• The Emporer's Mighty Brother

    From Garrison Hilliard@21:1/5 to All on Sun Dec 20 16:10:23 2015
    The emperor’s mighty brother

    Demand for an aphrodisiac has brought unprecedented wealth to rural
    Tibet—and trouble in its wake

    Dec 19th 2015 | YUSHU, QINGHAI PROVINCE | From the print edition



    BY THE middle of May, the snowline in Yushu prefecture has retreated
    to the peaks of its steep valleys. Nomads who have spent the winter at
    the bottom of them have begun to herd their yaks and goats to higher
    pastures, where the first shoots of green have replaced the scorching
    white of winter. The landscape is still bleak and forbidding. Wolves
    prowl. Lightning strikes terrorise those caught exposed on the bare
    slopes.

    Yushu is a vast area of mountains and alpine pasture, larger than
    Syria but with a population of fewer than 400,000 people (see map
    below). About 95% are Tibetans, who call the area Yulshul. For those
    living in the countryside—more than half of them—this is the busiest
    time of year. Elsewhere, in China’s densely populated interior,
    children get a short break to celebrate Labour Day on May 1st. But in
    Yushu, as in many other rural settlements across the Tibetan plateau
    (a sparsely inhabited region the size of western Europe),
    schoolchildren are given an additional four weeks’ holiday in May and
    June. They have to make up for it with a shorter summer holiday. And
    it is not for the sake of fun.


    Children are at the front line of the armies of Tibetans (almost every able-bodied rural resident in Yushu) who will spend a frenzied month
    scouring the hills for what they call yartsa gunbu. In Chinese its
    name is dongchong xiacao, literally “winter-insect-summer-grass”, for
    that is what it resembles.


    In summer the airborne spores of a fungus known as cordyceps (or ophiocordyceps) sinensis invade the caterpillars of various species of
    ghost moth, a large pale insect that flits over the pastures at dusk.
    After grubs thus infected bury themselves in the soil to hibernate,
    they die; when winter comes they freeze. The warmth of spring
    activates the fungus, which grows to fill the caterpillar’s entire
    body, leaving only the outer skin. A spindly brown shoot of it emerges
    from the caterpillar’s head and pushes its way through the soil into
    daylight: just four or five centimetres—so tiny and often so widely
    separated from others that the keenest of eyes are needed to spot it.

    This is Tibet’s annual gold rush. Yartsa gunbu is so highly valued as
    a medicine that it often sells for more than its weight in the metal.
    It has many purported benefits, ranging from preventing cancer to
    curing back pain. But what makes it so prized is its supposed ability
    to improve sex lives. It is often described as a “Himalayan Viagra”,
    good for treating erectile dysfunction and (in women as well) low
    libido.

    The children’s good eyesight and short stature make them the best
    spotters of the fungus among blades of grass and stalks of
    ground-hugging cinquefoil shrubs that soon, as the weather warms, will
    dot the slopes with bright yellow flowers. It is not a job for those
    unused to the plateau’s thin air. Caterpillar fungus, as yartsa gunbu
    is usually called in English, is generally found at altitudes above
    4,000 metres (13,100 feet). That is higher than Lhasa, the capital of
    the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) which borders on Yushu and occupies
    about half of the plateau.



    Flat out on the plateau


    As your (ill-acclimatised) correspondent found, ascending the steep
    slopes of Yaseeda ridge in Yushu’s Chindu county requires nimble limbs
    as well as the genetic advantage Tibetans enjoy at such elevations,
    where there is 40% less oxygen than at sea level. His agile guides
    were sporting enough to let him rest as his heart pounded in a
    desperate quest for atmospheric sustenance.

    Throughout the month of May each year, hundreds of villagers search
    through the scraggy vegetation looking for the precious fungus. Mayong
    Gasong Qiuding, a local guide, crawls on his hands and knees. At the
    start of the season, he says, he would spot one fungus every 15
    minutes or so. By the end, it would be one every couple of hours.

    Digging them up requires painstaking effort. A small pick is used,
    with great care taken not to break the sprout from the caterpillar’s
    body. There is little demand for separated pieces; yartsa gunbu is
    dried and consumed whole. Aficionados gauge the quality of a
    caterpillar fungus based partly on the relative lengths of body and sprout—impossible if there is no way of being sure whether they were
    once attached.

