The Mystery of Tianping Mountain
The Mystery of Tianping Mountain by Ye Meng There, it is very far. The car climbed up a great mountain, climbing for a long, long time, and no one knew just how high it was. The higher you go, the sparser the signs of human habitation and the denser the forest. No grain grows in the mountains, and only after a very, very long way is there a small flat terrace where one or two households of herb growers live. Where coptis is grown, it is called Coptis Terrace; where Jerusalem artichoke is grown, it is called Jerusalem Artichoke Flat. When a car passes by the door, men, women, children, and dogs all line up in front of the gate and stare for a long, long time without blinking…
The Enigma of Tianping Mountain
By Ye Meng
It's very far away.
The car climbed up a great mountain, climbing for a long, long time, no one knew how high.
The higher we went, the sparser the signs of human habitation, and the denser the forest. No grain grows in the mountains; only after a very long distance would there appear a tiny patch of flat terrace, where one or two families of herb growers lived. Where coptis was grown, it was called Coptis Terrace; where Jerusalem artichoke was grown, it was called Artichoke Flat. When the car passed by their doors, the men, women, children, and dogs all lined up in front of the house, staring without blinking for a long, long time.
By the time we reached the hinterland of the primeval secondary forest of Tianping Mountain on the border of Hunan and Hubei, it was already lamp-lighting time.
A brazier of red charcoal fire burned in the room, making one forget that it was already June.
A stream flowed past the door; reach out a hand, and it was icy to the bone.
The wind seeping out from the forest was refreshingly cool. Open your mouth and breathe in, and you seemed to taste a hint of sweetness.
The palace-like wooden building with upturned eaves was made entirely of catalpa boards, thick, with beautiful grain. In fact, not just this wooden building—everything here was clean, so clean it did not seem like the mortal world.
Looking out along the upturned eaves of the wooden building, a hook of a waning moon hung icy cold; all around, the great mountains were pitch black.
The night in the primeval forest was frighteningly quiet.
In the middle of the night, rain began to fall with a patter. This place was originally Hunan's "rain capital."
The next day, Tianping Mountain generously gave us a sunny day. The one who led us into the forest was Xiao Liu from the seed garden, a young man who had graduated from a forestry school.
As soon as we plunged into the dense forest, our eyes seemed to have put on a pair of green sunglasses; green filled our vision.
The ground seemed to be covered with a thick, wet green carpet, into which lucky grass, oxalis, plantain, and orchids were tightly and densely woven.
The sky was green; the dense crowns of associated miscellaneous trees and tall broad-leaved trees strictly covered the sky.
The streams and ravines were green, so green they were black. The large rocks covered with dark green moss stood every which way in the middle, as deep and secluded as ancient wells and old lanes.
The tree trunks were green. Apart from the Tianmu purple-stem tree, almost every trunk had put on a green woolen garment, covered with stone orchids and other moss and fern plants, thick and dense; some even looked like tassels woven of green velvet, others like embroidered fringes. It was as if every tree had a makeup artist carefully dressing it.
The air also seemed green, the flowing, bright kind of green. If I opened my hand and grasped at the air, I seemed able to squeeze out a few drops of green juice.
I could not see the original colors of sky and earth, nor distinguish the brilliance of sun and moon; only green was the overlord here.
In this green kingdom, I suspected that the part of my skin exposed outside had also been dyed green. If the flowing chlorophyll in the air could seep into my skin, would I not also have the function of green plants, letting me become a tree or a vine in this forest, sharing prosperity and life with this primeval forest—would that not be wonderful?
I only cared about plunging deeper into the dense forest, and the guide Xiao Liu kept calling me from behind. He was afraid I would get lost. Once lost, it would be trouble. A few years earlier, a young man from Sichuan building a road had gotten lost in the forest and never made it out.
I was afraid of getting lost and did not dare wander recklessly.
"Ah! Leeches." The lady with us cried out in alarm. She rolled up her long trousers, and on the transparent silk stockings at her lower leg, several mountain leeches were clinging, and there were a few on her body too.
