The China Journey

Claes Eliasson, Bäcktorpet, Torphyttan 16, 711 91 Lindesberg

Since my youth, the dream of experiencing nature and especially the butterfly fauna at the other end of the Eurasian continent has attracted me. I realized this dream in 1989 when the political climate in the communist world began to show signs of spring. At least in China, it had become relatively free to travel independently, as long as one stayed in places approved by the authorities.

However, butterfly collecting there took a frightening turn and gained new relevance in 1996 through the misfortunes of five Swedish colleagues in Indonesia. One of the reasons many Asian countries today are so strict about butterfly collecting can best be described by Sven Järring's pithy words: "Japanese, Japanese, Japanese, Japanese everywhere." At the place where I was arrested, the policemen spoke proudly about having already caught nine Japanese before me and that I was the first Westerner. Unfortunately, it seems nearly hopeless to obtain permission to conduct collections in China. I was supposed to meet up with Laszlo Ronkay and other Hungarians in Urumehi. They had managed to negotiate a permit. The conditions must be considered horrendous. The Chinese Agricultural Authority demanded, in exchange for every Chinese butterfly collected, one prepared and labeled butterfly from Europe! For this reason, no further expeditions were planned. The 1989 expedition was stopped due to the student uprising at Tiananmen Square.

I arrived in Beijing in the first days of April when the cherry trees were blooming and the blue jays (the same species as in Spain) played in the trees in the city's parks. It was a fantastic start after a tedious journey through Siberia's flat, lake-poor forest steppe with several days of only birch and meadows outside the train window. We joked about certainly traveling through secret areas and that what we saw was only the same backdrop being cranked past the window.

The natural variation only began after Krasnoyarsk, where pine, spruce, larch, and especially aspen became common. A few miles beyond Lake Baikal, the forest ended and thereafter only rolling steppe landscape remained with some poplars and willows in the river valleys. The only noteworthy sight during the entire journey was two Whooper Swans in a gigantic reed marsh that was still frozen. This was along the way between the border and Harbin.

Northern China was still in its coldest phase upon my arrival, so I traveled southwest to Sichuan Province and stayed in the small university town of Emei Shan at the foot of the mountain of the same name. The mountain is an ancient pilgrimage site for Buddhists. In one of many temples, a few elderly monks and their young novices still lived. They had been allowed to represent the rejected past. It was excellent to stay there, and from here I made daily excursions at the foot of the mountain to fields cultivated with mustard plants and the half-dried riverbed where, in particular, women's washing places and other wastewater from small outlets attracted butterflies. According to two English teachers who had lived at the university for a couple of years, I had extraordinary luck with the weather, as there are only 25 cloudless days per year and I got an entire week.

With each passing day, more and more butterflies emerged, and it is primarily the Papilionidae that I remember from here. Two species were very common. They were Pazala eurous and an Achillides species that readily visited mustard flowers. On dirty water patches by the riverbed, I caught one of the nervous Idaides species, which with the fitting name bluebottle, in the heat reminded an absorbed entomologist that he too must drink occasionally. The equally extremely fast-flying sap-feeding nymphalid Polyura eudamippus I caught on a dead mouse. The powerful wingbeats of these butterflies mean that wings easily break apart in boxes that are too small.

Here by the river I was also mocked every day by the beautiful blue Kaniska canace, which resolutely refused to land. In the shadier parts of the river where the forest began, flew a pleasant orange and black species of the Neptis species, which are very well represented in Asia. These species have a very appealing sailing flight and are easy to photograph or catch. The most difficult species to catch was, however, a large tiger beetle of the genus Cicindela, which I crept up on using a landing net. It moved constantly in circles, but despite countless misses, I eventually caught a colorful specimen in red/green and blue, about twice as large as our campestris.

Night butterfly collecting was less rewarding as the lighting everywhere consisted of ordinary incandescent bulbs. A day's walk along the road up the mountain did, however, lead me to a good spot. This was a small power station where butterflies had gathered everywhere on the walls inside the building. With the help of a small sketchbook and net, I explained to the Chinese what I wanted to do in there, and they subsequently watched me laughing. The only night butterfly I possibly collected here and still remember was a very powerful night flyer with blue-banded hindwings. I saw it later during flight when it made a strange sound. Laszlo Ronkay later showed me that this is produced by a bladder in the hindwing. In the Emei Shan area, I saw no species that were familiar from Europe.

I moved from here in a south-southwest direction to the northernmost part of Yunnan Province and the small picturesque town of Lijiang in a valley at perhaps 2,500 meters above sea level, east of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which is perpetually snow-covered at 5,586 meters above sea level. Despite a persistent cold wind from the mountains, the butterfly richness was great, and I encountered for the first time a familiar species, the swallowtail, Papilio machaon. More common, however, was Papilio xuthus, which is quite similar to our swallowtail.

