World’s End in Kachin State
It’s sometimes called Burma’s Shangri-la, but life in this remote mountain valley is tough
By Wolfgang H Trost
July 01, 2007—At the end of a mountain valley in the far north of Burma’s Kachin State lives a tiny community who know very little about what is happening in far off Rangoon and Naypyidaw. They’ve probably never even heard of Naypyidaw—which replaced Rangoon as Burma’s capital in a fanfare of regime hype.
When I visited the ethnic Tibetan village of Tahawndam after an arduous 14-day trek on foot through northern Kachin State it was home to about 10 families.
Although the inevitable comparisons are made with Shangri-la, life is hard. The rugged villagers live in log cabins, with no electricity, and scratch an existence from the land. The women work the fields, while their men folk hunt with crossbows and poisoned arrows.
The outside world is gradually encroaching on this forgotten corner of Burma, however. It is part of a nature reserve named after the mountain that towers over the village, the 6,000m Hkakabo Razi, and the government in Naypyidaw is opening up the area for climbers, trekkers and eco-tourism. There have even been rumors of plans to build a ski resort at the foot of the mountain range, which is covered in year-round snow.
One of the villagers, Nyama Jonseng, was the first to scale Hkakabo Razi, with a Japanese mountaineer, Takashi Ozaki, in 1996, and they remain the only ones to have stood on its summit. Nyama Jonseng and some villagers who assisted in the expedition are among the few people to have ventured far out of the valley, invited to Rangoon and Myitkyina for celebrations commemorating their feat.
Tahawndam is one of four ethnic Tibetan villages in the area; the other three lie some distance away in the Seingkhu valley linking Kachin State and India’s Arunachal Pradesh. They were founded by Tibetan refugees fleeing harsh living conditions and oppression by the Chinese who took over their country in the early 1950s. The Burmese authorities issued them identification cards in the mid-1990s.
Although the valley where the people of Tahawndam settled is 2,000 meters high, it’s a lowland landscape compared to the heights of the Himalayas where they once lived. They make excellent use of the fertile valley, rotating crops on land irrigated by the icy waters of the valley’s Adung Wang River, fed from the surrounding snow-covered mountains and glaciers.
The forests that clothe the mountain slopes provide rich booty for the men of the village—various kinds of deer, mountain goats, takin (a kind of bison), flying foxes and many other rare species of animal. The British botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward, who explored the region between 1900 and 1950, estimated that this remote area of Burma was home to more than 7,000 plant species and hundreds of kinds of mammals and reptiles, some of them still waiting to be discovered. Like the people of Tahawndam themselves.
