Lijiang

Leaving the heights of Tibet, I flew to Lijiang which turned out to still be mountainous.  The Old City of Lijiang is a large non-walled city.  I was a little confused what a non-walled city was, but they retained the old buildings and stone roads, and there is no vehicular traffic in the city which is more than a mile and a half long by a mile wide.  Although I have to say that it seemed much larger to me as I constantly got lost and it took me an hour or two and several wrong turns before I could find my hotel.  I didn't mind as I loved wondering through the town.  Besides the cobblestone streets and alleys, there are several canals running through the city making it - of course - the Venice of China.  There are several hundred bridges crossing the canals, ranging from wooden planks to arched bridged, and the entire city is decorated with flowers, lights and hanging umbrellas.

Like Lhasa, Lijiang lies in a plain surrounded by beautiful mountains, but the elevation is more manageable here - about 7,000 or 8,000 feet on the plain, with the mountains as high as 16,000 feet.  But I did not climb any more mountains here.  Whew!  Nonetheless, the view is spectacular.  Last month as I went from one city of 20 million to another, I wondered why I was taking anti-malaria drugs, but finally, I have made it to the countryside in China and it is beautiful.

On our first morning, we went to Black Dragon Pool in a local park.  The pool is a beautiful green lake surrounded by ancient bridges and pagodas.  As usual, people were doing ballroom and line dancing in the park, but today I also saw a large group of people doing tai chi.  Unlike the line dancers who are almost all older women, the people doing tai chi were an even mix of men and women, young and old.  And all very serious.

Then we visited a Lama temple that had ancient murals in it.  A Lama Buddhist temple is Tibetan as opposed to a Han Buddhist temple which is traditionally Chinese.  While both are Buddhist and have several elements in common such as one or more large Buddha statues and the four kings in the entrance hall, each incorporates elements of its pre-Buddhist religion.  You will not find prayer wheels in a Han Buddhist temple.

Notwithstanding China's treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, the official party line is that the country is multicultural and celebrates its more than fifty native minority groups.  Lijiang is the heart of the Naxi (pronounced Nashi) people.  Occasionally here you can see people in traditional clothes, and I sampled Naxi food.  We visited the Dongba (pronounced Doongba) Cultural Museum where the preface explained:

Long ago, having set up the earth and the sky, the nine brothers and seven sisters of the Naxi People conferred with the wise-men and the able-men.  They decided to build Junashiluo Mountain which could prop up the sky and guard the earth.  Thereafter, the Naxi People told the story that human beings and nature are brothers, and that the Tibetan, Bai, and Naxi People are originated from one ancestor.

The Naxi practice Dongba culture and religion, and if I understood my guide correctly, the priest is called a Dongba as well.  The end of the preface says:  Today let us stop here and appreciate the Naxi dongba miraculous stories.

One section of the Naxi Museum showed their pictographs, and compared them to Chinese characters.  I thought the pictographs reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Sure enough, three displays later was a large chart comparing Naxi pictographs with Egyptian, Babylonian, and Mayan pictographs. 

As I was thinking about how so many different cultures developed so similarly, I did a double take at this picture of a Dongba priest.  Is he blowing not one but two shofars?  Probably yak horn rather than ram.

Next we went to Yufeng Monastery which celebrates two men who could not have been more different.  While Genghis Khan was a great military leader, it was his grandson, Kublai Khan, who united China with Tibet and Mongolia in the thirteenth century, establishing the Yuan Dynasty that ruled over a single united country.  When Kublai Khan passed through here with his army of 100,000, the Naxi people helped his ford the river.  Other tribes resisted Kublai Khan and were destroyed.  In the Monastery, there is a museum to Kublai Khan.

Outside the museum is a huge camellia tree that blooms gloriously in the spring with large red and small pink flowers.  Long ago the pink camellias were grafted onto the original red tree, and both continued to bloom.  By the 1950's the tree had been neglected and was on its last legs.  The authorities hired a 38 year old peasant named Nadu to take care of the tree.  He nursed it back to life and transformed it into the beautiful flowering plant that it is today.  The authorities encouraged him to retire when he was in his 60's but he refused.  He felt that his destiny had merged with the camellia and he continued to tend it until his death at age 99.  So across the courtyard from the shrine to Kublai Khan is a shrine to Nadu in the room he lived in for 61 years, with several pictures of him.  I love the amazing contrasts here.

