外刊阅读 | 国家地理 | 双手，而非机器，决定着生活节奏

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星标我，不迷路！

It is too early to tell whether any blockbuster drugs will result.

blockbuster   n.一鸣惊人的事

目前尚无法判断是否会诞生重磅药物。

hands—not machines—define the rhythm of life

手——而不是机器——决定着生活节奏

1

Watch them till the soil. How often have they done this chore? A thousand times? Ten thousand? More? Yet they are incapable of consistency. Over the course of their working life, they will never swing a hoe the same way twice. Or study the fingers of the rattan weaver: His baskets are saved from idiot sameness by tiny, beautiful human errors. Or the big, meaty hands of the stone-setters—the village masons—building simple houses that are actually habitable sculptures: each wall and corner unique, and never quite plumb. Such confident hands. Clever hands. Wise hands, even. Hands that perform everyday tasks with a certain authority, a kind of ineffable power.

Because this is 21st century China: a clichéd panorama of hyperactive megacities, punctual bullet trains, over-lit malls, and hi-tech ports—the famed “factory of the world.” An economy whose tireless conveyor belts satisfy humanity’s vast demand for cell phones, plastic toys, solar panels, clothing, and countless other articles of industrial mass production. 

Yet in the scarps and valleys of western Yunnan Province, bordering Myanmar and Tibet, a startlingly different Middle Kingdom abides: a stronghold of manual, artisanal trades. A cosmos of makeshift villages and crooked roads.“It’s too steep here for industrial farming,” says Shen Jisheng, who hand-plants corn and potatoes atop a piney ridgetop hamlet called Songpo. “So everything we do is organic.”

Shen isn’t exaggerating. His fertilizer is a homemade concoction of pine needles and pig waste. A hand-carved wooden stick functions as a corn de-grainer. Hand-woven shoulder baskets hold his harvests. Even Shen’s small fields defy the rigid geometries imposed by the mechanical world: They’re irregular, amoeboid, lobed.

A shield of mountain walls only partly explains why western Yunnan has largely escaped the tsunami of industrialization enveloping much of the rest of China. The region’s old lifeways also are likely preserved by its complex mosaic of ethnic minorities. On a three-month foot ramble through Yunnan’s lumpy backcountry, starting near Tengchong, hard by the Myanmar border, and hiking more than 500 miles to a popular tourist city called Lijiang in the north, I have encountered such a boggling array of medieval occupations that I’ve begun keeping a list.

China is known as the factory of the world, but for many villagers tucked away in the mountains of Yunnan, hands—not machines—define life.

tuck away  坐落在；使隐藏

中国被称为世界工厂，但对于许多隐居在云南山区的村民来说，他们的生活是靠双手而不是机器来定义的。

Do not romanticize poverty. Do not exoticize underdevelopment. Do not indulge in naïve fantasies about the hardships of preindustrial life. 

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