A remote mountain monastery reveals the earthly yearnings behind our quest for utopias such as Shangri-La
is a 24,000-mile storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears. He sends this dispatch from Sichuan Province, in China.In simplest terms, Muli is a latitude and longitude: an obscure waypoint on the Silk Roads that once unspooled, like chalky strings, across the river chasms and wind-stripped passes of Sichuan, in far southwestern China. Muli is also a 16th-century monastic center.
Four days out, we climb Wachang Pass, elevation 13,100 feet. A village guide with the legs of an Olympian points to tiny structures on a dun scarp one vertical mile below.Photograph by Sonam GelekBut it hardly matters. On the degeneracy of the modern world: “It is after all a wonderful life, a free life out in the open among the mountains, fields and flowers and singing birds. How much more of the real life than that which people of New York live in their tenements, even the rich I do not envy them in their artificial existence . . . I dread the idea of returning to the so-called civilized world.”
On rival scholars: A British botanist in Yunnan was so lazy, “he even had a man to walk his dog for him.”