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Published: August 13th 2010
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Demon?
I'm not sure why the demon's eyes and groin and other very specific areas have been gouged. He is painted on the side of a tea house beside a temple on a hill. Kunming is located approximately in the middle of Yunnan province. It's a metropolis centered among the many popular tourist sites in the region, so I guess it is belatedly that I managed to venture out to see more of Yunnan. I finally got around to it when my mom was visiting: among the many options, we decided to go northwest. The first leg of our trip was a 45-minute flight to Lijiang.
First, a quick geography and culture lesson: Along Yunnan's international border are Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar (Burma). Internally, Yunnan borders Guangxi and Guizhou provinces (not so famous) as well as Sichuan (Szechuan) and Tibet (those should ring a bell). Yunnan thus represents a wild mash-up of Southeast Asian as well as Central Asian and traditional Chinese culture, and it's kind of amazing. Besides its fantastic subtropical highland climate and lovely scenery, one of Yunnan's claims to fame is its level of diversity. The vast majority of China's population identifies as Han (between 90 and 95%). This is your basic white bread (white rice?) Chinese person, from farmer to Party Leader. They're so numerous and widespread that it's hard to point to any significant unifying characteristic other than utter
More Rooftops!
Because it's not okay to go to the countryside in China and not take panoramic shots of rooftops. The top of the house is the best part! domination by numbers. The ethnic minorities making up the last 5-10% of China's population include Mongolians, Manchurians, Hmong, Tibetans, and also other groups that are less well known outside of China. Yunnan province, by contrast, has a Han population of approximately 62%, with 25 different ethnic groups making up the rest. One of the most famous ethnic groups of Yunnan, the Naxi (or Nakhi), are located mostly in Lijiang.
Lijiang (meaning Beautiful River) is a city with a very well preserved Old Town district, which has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The salient characteristics of the Old Town are its narrow, winding cobblestone footpaths, its one- and two-story buildings of stone and wood, and the influence of the Naxi people's culture.
The Naxi are a highlands people who speak a language entirely distinct from Mandarin, related to Tibetan. What they are perhaps most famous for are their matriarchal or matrilineal traditions. One subgroup of the Naxi, the Mosuo, are known for what they call "walking marriage," in which women choose partners to father their children, but do not incorporate these men into their family structure. The children are raised by the mother and her brothers,
Naxi Girl
A modern, upper-middle class four-year-old Naxi girl. Chinese people consider her exceptionally pretty, except for the fact that her complexion is darker than desirable. who live in the same home; at the same time, these brothers may have fathered other children that are in turn raised by their own mothers and maternal uncles. Needless to say, this is a very basic explanation of a complex and varied system. I am not an anthropologist!
Some Naxi maintain their traditional ways and live in villages. While the spoken language is alive and well, many are working to preserve the unique
pictographic script. Some Naxi live and work in the modern part of the city of Lijiang. We had the privilege of a Naxi escort for part of our stay in Lijiang, a modern woman who works in the government, and the cousin of a family I know in Kunming. He Jinzhen (Golden Pearl He) and her husband are both Naxi, and speak the Naxi language at home with their daughter. As a government employee, she also speaks spotlessly standard Mandarin, and some English too. In the company of Golden Pearl and her daughter, we were lucky to get out of the somewhat crowded tourist section of Old Lijiang and visit the less populated district of Shuhe (meaning Cluster of Streams).
Here, we were able to
Naxi Gardens
Among the old buildings of Shuhe there are tracts of vegetable garden. Note the canals flowing between the rows of plants. catch a bit more culture than in the central Old Town district. Golden Pearl showed us to a street that was once a major thoroughfare on the Tea and Horse Road (sometimes called the Southern Silk Road, in contrast to the Northern Silk Road, which traverses the Gobi Desert). Clear canals run along either side of the pedestrian roads in Shuhe. People store glass bottles of yak yogurt in the cold running water to keep them fresh. We walked through the gardens kept by the Naxi living in Shuhe today and encountered several "three-terrace wells." These wells have an upper basin, fed by a clean stream, which drips its overflow into a middle basin, about two feet lower, and finally a lower basin, fed from the middle. The overflow then runs off into the garden canals. Golden Pearl explained that the top basin is used for drinking water, the middle for washing food, and the bottom for washing clothes. This way, contamination is kept to a minimum without wasting water.
That evening we ate at a farmhouse-turned-restaurant. Highlights of the meal were oily mashed potatoes with cilantro (coriander leaves), chicken and cabbage soup, and the local flat bread called
Rainy Restaurant
A cafe with water dripping decoratively off its eaves into the small canal below. You can see it's not raining out; the effect is man-made. baba, which can refer to either a steamed cake or in this case, a pressed, doughy bun.
We said goodbye to Golden Pearl to return to our hotel, which was more of a guesthouse. The courtyard was complete with beautiful stone mosaic work and a water wheel above a koi pond. Such a place is entirely standard and totally affordable for tourists in Lijiang. We paid about $24 U.S. per night, with free Chinese breakfast included--although I must say, much of the Chinese breakfast repertoire is among the few aspects of Chinese food I'm not completely charmed by. Typical breakfast is watery rice porridge (congee) or rice noodles that are quick to disintegrate, topped with shreds of slightly carcinogenic-tasting pickled vegetables and a chopped up hard boiled egg or two. I'm not always in the mood for it, and I much prefer the Kunming variety of fast-food breakfast: mushroom-filled steamed buns and warm soy milk. Even still, I sometimes long for Western breakfast--I think breakfast has a way of really tugging at the comfort food heartstrings.
Most of the two days we spent in Lijiang and Shuhe was just devoted to aimlessly wandering the winding alleys. I quickly
Friendly Reminder
Please, no shopping benders. You are not savages. gave up on the map we'd bought for 75 cents, but Mom managed to work with it a bit so that we did manage to stumble across some of the important sites, like the Temple Hill with its gorgeous view of the town below (and really thought-provoking murals, see above!), and the palatial mansion of the formerly ruling Mu family, charmingly rendered in many English translations as "Mu's House."
The next stop on our trip was Dali, a topic for another entry.
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Heidi / mom
non-member comment
Brings back memories!
Thanks, Erika! Not only did this entry bring back great memories...you also told a bit of history I hadn't caught on to during the trip!