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The legend of Lijiang has been fed by a succession of adventurers, starting with the irascible 1920s Austrian-born eccentric Joseph Rock who supplied National Geographic with some of its most exotic coverage, to Peter Goullart, whose captivating book, Forgotten Kingdom, recalls life before ‘Liberation’ amongst the shamans, petulant princesses, matrons and merchants, even the bandits with whom he mixed.
The legend sits uncomfortably with the reality of a modern Chinese provincial city, twinned with a heritage district so meticulously preserved and in part rebuilt following the 1996 earthquake as to resemble a museum town through which backpackers and coach tourists tip-toe. Thanks to its World Heritage status, which almost guarantees mass tourism, the Old Town of Lijiang’s Naxi minority people has defied the rush to modernisation.
In recent times the celebrated British writer Bruce Chatwin eulogised a Naxi village herbalist, Dr He. Another local celebrity, Xuan Ke, survived lengthy imprisonment to realise his dream of reviving the Naxi chamber orchestra, itself a survival of the classical court music now lost in Han China, China proper.
After eight centuries, Lijiang’s Old Town remains an engaging, seemingly spontaneous huddle of sombre stone and timber houses. Sinuous cobblestoned streets follow the fast-flowing streams, spanned by impossibly picturesque stone bridges. In their trademark blue garments the Naxi remain much in evidence, gathering in the central market square or dispensing delicious baba pancakes from backstreet bakeries. The town’s streams are fed from Black Dragon Pool, the setting for one of China’s fabulous set-piece vistas: pagoda roofs are reflected in still waters below snow-capped peaks.
North of Lijiang, we gaze upon the First Bend of the Yangtze, where China’s artery swings from south-east back to north-east, then weaves five thousand more kilometres through the nation’s heartland to reach the sea. Soon, the placid waters are confronted by the 3,900-metre walls of Hu Tiao Xia, Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the world’s deepest ravines. For seventeen kilometres the river writhes and roars through rapids too dangerous for rafting.
The road to Shangri-La, more prosaically Route 214, climbs into conifer forest. Log cabins appear in clearings, the homes of Yi minority women wearing huge black hats. Tibetan prayer flags, multicoloured scraps of coarse cotton, flap raggedly around the white chorten or shrine which crowns a 3,000-metre pass. Rather than Siberia, we have reached the so-called Shangri-La, rediscovered it seems by unlikely romantics, the party functionaries of Diqing.
Shangri-La was the mystic vale that the novelist James Hilton discovered amidst the mountains of his own mind. Lost Horizon evoked a bountiful land somewhere in the Himalaya, chanced upon by three pilots who survived the wreck of their aircraft.
Hilton’s demi-paradise bore little resemblance to the austere steppes at the easternmost outlier of the Roof of the World. Still, Diqing remains an other-worldly land where ethnic Tibetans maintain an unshakeable faith in the cycle of reincarnation.
The distant snow-flecked Bai Ma or White Horse Snow Mountains guard the Tibetan Plateau beyond as we roll across a wide, treeless plain, hemmed in by low, forest-clad ranges. The road cuts straight across the plateau, the snowline seemingly within reach.
Solitary figures tend browsing yaks. Scattered townships wear a frontier ambience, the Tibetan homesteads distinguished by whitewashed stone, small windows and ornately-painted eaves, sprawling fenced yards and drying racks. No rice can be grown, no potatoes raised at this altitude. The diet consists largely of tsampa gruel, milled from barley and served with meat and turnips.
To call on a Tibetan family, wait for the mastiff to be restrained, then sidestep the sturdy yaks. Climb the steps to the first floor, where your eyes and nostrils adjust to a smoky gloom. Eight Symbols of Good Fortune adorn the wall behind the hearth with its squat, bulbous cast-iron stove. Butter worked in a wooden churn is poured into the teapot, returned to the boil then strained into serving bowls. Four generations are present, from rosy-cheeked infants to weather-worn elders. On the family altar sits a portrait of the Panchen Lama – the Tenth incarnation, not the current incumbent favoured by the government.
Three hours from Qiaotou we reach Diqing’s capital, Zhongdian (Gyelthang in Tibetan). With an influx of Han Chinese, the streets display intriguing mix of faces and costumes. One man wears a finely embroidered golden frockcoat under his parka, topped by a straw hat. He’s browsing in a pharmacy whose inventory reads like the spam in my inbox: Five Penis Mens Concentrat (sic), Darling Darling Darling.
The Long Life Tibetan Hotel is a veritable Fawlty Towers richly decorated in geometric gold with blue, green and pink flowers. Our room is already occupied by snoring bodies and the next requires hasty improvisation in the bathroom before we can be ushered in. The English-language menus are well-nigh incomprehensible and the servings arrive without plates. Our laundry, which reappears by bicycle cart, has been tagged but not so carefully that we don’t receive other guests’ smalls. Our six o’clock wake-up call comes at five-thirty and is followed shortly by another, suggesting we go back to sleep. Fortunately, the electric blankets work well.
On the outskirts of Zhongdian appears a hardy band of entrepreneurs, Tibetan men and women who have staked out the best vantage point on the approach to the Songzanlin Monastery, striking costumed poses as Equestrienne or Bandit Chief. Founded in 1679 by the Fifth Dalai Lama, Songzanlin presents an imposing spectacle: a hillside covered in golden roofed temples, monks’ dwellings clustered below. Six hundred monks live here, the novices, ten to fifteen years old, waiting on older monks.
The Seventh Dalai Lama rebuilt the monastery, restored once again after the Cultural Revolution. Construction continues, the burden shouldered, literally, by women labourers garbed in coral pink turbans.
A visit to Songzanlin is a primer in Tibetan Buddhist belief. Butter lamps flicker before the altars; horns, drums and cymbals stand ready. Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, stands in for her reincarnation, the exiled Dalai Lama. Huge painted thangka banners hang from the ceilings or drape across the parapets, lurid murals occupy every available wall. Shortly we’ll be back in Kunming, where giant billboards laud the latest mobile phones.
Philip Game travelled as a guest of Peregrine Adventures
More images from Lijiang and from Shangri La. More stories
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