For years, I have immersed myself in my heterotopia, in writing about heterotopia, where I have experienced my share of melancholy, joy, doubt and growth. I most deeply regret that I could not write faster. Li Zanxu (b. 1933), a renowned and respected scholar who dedicated his life to the cultural and historical study of the Bai minzu, passed away in early 2017. For each of the past...

It was the summer of 2014, Shangri-La County, Southwest China. The narrow cobblestone alleyways in a quarter of the town of Dokar Dzong lined with shops, bars and guesthouses guided me to a scene that was both expected and unexpected. I tried to look unflinchingly at the aftermath of the blaze that had broken out half a year...

Part I

Who are the Bai people? Can they trace their ancestry to those who founded the Nanzhao Kingdom in the seventh century? The first question was probably the most important that the Nationality Classification Project of the 1950s needed to address. The arguments surrounding the second question underline the goal of Chinese scholars to justify the Bai as a legitimate national group, or more precisely,...

The artful crafting of the Bai identity takes the route of what I term an “active regression,” reaching to a past whose relics are believed to be alive in the fabric of folk literature. Since the New Cultural Movement in the early twentieth century, Chinese scholars have been fascinated with the mythical elements in the texts at the genesis of Chinese literature, and also with the oral...

My approach of examining the various adaptations of Baijie as they pertain to China’s minority discourse speaks to an imagined past that has been attributed to the Bai minzu. The adapters of the Baijie story navigate through the dominant modes of articulation that prioritize ethnic amalgamation and harmony, opening up new paradigms of writing to express their own conceptualization of...

Part II

To many, the Mosuo are abstract, constructed and formulated through texts. The legacy of Joseph F. Rock is a key to making sense of the texts about the Mosuo, when each text does not function in a closed system. I would like to argue that Rock is now favorably remembered because of a selective memory of his record describing the cultural terrain of Yongning. There seems to be collective...

Bai Hua’s novel The Remote Country of Women is a creative rewriting of the expression of the masculinist center’s possession of the feminine margin. The novel describes two parallel spaces: one replete with drab and hypocritical slogans and the political platitudes particular to the Cultural...

Yang Erche Namu has created a phenomenon that has been named after her (H. Zhou 249). The writing career of this minority woman has developed into a fantastic yet controversial spectacle. Namu’s books are bursting with the pride of being a Mosuo woman. In a sense, it is as if Sunamei in Bai Hua’s novel that we discussed in the last chapter was incarnated in Namu. Or we can imagine...

Part III

On December 17, 2001, the State Council of China sanctioned the county of Zhongdian in the Diqing 迪庆 Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture to assume the mythical name Xianggelila 香格里拉 (the Chinese transliteration of Shangri-La). To this day, the local people still have a...

As the representatives of diversity in China, minority people also engage in the production and reproduction of difference, which is mostly imagined along the lines of their cultural tradition. In this context, the artistic potential of Shambhala in literature invites the creation of an “other space” or “heterotopia” within our modern world. Shambhala as a mirroring...

As we have seen, the journey in search of Shambhala/Shangri-La has basis and echoes in both the physical and textual worlds. The ten volumes of Zangdi mima came out between 2008 and 2011 with the English name The Tibet Code printed on their covers. This is a novel...

In this book, we have examined a series of stories that take place along the Ancient Tea Horse Road, which constitutes a discourse of forming and performing the mythical elements in minority culture. These narratives are told by others as well as minority selves, who have discovered, appreciated, and remade the mythical basis...

Ai Wu,

Yuqing Yang teaches at the Minzu University of China. She received both an MA in Asian studies and a PhD in East Asian languages and literatures from the University of Oregon. Her main research interest lies in the aesthetic, ecological and cultural dimensions of ethnic-minority-themed Chinese literary and visual texts.