Word: yunnan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...image of her worn body leaning against the steep green drop of the deepest gorge in China's Yunnan province has since remained to haunt me as I prepare to travel to the small town of Degen, less than 50 kilometers from the official Tibetan border...
...citizens on my route through the northern Yunnan region--mountainous, isolated, populated predominantly by Tibetans and other non-Chinese ethnic minorities clinging determinedly to their traditions on their red-brown earth--have been relatively late in embracing tourism. Stretches of the area are closed to foreign travelers. Zhongdian, the town which I am currently exploring, still has a rough-hewn, construction-made frontier feel, and Degen was opened up to foreigners less than a year ago. Through the long days of riding rickety minibuses whose doors are kept shut with screwdrivers, my excitement would rise with the knowledge that...
...rest of China is changing. Domestic tourism is booming as the increasingly prosperous Chinese overflow into Yunnan's parks, ethnic music halls and village markets, gorging themselves on their newly acquired freedom to travel. Tourism, it seems, is one way the wealth of the coastal cities is being transferred to the rural interior, and I hope to help do the same by bringing in foreign currency as I help international travelers enjoy northern Yunnan...
...even as Wonderful Life was being published, the discovery of new Cambrian-era fossil beds in Sirius Passet, Greenland, and Yunnan, China, was stripping some of the weirdness from the wonders. Hallucigenia's impossibly pointed legs, for example, were unmasked as the upside-down spines of a prehistoric velvet worm. In similar fashion, Wiwaxia, some scientists think, is probably allied with living bristle worms. And the anomalocaridids - whose variety is rapidly expanding with further research - appear to be cousins, if not sisters, of the amazingly diverse arthropods...