    Fungus-hunters often camp out on the hills. Mr Mayong says a diet of
    dried yak-meat and instant noodles (a product of China’s spreading
    culinary influence: balls of roast barley flour, known as tsampa, are
    the cultural norm) keeps him going from dawn to dusk. Plastic sheeting
    provides makeshift shelter from rain. Dried yak dung (no shortage of
    that on the slopes) and the withered stalks of cinquefoil provide fuel
    for cooking.

    On top of the world

    Later, at his house in Xiewu township, Mr Mayong points out a man high
    up on a slope above his house—barely a speck, surrounded by other
    specks that are the man’s yaks. “That is probably my brother,” he
    says. Searching for caterpillar fungus may be tough and sometimes
    dangerous. (“If a bear comes, the best thing to do is run,” he
    suggests.) But it is much more lucrative than tending yaks, which
    provide a subsistence living at best. Rural incomes in Tibet are among
    the lowest in China. Herders live hand to mouth, or at least they did
    until the 1990s when the price of yartsa gunbu began to soar. Since
    then an explosion of demand, almost entirely from non-Tibetan parts of
    China, has transformed the economy of large swathes of the Tibetan
    plateau. Daniel Winkler, a fungus expert who runs Mushroaming, a
    Seattle-based travel agency, and who has done extensive research on
    this, says caterpillar fungus has entwined the plateau’s economy with
    that of the rest of China in a way that few other products have—there
    is little else made in Tibetan areas that is in such high demand
    elsewhere.

    It is all the more remarkable for having remained largely a Tibetan
    preserve: despite much effort, no one has yet succeeded in producing commercially viable quantities of good-quality yartsa gunbu in
    artificial conditions. This means colossal dividends for Tibetans. In
    the TAR the retail value of the more than 50 tonnes of yartsa gunbu
    harvested there in 2013 was around 7.5 billion yuan ($1.2 billion),
    equivalent to nearly half its earnings from tourism. Total annual
    production on and around the plateau, most in China but also in Nepal
    and Bhutan, is worth several times more.

    It is omnipresent: at the airport in Xining, the capital of Qinghai
    province, huge advertisements for the stuff fill the arrivals hall.
    The streets of tourist areas of towns and cities across the region are
    lined with shops selling it. A souvenir shop in Yushu sells
    freeze-dried yak meat; the price would seem ridiculous, were it not
    (perhaps) for the large characters on the box: “Fed on caterpillar
    fungus”. Over large areas of the Tibetan plateau, about 40% of rural
    residents’ annual cash incomes have been generated by the fungus in
    recent years. Tibetans’ income from farming (including
    fungus-gathering) has usually risen faster than the farming income of
    rural residents in other parts of China.

    This windfall is the result of the rapid emergence of a middle class
    in other parts of China, and with it a big growth in spending power on
    health products—not least those that claim to help with erections. The
    Chinese often appear not to share Westerners’ embarrassment about such medicaments; a good sex life is seen as evidence of overall health.
    One high-class restaurant in Beijing specialises in animal penises,
    the eating of which is supposed to boost virility. Westerners visit
    for a titter, Chinese businessmen to impress their clients. (Yak
    penis, says the eatery’s website, is a “luxury gift for close
    friends”.) A book of “traditional, health-preserving” recipes on sale
    in one of Beijing’s biggest state-run bookshops includes the following
    remedy for impotence and premature ejaculation: “18 grams of
    caterpillar fungus; one fresh human placenta. Wash the caterpillar
    fungus and the placenta separately. Place in a saucepan, with water.
    Stew at high temperature until the placenta is cooked. (Drink the
    human placenta soup once a week for one or two weeks to see results.)”

    Caterpillar fungus may even have been the salvation of Tibet’s
    pastoral way of life (or what remains of it after the forcible
    settlement of many nomads by the government). In the rest of China,
    less than half the population now works on farms. On the Tibetan
    plateau, which is home to around 6m people, the share raising animals
    or growing crops fell only slightly between 2000 and 2010, from 87% to
    83%. Andreas Gruschke of the University of Leipzig says yartsa gunbu
    has provided some herders with enough extra income to make yak-rearing
    viable. It certainly helped in Yushu after an earthquake in 2010,
    which flattened much of the main town of Gyegu (or Yushu city) and
    killed more than 2,600 people. To aid the area’s battered economy, the government launched an annual “caterpillar-fungus culture festival”—a
    trade fair, in effect, attracting buyers from across the plateau
    (prices are often decided by a coded touch of hands under a cloth, to
    keep rivals in the dark).

