Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1645 Nimu Mogu

After the car went over the mud mountain, the road began to look "worn", and National Highway 108 passed through the Daxiangling Pass. The altitude had risen to more than meters, and there were still meters to the highest point of the mountain.

The road here has been winding in a zigzag shape. It went up at the beginning, but now it goes down.

Standing on the pass, you can find that this is a famous climate watershed. Daxiangling and Erlangshan together block the moisture brought by the eastern monsoon, giving birth to Ya'an, the rainy city in the east of the ridge, and Qingxi, the windy city in the west of the ridge.

The pass faces the hillside of Ya'an, with rainy, warm and humid climate, lush vegetation, and a standard subtropical monsoon climate.

The scenery along the way is very beautiful, with artificial forests and natural forests complementing each other. From an altitude of 1,500 meters to 3,000 meters, it is almost all forests.

It is still very cold here at the Nibashan Pass. It is February now and we are still surrounded by snow. Along the way, apart from the road crew removing ice and snow and conducting the traffic, there are only large trucks with anti-icing chains passing by carefully.

The pass is also an excellent viewing platform. Looking out over the Gongga peaks from here, one can better appreciate the insignificance of human beings.

After passing the pass, the lush forests and wild animals disappeared, and both sides of the road were covered with snow, jade trees, and glaciers.

When we leave the snowy top, the climate changes to dry valley climate with little rain, with bare rock soil, low bushes and endless meadows on both sides.

There are also pepper trees all over the mountain.

The pepper trees on both sides of the road exude a spicy aroma from time to time. The peppers here were once a famous tribute both at home and abroad, known as "tribute peppers."

In addition to the aroma of pepper, there is also a faint fragrance of grass and the smell of fresh cow dung and sheep dung.

From time to time, Yi people wearing blue clothes and "hero knots" on their heads would appear on the roadside, driving herds of yaks, sheep and horses to graze on the grassland.

The Heroes Festival is a festival celebrated by the Yi people in this area. They wrap their heads with green or blue cloth and tie a long cone-shaped knot on their foreheads. Occasionally, they will embellish it with silver ornaments or tassels to express their bravery and majesty.

From time to time, there is a small path leading to the Daxiangling Mountains, which are full of gullies and peaks. It is said that in those deep mountains, there are tens of thousands of acres of grassland, where in addition to cattle and sheep, there are also a large number of horses.

On the ancient Tea-Horse Road of the Southern Silk Road, there used to be a long-term travel of horses that were special to this area. These horses were small in size, had moderate load-bearing capacity, and had great endurance. They transported the abundant copper and other products from central Yunnan, and brought in the rest of the products from Sichuan. During the Qianlong period, they accounted for a considerable proportion of the country's copper and supported the economic circulation at that time.

As we walked down the mountain, we occasionally saw mountain people on the roadside carrying backpacks in front of them, wrapping themselves in "Charwa", a unique felt cloak of the Yi ethnic group, and smoking a bamboo pipe in their mouths, smoking homemade "orchid cigarettes".

In their backpacks are wild rabbits and pheasants, which are strictly speaking protected animals. They catch them and sell them to drivers passing by along the way, hoping to earn some income for their families.

In addition to prey, there are also precious medicinal materials such as angelica, Fritillaria cirrhosa, Gastrodia elata, Cordyceps sinensis, etc., which are sold very cheaply, even less than one-tenth of the price in Shudu.

Zhou Zhi knew that there was a large breeding ground for wild animals and wild medicinal materials. Finally, the country established the Dafengding Nature Reserve in this area to protect five first-class protected animals such as the giant panda; nearly 30 second-class protected animals such as macaques, red pandas, and white-bellied pheasants; more than 30 rare relict plants such as Davidia involucrata, Ginkgo biloba, Fructus sylvestris, and Taxus chinensis. The mineral resources here are also very rich, including basalt, iron ore, coal, copper ore, limestone, gypsum, sulfur ore, bauxite, asbestos, and crystal stone. Along the way, countless trucks headed towards Nibashan Pass and transported them to the Yucheng area.

Soon, the guards began to pass through some villages. Compared with the magnificent large wooden houses in the villages on the other side of the mountains, the houses in this village were very short. The high-end houses had mud walls made of mud bricks made of yellow mud, while the ordinary houses were simply made of bamboo walls woven with rattan and bamboo strips and covered with mud.

Many houses don’t even have a front door. The more sophisticated ones just hang a black blanket, because there is basically nothing in the house except the fire pit. They are so poor that even the front door has become a useless decoration.

Except for a few luxurious green-tiled roofs, many roofs are even made of tree bark, which is somewhat similar to the thatched houses commonly seen in Jiachuan in the 1960s and 1970s, but without the grass roofs.

There is no way. The arable land here is basically planted with corn, potatoes, beans, and pumpkins. These are the only things that can grow on this dry and barren land.

Without rice fields, there would be no straw; without straw, there would be no thatched roofs.

After a few years, many of these villages were demolished by the government and moved down the mountain. What Zhou Zhi saw now was far more numerous and poorer than when he came here in his previous life.

This is still on the main road with relatively convenient transportation, but those scattered among the vast mountains are simply unimaginable.

This was an arduous and arduous battle. It was from this time that the Chinese people began their fight, and it took another forty years before they finally won this heroic battle against poverty.

As someone who had experienced this before, Zhou Zhi couldn't help but feel proud every time he saw the poverty alleviation campaign on TV in his previous life. Thinking of this, he became more anxious.

Fortunately, the road finally began to become flat at this time, and a river appeared on the side of the road. The car drove forward along the gravel dirt road beside the river valley.

The name of this river was Beishui in ancient times. During the Western Han Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago, Beishui County was established here because of the river.

There is no reliable evidence as to when Beishui was renamed Meigu River. During the long course of history, this area was mostly out of reach of the rulers of the Central Plains. Therefore, this name is more likely to come from the Yi word "Nimu Mogu".

Mogu means "center" or "heart". According to legend, the two major clans of the Yi people, Guhou and Qunie, met here when they migrated from central Yunnan to Liangshan. Later, when the Han people after the Western Han Dynasty established the county, they transcribed the "Mogu" River into the "Meigu" River. The county was named after the water and became Meigu.

However, Zhou Zhi thought that this name may have a third origin, because the ethnic minority girls in this area are very beautiful, with high noses, thin faces, deeper eye sockets than the Han people, and slim waists. Now in the annual "Duze", which is the beauty pageant of the Torch Festival, girls from Meigu County have the highest proportion of the top three beauties over the years, and they really deserve the name "Meigu".

The two major clans, Guhou and Qunie, later became the "co-grouping" place of the Yi people in the Liangshan area, and this place also became the birthplace and heartland of the Yi people. Meigu became the county town with the most complete preservation of the Yi traditional culture and the strongest customs, and later became the county town with the most Yi national intangible cultural heritage projects.

Zhou Zhi was once most interested in the Bimo culture here.

Bimo means saints and wise men, and is the inheritor of the core heritage of the Yi nationality. In Yi legends, they encompass cultural knowledge of astronomy, history, geography, philosophy, education, medicine, music, art, and rituals, the source of which is Huangmaogeng in Meigu.