“ALL THE PLACES IN THE WORLD”

BY Clay Larroy

Leisure travel is a wonderful experience that everyone should have in their lifetime. Even business travel can be made enjoyable. There are some aspects of travel that can detract from your enjoyment.  When planning to fly for a trip, don't forget any frequent flier miles you might have racked up. It does you no good to hang onto those once you've already gone on your big vacation. Even if you don't have enough miles to cover the whole trip, many airlines will allow you to discount your rate using your miles. When you want to plan a vacation contact me!

Lijiang, “China a Disappearing Culture”

By Steve Tauschke

Nearby is the Yu Feng Si (Jade Peak) Buddhist monastery, home to the Tibetan Red Hat sect and a 500-year-old sacred camellia tree believed to bloom 10,000 pink flowers each spring. Piling out of our mini-bus, we climb the carved stone steps to view this 5.6-meter-high Ming-era relic. On closer inspection, the camellia is actually an outgrowth of two entangled trees - resembling one male, one female - planted too close together.

During the 1950s, a resident Buddhist monk Nong Lu risked death at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards by secretly watering the tree at night. Now nearing his 90th birthday, this faithful guardian still sits in blissful solitude on a nearby porch, watching over his beloved camellia.

Ten kilometers further south is Lijiang’s main town and star tourist attraction, Dayan. This picture-book quarter is one of China’s most popular sites, boasting the country’s largest collection of free-standing, antiquated wood and stone houses. Built in the 13th century, the charming design of these ornate structures is a poignant reminder of Lijiang’s centuries-old continuous history.

A majority of these dwellings, with their upturned eaves and potted flower-lined terraces, survived a devastating earthquake in 1996 that destroyed adjacent Lijiang’s modern concrete buildings, killing 300 people. That the old quarter withstood the powerful quake is testament to time-honoured Naxi construction methods, where erected wood-pole frames allowed mud-brick walls to collapse outwards leaving both tiled roof tops and village inhabitants largely untouched.

A year later in 1997, amidst a flurry of restoration work, UNESCO listed Lijiang as a World Heritage Cultural site, signaling a new co-existence between tradition and tourism. Today, the town is Yunnan’s contribution to the growing acceptance by the central Chinese government that rampant development is not always welcome. Indeed, bus-loads of Chinese tour groups now flock to pedestrianized Dayan in great numbers to experience firsthand a rapidly vanishing culture - old world China and all its inherent charms.

One of the town’s prettiest features is its twisting network of spring water canals. Fed by the snow-capped Jade Dragon mountains and collected in the nearby Black Dragon Pool - rumored to harbor a mythical dragon among its deep waters and phoenix pavilions - these swiftly-flowing streams are the lifeblood of Lijiang (‘beautiful river’), giving rise to the town’s reputation as the Oriental Venice.

The Naxi have cleverly diverted streams through their homes and kitchens, creating small artesian wells the Chinese call canyi. At the southern end of town, the Baima Long Tan Triple Well divides water pools according to usage; the upstream well is strictly for drinking only, the second well for washing fruit and vegetables and the third for washing clothes.

In the dull half-light of early morning, we follow Dayan’s labrynth of canals, strolling past countless chestnut wood gangplanks that link houses to the myriad stone alleys paved smooth by years of foot traffic. The scene is China in rewind: store holders sleepily remove carved door panels, tai chi-slippered street masseurs limber up, shuffling old Naxi folk hawk fresh vegetables from rusted three-wheel carts and pork buns and jidou liangfen (bean curd jelly) from open windows.

Flanked by weeping willows and red lanterns, and spanned by stone-arch bridges, Dayan’s canals are often wider than the narrow walkways that run beside them, suggesting that it is water and not the road that ultimately guides the way. Most of Dayan’s backstreets invariably lead to bustling Sifang street, actually a market square, the town’s nerve center and once part of a vital tea-horse trading route through to Tibet. Now highly commercialized, the square is ringed by cafes, guest houses and souvenir shops peddling handicrafts, Mao memorabilia and the ubiquitous postcard set, all part of China’s great leap towards modern capitalist success.

Still, the square remains an important meeting place for many of the town’s 40,000 residents and mid-morning elderly Naxi women gather in full costume to sing and line dance in a fabulous ritual that often sweeps up unsuspecting tourists. Forming a long circle chain, they hold hands and stamp their feet in a traditional method called alili designed to keep toes and fingers warm during the cold winter months. This dance is believed to bring to life cultural traditions involving family, love and solidarity.

Unlike the neighboring cobbled town of Dali to the south, Lijiang was originally built for trade, not political purposes, hence its free-form and unfortified architectural layout, quite an exception in wall-obsessed China. With houses cozily integrated together and sharing a single courtyard, the town’s pervading focus is one of unity and harmony where Naxi, Tibetan, Han and Bai people have peacefully co-existed for centuries.

Olden as it is, Lijiang and its hidden beauty are hopefully here to stay.

REFERENCE SITES:

http://www.travelresearchonline.com/

“Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.” 
― Lao Tzu

Travel to experience life!