5 - Shangri-La (Gyalthang) to Kalimpong: The Road of Trade, Transculture and Conflict

Summary

It is here that the coining of numerous ‘isms’ belongs, serving as collective and motivating concepts capable of reordering and remobilizing anew the masses …

—Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past

I am open and above board, not afraid of anything. I was born a Chinese and even if I die, my ghost will fly to Beijing and complain in front of Chairman Mao.

—Ma Zhucai, ‘Huiyi fuqin Ma Zhucai’

Introduction: Ma Zhucai's Transculturalism and Interpellation

This chapter analyses narratives and recent representations of the Ancient Tea Horse Road (ATHR) trader Ma Zhucai (1891–1963), who developed Kalimpong as the headquarters of his business empire as he charted and moved in and within the trade connections between the 1910s and the 1960s from southwest China. The narratives here bifurcate in two separate Mas: the official Chinese patriot Ma Zhucai (the Memorial-Ma) and the Kalimpong-based trader-smuggler Ma Chu Chai to his English-speaking contemporaries (or the IB-Ma). The former representation emanates from an edited volume whose title is best translated as Diqing Literary and Historical Materials, vol. 10: Memorial of the Patriotic Overseas Chinese Leader Ma Zhucai (hereafter Memorial). The latter representation is from the archives of the British Indian colonial state (mainly of the IB) and the postcolonial Indian state along with ethnography done in 2016–2017 in Shangri- La, Yunnan and Kalimpong. The argument that develops in these Memorial representations is a robust picture of an idealised Ma embodied in the Chinese nation, zhonghua minzu, protecting its borderlands. What emerges unfailingly is the icon of an ideologically interpellated Chinese trader who crossed bounteous borders, from Gyalthang, or Shangri-La, in Kham-Yunnan through Lhasa in Tibet to Kalimpong in India, yet remaining loyal to his motherland. Here we critically contextualise Chinese patriotism and nationalism and its concomitant politico-cultural technologies of memorialising by unpacking Ma's 41 years in Kalimpong and the geographic and economic entanglements with a GMD and CCP China.

Gyalthang (Shangri-La), Ma's native place, is located in the easternmost foothills of the Himalaya mountains at around 3,300 meters above sea level, seen from a Chinese perspective as in the ‘northwest corner of present-day Yunnan province in southern Kham. From 1725 until 2001, this area was referred to as Zhongdian in Chinese.’