This weekend I went on one of the most challenging excursions of my life – hiking through Wuyuan, China’s mountainous rural landscape. Me and two other classmates hiked 50 miles over the course of 2 days in one of China’s most beautiful areas, got lost over 100 times, and even accidentally ended up climbing a mountain into a different province than what Wuyuan was in. It was an amazing, yet tiring, experience, and taught me a lot – not only about how far I could push myself, but also about Chinese rural life.
On the first day, we took the super cool bullet train from Shanghai to Wuyuan station (I have decided the bullet train is one of my favorite things about China). Wuyuan is a county in Jiangxi province that composes of a central, small, city (roughly the size of a metropolitan suburb in the US) surrounded by a vast, rural, mountainous area dotted with tiny ancient villages and loosely connected by small roads and stone pebble pathways. Our luck started off great! On the train we met a lady who was willing to give us a free ride to the Wuyuan tourist distribution center and help us find a safe and reliable driver to take us out into the wild. We got into a van with a nice man, who had agreed to take us to Da Zhan Shan for only 60 RMB, or 8 USD (however, along the way we also picked up and dropped off his friend at worked and went to get his mail at the post station). About an hour out from Wuyuan city, he dropped us off at the foot of Da Zhan Mountain’s Wolong Valley, which is a nicely preserved and set up hike up to a beautiful large waterfall. It had just rained in the area so the mist and freshness gave the valley a mystical atmosphere. The hike was gorgeous and after 4 hours or so we came down to a small village in the middle of another valley, in which we stayed in a farmer’s guest house and ate a wonderful meal cooked from fresh vegetables.
Coming into this trip, we had no map. Wuyuan is an ancient area, and all of the villages are connected by ancient old limestone pathways that weave up and down the mountains. So, to hike through Wuyuan’s moutains, you followed this old path until you found a village and hoped it was the place you had originally designated on your route. We only had a rudimentary sense of the names of the places we would pass through, but decided to try anyway. So, on the second day, we got up and set out on our route. Little did we know that this encompassed climbing 4 different mountains and getting extremely lost. Throughout the entire trip, we ended up in the wrong villages multiple times, had to ask for directions constantly, and even climbed the wrong mountain on our way to our final destination and ended up way farther north – in a different province to be exact. Ultimately, after 50 miles, we ended up where we were supposed to be to find that we would have to bribe a CCP official and a policeman to take us back to the central city of Wuyuan. It was an experience.
Throughout our trek, I was also doing research. My research was a survey of values (including sexual, political, cultural, etc. norms) as I wanted to analyze the development of values in rural areas. Unknowingly, my survey caused a couple existential crises within these villages. Many villagers refused to take it, some thought I was from the Chinese government come to investigate them, some spent a long time debating with each other the right answers to my questions. Ultimately, it was a hilarious experience and became a really interesting way that I learned about rural Chinese life.
Rural China hosts a simple life. Food is never an issue, every villager seems to have plenty for them and their families to live from. The people are welcoming, warm, and do not seem stress. While the infrastructure in wuyuan is not amazing, and I doubt healthcare and other services are nonexistent, there is a certain romance to Chinese village life in this part of the country. The villagers all know each other, they all sit with each other during the night, basking in the beautiful area around them. There are kids running everywhere, playing happily. Although I hoped to see some of the problems associated with this part of China, they did not show themselves clearly in Wuyuan and if the villagers meant to show off a happy paradise, that is what they did. Rural China was an amazing experience. It was beautiful and serene, yet challenging at the same time.
