Her eyes were the empty buds of a beech tree in the autumn,
Her lips the honeyed sapwood beneath the curled bark of her skin,
The dark down on her forearms were the stripes on a tiger’s coat,
Her wrists the burnished tree bole from whose stump white flowers blossom,
And her hands, which picked the food that she served to us that evening,
Were strong as any peasant’s, their palms reddened by hard labour,
With nails like pearlescent shells dug from the bed of an ancient sea.
Her hair was the veil of night drawn from the freckled morning’s face
And tied in evening’s knots at the close of every day,
And her smile was like the sunrise above the mountain in the morning
Long before I rose to leave the cloven valley of her home
In which she lives her life like water running in a river,
Like trees grow in a forest, the moon rises in the night,
Like goats climbing a cliff-face, like a tiger leaping the gorge.
— Tiger Leaping Gorge, June 2025
• • • • •
In the summer of 2025 we travelled to Tiger Leaping Gorge (虎跳峡), where we stayed in the village of Bendiwan (本地湾村), 2,000 metres up Haba Snow Mountain (哈巴雪) on the ancient Tea Horse Road (茶马古道), with a view across the gorge to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (玉龙雪山), 5,596 metres high. At that proximity — a mile to its lower slopes and another to the summit crags — it looked like the largest thing I’ve ever seen. Our hosts were a young woman in her mid-twenties, her husband and daughter, all of them members of the Naxi people. She was as I describe her, and struck both my girlfriend and me as a wood spirit or faery, as at home in her landscape as its other inhabitants, both animals and vegetation, and far from the alienated existence that we and the mass of humanity accept as our lives. That said, when we arrived at her guest house she took photographs of our passports and our faces with a smartphone, presumably in line with requirements laid down by the Chinese state.
On our second day in Tiger Leaping Gorge we hiked on a track that ran north along the river about 2,000 metres up Haba Snow Mountain. For once, the word so abused by US teenagers was accurate to describe the awe we felt at the views below and above us. As we approached a waterfall, however, a queue of Chinese tourists formed on the narrow track: the reason, we eventually established, was that a young man — perhaps her boyfriend, perhaps her personal photographer — was taking numerous photographs of a young women who was posing before the fall, clutching in her hand a can of some soft drink with the logo carefully turned towards the lens. None of the waiting Chinese appeared to think this was rude or even strange, and they all waited for the shoot to finish before their slightly less professional girlfriends sported their own poses. A line of mountain goats coming the other way, however, who were confused by the delay, pushed their way through. As did we.
A Communist in Hong Kong 