Marriage has suddenly become very popular in Hemu, one of the world’s most remote villages. In the past two years, the village, located in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in northwestern China, has registered a spike of unions between outsiders and native Tuwa people. The attraction is, apparently, physical: not physical as in beauty, but physical as in geography. Hemu is set to become a hot tourist destination following its inclusion in Kanas National Park – designated last July – and canny operators are rushing to secure property rights in the picturesque village by whatever means necessary.

‘As soon as they heard the area would open for tourism, outside developers moved in and found local girlfriends or boyfriends, or married locals, in order to gain legitimacy to live and do business in Hemu,’ says Hongjiang Chen, the director of Altay Tourism Administration. ‘Fifty-seven families of outsiders moved in during the past year and a half, building tourist lodgings amounting to 1,103 new beds.’

Protected zones
Home to just 700 native Tuwa, the village is set beside the fast-flowing Hemu River in a cusp among mountains stitched with birch and pine trees. The vistas are quaint and pastoral, and Tuwa homes are charmingly constructed of unpeeled logs, with the seams between logs sealed with mud and moss, and pitched roofs made of uneven, roughly sawn planks. Hemu is the sort of place where you can sit contentedly and soak up the atmosphere: herders on horseback amble along the dusty streets, cows tear out grass at the road verges and kites wheel in the blue sky above.

Equally alluring is the larger setting, where the Altay mountain range peters out, having marched down from Russia, through Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These rugged peaks are eclectic in their scenery and culture: cloaked in taiga forests dominated by birch and fir, and grasslands peppered with flowers; dissected by fast-flowing rivers with translucent greenish water; and hosting a suite of distinctly Eurasian birds, including tits, thrushes and warblers, and nomadic Mongol and Kazakh herders encamped in yurts. Now, all of this is enshrined in the newly designated Kanas National Park, at 10,030 square kilometres – an area larger than Cyprus – the world’s largest.
 
The park is divided into three zones. People are totally barred from the 1,700-square-kilometre ‘core zone’, and only limited human activity, such as research or exploratory tourism, is allowed within the 7,830-square-kilometre ‘experimental zone’. General tourism is permitted in the area that’s already disturbed, the 500-square-kilometre ‘buffer zone’ where the Tuwa live, the herders are densest and tourism had already made inroads before the park was designated. 

‘By limiting tourism to the buffer zone, we will reduce or eliminate the pressure on the core wilderness,’ explains Hongjiang, the Kazakh-Chinese tourism director who’s responsible for overseeing the management plan. ‘Moreover, according to our carrying-capacity study, the buffer zone can support a million tourists annually without cumulative environmental degradation. In 2007, we had 657,000 tourists, so there is still room for expansion.’

Shepherding tourists
Capping visitors at one million is an ambitious goal, and it would seem to be a challenge to achieve it without resorting to elitist policies. But Chinese tourism is actually relatively easy to contain. Chinese employees don’t have a flexible allocation of annual leave, only fixed public holidays, the longest of which are the cluster of days off at New Year and May’s Labour Week. This limits travel to a few days at a time, which, in turn, forces holidaymakers to join speedy organised tours. Hence, they are conducive to shepherding, a situation being exploited by Kanas’s management plan.

When the region was first opened for tourism in 1998, hotels sprouted up near the shore of Kanas Lake, which emerged as the focal attraction. Then, three years ago, the government spent £500million to relocate the hotels (which have 7,000 beds) 30 kilometres south to a place called Jiadengyu, where the environmental impact could be contained, away from the pristine lake.

Now, tourists can only drive as far as Jiadengyu – where sewage is treated and rubbish is separated. Going further means travelling along the park’s single road in one of 130 minibuses, which run on biofuel. The road winds to Kanas Lake, which boasts the largest Tuwa village (imaginatively named ‘Tuwa’), and the Fish Viewing Pavilion – a platform perched on a 2,200-metre-high peak above the lake – and then on to Hai Baba, another Tuwa village.

Most Chinese are content with this arrangement, hopping from one viewpoint to the next. Indeed, few ever leave the road; I only met a handful of other walkers along the five-kilometre boardwalk that skirts the lake’s shore and didn’t encounter any as I climbed the 3,000-plus slate steps up to the pavilion.

For trekkers, this is a boon, as it’s possible to find empty landscapes just a few kilometres off the road. The downside is the pressure to build more roads so that bus-bound tourists can see more of the park’s landscapes. Already, a new road to replace the 35-kilometre horse path between Hemu and the lake is being mooted.

That route is currently being used by adventurous tourists, who make the run on horseback or foot. It winds up the mountains from the lake, first through monumental pine forests, then across windswept grasslands and finally up into the high mountain peaks. The highlight is Black Lake, an expanse of opaque bluish water that nestles at the bottom of a wide valley, surrounded by slopes smothered with golden flowers and, higher up, a girdle of darkish summits patched with ribbons of snow.

Herd instinct
It is, however, still possible to lodge in Tuwa homes in the villages of Tuwa, Hemu or Hai Baba, which allows visitors to stay closer to some of the best landscapes. It’s what I did, and one afternoon, I took a five-kilometre walk from my base in Tuwa village west to a grassland called Dongxi Nieke, where jin lian flowers fragranced the air and turned the ground bright orange.

