Writer and National Geographic Society Explorer Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears. This is his first dispatch from China.
Yusan, Yunnan, ChinaMy walk restarts at a crossroad.
The crossroad is charred by a subtropical sun. It quarters a village of tiled roofs called Yusan. Yusan means "umbrella" in Mandarin. It is located in Yunnan Province, in far southwest China, close by the Myanmar border. How old is the village? Like many things Chinese this is difficult to know. Yusan once straddled the antique frontier between Ming dynasty China and the outside world—the bazaars of Southeast Asia and India. But roads are older than empires in Yunnan. A hundred generations of long-legged mountaineers have hauled jade, tea, copper, and ivory atop the crooked lanes of Yunnan. Centuries of mule caravans have carved divots into the roads’ grey basalt. Roman
