Word: mountainous
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Maybe it won't go down as the defining moment in Chinese music history, but the two-day Snow Mountain Music Festival, which got rolling Aug. 17 on a picturesque mountainside in southwestern China, may have set the record for the highest-altitude outdoor rock concert. The thin air at 12,000 ft. had Beijing rocker boys taking oxygen hits onstage between songs. There may have been 100 times the crowd at Max Yasgur's farm in 1969, but China's Woodstock can boast at least one thing in common with its American counterpart: the mud. It had been raining...
...last summer at the seaside town of Beidaihe was canceled, to the surprise of few. Beidaihe is where top Communist Party leaders hold their annual summer retreat, and that first abortive Woodstock was scheduled to begin just after those meetings concluded. Timing wasn't ideal for the Snow Mountain festival either. The 16th Party Congress, at which the communists are expected to name a new team of leaders, is set to take place this fall, and the run-up is a peak period of political sensitivity across China...
...comes out on Day Two, and the festival's eponymous mountain finally puts in a brief appearance: the snow-capped peak looms high above the natural amphitheater to stage left. The audience swells to more than twice the size of the first day's; ticket prices are slashed, and whole families from the environs of Lijiang turn up. Miao minority women in ornate, outsize headgear wander the periphery and look on curiously; sanitation workers move through the crowd picking up garbage with chopsticks. I catch only one whiff of dope smoke?surprising, considering that cannabis grows wild all over Yunnan...
...locals are happy about the festival. Xuan Ke, venerable patriarch of the Naxi Ancient Music Orchestra, gripes, "Some Peking University students went to the mountain and five students lost their lives because they coughed. Here, there will not only be coughing but shouting and drumming. Then our very calm mountain will be changed, destroyed by this loud music." In the end, though, the mountain tolerates our intrusion. The music is good and loud, and the festival, for all its compromised counterculturalism, is a success in the eyes of the fans. They rock the night away, no one dies...
...back out again. The top of the wall makes for a comfortable, even exhilarating walk, about half an hour in either direction. The path, which was rebuilt in the 1980s, is wide and solid, and the view is expansive: the shimmering lake to the north, and Purple Mountain to the east, where Emperor Zhu's tomb still stands...