Nine months after I moved to Dali, in the autumn of 2020, I finally set off to climb Cangshan, the high mountain which towers over this valley in southwest China. Each morning, I had looked up at the top of its imposing ridge line, 2,000m above the village of Silver Bridge, north of Dali’s historic old town, that for a while I called home. Eighteen glacial gorges separated the 19 peaks, each carved by a running stream. Ever since moving there, I had fantasised about standing on top of that mountain. Reaching its summit had become an objective I fixated on. Scaling it would be healing, I had convinced myself.
I wasn’t alone in that outlook. It’s the quest for personal change that draws so many escapees from China’s cities to this rural valley. Cangshan (the “verdant mountain”) is a spectacular, 44km-long massif, carpeted by lush, evergreen forest, hugging the western shore of a crystalline lake and looming over a valley in the foothills of the eastern Himalaya, near the border with Myanmar. Each evening, I’d sit and watch the sun setting over them from my farmhouse, casting rays of pink, yellow and ochre through the clouds that rolled off the ridge line.
