Chengdu to Danba, day by day

The system ran from the Yuan through the Qing. In the southwest and along the Tibetan edge, the court confirmed local leaders in office, gave them a seal and a patent, and let the title pass from father to son — subject to approval, which is where the leverage sat. They collected grain and corvée, judged disputes, kept a small army, and answered for the peace of a defined territory. In return they were left alone.

Wori was one of the small ones. In 1658 the grandfather of the line submitted to the Qing and was given the title guoshi — a religious rank, not a secular one, which tells you what the family’s authority had been built on first. In 1750 his descendant Sedala was raised to Anfu si, a pacification commission, grade 5b, for supplying the Qing army in the first Jinchuan war. The house you are looking at was built on that promotion.

Grade 5b is a mid-ranking official. The tower is thirty-six metres tall. The gap between those two facts is the whole story of the frontier: the rank was small, the local power was not.

In the spring of 1770 Sedala, the tusi of Wori, was told by a lama that his neighbours’ family could be undone by writing their names and birth-dates into a curse text. He did it. The tusi of Xiaojin, a man named Zewang, fell ill; his grandson died.

Zewang’s son Sengge Sang had no doubt about the cause. He marched on Wori and attacked this house. Wori appealed to Chengdu. Chengdu had been waiting for a reason: the two Jinchuan valleys had been a running problem for twenty years, and a small client being attacked by a larger one is a legal basis for intervention.

The second Jinchuan war ran from 1771 to 1776 and consumed the better part of a hundred thousand troops. It went badly at first. In June 1773 a Qing army of some twenty thousand was surprised at Muguomu, a day’s march from here, and broke; its commander Wen Fu was killed. The court sent A Gui, who took the valleys back the following winter and finished at Galayi in 1776.

What it tastes of. 金冠 first: honey and pear drop, a skin that gives no resistance, flesh that breaks rather than crunches. 红富士 is the opposite — a hard snap, more sugar, less perfume, and it holds that for four months in a cold room. 红星 is the soft one, and the one that tastes most like an apple and least like a sweet.

The numbers. The geographical-indication standard sets a floor of 13% soluble solids and 11% total sugar at harvest, with acidity under 0.3%. That is a legal minimum, not a description: good fruit here reads well above it, and the packhouses now grade on the reading.

Why the skin matters. At this altitude the skin stays thin, and fruit sold at the orchard gate in September has never been in a cold room at all — which is why it bruises in a bag and tastes of more than sugar.

The second use. Fruit that will not grade is not wasted. It goes to juice, to vinegar, and increasingly to freeze-drying: slices are frozen and the water is pulled off as vapour, which leaves the shape and most of the flavour and none of the water.

苹果干 — dried rings, bagged at the gate. Darker and chewier than the freeze-dried sort, usually with the core left in, and sold in clear bags for most of the autumn.

What to look for in fresh fruit: weight in the hand, a stem still attached, no soft spot at the calyx. A 金冠 should be yellow at the shoulder, not green — green means a week early.

Mordo rises to 5,105 m. It is not the highest thing in the range and it does not look like the postcard mountains further west — it is a blunt, brown, cloud-wrapped mass, holy rather than beautiful. For the Rongcha — the Tibetan-speaking farmers of Danba, Xiaojin and Jinchuan — it is the centre of the world: the mountain their pilgrims walk around, the one their songs name first.

It is also, unusually, shared. Mordo is a Bön mountain, and the old religion walks around it anticlockwise; Buddhists walk clockwise. Here both are accepted, and you will meet pilgrims going each way on the same path. Almost nowhere else in the Tibetan world is that true.

Zhonglu faces it across the river. The name is usually translated as “the place people and gods both want to live”, which is the kind of phrase a village gives itself and then lives up to.

Who paid for them. Most of the towers here are family towers — built by one household, on its own land, for its own use. They are not the tusi’s. That is the single most important thing to understand about Zhonglu: this is not a fortress with a village around it, it is a village in which many families each built a small fortress.

Local accounts say a tower went up when a son was born and was finished by the time he turned eighteen, as his coming-of-age. We cannot verify that as a rule, and it may be a story told for visitors — but it fits the evidence of towers built in stages over decades.

What they were for. Store grain, keep the family’s valuables, watch the valley, and — in the end — be the last place you could retreat to. The county’s own classification runs: war towers, official-residence towers, signal towers on ridgelines, boundary towers between territories, and feng shui towers built purely to correct a bad site. Only the eight-sided kind was used for the last.

And then there is the tower the village calls the tusi tower — the largest eight-sided one, at the centre of the old settlement. About five metres of it are left.

Ground floor. Animals, firewood, tools, the winter store of potatoes. Often the only part of the house with no windows at all, and the part built most heavily, because it has to hold up everything above it.

Middle floor. The living floor: the kitchen with its stone hearth, the parents’ room, the seat by the window where the light is. This is where you will be taken if you are invited in, and where the butter tea comes from.

Top floor. Two things share it. One is the jingtang 经堂, the family chapel — small, dark, painted, not for guests unless invited. The other is the open roof terrace: a flat mud-and-stone deck where grain is spread to dry in October and where, on any warm afternoon, the family sits.

On the four corners of that roof stand white stone pillars, or simply white stones. They mark the four directions and hold the prayer flags. They are the reason a Rongcha village, seen from above, reads as a field of small white crowns.