As my hiking boots hit the first steps of the wooden trestle, I suddenly remembered the words of a Yellowstone Park ranger: “True time travel doesn’t require a time machine, only a pair of eyes that can penetrate the rocks.” Standing in Jiuzhaigou in northwestern Sichuan at the moment, watching the peacock-blue waters of the lake awakening in the morning mist, I suddenly realized the meaning of this saying – every drop of water here carries the memory of 200 million years.
Fingerprints of glaciers
In the primitive forest at an altitude of 3,000 meters, the needles of fir condensed with the morning dew. My Tibetan guide, Zhaxi, hands me a rock with shell patterns, “This is the deed to a house in the ancient ocean.” His dark fingers traced across the surface of the rock, “When the Tibetan Plateau rose from the bottom of the sea, Jiuzhaigou was the last undersea dweller to let go.”
Walking along Shuzhenggou, the 108 seas look like palettes overturned by the gods. At the bottom of the Wuhua Sea’s lake sleep thousand-year-old trees, their calcified branches slowly crystallizing in the flowing minerals, creating the spectacle of an underwater forest. American photographer Mark exclaimed as he set up his tripod, “This is more precise than the Grand Canyon’s geologic clock, and every piece of algae is calibrating the time for the earth.”
The monsoon writes its diary
The alpine azaleas bloom regardless in June, coloring the cliffs into pink and purple waterfalls. Emily, a backpacker from Seattle, spreads her arms wide in front of Pearl Beach Falls, “Look at these calcium carbonate terraces! Like lasagna yards of God’s own hands.” What she doesn’t know is that it takes 1,500 years of running water to stack these “cake layers” to a thickness of one centimeter.
The Changhai Sea in late fall is like a piece of liquid amber, with golden larch reflections sinking to the bottom of the 40-meter-deep lake. Wang Kai, a young man from Beijing, discovered while taking aerial photographs, “The lake changes color in different seasons!” This is actually a chemical dance between algae and minerals – lime green in spring, turquoise blue in the height of summer, and indigo violet in late autumn, each color a code for a specific temperature and light.
New life in the ruins
The 2017 earthquake tore huge fissures next to Norilang Waterfall, and now stubborn gerberas are drilling out of the cracks. Xiao Chen, a staff member of the reserve, points to the rebuilt Tibetan cottage: “We use traditional mortise and tenon construction, just like restoring an ancient bell from the Ming Dynasty.” At the Panda Sea restoration site, workers clean up landslides like surgeons, and beneath their feet, a new layer of calcareous is growing at a rate of 0.3 millimeters per year.
When she stays at Shuzheng Zhai at night, 75-year-old Ama Drolgar turns the sutra: “Tourists bring colored candies and also colored plastic bags.” She teaches me to distinguish real cordyceps, “True guardianship is not to shut the beauty into a safe, but to let the landscape continue to grow.” The next morning, I see rangers using yak-hair brushes to clean moss from the trestles – they refuse to use chemicals for fear of disturbing the ancient microorganisms in the water.
Eternal Time Zone
As I stand in the primary forest observatory at an altitude of 3,100 meters, Dr. Li, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is recording the annual rings of the fir: “These trees remember the Little Ice Age of the Ming Dynasty, and the global warming of the twentieth century.” The breathing curve of Jiuzhaigou jumps on his computer screen – the pH value of the lake, the negative oxygen ions in the air, the activity radius of the golden monkeys, each data is the pulse of the earth.
On the way back, Zhaxi sings an ancient Qiang song, the lyrics flowing with the rhythm of glacial meltwater. Professor Bryan of the University of Chicago’s geology department suddenly said, “I finally understand why this place is called ‘Jiuzhaigou’-nine is the extreme number in Chinese, and this place harbors the Earth’s ultimate time code.”
As the last rays of the setting sun tinted the Sea of Reeds in gold leaf, my sports camera showed that I had walked 23 kilometers. But time loses its metric significance here – in the reflection of the Sea of Mirrors, the clouds take a second to travel a thousand years, while it takes three hundred years for the calcified wood under the water to complete a flip. Perhaps this is the magic of Jiuzhaigou: it allows engineers from Silicon Valley to forget about cell phone signals, traders on Wall Street to put down their K-line charts, and every modern human being to become a child of the earth again and find his or her own coordinates in four-dimensional time and space.
