The mountain culture of Meishan

The name first appears in Chinese records as a place the records could not reach. Meishan was the high country between today's Xinhua and Anhua counties, and the Song History's chapter on it opens with a flat sentence: the Meishan cave people, it says, previously had no communication with China. Geography enforced the isolation — ridges of the Xuefeng range, country that is 82 per cent mountain in Anhua, peak after peak above a thousand metres — and so did the people themselves, the 'cave folk' of the chronicles, usually read today as Yao, among the descendants of the old populations that filled Hunan's forests before Han farmers arrived. Contact, when it came, was written in blood: in 977 a Song army under Zhai Shousu is recorded as capturing or killing twenty thousand Meishan people. A century later the state tried administration instead, and in 1072 the hills were opened and two counties chartered out of the same campaign — Xinhua, 'newly transformed', and Anhua, 'pacified and transformed by virtue'. The mountain culture took the district's old name for itself, and has kept it long after the name left the map.

What survived the opening is, at root, a hunter's kit blessed by gods. Meishan culture shows, its chroniclers say, in food, sport, ritual and belief, and its most distinctive figure is Zhang Wulang, the ancestral deity of hunters, remembered as one of the Seven Sages of Meishan — a band of spirit-generals that folk religion attached to the god Erlang and that Ming novels such as Journey to the West carried into national literature. Hunting is the culture's spine, and the living parallel lies in the same mountains' Tujia households, among whom nearly every family kept a hunting gun into the mid-twentieth century and boys learned the mountain on the trail beside their fathers. The knowledge that rode with the hunt was herbal and practical — which bark stops bleeding, which grass heals stock — and it issued in arts still listed as county treasures: Meishan martial arts, and the Meishan mountain songs that Xinhua counts among its unique goods. The old religion survives in village practice, from the Maoshan teachings and the shigong ritual masters to funeral daochang and the 'washing of the third morning' after a birth. Its pantheon reaches far back: the war god Chiyou's legend is set on Xinhua's own Daxiong Mountain.

The culture now performs itself for visitors and sends its people out to run the country's copying machines. Xinhua County — 1.2 million people on the middle Zi River — has built a tourist circuit around the Meishan name: the Meishan Dragon Palace, a show cave billed as a first-class wonder; the Ziquejie terraces climbing the valley walls; the home of the soldier Luo Shengjiao; and the martial arts and mountain songs staged alongside them. The base economy is still farming — rice in the valleys, tea and tobacco as the cash crops — with coal, ceramics and machinery in the industrial towns, and three-quarters of the county's people, by the local account, descended from Jiangxi settlers of the great waves that filled Hunan, a heritage still audible in the local speech. The strangest export is entrepreneurial: by one widely cited study, people from Xinhua run 85 per cent of China's print-and-copy shops, a network of nearly 200,000 workers grown from typewriter repair crews in the 1960s, so a Xinhua accent behind a copy counter is a familiar encounter clear across the country. Heritage programmes keep the songs and the martial arts on stages and in schoolyards; what they have changed is the audience, from villagers who needed the rites to county festivals that sell tickets to them.