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Where trash was once king

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2020-08-22 09:58:54China Daily Editor : Feng Shuang ECNS App Download
Special: Poverty Alleviation

The saint lake Yehai Lake in Lintan county, Gannan Tibet autonomous prefecture of Northwest China's Gansu province. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

Tired of being notorious for the lack of care for their surroundings, Tibetan townsfolk clean up their act and gain acclaim, tourism success and better lives.

IT'S A BRILLIANTLY SUNNY DAY, and as voluminous white clouds float across a blue sky that seems almost within hand's reach, black yaks and white sheep enjoy the bounty of the fields below.

We are in Gannan Tibet autonomous prefecture northeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, about 3,000 meters above sea level, with neighboring Qinghai province to the west and Sichuan to the south.

Thirty-five years after the renowned anthropologist Fei Xiaotong visited Gannan for six days and wrote a highly influential essay about all he had found, I'm here for six days, too, to see what has changed in the intervening years.

Gannan plays an important role in China's ecosystem, lying in the watershed of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River.

The topography is in marked contrast to what you might have expected to find this far north. Instead of the usual loess, deserts or semi-deserts, what greets the eyes are rich green grasslands resembling beautifully cared-for plush carpets that stretch as far as the eye can see.

For those who dislike the seething summer heat prevalent in many parts of China, Gannan is an ideal retreat, the daily maximum temperature from June to August being about 20 C, and the minimum about 0 C.

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A typical Tibetan-style guesthouse newly remodeled in Heiliningba village. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

Twenty-four ethnic groups including Han and Hui live here, of which the Tibetan ethnic account for nearly 56 percent. For thousands of years people have lived a nomadic lifestyle on the harsh plateau.

In its 45,000 square kilometers also live more than 20 rare animals, including giant pandas and Asian golden cats, and more than 400 plant species.

But for all the fabulous natural assets with which Gannan is endowed, it remains one of the most poverty-stricken areas of China.

In early 2013, nearly 37 percent of the population were having to make do with an annual income of less than 2,300 yuan ($333), compared with the national average at the time of 18,311 yuan.

So governments central and local have faced the fiendishly difficult problem of how to lift standards of living and at the same time doing their utmost to protecting the environment.

As Fei planned his very first visit to the plateau in 1985 at the age of 75, the prospect of such old bones venturing into the Tibet autonomous region lying at 4,500 meters may well have seemed too daunting for him, and it was to Gannan, at a more friendly 3,000 meters, that he opted to go.

As a scholar of ethnology, what drew him to Gannan as well was the scale of its multiethnicity. In his resulting essay, A Trip to Gannan, he described his excitement at finally being able to investigate Tibetan life in situ.

In his six days here he examined geography, ethnic demographics, commercial development, forestry, animal husbandry, education, industry and the renowned Buddhist Labrang Monastery.

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Workers renovate a villager's house into a Tibetan-style guesthouse in Heiliningba village, Xiahe county in Gannan Tibet autonomous prefecture in Gansu province. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

He reported on problems in forestry and animal husbandry that threatened not only the environment but people's livelihoods, but also told of the opportunities that lay before Gannan thanks to its special location.

In the 13th century Gannan had become the center of tea-and-horse trade between the Han and Tibetan ethnic groups. It took 28 days to reach Lhasa, 1,400 kilometers away, riding a horse starting from the monastery, Fei wrote.

In the 1980s businesses in Lhasa were also mainly run by those of the Tibetan ethnic group from Gannan, he wrote.

Fei concluded that Gannan, believed to have been the frontier where the Han and Tibetan ethnic people had their first contacts, could serve as the springboard for the Tibetan ethnic group to join in the modernization that China was then experiencing.

For him, it was important to protect the environment, to restore forests and exercise careful control over grazing while developing education and industry.

Thirty years later, Fei's views had inspired the locals to build a trash-free Tibetan autonomous prefecture and develop green tourism as one of the pillar industries to improve people's incomes. Among those locals were a young woman named Zhao Norjinma and her family.

On a summer's day in 2009 the family, from a Tibetan village in Zhuoni county of Gannan went to a flower festival in the town of Yeliguan, Lintan county, about 79 kilometers away.

The four spent the day visiting local tourist attractions, and given the long journey back home they decided to stay for a night in a guesthouse in the town. When they had arrived by bus earlier they had seen a row of white-walled, blackroofed shabby bungalows.