At the edge of the grassland sit a cluster of Tuwa log farmhouses, partially abandoned as a result of the park administration’s policy of moving Tuwa currently scattered in the mountains to the central Tuwa village. Once again, the point of relocation is the containment of the environmental impact. 

‘We are already seeing some positive results from the management we have carried out in the past five years,’ Hongjiang says. ‘Swans have now returned to Kanas Lake, and other rare animals have also returned to the buffer zone, including brown bears, snow leopards, snow owls, red deer, and pheasants. Overall, however, key species are still decreasing due to general habitat degradation.’

Environmental degradation is largely driven by the herders: Tuwa as well as nomadic Kazakhs and Mongols who move their herds to pastures inside Kanas during the summer. These pastoralists and their yurt encampments make an exotic sight, and it’s easy to fall into romanticisms about their harmonious way of life. But look closer and you see that the grasslands where their animals graze have been reduced to tufted lawns and muddy puddles, while untouched grasslands have hip-high grasses teeming with flowers, insects and birds. The herders also cut trees for firewood and leave behind heaps of rubbish.

‘Five years ago, there were 5,000 herders and 300,000 animals in the park,’ Hongjiang explains. ‘Now we are developing pastures near the herders’ winter settlements, which are outside the park. We are doing this by siphoning water to nurture grasslands amounting to 150,000 square kilometres. As a result, the herders in Kanas have been decreasing by three to five per cent yearly over the past five years. As the herders move out, we reconstruct the grasslands and forests they vacate – every year, we treat 8,000–10,000 square metres of grasslands, and plant up to 50,000 trees.’

Under this rolling plan, only native Tuwa inhabitants would be left in the park, and they’ll give up herding for tourism. They are permitted to build extensions to their homes to take in lodgers, to open restaurants and shops, and to take tourists horse-riding. ‘Already,’ Hongjiang says, ‘we employ 150 Tuwa as drivers, cleaners, guards and so on. Another 150 are now licensed to take tourists horse-riding, and 57 households are licensed to take in overnight lodgers. Inhabitants who are unemployable, such as the old, receive a pension.’

Other special arrangements are planned for Hemu, as the situation there is different – it has its own access road and is still largely off the circuit of most tour operators. ‘Soon we will start working on the local plan for Hemu,’ says Zhang Yongshu, an official who works in Hemu. ‘Roads will be paved and overhead wiring will be removed and run underground. We want the exteriors of all buildings here to look rustically traditional, but then the interiors can be comfortable modern hotel rooms. The key is to retain the traditional ambience here, and in the future, cars won’t be allowed to drive into the village – visitors would have to park outside, and then walk in.’

Both Hongjiang and Zhang bemoan the unscrupulous outsiders who have formed familial arrangements with the Tuwa in order to do business in Hemu. ‘Before the new developments,’ Hongjiang says, ‘houses were spaced out at 30–50 metres for openness and as a precaution against fire. Now, the former ambience and openness of the village has been ruined, but not for long: local people will not be touched, but new structures built by the outsiders will be knocked down.’

The plan is to allow the hotels that the outsiders have built to be redeveloped two kilometres outside the village in an arrangement that’s similar to what has been done in Jiadengyu. Although this legitimises the foothold that the outsiders have gained, it’s far from ideal for tourists, who would naturally prefer to lodge in the atmosphere of authenticity that the village offers rather than guesthouses run by non-Tuwa. In that sense, the outsiders might be counting their riches prematurely, and Hema might soon see an equally large spike in separations.

The Tuwa
The Tuwa are one of the world’s smallest ethnic minorities, numbering just 1,500 individuals. Although there is some debate about their origins, the dominant theory is that their ancestors migrated south to the southern fringes of Siberia about 500 years ago (perhaps from today’s Tuva republic in Russia).

They’re nominally Muslims, and their faith is expressed outwardly only in simple décor such as prints of Mecca found in private homes (there are no mosques, no Muslim celebrations – the only temple in Kanas is a Buddhist temple in the Mongol style). Their most distinctive ethnic trait is a unique language that is related to Kazakh.

Tourism is bringing about rapid social change. ‘Before this  place opened for tourism in 1998, these people were completely isolated,’ says Zhang Yongshu, a government official in Hemu. ‘No-one had a television in 1998, now virtually everyone has one. So these people are developing and learning quickly.’

One result is that the Tuwa language is withering. Since the language never developed a written form, it isn’t taught at school. ‘We only speak Tuwa at home,’ says Yang Xue Yi, owner of a guesthouse in Hemu. ‘And, increasingly, the children speak a mixture of Mandarin and Tuwa.’

One thing that hasn’t changed is the diet – heavy in meat and cheese, it may account for their characteristic chubbiness – and the penchant for guzzling the potent vernacular whisky distilled from sheep’s milk. 


China co-ordinates
When to go
The best time to visit China’s northwest is in August or September, when the weather is at its mildest. Its contintental location mean that summers are hot and dry, with temperatures averaging 25°C in July; winters are long and bitterly cold, with January averaging around –10°C.

Further information
Victor Paul Borg is an associate in a new niche travel agency that specialises in authentic nature and culture travel in western China, including Altay Prefecture, where Kanas is situated. For more information, visit
www.peppermountains.com.


May 2009