    But clouds hang over the industry, and are looking ever more ominous.
    Fakes, sometimes dangerous, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous,
    threatening consumer confidence. Your correspondent bought two
    caterpillar fungi from a Tibetan in Gyegu’s main square for what
    seemed a bargain price of 50 yuan. Later he accidentally dropped them
    on the floor of his hotel room; they snapped, revealing that they were
    made of plaster moulded onto tiny sticks. To boost demand for the
    fungus, some merchants adulterate products made of it with Viagra, or
    Weige (Mighty Brother), as it is more suggestively named in Chinese. Wholesalers—most of them in Qinghai are Hui, a Muslim ethnic
    group—were surprisingly candid in expressing doubt about how much the
    fungus by itself could really help to boost libido.

    Even more troublesome to those in the business is President Xi
    Jinping’s campaign against corruption, which has been unusually fierce
    and protracted. This has curbed the once-common practice of bribing
    officials with expensive gifts, including caterpillar fungus. A glass
    jar containing 80-odd plump specimens neatly tied together still sells
    for 63,380 yuan—nearly $10,000—at a medicine shop in Beijing. But
    prices have fallen by as much as 20% in the past year, even as supply
    has remained level.

    More worrying for the authorities, yartsa gunbu has fuelled unrest on
    a plateau already boiling with discontent over Chinese rule. Gyegu’s
    annual horse festival offers a clue to this. The three-day summer fair
    involves displays of horsemanship, singing and dancing—including, one
    year, by children dressed as caterpillar fungi (pictured, in 2007). It
    attracts thousands of Tibetans, many of whom camp on the surrounding
    grassland by a meandering river. The festival resumed in 2014 for the
    first time since the earthquake. At this year’s event your
    correspondent saw police deployed in large numbers, some equipped with fire-extinguishers. Two fire engines were parked by the main arena.



    Everybody do the caterpillar fungus


    Such precautions are common these days in areas where Tibetans gather,
    lest anyone attempt to set fire to themselves: a desperate form of
    protest against Chinese rule that has claimed at least 123 Tibetan
    lives since 2009. In the now lavishly rebuilt city of Gyegu, a
    27-year-old Tibetan monk apparently tried to kill himself this way in
    the main square in early July, just a few days before the horse
    festival. Police extinguished the flames and hustled him away.
    Tibetans in exile say he died a few days later in hospital.

    Fungus, a bogey man

    Yartsu gunbu has, indirectly, heightened these tensions. It has
    contributed to a surge of visitors to the plateau in recent years,
    most of them members of China’s ethnic-Han majority. Uneasiness over
    this influx, and the fact that businesses catering to tourists are
    also dominated by Hans, were among the causes of an explosion of
    unrest across the plateau in March 2008, including anti-Han rioting in
    Lhasa that left several people dead.

    Caterpillar fungus has also been a direct cause of violence among
    Tibetans, and between Tibetans and caterpillar-poaching Hans. In parts
    of the plateau, the annual rush for fungus is Klondike-like. In a
    report by the Communist Party committee of Nangqian county in Yushu, a
    village official says: “Caterpillar fungus has turned people bad. It
    has made them think only of money and caused them to lose their sense
    of family, friendship and humanity.” Complaints abound about Tibetans frittering away their caterpillar money on gambling and booze (there
    are few opportunities for Tibetans to find decent work in cities,
    where jobs usually go to Hans or Huis).

    Mr Mayong, the guide, insists that in his experience, fellow villagers
    are courteous to each other in their collective scramble. That is not
    how it works between rival villages, however, or when caterpillar
    poachers invade a village’s territory. In 2013 two people were killed
    in another part of Qinghai when villagers shot at rivals. The Dalai
    Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, said fungus-fuelled fighting
    had caused “disgrace to the Tibetan people” and a “crisis” on the
    plateau.

    During this year’s harvest season, security forces in some parts of
    the plateau warned that the task of “stability preservation” was
    “grim”. In Shangri-La, a Tibetan town in Yunnan province (so named in
    2002 in order to attract more tourists), police told residents to give
    up any hidden guns as the season approached. In one county of the TAR, villagers were told they would be banned from harvesting caterpillar
    fungus for a year if they used any outsiders to help—an attempt,
    partly, to curb the kind of violence that has sometimes broken out
    between Tibetans and Han fungus-gatherers.

    The environmental fallout has been considerable, too. For a time
    before the earthquake in Yushu, the horse festival (which includes yak
    races—a perilous sport for the riders) offered a clue to one aspect of
    this. It was in the elaborate traditional costumes that rural Tibetans
    like to wear on special occasions. Enriched by caterpillar fungus,
    some took to augmenting their garb with the skins of leopards and
    tigers smuggled from India through Nepal.

