Mongolians in Tonghai, and how we got to ride in a police car

In the county of Tonghai, there are, reputedly 14 000 Mongol descendents of Kublai Khans army from when he came down to conquer the south. Some of the army got left behind, i'm not sure how, and these Mongols fished the lake there and then more recently turned to agriculture as the lake receded. They still retain some elements of their traditional dress, which obviously wasn't suited to the climate and was shortened and altered.

We visited a village (Xingmeng) where about 5000 of these supposedly ethnic Mongols live, still speaking their own language (which I'm certain is nothing like what is spoken in contempory Mongolia). It was hard to figure out who was who in terms of facial features though. The area also had a huge hui population, Muslim Chinese, whose features seem to differ subtly from the Han. We think we saw lots of different looking faces though, and a distinct dress- blue tunics, red scarves on the heads of women, and different jewellry, although while i think the community had distinct dress, i am unsure how mongolian it can have remained after so many years of isolation from the 'mother culture'. We only stayed in the village a couple of hours, but we found the people a lot shyer than where we'd been- people didn't look at us much, even though the town had no tourist infrastructure and would see little foreigners coming through i would say. It must be hard being the ones who got left behind.

In the town of Tonghai itself, we immediatly noticed the Hui population- heaps of street vendors cooking mutton kebabs, roast sweet potatoes, BBQ tofu stuffed with chilli, a mosque- (hard to figure out it was a mosque though), and women with headscarves, men in pillbox hats. We only stayed one night, and went to see the ancient temples on the holy buddhist hill in town. This would have been a pleasant experience- saw some trees that were hundreds of years old- pistacios, camellias, magnolias. When we arrived at the top, it seemed to be snowing or sleeting- but that was impossible as just outside the temple at the top it was not raining or anything. Then we saw there was ice falling out of the super high trees inside the courtyard! It was 1pm, and there hadn't been ice in the trees on the way up, although the day felt bitterly cold and even the locals were complaining. So it was a surprise to see ice falling as if it was snowing in the top courtyard- those trees must sit up in the cloud and stay cold most of the day!

Anyway, it was up in the top temple that i realised I was missing my camera, and we spent the next hour or two going back down and up the hill (the chinese call it a Shan which is technically a mountain) looking for it, and finally accepting it lost or stolen. I may have left it somewhere, but where-ever that might have been it was no longer there a bit later. I am quite baffled as I don't feel like I would have left it somewhere, and we hardly stopped anywhere where I would have put it down.

Today (this happened yesterday), we went to the police in kunming, a pretty big city, to make a report, hopefully my insurance will cover this. This is how we got to get driven from one station across to another one, to get a report, in the police car. Very priviledged service- at first I think they were just going to tell us to go to the other one ourselves, but then I must have managed to look/ sound clueless enough! I signed my name on the report in the space labelled 'Loser's signature'. After that we got dropped off at our hotel in the police car! It was much less intimidating and stressful than I was fearing.

Luckily I only had a few days worth of photos stored on the camera, but the worst loss is the photo of the lady with bound feet. As I itemised the value of the batteries, memory card etc, I could not but help think of the mastercard ad, that picture: 'priceless'.