Exploring China Part 3: Lijiang

On Wednesday, October 28 we arrived in Lijiang around 8:00 pm. Lijiang is home to several minorities, including Tibetan. It is mostly made up of the Naxi minority, which is one of the only societies in the world to still widely use pictographs as their written language. Their language is called Dongba and most of the signs, especially on the shops, still had the pictographs on them. In an effort to conserve the language, Dongba, as well as Mandarin, is still taught in school. By the way, I forgot to mention earlier the minority statistics in China. China is made up of 92% Ethnically Han Chinese. The rest of the 8% of the population, which is over 1 million people, are officially made up of 56 different minority groups. As many of you may know, the Communist Party created these official groups and gave them names, and the government is not perfect. Many people argue that they actually grouped many different groups that were culturally different into one group. Anyway, the Naxi people are one of these groups. The Naxi people practice a religion that worships a Tree god and their religion forbids cutting down trees.

Anyway, we arrived in Lijiang around 8:00 and were exhausted when we checked into the hotel. We quickly showered and headed off to dinner. We found that area we were staying in this night (as opposed to the night before last) was swarming with tourists and much more commercialized. However, it was still a charming and beautiful town that reminded me of Venice. Even though I've never been there, I imagine that it might be similar. There were canals that ran along the streets with small bridges everywhere to cross them. Red lanterns glowed in the entrances to all the shops and restaurants and you could see the mountains in the background. After an awkward encounter when a restaurant gave us an English menu that was more expensive than the Chinese one, we finally found a restaurant and ate more Yak meat! As you might have already noticed, Yak meat is a staple in Yunnan Province.

After that, we walked around the endless winding streets for a couple hours, exploring the new town and chatting. After that a few of us sat in a circle in the central town square playing a game that is kind of hard to describe, but let's just say it's kind of one of the elementary school games that involves clapping. That certainly attracted a lot of attention and a few Chinese men joined us but they quickly gave up because it was somewhat complicated. The next morning was Thursday and we woke up at 9:00 am for a lecture given by a university and/or government official (we weren't sure) about the Naxi minority and Lijiang itself. He told us about the ways that the local Naxi government is preserving Lijiang and other interesting facts about the minority. He also said that this area attracts a lot of Japanese tourists who believe that the Naxi people are ancestors of the Japanese, but he said he did not agree that those facts were true. Afterward, we walked around shopping for more Christmas presents and 3 of my friends and I bought matching friendship necklaces.

They decided to check out "Ma's Mansion" which is the old mansion complex from the previous Naxi clan ruler from long ago. I decided to head back to the hostel, where I met up with some friends who were going to the Black Dragon Park. The park was absolutely beautiful, but a bit crowded with Chinese tourists. 3 of my friends and I decided to sit and play Chinese chess on a bridge over a stream in the middle of the park. I played 2 games against Jeff and we tied, and Tom ended up playing a random Chinese guy, as we like to say sometimes.

Jeff and I headed back to the hostel and met up with some of our friends for dinner. We went to the "Prague Café" which had Western food, namely pizza, hamburgers and milkshakes, which are extremely rare commodities in China. Luckily the prices were relatively equivalent to the nearby restaurants, and so we indulged in some of our cravings. I myself got some Westernized Chinese food, which tasted exactly like what a Sweet and Sour pork dish in the US would taste like. I get cravings in China sometimes for American Chinese food. The other foods that I usually crave are cheese and salad. Anyway, we had a very fun dinner in which we played a couple mind games, first the "umbrella" game, which was a word-pattern game, and then the "triangle" game, which involved pointing. They were two mind-boggling games and we laughed so much trying to figure out the answers. We played more games back at the hotel and packed to get ready for our next city, Chengdu.

This is me and Linnea playing the triangle/pointing game, trying to figure out what the trick was to the answer by keeping our legs folded and our hands crossed.

This is Jonathan with some random Chinese guy that gave him flowers. I included this so you could see all the red lanterns hanging.