At night I went to a concert of traditional Naxi music.  Not my style but again, I can't help wondering why cultures so far apart geographically and linguistically develop so similarly.  Except for a wooden flute, all of the instruments were either stringed instruments that are bowed or plucked or percussion instruments.  None of the specific instruments were familiar to me and yet ... all of them were.

The next day we went to Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the deepest gorges in the world, depending on how you measure.  The gorge lies between two very tall mountains, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain, which tower over 12,000 feet above the river.  The name of the gorge comes from a legend that tiger leapt across the gorge at its narrowest point and you can see the rock in the water that he put his paw on.  The Yangtze river starts in the Himalayas and flows through the gorge.  To reach the gorge, we first crossed the river back into the Tibet Autonomous Region.  I didn't realize how close Lijiang is to Tibet as it took me two hours to fly from Lhasa.  But Tibet is quite large.  Once we went across the river, the area of Tibet we were in is called Shangri La.  My guide insisted that the mountains were the Himalayas but I am pretty sure he is wrong.

Unfortunately, you can only go to a small section of the gorge, so you do not get the sense of grandeur you do at the Grand Canyon.  Nonetheless it was impressive.  We walked down to the bottom for a close up view.  A third of the way back up, I asked the guide how many steps and he said 700 each way.  Glad I didn't know that before I started.

This is what a chair lift looks like at Tiger Leaping Gorge.  But the day I need to be carried is the day I stay home in my rocking chair and look at pictures of the world.

On the way to and from the Tiger Leaping Gorge, we could see the construction of the high speed rail they are building to Lhasa.  I have seen pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge when the cables were in place but they had not yet attached the roadway.  You can see the same thing here.  There are towers on either side with the cables in place, and they are lifting a section of the roadway.  Across on the other mountain, you can see the towers for the elevated train with gaps between them where the railbed is incomplete.

Finally, on the way back from Tiger Leaping Gorge, we stopped at a small village called Shigu which is near the first bend of the Yangtze River and has in it a 1,000 stone drum engraved with ... I'm not sure.  Maybe 1,000 year old history.  Up the hill was a museum to Mao's Long March.  My guide asked if I wanted to see it and of course I said yes although it was all in Chinese.  But it was very interesting.

Quick history:  in the 1930's the Communists under Mao were fighting a civil war with the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai Shek.  Mao was losing badly and from 1934 to 1936, he retreated to the mountains in the north, trying to drum up support along the way.  This retreat, later gloriously named the Long March, started with 80,000 soldiers and ended with 8,000.  Mao was finished.  Then the Japanese invaded China.  A year or so later, Chiang Kai Shek was kidnapped and forced into a meeting with Mao's second in command, Chou En Lai, who convinced Chiang that they should join together to fight the common enemy, the Japanese, rather than continue to fight each other.

This was very similar to the dilemma the Jews in Palestine faced during World War II.  Do you keep fighting the British or help the British fight the Nazis?  Well, Chiang made the wrong decision - for him.  Since China was on the side of the Allies, the Japanese were going to be defeated anyway.  But Chiang allowed Mao to rebuild the Communist Army and Mao turned the soldiers into veterans by fighting the Japanese.  In the next Chinese civil war after World War II ended, the Communist Army was strong enough to defeat the Kuomintang, leading to the formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the 70th anniversary of which was celebrated this month with great fanfare.

There are three Chinese leaders that everyone talks about and mostly positively.  Mao is credited with creating the unified country of China.  Yes, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolutions were disasters, but ... he unified the country.  Deng Xiaoping opened China up to business, leading everyone to greater prosperity.  And Xi Jinping, the current leader for life?  To quote my guide:  he is getting rid of corruption and he ended poverty.

Americans sort of miss the point.  Freedom of speech does not put food in your stomach.  Freedom of the press does not help the poor.  But Xi ... he ended poverty!!!  Don't take too seriously what you read in American papers; most Chinese are not unhappy with their government.

I walked through the old city of Lijiang for several hours on my last night - mostly lost but that was okay.  Chinese tourists rent old costumes and do photo shoots in the city.

The morning I left Lijiang was sunny and clear, and you could see Jade Dragon Snow Mountain behind the city.

What a lovely visit I had to Lijiang.