Raid on Cikou Church
Western missionaries were not always welcome in Yunnan. And when in 1867 they opened a mission in the upper Mekong valley, on the gates of Tibet, they incurred the wrath of Tibet's rulers.
Hidden in the forests above Shangyun 上允 are the ruins of a Buddhist temple fortress founded during the Qing Dynasty by separatist monks from Jizushan who built a significant religious following by the local Lahu and Dai people.
Fei is the father of modern sociology in China: western-trained, he came to Yunnan at the end of the 1930s when China's eastern universities relocated west. In "Earthbound China" he applied modern empirical techniques that he had pioneered around Shanghai to the Chinese hinterland. The economical development, and subsequent societal changes, of three un-named, but typical villages in Yunnan is analyzed in great detail in this fascinating study.
A number of Chinese historic texts covering life and politics in Yunnan have survived over the centuries. I have translated a few of them.