The Price Of Salt

In Myanmar's far north, the body parts of endangered wildlife are bartered for a scarce and highly prized commodity.

I took off my boots and crouched down at the doorway to enter the smoke-filled hut. The village headman, his outline barely visible, was comfortably settled beside a small fire burning in the center of the room. After motioning me to sit beside him on a pile of deerskins, he placed a teapot on the burning coals. A woman came out of the shadows and carefully handed over a much-dirtied paper packet. Turning to me as if to make sure I watched what he was doing, the headman opened the packet and poured most of the contents into the teapot, then emptied the remainder into my cup. I'd been through this ritual many times during the previous week, but it still fascinated me. He was sharing one of his most precious possessions--and giving me a little extra--to acknowledge the value he placed on my visit. A common condiment throughout the modern world but desperately scarce and highly prized in this remote mountain region, it was the central player in a bartering system that provided the local people's only regular contact with the outside world. The headman was giving me salt.

It was March 1997, and I was accompanying a team of eight scientists and forestry officials on a wildlife survey through the mountainous northern region of Myanmar (formerly Burma). Called "the most forbidding terrain on Earth" by Frank Kingdon-Ward, a British botanist who collected plants there in the 1930s, northern Myanmar remains one of the most biologically unknown and unspoiled regions in Indochina. The area's plants originated during the Miocene, presumably became isolated during the turbulent glacial and interglacial period of the Pleistocene, and have remained isolated to this day.

I had first visited the region in 1996 and had gotten as far as the town of Putao, gateway to the rugged terrain where the eastern Himalaya meet up with the Gaoligong Shan and Hengduan Shan ranges that define the border between Myanmar and China. At the town's market, I had discovered the magnificent horns of a blue sheep while examining wildlife body parts being offered for sale. Blue sheep were known from neighboring Tibet, but this specimen had reportedly been killed north of Putao, in what are locally referred to as the "icy mountains."

As the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Director of Science for Asia, I had arranged with Myanmar's Department of Forestry. to make biological surveys here and to recommend specific areas for protection. Now, in 1997, having walked 250 miles from Putao in the course of nearly a month, we were close to the border with Tibet. The hut where I was drinking tea was in Tahawndam, an enclave of Burmese Tibetans (the Rawang are the region's other principal ethnic group) and the last village one encounters before reaching Myanmar's tallest peak, Hkakabo Razi.

Long before arriving in Tahawndam, we had passed through a dense subtropical forest--the northernmost range of most Indo-Malayan animals-and had entered the temperate and alpine habitats of the lesser known Sino-Himalayan wildlife. This was the most rugged country I had ever been in. Between valleys and mountain passes, we followed trails that climbed precipitously from 1,500 to more than 10,000 feet. Weather and punishing terrain restricted our movements much beyond Tahawndam, but we had already found three large mammal species not previously known to live in Myanmar: blue sheep, black muntjac (barking deer), and stone marten. Our most exciting find, as we moved north through the transition zone between subtropical and temperate forest habitat, was a deer not quite two feet tall and weighing less than twenty-five pounds. I suspected I was looking at an animal few people, if any, had ever seen outside the region. Further examination of more of these deer--called leaf deer by local hunters--would later confirm my suspicion: this was a species new to science (it is also one of the smallest, and possibly most primitive, members of the Cervidae family).

These important discoveries made me even more concerned about the issue of wildlife protection. Although the people of the region were primarily simple agriculturists, growing staple crops of wheat, corn, and millet, they also hunted. In many village homes, there were skulls mounted on trophy boards--a practice based on the animistic belief that it will bring success on future hunts. Skins, horns, and other animal parts were piled in the corners, waiting to be exchanged for basic necessities when traders came from Myanmar's towns and villages to the south, from neighboring Tibet, or from China's Yunnan Province. At the heart of this trade was salt.

The use of salt can be documented as far back as Neolithic times and has long played a pivotal role in human affairs. Settlements have flourished or disappeared because of salt. The historical record indicates that this substance was one of the single most valuable items of commerce in developing civilizations and was also often the currency used both for taxing and rewarding the populace. In China a system of collecting salt as tribute was in place by about 2000 B.C. The word "salary" comes from the Latin salarium, referring to the salt payments given to Roman soldiers.