I secretly rejoiced: I had not yet been bitten by mountain leeches! In the midst of my smugness, a trace of melancholy arose instead. Instinctively I rolled up the edge of my trouser legs: on the sock at my ankle there was actually a patch of bright red. Ha! So the mountain leeches had already paid a visit, eaten their fill, and left their battle record before departing. At that moment, my heart suddenly felt at ease. We uninvited guests had disturbed the primitiveness and tranquility of this green kingdom; this little retaliation from nature was only proper.
Actually, green was not absolute either. In the grass there were often fallen petals in profusion: yellow and white petals whose names I could not tell. The red ones were late-blooming azaleas, drifting down abundantly from very tall azalea trees.
Suddenly, from the green grass by my feet, a vermilion brush-like flower bud rose up, somewhat like a lotus bud. Xiao Liu told me: after this large bud bursts open, the flower buds gradually open one after another like sesame flowers, very beautiful. I looked carefully: there were actually several plants around; looking a little farther, those buds standing gracefully in the green grass were like one torch after another, everywhere, so dense.
It turned out my eyes had become colorblind: I could only distinguish green. Green had blurred my eyes; heaven knows how many flowers I had also overlooked.
Medicinal herbs were everywhere. Xiao Liu casually pulled up a Paris polyphylla and said, "Gastrodia and Panax notoginseng can often be encountered too; there are six or seven hundred kinds of medicinal materials here."
The forest here was not like other places; it was composed of multiple forest communities, each with its own different content. There were many tree species, mostly precious species and ancient relict species. No one knew exactly how many plants had not yet been discovered and named; no wonder people called Tianping Mountain a treasure house of green plants.
Along the way, Xiao Liu taught me to recognize trees.
This is Tetracentron sinense; when the new leaves first emerge, the undersides are white and shining. That is Catalpa fargesii. The coffin in which the old lady in the Mawangdui Han tomb slept was made of this wood; it resists decay!
I did not understand forestry and could not remember so much at once. Liriodendron, Bretschneidera, Emmenopterys, Tapiscia, Tetracentron... Xiao Liu pointed them out to me one by one. I worried that once I turned around, I probably would not recognize even one.
However, the dove flower—Davidia involucrata—I did recognize.
As Xiao Liu walked, he suddenly bent down and picked up from the grass a large, pure white petal, like a folded dove's wing. "This is the bract of the dove flower. If only you had come a little earlier, when the large area of Davidia in Davidia Bay was blooming, like a great expanse of white doves spreading their wings, truly beautiful!"
The living fossil—the dove flower—with its special floral form and tall, magnificent tree shape, had rightly become the peerless beauty among trees, like Yang Guifei among beauties; it belonged to the classical, and for the green world and humankind, it was a venerable elder. On our small Earth, its kind had already passed away, having hidden in rock crevices billions of years ago to dream as fossils. But here, it had flourished to this day in large numbers as a dominant species. It was also because of Davidia and many relict tree species that people called Tianping Mountain a huge gene bank preserving prehistoric relict plants.
Beautiful dove flower, how did you, in this peculiar refuge of Tianping Mountain, escape the devastating catastrophe of the Quaternary glaciation?
This is a great enigma!
Davidia is an enigma, and the primeval secondary forest of Tianping Mountain is an enigma. This enigma attracts many scientists. Regarding this green treasure house, people have made investigations and conjectures from many sides, but they have not fully uncovered its answer.
I think: the full answer to this green enigma is probably known only to the Davidias.
Better go ask the elders of the mountain forest!
After a day of burrowing through the impenetrable primeval forest, we finally returned victoriously to base camp. The moment the sense of safety passed, a boundless sense of loss, like a bitter spring, welled up leisurely from the bottom of my heart! Looking back on my time in that forest, every little portion had become a moment that could not be bought for a thousand pieces of gold. I should not have walked out so smoothly: why did I not get lost? Oh, me!