Word: yunnan
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...Welcome home." It was a magic moment and the culmination of an emotion-charged journey for my wife, Sawitree. She is the first of her large northern Thai family to travel back to the land of her ancestors, the Dai people, who inhabit the southern tip of China's Yunnan province. The region is now known as Xishuangbanna, a Sinicization of the Dai name, which means "12,000 fields...
...teak palace was torn down by rabid Red Guards. The Dai were a feisty people, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and it was felt they did not need a monarch around to stir up ethnic pride or notions of independence. (These days, the septuagenarian King works at the Yunnan Research Institute for Nationalities, and the Chinese government prizes the bright costumes and quaint villages of the Dai as a lucrative tourism draw...
...communists swept to power in 1949, more than 12,000 troops from the 3rd and 5th armies of the kmt fought their way out of Yunnan province while their compatriots hot-footed it to Taiwan. The dedicated troops set up a makeshift camp deep in the jungles of northern Burma, and for the next 12 years waged a vicious, opium-funded guerrilla war against the armies of both communist China and Burma. They were gradually pushed south until, battle weary and demoralized, they sought sanctuary in neighboring Thailand. About 4,000 men, under General Tuan Shi-wen, settled in what...
...uncle Lue seems to have found his second calling. Sipping tea on the sun-drenched balcony of his villa, I ask him about the cherry blossoms. I mean, they're lovely, but aren't they kind of, well, Japanese? "No," he replies. "These are special Chinese sakura trees from Yunnan. I planted some of them myself...
...least four glossy photo books are devoted to Yading's claim to Shangri-la, but several authors insist it can be found in Yunnan's Deqin prefecture. To get there fly to Zhongdian, some 170 km away. Nobody would mistake this northern town, with its neocommunist concrete structures and rows of karaoke bars, for a terrestrial paradise, but nearby is the stunning Songzanlin Monastery, which could as easily have sprung from Hilton's imagination as that of a Tibetan architect. And Deqin?especially the majestic, glacier-draped Mount Kagbo, Yunnan's highest peak at 6,740 m?lives...