hotel room. Yet, this year it was all different.

The worst incident was the massive mudslide in Puladi near Gongshan along the Nujiang River, where a whole village was wiped off the face of the earth. Many people were killed and lots of homes were buried. We were trapped for 3 days in the nearby village of Bingzhongluo before the PLA could open the road and get us out.