After a few days, I discovered that all day butterflies were drawn to watercourses. Perhaps something like a counterpart to the hilltoppingeffekt where butterflies with sparse populations are drawn to heights. They naturally needed moisture, but subsequently moved little from the small channels of meltwater that found their way down from the mountains. For several weeks, I experienced no rain, and it seemed to be the normal order that spring here is bone-dry just as in the Himalayas and that rain arrives only with the respective monsoon. The area was particularly rich in Lycaenidae with incredibly beautiful small Heliophorus species. Only one Neptis species flew here and may well have been the banded glider found in Europe, Neptis rivularis. Two skippers were absolutely enormously charming and not entirely easy to catch in the net. These were a Carterocephalus species, probably C. alcinoides, and the powerful Lobocla liliana. In Europe, we lack large skipper species similar to liliana, and it was pleasant to outsmart it. The sweet alcinoides almost gave me homesickness for meadows with silvicolus and palaemon.

In the dry pine forests, a Hipparchia species flew so rarely that I failed to catch any. Blooming Azalea and Rhododendron had no visiting butterflies, and I therefore preferred to stay in pastures with legumes and shrubs.

The next stop on the journey was the fateful town of Dali for me, on the shore of Lake Erhai. Here I was already as far south as the 26th parallel (corresponding to the Canary Islands), so it was somewhat surprising that so many species were still entirely familiar. By the lake at 1,800 meters above sea level, I found larvae of the rosy marsh moth, Arsilonche albovenosa, which I reared after a couple of weeks. On common aspen, Populus tremula, on the mountain slope, I collected larvae of the common puss moth, Dicranura vinula. Despite the move from Lijiang being relatively short, the fauna changed considerably, which may have been due to the somewhat lower altitude and the approaching summer.

Each day I followed one of the countless small rivers up into the mountains and here encountered silver pheasants and a large marten which the Chinese called choli. The terrain changed rapidly from open pastures on the moraine-covered foot of the mountains to impenetrable scrub and bamboo thicket where the rivers disappeared into deep ravines. Best was to follow the hunters' trodden paths and watch out for their pheasant snares or to balance on the edge of irrigation channels that diverted water deeper into the mountain. In the actual transition to forest, butterfly fauna was richest with several species of the inedible Byasa, Windmills, which could sail but rarely flew away from a running net. Furthermore, a couple of species of Dodona, Argynnis, and Vanessa indica.

Only one grass butterfly genus was represented, Ypthima. The great species richness was as before among the Lycaenidae. Over these mountains, clouds constantly hung, and one soon entered the cloud forest where only occasional sluggish Windmills struggled upward with lazy wingbeats, or glided down on falling winds. I found only a small pleasant butterfly oasis in the denser pine forest at higher altitude. This consisted of a depression with an open fen with a blue iris species, ferns, cloudberries, and several large-growing Oriental unknown plant species. A small sooty-black metallic-winged forester, Procris, was here in great abundance, which surprised me as I had not seen any species in this family before. On poplars at the edge of the terraced fields at the foot of the mountains, numerous pupal cases on the trunks revealed that a larger clearwing, probably a Paranthrene species, was on the wing. I tried an entire battery of Nils Ryrholm's pheromones, but these were apparently not sufficiently exotic.

In mid-May, I left Dali for the tropical southern part of Yunnan and traveled to Jinghong in Xishuangbanna on the Mekong River. Here I waved the net less, as I was less inclined to collect the large number of tropical species. The first day I was constantly bitten by large Papilio species, the beautiful black ones with emerald green and blue markings. Even when these sat still, the air cushion in front of the net seemed sufficient for them to slip to the side with their large wing area. The pine forests here were full of a very large genuine tiger moth species that had defoliated the trees and spun cocoons on the trunks, similar to those of the pine-tree lappet, Dendrolimus pini, but considerably larger.

Upon returning to Dali, there was more activity around the town's few mercury vapor lamps, and I made a nighttime raid every dawn. I soon discovered that Chinese bats are more cunning than our species. These picked sitting butterflies from the wall. Left were only inedible species of the family Arctidae and a large yellowish-green Saturnid, the moon moth, Actias selene, which the bats probably perceived as too large a catch. Closer to ground level, one could, however, find some night flyers, but generally, the fauna here seemed to be in the quiet phase we are accustomed to in Sweden after the spring flight itself. An impressive species in any case was the black-banded prominent, Acronycta major, which resembles our psi but with double wingspan, and the very beautiful metallic-gleaming scarlet tiger, Callimorpha principalis. The latter I also found freshly emerged in daytime, but only in urbanized areas with many nettles.

The hour of fate had now struck, and a chambermaid at the hotel caught me with all butterflies spread out on the bed. The police waited, however, a few more days, until I checked out of the hotel and booked a bus seat. The raid should preferably yield maximum in fines, which was calculated based on the number of collected insects. The best policy perhaps would have been to stay there for good and let them wait until they could have become millionaires! The fine was the neat sum of 500 US dollars, not including all material, film, and notes. Thereafter, expulsion with a ten-day residence permit for the exit, which took me to Hong Kong, where I arrived a day before all tourists in China were instructed to leave the country for their safety. I later got a small revenge on the police.