Lijiang is simultaneously one of China’s most visited destinations and one of its most genuinely rewarding — a city where the UNESCO World Heritage designation of the Dayan Old Town in 1997 recognised an urban landscape of extraordinary integrity, and where the combination of the ancient Naxi town, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain rising 5,596 metres above the valley, and the world-class Tiger Leaping Gorge trek creates a concentration of extraordinary experiences within a single prefecture that few Chinese destinations can match.

The Dayan Old Town’s layout — its cobblestone lanes following the natural watercourses of the three streams that feed the town’s canal network, its traditional Naxi wooden architecture incorporating Han and Tibetan elements in a hybrid style specific to this cultural meeting point — is one of the few Chinese old towns that gives the impression of having grown organically rather than been planned or reconstructed. The Naxi people who built and inhabit it developed a unique writing system — the Dongba pictographic script, the only pictographic writing system still in active use in the world — and a music tradition that preserved Tang Dynasty court music when it disappeared from the rest of China, maintained by elderly Naxi musicians who perform it in the old town’s concert halls with instruments whose forms have not changed since the 8th century.

Tiger Leaping Gorge, 60 kilometres north of Lijiang, is one of the world’s deepest river gorges — the Jinsha River (upper Yangtze) cuts between Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain in a gorge 3,900 metres deep, and the two-day high trail trek that follows the gorge’s upper rim is considered one of the finest multi-day walks in China: a path that combines dramatic mountain scenery, vertiginous drops, and the genuine physical challenge of altitude and gradient with guesthouses in the gorge’s farm villages that provide some of the most memorable simple hospitality in Yunnan.