SONGS OF THE SOUL MOUNTAIN

« Halfway between the Tibetan plateaus and the Sichuan basin, in the land of the Qiang people, set in the median Qionglai mountain range, I have seen the worship of fire and the survival of mankind's original civilisation. »

Gao Xing Jian « La montagne de l’âme »

In 1997, I had not yet come upon Gao Xing Jian's writings; I was but a late Sinology student travelling through the foothills of the Himalaya in northwest Sichuan.
During my sojourn in this region approximately the size of France, I met two men from the Qiang minority. To explain their origins clearly to me, they started to sing the song which opens this CD.

In 1999, I was back in Sichuan to collect material on this little-known minority and I extended my field of investigation as I discovered a standpoint slightly different from my original intention. It would become the thread that ties this CD together.
Indeed, in this northwestern part of Sichuan, in villages located at an altitude of 1500 to 3000m in the heart of valleys opening onto the Zagunao Jiang river, three very different ethnic groups have been sharing the same geographical environment and living in harmony for centuries: Hans, Tibetans and Qiangs, three peoples, three languages, three types of beliefs, all in a single, vast territory culminating at more than 7500m, with steppes and high plateaus recalling the proximity of the great Himalayan range.
Unity of place and time thus mark this collection album, recorded not by an ethnologist but simply by a curious man.

Philippe Bouvet

« At this moment I realise that I really exist. »

Gao Xing Jian « La montagne de l’âme »

Sichuan, formerly the kingdom of Shu, has remained a living heart of old China. Chengdu, its capital since the fifth century B.C., retained until the late 20th century a historical city centre whose two-storey wooden house architecture was much damaged by the intensification of post-communist urbanisation.

Resting against the Himalayas with the Gonga Shan culminating at 7556m, the 'Chinese Alps' are so hardly accessible that certain valleys were not discovered until the advent of planes and helicopters. This isolation partly explains the region's ethnographic interest as well as the oral transmission perduring among the Qiangs of the High Valleys in Northwest Sichuan.
This "attic of China" (by its geographical situation) has conveyed the image of a fertile but inaccessible paradise — to the point that in some villages, I will have been the first westerner who travelled and sojourned among the Qiangs.

While the Hans —improperly called the Chinese because they are the majority, and the Tibetans living in China in what was The Great Tibet before the 20th century, have been known for centuries, we have not heard much about the Qiangs, although they are one of the most ancient Chinese people, already acknowledged in the Shang dynasty (1600-1046bc).
Nowadays, some 200 000 Qiangs live on the foothills of the Himalayas. These farmers and breeders are for the most part animists, or Lamaists when they live in districts with a dense Tibetan population. They had no proper writing until the late 20th century, and they have recently started to develop a phonetic transcription of their language in Roman characters.

Philippe Bouvet

« This is their native land, they have no reason not to live here in total freedom; over generations, their roots have plunged deep into the ground. There is no point in your coming from afar searching for roots on their behalf. »

Gao Xing Jian « La montagne de l’âme »

LINK TO THE CD : http://www.budamusique.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=701&category_id=3&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1〈=fr