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Tibetan-style guesthouses in Anguo village, Xiahe county, Gannan Tibet autonomous prefecture. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

When they walked into a courtyard guesthouse they found the guest rooms all had a bed large enough to sleep five to eight people at what seemed to be a reasonable price of 10 yuan a night for a person. However, after checking in they found the guesthouse provided no dinner, so after a long and exhausting day they were forced to go out looking for food.

Zhao Norjinma's father thus discovered a business opportunity, reckoning that if he could provide lodging and food to 20 people a day it would produce revenue of 1,000 yuan a day, much more than most workers could earn.

At the start of 2010 he paid 15,000 yuan to rent a guesthouse in Yeliguan for a year. Lacking expertise in food preparation, and after a string of culinary disasters, Zhao Norjinma's guesthouse staff eventually received training from the local government, and within three years the business was taking 30,000 yuan a year. By 2013 the town was attracting more and more tourists, and Zhao Norjinma's family decided to buy the guesthouse.

However, the town was wracked by one particular problem common to Gannan: it was notorious for its lack of cleanliness, with "piles of junk everywhere", says Zhao Norjinma, and over six years there had been no improvements to the wide-bedded guesthouses.

"It wasn't that tourists were picky. We could see what was wrong ourselves. It was common for people to defecate or urinate almost anywhere they could. There was little attention to maintaining a clean environment. The only people who bothered picking up rubbish in the streets were cleaners. In fact we ourselves used to toss rubbish from car windows without giving it a second's thought."

However, the prefectural government had cottoned on to the fact that something needed to be done to clean up the prefecture, and at the end of 2015 it launched a trash-free campaign.

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Tibetan-style guesthouses in Anguo village, Xiahe county, Gannan Tibet autonomous prefecture. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

Officials of different levels patrolled the streets, grasslands or along rivers, each wearing a red armband, and collecting trash whenever and wherever they encountered it, and they encouraged fellow citizen to start caring for the environment, Zhao Norjinma says.

As more people joined in the campaign, with strict supervision, over three years Gannan changed greatly, and an advertising campaign told the world about how it had been transformed.

In 2018 Zhao Norjinma received many tourists, perhaps keen to see how accurate the advertising was.

"They heard that Gannan had achieved its goal of no trash in sight, and they probably did not believe it so came to have a look for themselves," Zhao Norjinma says.

"They asked how it could be, wanting to know how many cleaners we had recruited, how many trash trucks we had bought and how frequently trash was collected. The thing is, it just wasn't like that. What happened was that everyone in Gannan had become a cleaner."

Last year the Gannan government decided to build guesthouses for the development of green tourism, and Zhao Norjinma's guesthouse was chosen as one of the models.

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Guru Tashi in his yard tells the story about how he opened the first cafe in Gaxiu village. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

She found that although many Tibetan ethnic tourists came to Yeliguan to pray at Yehai Lake, there was no Tibetan-style guesthouse in the town.

As a result, with the support of the government, she remodeled the family establishment into a Tibetan-styled guesthouse, supplying Tibetan food. The price for each bed for a night has risen from 30 yuan to 210 yuan, and revenue has shot up from 1,500 yuan a day to 9,000 yuan a day, she says.

The guesthouse has a booking page on various online platforms and within two months of opening, revenue had exceeded 300,000 yuan.

Zhao Norjinma's guesthouse is just one of the tens of thousands of guesthouses the prefectural government is building.

Some of those can be found in the village of Gaxiu, which is located at a crossroads along National Highway 213, which stretches more than 2,800 kilometers, from Gansu province to Yunnan province. Gaxiu's inhabitants are upgrading their premises to better meet tourist demand, and as a way of ensuring that competition is fair, guesthouses are required to have their own special characteristics.

Guru Tashi, 57, owns the only cafe in the village. It all started in May 2017 when several foreign motorcyclists arrived at his door, asking whether they could buy some coffee.

The motorcyclists, who had come from Labrang Monastery, were riding along the highway headed for Langmu Temple in the south. Langmu Temple tourist spot is one of the most popular destinations for foreign tourists to Gannan and is nicknamed Little Switzerland.

"Coffee is very new here," Guru Tashi says. "I thought it was a chance because we couldn't all provide just Tibetan food. So in my guesthouse we sell freshly brewed coffee, to which we add yak milk."

