Ashley Diary--Nadamu in Xiwuqi

By Ashley Eldridge

From Xilinhot, we set off to the east, to Xiwuqi (which, ironically, means West XX Banner), to catch the local Nadamu. The Nadamu is an annual, three-day sports competition encompassing the entire banner. In this year's competition, one-tenth of area residents were set to compete, with 500 men in the wrestling competition alone. Most of the remaining 9,000 turned up to watch the first day's festivities, so the atmosphere when we pulled up was something like that of a carnival - one in which I was the Elephant Woman. In such a rural area, my blond hair and bright blue party dress (we were told to wear our most colorful clothes) stood out like the lone flower in a meadow of identical blades of grass. People stared, people pointed, people took photos of me with and without their elderly relatives.

After escaping to the press box, I settled back to watch the wrestling. There was plenty of time in which to settle. The announcer, out of respect to the competitors, named each wrestler, racer, and archer by name and brief biographical details. The wrestlers came swaggering forward group by group, the best among them bedecked in ribboned collars. The jockeys paraded past clutching staffs bearing the insignia of the ancient Mongol tribes as tribal music throbbed through the loudspeakers. Watching the hundreds of men advancing on horseback against the brilliant backdrop of the grasslands, it felt like I had been time warped onto the set of a big-budget Hollywood epic.

Just before noon, the wrestling began. All of the competitors took the field at once, pairing off according to the results of a random draw. After the build-up, the actual matches ended rather abruptly. By Mongolian wrestling rules, a wrestler wins by knocking the other down - no pinning, no counting, no fuss. All but one pair finished within a couple of minutes, the victors departing after a few rounds of photos to prepare for the coming nine rounds of competition. The remaining two, a heavyset man whose strategy seemed to consist solely of planting himself in the mud and wearing down his lithe, young opponent, stayed locked in combat for nearly 40 minutes. The younger guy finally exhausted himself enough for the heavy man, sweat trickling through the folds of fat around his midsection, to topple him.

With that, the remaining spectators dispersed on foot over the hills toward town. A lucky handful hitched rides on our bus, as is the local custom. Back in town, we were warned to avoid major areas, where drunken revelers could potentially get out of hand in their excitement at the area's biggest social event of the year. My colleagues and I retreated to our hotel rooms to prepare for the long drive to our next destination in the morning.