Canals, rain and Naxi culture in Lijiang

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We left Dali on a tiny minbus and headed north to Lijiang - a trip which took 3 hours. Lijiang is situated in a beautiful valley and is surrounded by mountains, including the 5500 metre high Jade Dragon Snow Mountain - the peak of which we didn’t get to see! The bus dropped us in modern Lijiang, which was the usual conglomeration of cement, dirt, bustle and sprawl. Not at all attractive. We caught a taxi the 3 kilometres to the old town and were dropped off at the entrance. The streets within the old city are too narrow for any traffic so it very peaceful - or at least the streets away from the centre were! The city was crisscrossed with canals and tiny bridges and was a maze of tiny cobbled streets. Lijiang was leveled in 1996 by an earthquake which killed 300 people and injured 16,000. While most of the newer city was damaged much of the old city was unharmed. In the rebuilding the Chinese government took note of the fact that the old architecture survived the earthquake and rebuilt many of the surrounding villages in the old style. The earthquake made the world aware of this beautiful area and it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1999. Hoever our first impression of the old city was crowds! And more crowds! Lijinag is one of the principle tourist areas for Chinese tourists and a popular honeymoon spot. And we were there in the middle of the top holiday season.

It was a very hard place to find your way around - particularly without a good map and all the maps we found were in Chinese - so we had trouble finding some of the guest houses recommended in our guide book. Every small hotel was either full or we got the ‘no room’ mantra which basically meant that they didn't want the hassle of non Chinese speaking guests. Eventually we found a youth hostel with a room - it was tiny, damp and overpriced at 150 yuan a night but did have a minute ensuite bathroom. Dumping our bags we set off to explore. It was an incredibly pretty place - full of dozens of restaurants and literally hundreds of tiny shops. The prices in the shops were surprisingly cheap - certainly the cheapest we had come across in our travels. In the evening it seemed to get busier as people returned from daytrips and came out of air conditioned rooms - it was still hot during the middle of the day. And Lijiang was even prettier in the evening as it was aglow with hundreds of red lanterns. It was the cleanest place, other then the Juizhaigou National Park, that we had seen. In fact it was nearly sterile! Late in the evening gangs of people would go around the streets with tweezers and pick cigarette butts and toothpicks from the cracks in the cobble stones.

The city had some great cafes though and we found a few we liked and rotated between them all. We spent a fair bit of time in some - especially once the rain started! Our second day in Lijiang we caught a bus to the village of Baisha which was once the capital of the Naxi kingdom and was a fascinating place to watch the locals live life as they have lived it for centuries. The Naxi have lived in this area for 1400 years and it is a matriarchal society - even today. They have flexible ‘love affairs’ and couples don’t set up residence together as they both live with their respective parents. All children belong to the women only and are not financially supported by the men once the relationship is over. The Naxi women wear blue trousers and blouses covered by a black apron. They also wear a T shape heavily padded sheep skin cape which prevents their back baskets from chafing but also represents the heavens. Day and night are represented by the black and white colour and each cape has seven embroidered circles symbolize the stars. Also on each shoulder many have embroidered frog eyes. Frogs were once important Naxi gods. The Naxi still use a hieroglyphic (picture language) - the only such language still in use today in the world. The whole area is covered in these symbols - all their buildings and of course all the tourist souvenirs. Most of the houses in Baisha and surrounding villages were made from mud and the streets were lined with water channels which the locals used to wash clothes, vegetables and themselves in. It was also the water supply for the village. One of the tourist attractions in Lijiang is a concert by the Naxi Orchestra who play Taoist temple music on traditional instruments. The members of the orchestra are very elderly and many of them use instruments that they buried to save them during the Cultural Revolution. Many of these musicians live in Baisha and Jerry spent a happy hour with them playing music .We had a fascinating day there and actually booked two nights accommodation at the only guest house in the village for a couple of days. We were planning on returning in a another two days and then were going to go to Tiger Leaping Gorge and further north. We left the village and walked the 12 kilometres through the fields and mud to Lijiang. We were very happy to see the apartment blocks of the new city - it had been much further then we expected! We caught a bus back into the centre of the city from the outskirts.

