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"Our man in China"
Editor Mike Edwards.
Photographs Michael S. Yamashita.
Archive photos Joseph F. Rock.
ALL NGULUKO was out to see us off," he recorded as he began a journey to Yongning in 1928. His mules were laden with personal gear, canned food, animal feed, photographic equipment, and paper and charcoal for preserving plants and seeds.
With him, as usual, went a Naxi team, including his cook, muleteers, and men trained to collect and pack the specimens. Sometimes he complained that his helpers were lazy and careless, just as, at one time or another, he railed against almost every group he encountered in China: Buddhist monks who rarely bathed, Muslim soldiers, whom he called "absolute robbers," and overbearing Chinese officials. But on the whole he liked the Naxi, and once when he visited the U.S., he even brought along two of his assistants.
His caravan moved at the rate of 10 to 20 miles a day. Rock always stopped to visit local rulers and officials; to ward off robbers, he needed the armed escorts they could provide, In exchange he might offer the official a much prized Colt .45-caliber pistol. Rock himself carried two of them.
Sometimes he had an escort of as many as 200 men, but despite this protection his caravan was attacked at least twice. "We pushed on under fire as best we could," he wrote of one encounter. His soldiers fired back. "Thanks to the bad aim of the brigands we lost only one soldier killed."
That night he stayed in a Buddhist temple. At midnight soldiers came to warn that the brigands were nearby "and that they could not protect me." Rock laid out his pistols and prepared to flee or fight. "I opened up my trunks and distributed [silver coins] among my men, wrapped up some extra warm underwear, a towel, condensed milk and some chocolate. . . . Every minute I expected the firing to commence." The bandits, however, never attacked.
On an arduous winter journey in 1924 Rock crossed 13,000-foot-high mountains into Sichuan Province to reach "one of the least-known spots in the world," the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Muli, the size of New Hampshire with but 22,000 citizens.
Inside the walled monastery, Rock "donned my best and sallied forth to meet the king." Chote Chaba was a huge monarch, six feet two and corpulent. He offered his guest buttered tea along with "ancient mottled yak cheese, interspersed with hair," and cakes "heavy as rocks."
Rock cautiously sipped his tea while taking in the scene. He noted golden plates and porcelain cups. The necks of the monarch and his attendants were greasy and black, which "showed that soap was not in demand."
Muli became the subject of one of Rock's most fascinating articles, in part because Chote Chaba, as unlearned as a babe, peppered him with questions. Could a man ride horseback from Muli to Washington? Was that near Germany? Did Rock have binoculars that could see through mountains?
More challenging targets for Rock were mountains even higher than those that enclosed Muli, especially the little-known ranges along the border of China and Tibet.
He spent more than a year trying to reach the Anyemaqen peaks in Qinghai Province, delayed by hostile nomadic tribes and a war between Buddhists and Muslims. Enduring fierce snowstorms, he finally penetrated deep into the Anyemaqen Shan, where "even the valley floors . . . reach a height of more than 15,000 feet." He made an extensive photographic record of the peaks and believed that the highest soared to 28,000 feet. According to modern surveys, he overestimated by more than a mile; the height is 20,610 feet.
Rock had an abundant knowledge of the terrain of western China as well as that ofSiam and Burma, the main locus of his search for chaulmoogra seeds in 1920-21. At the height of World War II the U.S. Army wanted his help in drawing maps for pilots flying the "Hump," the lifeline for Allied forces fighting the Japanese in China. The cargo planes departed India and flew over Burma's mountainous border with China, landing at Kunming.
Rock was plucked from India, where he had gone to escape the war, and flown to Washington. He sent his belongings by ship. In those trunks was much of his Naxi research, including the dictionary that he had been working on for more than a dozen years. The trunks went to the sea-floor when the vessel was torpedoed.
Rock was apoplectic. But he seems never to have considered not returning to Yunnan to start over. With Harvard's support he was back in 1946, hiring dong-bas to help him translate Naxi manuscripts anew.
He had to hurry. "The political situation is not too good," Rock wrote early in 1949 to his friend Kip Ross at the GEOGRAPHIC. "The southern and eastern parts of this province are in the hands of bandits" -that is, communists.
Dayan (Lijiang), a small city near Nguluko, fell in July 1949, and "red soldiers with guns and bayonets searched my belongings." A month later Rock packed and departed.
He spent his last years in Hawaii, collecting plants and continuing to work on Naxi lore and language. His two-volume Naxi history had been published by Harvard. He wrote Kip Ross that he looked forward to the appearance of the dictionary by his 79th birthday on January 13, 1963. But on December 5 he died of a heart attack at home, surrounded by Naxi pictograph manuscripts. The first volume of the Naxi dictionary was printed soon after his death. The second was published in 1972.
Our man in China was, of course, not just ours; as a botanist he was Hawaii's and Harvard's, and Harvard also claimed him as a historian and lexicographer. But most of all, he belonged to China. He saw it, he survived it, he recorded it in words and pictures. He got there.
