Echos of time manifest in the structures built and left, the cultural attitudes cultivated by lived experiances, and the juxtapositions grown over a long history. Po Yirong tea farm is a rural Tibetan village sitting on a rippling lake and surronded by a crown of towering peaks and glaciers. And while the village is predominantly Tibetan, as evidenced by the archetecture and the people, nesstled inbetween these structures are ""1950's era"" stlye numbered dormatories and meeting halls.
The valley is rich in its fertility with a climate that seems to breathe life. With a low elevation for the plateau, the valley is affected by the summer monsoon feeding the farms with daily sprinkles and the melt of glaciers. The climate is unique to the plateau as it is the only viable location for tea production in all of Tibet. This climate more common in east China made the valley also viable for urban to rural relocation.
When asked for the next days weather forecast a local responded "the same tomarrow as it is today." That saying epitomizes the village stuck with the legacy of the ""recent past"" while the world changes dramadically outside the isolation of its mountains. Isolation is a fact of life in Po Yirung as a rough, muddy, and rocky 6 hour car ride is required to reach the nearest urban area (and this a small Tibetan city closer to India than East China). The road hangs over the turbulent Po Zongpo river and is prone to repeated land slide and road outage. The isolation has forced the village to be almost completely self-sufficient. Along with the tea, corn, cabbage, peppers, potatoes, peaches, and squash are grown and the uncultivated margins filled with pig, chicken, and cow. At our meals (prepared by a man from Schizhuan who had lived in the village 50 years) nearly every ingredient was grown locally and organically including the tea we drank.
The valley is rich in its fertility with a climate that seems to breathe life. With a low elevation for the plateau, the valley is affected by the summer monsoon feeding the farms with daily sprinkles and the melt of glaciers. The climate is unique to the plateau as it is the only viable location for tea production in all of Tibet. This climate more common in east China made the valley also viable for urban to rural relocation.
When asked for the next days weather forecast a local responded "the same tomarrow as it is today." That saying epitomizes the village stuck with the legacy of the ""recent past"" while the world changes dramadically outside the isolation of its mountains. Isolation is a fact of life in Po Yirung as a rough, muddy, and rocky 6 hour car ride is required to reach the nearest urban area (and this a small Tibetan city closer to India than East China). The road hangs over the turbulent Po Zongpo river and is prone to repeated land slide and road outage. The isolation has forced the village to be almost completely self-sufficient. Along with the tea, corn, cabbage, peppers, potatoes, peaches, and squash are grown and the uncultivated margins filled with pig, chicken, and cow. At our meals (prepared by a man from Schizhuan who had lived in the village 50 years) nearly every ingredient was grown locally and organically including the tea we drank.
The Tea farm was started in the 1970s to take advantage of the humid and mountainous climate required for tea cultivation. The opportunities associated with the fertile conditions lead a local resident to descibe the village at the time as "busy." Busy enough to fill the large ""1950's style"" auditorium for workers rallys, speeches, and movies. The auditorium is now filled with hay and sand and is shrouded in broken windows and glass.
The village has seen a marked decline in population due to the bankrauptcy of the tea farm in the 1990s. Dispite the regions ability to grow tea, the competiton from tea growers not burdened by such extreme isolation made the tea grown in Po Yirung economically unviable. The village was further pushed over the edge by a flood in 2000 asociated with a dam failure upstream. The flood marooned a boat adjacent to our sparten guest house nearly 1/4 mile for the lakes current level. These events have dropped the population to aproximatly 100 people. The numbered dormatories now sit vacant and deralict. Decomposing partly due to weather and partly due to lack of ownership. Rows of bleak and barren white buildings decay next to fields of corn, waiting for time to return them to the earth.
The juxtapositions of history, the changes inherent in time, the percieved perminance of the present all can be witness here in this rural village. And while the weather is "the same tomarrow as it is today." Each small drop of rain washes the present picture away.
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