Chasing the fountain of youth

Bapandun village in Bama. [File photo]

Every morning, Cui Xuedong, a liver cancer patient and former general manager of a transport facilities company in Beijing, puts on his gloves, then gets on his hands and knees to go climbing along a mountain trail in Bapandun village in Bama, a remote and mountainous county in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

He's not alone when he does this. Thousands of other cancer patients are there alongside him, each hoping that somehow, the area itself has unique properties that can extend their lives.

Bama county has the highest proportion of centenarians of any place in China. It is this statistic that has drawn Cui and others like him.

Climbing isn't the only method they are using in an attempt to extend their lives. Tang Laoye, 67, a retiree from Shanghai who suffers from prostate cancer, now lives in Baimotun village in the county. He told the Global Times Tuesday he witnessed a civil servant from Liaoning Province drinking his own urine in March in an effort to persuade his wife, who suffers from ovarian cancer, to follow his lead.

Of course, medical experts frown on these baffling beliefs, but that hasn't stopped sick or elderly people from flocking to Bama county, or other locations around China with allegedly mystical properties.

"With a strong desire to live, patients try anything they believe might be useful for them," Cui said.

Booming with life

Bama has a population of 270,000 and was recognized by the International Natural Medicine Society as the "hometown of longevity" due to its centenarian cluster in 1991.

Bama now boasts 82 centenarians and 776 90-year-olds. The ratio of centenarians is 31.5 per 100,000, which is about four times the international standard of 7 per 100,000, according to Li Yi, the director of the publicity office with the Party committee of Bama county.

Since 2011, about 100,000 tourists have visited the area each year. Most of them were people who come from South China or Northeast China suffering from diseases . They are called "transients" who range from 30 to 70 years old and usually stay in rural areas in Bama for periods between a month and a year.

But Bama county is not unique.

By 2007, there were 50 counties and cities that claimed they were among these longevity towns, the Changsha Evening News reported.

A history of longevity

These "transients" are far from the first to try to seek longevity.

"Pursuing longevity was a favored pastime for many Chinese emperors," Zhou Xueying, a history professor with Nanjing University, told the Global Times.

In the Qin Dynasty (221BC-206BC), Emperor Qin Shihuang was said to have sent 3,000 female and male virgins to certain islands in the ocean where "gods" were believed to live, in order to track down medicine that would help keep him young forever. But the people he sent to find the medicine never returned.

In a similar folly, Han Wudi, one of the emperors of the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD25), ordered alchemists to make him longevity medicine. Han died at 69 years of age, but his pursuit lives on in modern China.