    Local officials in Tibet were of little help in stopping this.
    According to Emily Yeh of the University of Colorado at Boulder, they
    wanted to encourage festivals as way of attracting tourists from the
    rest of China; exotically dressed Tibetans were seen as crowd-pullers.
    Counties in some parts of the Tibetan plateau “competed to show off
    their wealth and development status through the hyperbolic display of
    jewellery and pelts on the bodies of their Tibetan participants [at
    festivals], often so much that participants had trouble walking under
    their weight”, she said in a paper published in 2013. Popular singers
    began sporting pelt trims on their music DVDs. This surprising—and tragic—side-effect of demand for a purported aphrodisiac came to an
    equally unexpected end. In 2006, at a prayer ceremony in India
    attended by thousands of Tibetan pilgrims, the Dalai Lama called on
    Tibetans to cease wearing animal furs. The impact was immediate. From
    across Tibet reports emerged of Tibetans piling up their furs and
    burning them: given the garments’ huge value, an extraordinary display
    of devotion to the Dalai Lama. Anxious Chinese officials tried to ban
    such bonfires and arrested the organisers. In some places they even
    ordered Tibetans to wear their furs at festivals.

    But the Dalai Lama’s injunction held firm. Despite a stepped-up
    campaign by the government to vilify the exiled Tibetan leader since
    the unrest in 2008, Tibetans appear largely to have heeded him.
    India’s tiger population fell from 3,642 in 2002 to a low of 1,411 in
    2006. Since then it has climbed back up to 2,226. Your correspondent
    did not spot any furs looking like those of rare animals at this
    year’s festival in Yushu. In the privacy of Tibetans’ homes, the Dalai
    Lama’s popularity is evident. One yak-herder, in her tent on the
    4,500-metre pastures of Lanweilaha Mountain, gets out her box of
    recently harvested caterpillar fungi. She keeps it under a portrait of
    the Dalai Lama (banned in some parts of the plateau) which has a strip
    of yellow cloth draped over it as a symbol of respect.

    Another worrying environmental impact, which has yet to be stopped, is
    on the grassland itself. Mr Mayong says villagersreplace any turf they
    dig up with their small hand-hoes (as local regulations require them
    to). But some Tibetan villages employ outsiders who are often less
    fastidious. Estimates of the damage this causes vary wildly, from a
    few square kilometres of grassland damaged every year to more than 65
    square kilometres in Qinghai province alone. This compounds problems
    caused by global warming, mining, the spread of rodents and, officials
    insist, overgrazing, though herders and environmentalists accuse the
    government of exaggerating to justify settling nomads in places where
    officials can better control them. Yushu is the source of three of
    Asia’s greatest rivers: the Yellow river, the Yangzi and the Mekong;
    the grasslands play a vital role by regulating the flow of water into
    them.

    Yartsa gunbu is so highly prized as an aphrodisiac that it is worth
    more than its weight in gold

    In the rest of China, such concerns appear to weigh little on the
    minds of yartsa gunbu’s wealthy buyers. State-controlled media do not
    like to dwell on anything that portrays life on the Tibetan plateau in
    a negative light. Environmental activism—particularly related to Tibet
    and other areas inhabited by restless minorities—is kept on a very
    short leash. The authorities worry that eco-campaigning might provide
    cover for separatists.

    Neither is there much questioning of whether yartsa gunbu is all it is
    cracked up to be. The Communist Party is a staunch defender of
    traditional Chinese medicine (often called TCM), despite a lack of
    scientific evidence for some of its claims. At its margins, TCM blends
    into mysticism—a belief in a force, known as qi, that regulates the
    body in ways unrecognised by modern science. But the party sees itself
    as a defender of Chinese nationalism; TCM is seen by many nationalists
    as a vital ingredient of Chineseness.

    It is odd, however, that the fungus has become quite the TCM star that
    it is today. There is no known mention of it in Chinese medicinal
    works before the 17th century—by the standards of TCM, that is
    relatively recent. By the 19th century, however, the fungus had become
    linked with status. The Colonies, a British newspaper, told its
    readers in 1876: “[I]t is reputed to possess strengthening and
    renovating qualities; but on account of its scarcity it is only used
    in the palace of the Emperor or by the highest mandarins.”