That evening the rain started! It had been raining lightly on and off for the last week or so but it began to pour heavily that night. We woke next morning to heavy rain and our tiny room in the hostel was not just damp but cold and wet by then! We knew we couldn’t stay there any longer and spent a couple of hours finding somewhere else to stay. We found a room at a small family guesthouse which was dry, warm and much bigger (though also more expensive) which was thankfully not too far from the hostel as we had to move our luggage across in pouring rain. We spent part of the day trying to arrange a bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge but were unable to do it as all the roads were closed due to flooding. We realised then that we weren’t going to be able to travel up to the border with Tibet as we were told that there was severe flooding and landslides in that area. Even the airport in Zhongdian was closed and remained closed for the next few days. We spent the remainder of the day reading in our room or sipping tea in one of the cafes watching the Chinese tourists splash through the streets under brightly coloured umbrellas. We felt very sorry for them as most would have been on their annual 3 or 4 day, long saved for holiday so they had no choice but to stay out in the rain and see as much as possible.

Next morning we woke to less rain but a lot of mud so decided to cancel our booking in Baisha as it was in a guesthouse on a farm and we would have been ankle deep in mud. We spent the day exploring the outer streets of Lijiang. It was very quite and we got lost regularly as it was a real maze. We also found the markets and streets full of small eateries and shops, catering to the locals, not the tourists. We also climbed to Lion Hill park and explored the pretty temple within the park. The temple was 5 stories high and supposedly the highest wooden building in China. It had 9,999 dragons carved into various parts of the building. As the park was above the city we had a great view of the rooftops of Lijinag which certainly showed how closely together the houses were built. That evening we wandered around the city again and spent some time watching people float candles on paper flowers down the canals for good luck. It was a very pretty sight. We watched groups of local Naxi ladies circle dancing in the square. They spent hours dancing in traditional dress there every day. I'm sure that the government must pay those ladies to dance there - not a bad way to earn a wage I guess. They certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves. We have heard that the Yunnan Provincial Government to pay the local people extra money to wear traditional dress whilst they go about their everyday lifes. I think that's a good idea - both for tourism and to keep their cultural roots alive.

Next day we caught the bus back to Baisha and explored the village yet again - this time though we visited the Dabaoji Palace to see the famous frescoes. The palace was beautiful but we were unimpressed with the frescoes. They had been damaged by the Red Guards during the cultural revolution and were in a pretty bad state of repair. We decided to walk from Baisha into the countryside (this time away from Lijiang) to the Jade Peak Temple to see the 400 year old camellia tree in the grounds. A monk risked his life watering the tree to keep it alive during the cultural revolution. We walked a long way, passing some small villages and many curious locals. Eventually we saw the temple - on top of a hill with a very long road heading upwards. Just then an empty taxi went past which we flagged down - I wasn't looking forward to trudging up the hill. We spent a couple of hours in the temple grounds, admiring the architecture and the tree! Unfortunately there were no taxis or buses outside when we left so we walked down the hill and quite a distance before flagging down another minibus to take us back to Lijiang. it dropped us off somewhere in the new city, giving us a new problem of how to find our way back to the old town!

We checked whether the road to the Gorge had miraculously opened but of course it hadn't. That evening the rain started again. We had discussed going up to the top of the 5500 metre peak of Jade Snow Mountain but everybody we spoke to said that when they got to the top they couldn't see anything due to heavy fog (or clouds) and that it was bitterly cold. This was before the rain started so that plan was definetly abandoned. All the travel agents we spoke to said that the Gorge was not going to open in the near future and other tourists described the difficulties they had getting back from Zhongdian (including having to hire private transport which they then had to help push through mud etc) so we also abandoned any idea we had of going to the Tibetan areas close to the Tibetan border. Thankfully though we had already had a good insight into Tibetan culture in the Aba Grasslands. The crowds in Lijiang had started to get the better of us and we decided to leave next day and return to Dali. It was a really beautiful town and we would love to revisit the area again - but not during July or August.

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Photos

Street scene in Lijiang 2
Note the lady washing her hair in the plastic bowl. People washing on the street is a common sight in China.

Street scene in Lijiang 3
Lijiang is a maze of canals and cobbled streets hung with red lanterns - very picturesque.

A lady from one of the minority groups in the area.
Note the amazing flat hat - I would hate to wear it in high wind!

The streets of Baisha 1
This tiny Naxi village was 11 kilometres from Lijiang.

The streets of Baisha 2
A Naxi lady washing vegetables in the canals at Baisha.

Washing clothes in Baisha.
Note the heavy pads the women wear to protect their backs.

Working in the fields..
Note the fibre raincoat!

Resting between dances.
Large groups of women each day would dance circle dancers in the squares of Lijiang. I'm sure the Government must pay them to do it!

Chinken feet and Naxi bread , which was fried and quite heavy to eat.
We didn't sample the chicken feet!