Sky and Aja's Great Adventure

Lijiang
After the shocking bus ride here, Lijiang seemed quite out of place. It doesn't seem like a beautiful, rich, entirely tourist-based town with nothing but souvenir shops an fancy restaurants should exist here. Lijiang dies not share a social continuity with the coal mining villages and with their old substandard houses. Lijiang is a mirage that lets its hoards of tourists think that all is well in Northern Yunnan.
The old part of Lijiang was built in the 14th century and after withstanding a strong earthquake in the 60's, it was awarded world heritage status. All the houses have black tiled roofs and are separated by narrow cobbled footpaths. There no cars in the old section, which allows you to hear peoples voices, and the soft sounds of peoples feet on the stones or the trickle of water. A winding maze of cobbled streets and canals make up the old section. Flowing water accompanies most of the streets in town. The canal in the main plaza has a school of bright orange goldfish, and in smaller plazas there are square pools - always in a connected series of three - for washing vegetables, meat and clothes.
In the mornings, the military runs through town, shouting short, loud shouts. This way, the Naxi people who live above their ships don't forget about China.
The people here are Naxi people. They are animistic and use the only photographic writing system in use today. They build white plastered buildings with exposed red wooden pillars, and there are a few brick buildings in town. Inside, they are spacious and you can see the bottoms of the tiles being held between wooden slats. Their windows are lined with the finest latticework and carvings of scenes with birds, animals and plants. The carvings let through light in all the places between the birds' legs and delicately carved blades of grass. The doors to their shop fronts are not attached -they are removed from the building and each day and replaced each night, and if you walk through the city late at night or in the early morning, it feels like a different city without the crowds of people in the streets and in place of shop fronts, there are dark wooden walls stretching the length of the street.
The people of Lijiang like to sing. Every night groups of girls in traditional garb sing a short song from a window, and chant "Ya So, Ya So, Ya Ya So!" and another grip of people in the street or in the bar across the street will sing a song and end it with the same chant. As the night goes on, and people get drunk, the verses they sing get shorter and shorter.
The streets are lined with red lanterns and people float candles down the canals to make wishes. Red lights and the warm wooden glow coming from inside buildings and the golden light of candles in the water make a beautiful sight on Lijiang's chilly nights.
The old part of Lijiang is like an ethnic theme park. It feels more like Las Vegas or Disney Land than a village where real people live. I would not be surprised if everything is an act for tourists. Perhaps that is the role ethnic minorities play in China today. I read somewhere that most of the Naxi who used to live in their old section have been bought out and pushed along by the incoming hoards of Han migrants with more money from the cities. Yet every shopkeeper wears traditional Naxi clothes.
I expected to find the Naxi, as an ethnic minority, to be similar to the Native Americans. I expected to find something more like NM pueblos. I thought they would be herdspeiople, tribal, somehow technologically inferior to the "Chinese". In some ways, their position is similar to the Native Americans'. They are being colonized and force-fed Chinese culture. Their land is being bought up and their language is being strangled out. The Naxi are simply a people from a country that through some fluke wound up within the borders of China, and like the rest of the minorities in China, and minorities all over the world, they are undergoing cultural genocide. It will not be surprising when the next generation does not teach their kids to speak Naxi, and if a few generations later, they simply call themselves Han. Being an ethnic minority in China is a mighty struggle. The central government is relocating people from the coast and other parts of China to the Western regions, creating minorities out of the cultures that live there, forcing them with the choice between assimilation and inferiority.
We met one young girl here who says she would rather speak Chinese or English than Naxi. It is a shame that an economic and bureaucratic Chinese dominance can make a language and a people irrelevant. They call Lijiang county a Naxi Autonomous Region, but all business must be conducted and written in "Chinese. Perhaps fewer Han would move here if the Naxi still held linguistic authority - if all the signs, labels, receipts and banks only operated in Naxi.
The new city of Lijiang is a typical Chinese city. The traffic, the market, the architecture, the chain stores, all of it is almost indistinguishable from other cities in China. Except, perhaps, for the vacant lots of rubble overgrown with weeds and weed!

# posted by Sky Tallman : 7:25 AM