Japanese climber's mission to fill in blanks on China map
Tamotsu Nakamura, 82, a businessman turned explorer, has spent his retirement scaling unclimbed peaks in China's west and south. And the adventure is not over yet, he tells Paul Niel
IT ALL BEGAN IN YUNNAN I was born in Tokyo and grew up during the second world war. My interest in the outdoors started as a teenager but it took until university before I could join my friends in mountaineering. From early on I was fascinated by the exploration of unknown territories and, in the 1960s, I was lucky to be part of a Japanese expedition to South America. There we undertook several first ascents of peaks in the Cordillera Blanca, in Peru, and in the Bolivian Andes.
No porters, no maps: Hong Kong adventurer in first climb of remote China peak
A key turning point in my life was moving to Hong Kong (Nakamura was sent to the city by the tunnel-building company he worked for and lived in Sheung Wan from 1989 to 1994). It was on holiday in Lijiang, Yunnan province, that I experienced a deeply touching moment: I saw for the first time the Yulong Xueshan, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The mountain was the spark for my personal odyssey through western China, which lasted for more than two decades.
PEAK PERFORMANCE In the beginning I travelled mostly to the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, then gradually moved my interest to eastern Tibet, where a lot of areas remained blank spots on the map. I found hundreds, maybe thousands, of unknown and unclimbed peaks bordered by the Himalayas in the west, the deep gorges of the Yangtze and Mekong in the south, and the Chinese plain in the east. In search of new discoveries I have returned to this area again and again on more than 37 expeditions in the past 25 years. The uniqueness of the area lies in the variety of its landscapes: many peaks tower into the sky, not unlike the Alps; others are glaciated and resemble the mountains of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. I was also fascinated by the minority people that live in these remote valleys – the unique cultures of the Khamba, Kongbo and Pome people on the eastern Tibetan plain or those of northwestern Yunnan that live along the Mekong and Salween rivers.
Climbers drawn to uncharted China mountain range
The main reason this area has remained so remote is that the logistics to get there are often very complicated – Chengdu, Kunming and Kathmandu provide the main access points. But the tricky part is the red tape; permission has to be obtained from up to four organisations and often there is no official procedure or tariff and the process is subject to negotiation and the goodwill of the local government representative. In 1999, my partner and I were arrested in Nyingchi prefecture, in east Tibet, for not having a travel permit, despite having obtained all the correct papers. We were released a day later but the incident put me on a black list for more than a year and a half and it took a lot of effort, money and good contacts to get the travel ban lifted.