When a Billion Chinese Jump Read Online Free PDF Page A

plants could survive, while most animals in Europe were wiped out. 24 Its remoteness kept it from the worst ravages of human development during the past two centuries. For novelists and filmmakers it became “The Land That Time Forgot.” For conservationists and ethnologists it was, and still is, an ecological treasure house for species wiped out elsewhere.
    The range of natural and human life in Yunnan is greater than anywhere else in China. The province covers 4 percent of the nation’s land area, but it is home to more half of the country’s vertebrates, higher plant species, and orchids as well as 72 percent of the country’s endangered animals, many of which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. 25 Almost a third of the 42 million population are from ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, Naxi, Bai, and Miao. Ethnic and biological diversity were vital elements in any Shangri-La worthy of the name.
    As the car carrying my assistant and me wound through the mistymountain road from Lijiang to Shangri-La, I saw why this area might be considered paradise on earth. Looking up, I could see the misty slopes of holy mountains that soar over 6,700 meters. Down below, I saw perilously deep ravines including the churning waters at Tiger Leaping Gorge. This was the gateway to the Three Parallel Rivers National Park, where three of Asia’s great waterways—the Yangtze, Lancang (better known outside China as the Mekong), and the Nu (Salween)—run within fifty miles of each other. As they descend through mountains and foothills, these rivers had carved out spectacular canyons teeming with life. More than three-quarters of the area was carpeted with dense forest. Occasionally the wood gave way to precariously cultivated terraces, grassy plains, crystal streams or vast lakes. It was a spectacular land, sparsely peopled by farmers and monks.
    I didn’t need to be a botanist to see why conservationists get hot flashes about this place. A single gorge can be home to more varieties of life than are found in entire countries. The steep slopes that rise up from the Gangqu River are particularly abundant, ranging through six climatic zones from the subtropical in the moist, warm valley to the alpine in the cool and craggy peaks.
    It is a living museum of biological history, a glorious reminder of what nature was capable of. Rhododendrons—ornamental garden shrubs else-where—grow here into gnarled Tolkienesque trees. Twelve percent of the animals, reptiles, and fish in Shangri-La are found nowhere else in the world. Thirty mammal species are “protected,” including the musk deer, the Chinese screw mole, the black-necked crane, and the Yunnan Golden Monkey—until recently presumed extinct. Today, there are thought to be about 1,500 in the wild, roaming in a narrow strip of land between the Mekong and the Yangtze, mostly in Shangri-La. To satisfy tourists’ hunger for novelty, locals reportedly drive these endangered animals from their mountain forest homes to the valley resorts below almost every day. So much for “protection.”
    The value of biodiversity is yet to be fully understood. There are at least 7,000 known plant species in this region, and many more as yet unidentified. Yunnan’s forests have proved to be a medicinal gold mine. The Himalayan yew is important in the production of artemisinin, the drug identified by the World Health Organization as the best treatment for cerebral malaria, though Tibetans have known for centuries of the plant’s healingpower. Such “discoveries” were bad news for the forest. Two Himalayan yews had to be felled for each patient given a course of Taxol, one of the most effective treatments for breast and ovarian cancer. Villagers tried to stop the unsustainable plunder of their forest, but they were powerless against local businessmen and officials who worked on behalf of suppliers to the big pharmaceutical companies.
    By the time we reached the Shangri-La tollbooth, dusk was