Story: Making Peace With Lijiang

There must be so many small corners of China that deliver the sensory experience of the Old Country without the admission fees and flag-waving tour groups of the New Country. I suppose if I had the benefit of better language skills and more of a PeaceCorps sense of adventure in this ninth month of my year-long trip through Asia, I would be riding for days in cramped mini-vans and sleeping on straw beds to discover these places.

But pacing wins the marathon and sometimes I have to behave like I'm on vacation, like normal people just taking a break, and not making a job of moving around and roughing it. Experiences on a long trip are collected like paychecks and then, when it feels like I’ve hustled enough weird conversations in bus stations and awkward stares in back alley produce markets, I go to Lijiang.

Lijiang is something of an Old China theme park. You’ve read the newspaper, so you know that China is modernizing and growing at breakneck speed. When the harried, overworked residents of the bulging cities of the East need a break from the ladder, they turn to the remnants of Old China. Specifically, they turn to the remnants that have been groomed and pimped for tourism, remnants like Lijiang.

Things weren't always like this. In 1996, this 800 year old powerhouse of the Song Dynasty suffered the effects of a massive earthquake. With the deaths of more than five thousand people, the region's dominant Naxi culture suffered a tremendous loss. In response, the Chinese government restored the entirety of Lijiang's Old Town to it's "authentic" Song Dynasty form. The New Old Lijiang was marketed as China's premiere ancient village experience. Naxi culture in the area began to flourish again - this time for the benefit of a steady stream of international shutterbugs.

The Old Town of Lijiang is indeed a sight to behold. It is every picture you’ve seen of the ancient Chinese village; a cobblestone maze of narrow streets lit by glowing red lanterns, rushing canals and bubbling wells for washing clothes, washing babies and washing lettuce, brick buildings and lattice shutters topped by moss-covered tile roofs that swoop and dive in unison and a parade of leathery old villagers hobbling on canes and grooming long gray beards.

The Old Town of Lijiang is also every picture of the modern tourist trap – gift shops, “Visa Accepted” signs, gift shops, cell phones, gift shops, tour buses, fancy coffee, gift shops and travel agencies. It’s the kind of place that a great number of independent travelers would avoid, based on this information alone.

What saves Lijiang, however, is it’s size and the adaptability of its still majority ethnic inhabitants, the Naxi. While most every traditional blacksmith, laundry, grocery, tea and medicine shop in Lijiang’s Old Town has been replaced with souvenir and clothing shops of wildly variable success and interest, the Naxi culture has adapted. Those who have left Old Town for the glittering condos of New Town have made small fortunes by leasing their heritage property for guesthouses and restaurants. And the multi-generational families still living in the old town peddle crafts and traditional foods to tourists (tailored slightly to Western and mainstream Chinese tastes). They still buy their raw food from bewildered old farmers who walk the Old Town melee every day. They walk their children to school in the morning, and they gather around tables of Chinese chess, poker and mahjong when the day is long. Even better, if you wake up before the daily tour group invasion, the narrow streets and chaotic food market are as misty and magical as the day they were first built.

Strip the Old Town of its layers of new commerce and what’s underneath is actually a rare gem in Asia – a place that’s as teeming with honest, storybook scenes of old lives as it is full of comfortable guesthouses and delectable international cuisine. Lijiang had me for eight full days and I completely lost track of time.