The cafe and three guestrooms, Guru Tashi says, give him income of more than 30,000 yuan a year, in addition to the 40,000 yuan a year he can earn with his 200 yaks.

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Zhao Norjinma arranges the cups in order in her Tibetan-style guesthouse in Yeliguan town, Lintan county of Gannan. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

In total, there are 52 houses in Gaxiu village, each of 667 sq m. As with Yeliguan, there is no litter to be seen.

However, things were very different before March 2017.

"There was yak dung and horse dung everywhere, and there were illegal buildings all over the place," says Lhamo Kyab, 59, Party secretary in the village, as he stands at the gate to his house, with several laborers busy building a path in the yard.

He says when Yu Chenghui, Party general secretary in Gannan, arrived in Gaxiu in March 2017, he said the village resembled postwar ruins. In the clean-up campaign, led by officials, villagers began picking up litter in public places and putting it into rubbish bins.

"Villagers now pick up trash up whenever and wherever they see it," Lhamo Kyab says.

Lhamo Kyab used to have 180 yaks, but to protect grassland the government pays his family of six 15,000 yuan a year in return for cutting the number of yaks to 150, and grazing is prohibited in spring and autumn.

Now, after three months, renovations of Lhamo Kyab's guesthouse have entered their final stage.

"Many guesthouses in our village are updating the infrastructure according to the diversified designs provided by the government," Lhamo Kyab says. "The focus is on building toilets because we didn't have them before. The renovation cost 40,000 yuan, of which we paid half and the government the rest."

Not far from the crossroads is the tent city of Gaxiu village, where 108 white or black Tibetan tents that serve as guestrooms, theater, Tibetan restaurant and cafeteria stand.

Profits are divided among 81 poor households that invested 15,000 yuan each to pay for construction.

The trash-free campaign and environmental protection around the prefecture have benefited not only such guesthouse owners in Gaxiu, Heiliningba, Anguo, Gongquhu villages in Xiahe and Luqu counties, but also high-end hotel owners.

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Laborers build the path in Lhamo Kyab's yard as the renovation of his guesthouse in Gaxiu village, Luqu county of Gannan, enters the last stage. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

Sonam Dondrub, 40, who graduated from Minzu University of China in Beijing, ran businesses in the capital and in Shenzhen for 15 years, before returning to his hometown of Gannan in 2015. He soon started a tourism and culture development company.

In March 2018 he started renovating 52 houses in Anguo village, Xiahe, into Tibetan-style guesthouses. He also rented villagers' grassland.

Seventy percent of Yang's staff in charge of the management of the guesthouses in Anguo are from the village, and they are paid a basic monthly wage of 2,800 yuan.

These villagers received a total of 350,000 yuan in bonuses at the end of 2018, and a year later the bonuses paid amounted to 650,000 yuan.

In addition to the guesthouses, with government support Sonam Dondrub has also opened a tent hotel on the grassland, charging from 3,280 yuan to 9,800 yuan a night.

To protect the grassland, floors of the tent are suspended above the grass. Since it opened on June 28, the hotel has been so popular that on many nights all the rooms have been booked.

Although tourism is still not well developed in Gannan, the autonomous prefecture has many travelers pass through it, Sonam Dondrub says.

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Tibetan-style guesthouses in Anguo village, Xiahe county, Gannan Tibet autonomous prefecture. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

Every summer before this year, 60 percent of tourists came from the surrounding Qinghai, Sichuan, and Shaanxi provinces, and Ningxia Hui autonomous region, he says, and most of the rest came on self-driving tours.

However, there are few places for tourists who have driven long distances to take a break, he says.

For example, along National Highway 213, if there were a place that offered shelter from sun, or a vendor selling yogurt, they would stop to take a break, but there are few such places, which is why he built the tent hotel, he says.

"Only if people stay can other related tourist products and services be developed."

Tourists start pouring into Gannan usually at the end of June. After three peak months, their numbers fall rapidly in September, and the travel season comes to an end in October. However, Sonam Donrop has built a heating system in his tents so travelers can come to the grassland to see the snowy winter landscape.

"The local government is developing tourist products throughout the prefecture, but we are short of management talents, especially pioneers who have advanced skills and ideas. If we can be successful, perhaps we can set a model for the whole of Gannan."

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Tibetan-style guesthouses in Anguo village, Xiahe county, Gannan Tibet autonomous prefecture. [Photo by Yang Yang/China Daily]

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