    Early foreign observers were no less astonished by yartsa gunbu’scost.
    “A Handbook of the Larger British Fungi”, published by the British
    Museum in 1923, said in a footnote: “Black, old and rotten specimens
    are said to be worth four times their weight in silver.” The Communist
    takeover in 1949, however, was a huge blow to business. Wealthy
    Chinese, the main consumers, fled abroad; under a Western-led trade
    embargo, trade slumped.

    The fungus revival began in 1993, at the World Athletics Championships
    in Stuttgart, Germany. A team of little-known Chinese runners took the
    gold medals in the women’s 1,500-metre, 3,000-metre and 10,000-metre
    races. Then, a month later, the same team won these races at China’s
    national games in Beijing, setting world records in all categories.
    One of them, Wang Junxia, shaved an astonishing 42 seconds off the
    previous best for 10,000 metres. Only a year earlier, she had been
    ranked a mere 56th in the world.

    The “secret weapon” of the team’s success, said their coach, Ma
    Junren, was a combination of intense high-altitude training on the
    Tibetan plateau, turtle blood, ginseng and a tonic made of caterpillar
    fungus. Yartsa gunbu’s fans prefer to leave the story at that,
    downplaying evidence that emerged several years later that other
    athletes trained by Mr Ma had been taking banned substances, including testosterone (he denies giving them any). Mr Ma is now reported to be
    engaged in a new business, breeding Tibetan mastiffs.

    Mr Ma’s plug for the fungus came at an opportune moment. Grassroots
    health care in the countryside had disintegrated in the 1980s with the
    break-up of the “people’s communes” that Mao Zedong had established.
    Now in the cities many state-owned enterprises were teetering on the
    brink of collapse, and with them the basic medical services they had
    once provided. Citizens were being forced to pay cash for treatment;
    serious diseases could easily plunge families into dire poverty.
    Demand for TCM remedies, with their reputed prophylactic properties,
    was beginning to soar. Caterpillar fungus appealed to the better off,
    but TCM offered many medicines that were cheaper than imported Western
    ones. TCM-related mystical practices such as qigong—involving
    breathing exercises and meditation—could supposedly ward off major
    illness for no cost.

    That there was no clear evidence of yartsa gunbu’s properties made
    little difference. Between 1998 and the global financial crisis in
    2008, calculates Mr Winkler, the price rose more than 17-fold to
    nearly 70,000 yuan per kilogram. In 2003 an outbreak of SARS, an often
    deadly respiratory disease, gave the fungus a further publicity boost:
    TCM doctors claimed it had helped some patients to recover more
    rapidly than they would have with Western medicine alone. The People’s
    Daily, the Communist Party’s main mouthpiece, said that in the fight
    against SARS, TCM “once regarded as outdated or effective only against
    chronic diseases” had proven to be “one of the most powerful weapons”.

    There are some sceptics, too. Last year an anti-TCM campaigner in
    Beijing offered a 50,000-yuan reward to any TCM doctor who could
    achieve a success rate of at least 80% in diagnosing pregnancy merely
    by checking a woman’s pulse (a critical diagnostic tool in TCM). His
    challenge aroused considerable media interest in China. There were a
    couple of well-publicised failed attempts, but nobody won the prize.
    Advocates, however, claimed a victory in October when a TCM doctor, Tu
    Youyou, was given a Nobel prize for the discovery of artemisinin, an anti-malaria drug. The prime minister, Li Keqiang, said the award
    demonstrated the “great contribution of traditional Chinese medicine
    to the cause of human health”.

    Mercifully for the government’s budget, caterpillar fungus is not one
    of the medicines covered by state-funded health insurance. Your
    correspondent had only his own wallet when he went to the
    caterpillar-fungus department of a TCM clinic attached to an emporium
    in central Beijing run by one of China’s biggest retailers of TCM
    products, Tongrentang, a company founded in 1669.

    Dr Li Zhenhua took the pulse of both wrists and looked in his
    patient’s mouth. He asked a few questions: “Do you feel thirsty?”,
    “How is your sex life?”. Then came a more animated discussion about
    what to prescribe (the only symptom proffered was poor sleep, though
    Dr Li said his examination revealed a lack of vigour in the kidneys).
    What quality of caterpillar fungus would the patient like? Would he
    like ginseng, too? The prescription thus negotiated involved three
    months of daily medication. At a cashier’s desk the bill was totted
    up. It came to more than $4,600—possibly the most expensive remedy for
    jet lag ever prescribed. Your correspondent muttered his excuses and


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