Explodes Bamboo Insect

Lijiang 30-Jun

So we all recovered from the horse incident, and it’s funny to see how many people had posted about the experience on their facebook pages. As for today’s agenda, we were to meet up at 9:45 to head off to a 10 am meeting at the DongBa cultural center, then a visit to Shuhe (pronounced Shoo-huh), and then a voluntary interview with a Naxi family. I ended up missing the DongBa meeting because there has been a group project that J-Bo, Rachel and I have been working on. The visit to Lijiang has been to study a cultural heritage site, look at the systems in place; cultural, social, infrastructure, architectural, and the like. Our group was interested in the water system in Lijiang, and how the series of canals works today, as opposed its historical function. I was also curious about trash and waste removal in the old city. Because the meeting was in the park that contains the current and historic water supply of Lijiang, we opted out of the meeting to explore the headwaters, and get a first hand view of how the water supply is being treated.

To start, we climbed half way up this hill called Elephant hill. From this vantage point we could see the entire park, and somewhat ascertain the flow of the water through the park. We then climbed down and hiked around the park and took some photos. We asked some questions and found out the ponds and lakes are fed by underground streams that originate on the glaciers of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. I love that name. The name is only four syllables in Mandarin, but that is the literal translation. At one point we were walking and we could see some people walk down to the edge, and these two women took a drink for the spring. I don’t know if I would recommend this to anyone, but they weren’t the only two I saw doing this. Theoretically, the spring hasn’t even seen daylight, so it is clean, but in a urban area of nearly a million, I don’t know if I’d trust it.

After thoroughly exploring the park, the whole group went over to Shuhe, another ancient Naxi village up valley from Lijiang. This area was not as commercialized, or as the Chinese say, developed, before the 1996 earthquake, therefore there wasn’t as strict of guidelines for the rebuilding of the town, which, opposite of what you may think, actually worked out to the benefit of the town. The city still is a functioning rural community, replete with vegetable gardens intertwined amongst the village and stream. The commerciality of the village hasn’t overrun the entire core of the city, and it still feels like a gem of undiscovered culture. The Naxi people were prevalent throughout the town ,and not just as token minority figures, it was clear they still lived and worked in the area. We ate lunch at a place right on the river, and then explored a little more of the town. Jewel, one of our faculty, wrote her master’s thesis on Lijiang, Baisha, and Shuhe, the three towns of the UNESCO heritage site, and said when she finished her thesis, Lijiang looked like Shuhe, and Shuhe and Baisha were at relatively the same level of development. That made me fear for what is to come of the Shuhe village, if the Chinese government continues along its same path.

After that, we headed home, and on my way from the drop off to the guest house, I found a little vendor on the street selling these fried donut looking things. They weren’t sugared, but they sure were tasty. At the guesthouse, we had the option of visiting with a Naxi family that lives in the old town, or not. I decided not to go, I needed some downtime. I went up in my room, and slept a little and wrote for yesterday’s blog entry. Around 6:30, J-Bo and I went to round up some supper. We got to the restaurant, we ran into Dana, Tim, and Marijean. J-Bo and I ordered some dumplings and noodles, and made plans with everyone to hang out later in the evening to celebrate leaving Lijiang, and also to bid farewell to Dana. She is an undergrad from the Yale Architecture dept. and she is in China on a research grant. Her mom was one of the organizers of the seminar last spring, and they thought this might be a great way for her to get some research done. Well, last night she told us she wanted to focus less on tourism research and more on actual architecture. So we all went out and got some beers, had some laughs, and wished Dana a fond farewell. She said she was planning on staying for sometime in Chengdu, we’ll most likely run into her when we come back around the fourth of July.