Dukezong Ancient Town, or Jiantang Ancient Town, is the best preserved ancient town in Tibetan areas in Yunnan.
Dukezong means blue moonlight. It is situated at Jiantang Town, Shangri-la County, Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan. With an altitude of 3,300 meters, it is a wide land surrounded by mountains. There is a mountain in this area. As its shape looks like a tortoise, people call it Dagui Mountain (Huge Tortoise Mountain). Since long time ago, it has worked as an important town on Ancient Tea Horse Road as well as the must-go place for the present Yunnan—Tibet Road.
The temperature difference between days and nights is obvious in Diqing. A chain of mountain is erecting on the south of the town, turning cold wind back. This is why Dukezong Ancient is pleasantly warm in winter, while most areas of Diqing are cold. Three rivers are flowing on the north, nourishing people on the land. On the highland of the north, it is the well-known Ganden Sumtseling Monastery, the biggest Tibetan monastery of Buddhist in Yunnan.
According to the historical record, Dukezong was a castle built by Tibetan regime in Tang Dynasty (618A.D.－907A.D.). A headman whose family name was Mu constructed Yueguang Village (Moonlight Village) during the Ming Dynasty under the rule of Emperor Hongzhi (1488 A.D.－1505 A.D.). It has been repaired for many times later and becomes the best preserved ancient town in the Tibetan areas in Yunnan.
It is a rare opportunity to find old houses here, since most of them were constructed or restored based on the former buildings. Wide and bright, Tibetan Tuzhang Houses are the typical buildings here.
Twenty ethnic groups inhabit here, such as Tibetan, Naxi, Lisu, Pumi and Bai. Each ethnic group has their own belief and culture, the town is a museum in which multiple ethnic groups are living. If one wants to know about the details or magnificent factors of their lives, he/she should meet real opportunities, for example, house building, wedding, children’s entrance of universities. A banquet is a necessity in all colorful activities. Take house building as an example, some families entertain at a banquet for as long as three days.
There is a well at the bottom of Dagui Mountain. With a history of more than a thousand years, people here cherish it exceptionally and compare the water in the well to breast milk.
In a common Tibetan family, woman of the house is making buttered tea. The master of the family prefers cooking teas with the well water in the ancient town. According to the woman, women used to carry water on their backs. Tying wooden buckets tight on their backs with leather belts, they came along for fetching water. A water ladle made from birch bark was placed on the water, preventing it from flashing over the bucket. Today, one can hardly see the scenes, because the tap water is provided in every family. The woman introduced that people fetch water in the well every eve of Spring Festival to carry the predestined auspicious relationship home.
People killed pigs to celebrate the Spring Festival in the man’s hometown and hung the bacon on the beam beside a fire pond of a house.
The woman cooks traditional Tibetan breakfast, mainly buttered tea and zanba, roasted qingke barley flour. They have Tibetan steamed stuffed buns, roast bacons for lunch. The dinner is grand, yak, dried vegetables, tofu, wild mushrooms and homebrewed barley wine.
Each morning, the man burns pine branches and some grains, paying lucks to the whole family.
What the man likes most are stories about the horse caravans. Dukezong used to be an important town on Ancient Tea Horse Road. During the years when tea and horses were main trading goods, horse keepers were all Tibetans. The best horse keepers were from two places principally: Mangkang County in Tibet and Shangri-la in Yunnan. As a place crowded with traders, Dukezong Ancient Town was gathered with horse caravans. Characters can be seen on the center pillar and beam of a house with a history of more than a hundred years. According to researchers of Tibetology, these characters were carved records of quality of goods left by horse caravans in the earlier years.
Leather bags for wine and Zanba which were predecessors’ necessities after leaving homes are found in the man’s store room, and even the furs on their surfaces have been rubbed. Having not been used for many years, they feel stiff today. The man said that when a house driver left homes, he handed his life over to the mountains, praying the god’s blessing for a journey throughout, because those roads were extraordinarily risky, many of them failed to return soundly.
In the history, the horse caravan has been working as a main transportation method connecting Shangri-la and the outside world. In this way, horse caravans could be found in every village.
As shown in the written records, the business in Diqing was blooming during Qing Dynasty under the rule of Qianlong Emperor (1735A.D. to 1795 A.D.) when the cargos traded annually were more than 60,000 kg. One horse driver was able to earn two taels of silver, if he returned home safe and sound. The horse caravan has become one of the largest twenty horse caravans in Yunnan from the late Qing Dynasty to the beginning of the Republic of China (1912 to 1949) when cargos carried by pack-horses reached nearly eight thousand loads.
There are ten far destinations for horse drivers in Shangri-la, Pu’er , Gongshan and Kunming in Yunnan province, Batang in Sichuan province, Qamdo and Lhasa in Tibet, India and New Delhi etc. They brought tea, silver coins, hams and brown sugar to Tibet and India. Then they brought khaki cloth, cigarettes, pigment and salt home to Lijiang, Dali and Kunming. They also traded mountain products, herbs and mineral products.
The man said that the roads today used to be primeval forests, and one was easy to get strayed. The present flights and vehicles have made the travelling easy. Only those who live deeply in the mountain have to carry gains and daily uses by horse today.
(Editors:Lynn, Minnie Mao)
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