Old Town of Lijiang (丽江古城)

Why Go

Read It as a Water System and a Reconstruction

1. The channels are the plan

Water from a spring at the north edge of town is divided into three main channels and then again and again, until almost every lane has a stream running down one side of it. Houses were built to that grid, bridges cross it every few dozen metres, and the stone paving was laid around it. There is no north-south ceremonial axis of the kind Chinese city planning usually insists on: the layout follows falling water instead.

That is also why the town has no wall. The usual explanation offered locally is a pun, that the ruling family’s surname Mu, written as a character, would become the character for besieged if you drew a wall around it. Whether or not that is the real reason, the absence is genuine and it shows: the town simply thins out into fields rather than stopping at a line.

2. What the 1996 earthquake did

In February 1996 a magnitude 7 earthquake hit Lijiang. Much of the modern concrete building in the new town was damaged or destroyed, while the old town’s timber frames, which flex rather than crack, came through comparatively well. That contrast was noticed, the reconstruction money and international attention arrived together, and the old town was inscribed by UNESCO the following year.

So the place you walk through is genuinely old in its plan, its water system and much of its fabric, and it is also a reconstruction shaped by a specific disaster and a specific listing thirty years ago. Both of those are true at once, and knowing it makes the very smooth surfaces easier to read.

Orientation

Uphill Is Out, Downhill Is In

The simplest way to navigate is the water. The channels run downhill from the north, so walking against the current takes you toward the Black Dragon Pool and the edge of town, and walking with it takes you down into the middle and eventually to Sifang Street, the old market square. Phone maps struggle in the lanes; the streams do not.

The view from Lion Hill in the middle of the old town is what the photographs on this page are, and it is the quickest way to understand the shape of the place. Go up early, before the light flattens and the steps fill.

Context

Who the Naxi Are, and Who the Mu Were

The Naxi are one of the peoples of the eastern Himalayan borderland, with their own language and their own religious tradition, Dongba, which has a pictographic script still used by ritual specialists. Lijiang was their centre, on the trade route that carried tea north toward Tibet and horses south in return.

The Mu family ruled here as hereditary chieftains, confirmed in office by the Ming court in the fourteenth century and continuing under the Qing. That arrangement, a local dynasty governing on behalf of a distant capital, was how much of the southwest was administered for centuries, and the compound in the middle of the old town is what it looked like on the ground.

The town’s modern fame came in stages: the earthquake and the listing in the 1990s, a domestic tourism boom in the 2000s, and the arrival of the fast train and the airport after that. The population of the old town changed as the rents rose, which is the ordinary mechanism behind what visitors notice as commercialisation.

Where to Base

Lijiang (丽江)

The old town is the reason most people come to Lijiang, and it is also the base for the mountain, Tiger Leaping Gorge and the road north toward Shangri-La. The airport and the railway station are both outside the old town and both are quick.

Two nights is the working minimum: one for the town, one to acclimatise before going up. Three if you are walking the gorge afterwards.