Lijiang, Yunnan, China
丽江古城 · Lìjiāng Gǔchéng
A town of the Naxi people at 2,400 metres, more than 800 years old, with no city wall and a stream past almost every door. World Heritage since 1997.
Photo: Chensiyuan, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are standing in a town that has no wall. Most old Chinese towns were built inside one. This one was built around water: a spring to the north feeds a stream, the stream splits in three at a stone bridge, and the three branches divide again and again until almost every house has running water at the door.
The town belongs to the Naxi, a people of about 300,000. It was built in the late Song (960–1279) and early Yuan dynasties (1271–1368), more than 800 years ago, and it stands 2,400 metres above the sea. The snow mountain to the north is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
The World Heritage site is three places, not one: the old town of Dayan with Black Dragon Pool at its head, and two older villages to the north, Baisha and Shuhe. The streets of all three are open; what sells tickets is a handful of buildings inside them.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The old town of Dayan: the streams, Sifang Street, the lanes | Open day and night. Reported free in 2026; book on the official WeChat account |
| A Naxi house (Hengyugong museum) | Free |
| The Mu Mansion | Own ticket, about 40 yuan |
| Wangu Tower on Lion Hill | Own ticket, about 35 yuan |
| Black Dragon Pool | Reported free; one report says a charge. Ask at the gate |
| Naxi ancient music concert | Evening concert, own ticket |
| Baisha village and its murals, 9 km north | Village free; murals own ticket |
| Shuhe village, 4 km north-west | Reported free |
| Jade Dragon Snow Mountain | Not part of the old town. A separate park with its own fees |
Look at the water under you. It comes from Black Dragon Pool, a spring-fed lake a kilometre north of the town. At Yulong Bridge it divides into the West, Middle and East rivers. By the usual count more than three hundred bridges cross them.
Look at the roofs. The houses are timber frames with tiled roofs, built to sway. On 3 February 1996 an earthquake of magnitude 7 struck. Many walls fell and the frames stayed up, and people here say of their houses: the walls fall, the house does not.
Look for writing made of small pictures on shop signs and street signs: a man, a bird, a mountain. This is Dongba script, the writing of Naxi priests, one of the very few picture scripts still in use.
Why no wall? Historians give a plain reason: the mountains were wall enough, and the Mu family held the passes.
The Naxi have their own language, their own religion and their own script. The priests are called dongba, and their books, written in pictures on handmade paper, record myths, medicine, calendars and rites. In 2003 the old Dongba manuscripts were entered on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
Older Naxi women still wear a blue tunic and a sheepskin cape with seven embroidered discs on the back. The name people give it means "carrying the moon and the stars": out before dawn, home after dark.
What differs from the rest of China for a visitor is mostly about water. A public well here has three basins in a row. The top one is for drinking, the middle one for washing vegetables, the bottom one for washing clothes. Do not rinse your hands or shoes in the top basin.
The pool lies at the foot of Elephant Hill, a kilometre north of the old town. Springs rise through the bed, and on a clear morning Jade Dragon Snow Mountain stands upside down in the water behind a white bridge of five arches. This is the most photographed view in Lijiang.
The Dragon God shrine dates from 1737. The pavilion in the water, the Moon-Embracing Pavilion, burned down in 1950 and was rebuilt in 1963. The Five Phoenix Pavilion was built in 1601 at a temple in the hills and moved here in 1979.
The Dongba culture research institute is inside the park. In some dry years the springs stop and the pool shrinks or empties, so the mirror view is not guaranteed.
From the pool the Yu River runs south to the big water wheels at the north entrance. At Yulong Bridge it divides into three. Each branch splits into smaller channels, so the streets follow the water and none of them is straight.
When UNESCO listed the town it singled out this water system, old and intricate and still working. The town's own phrase is "a hundred bridges, a thousand lanes".
Sifang Street is not a street. It is an open square about forty metres across where the main lanes meet, and it was the market of the tea-horse road, the caravan route that carried Yunnan tea to Tibet. Bridge and lane names nearby still say what was sold there: Duck Egg Bridge, Grass Market.
The square slopes a little. By closing a sluice on the West River, people sent water across the paving stones to wash the market clean. A 2022 report says this is still done on Wednesday and Saturday mornings; we could not confirm the present schedule.
The usual plan is "three buildings and a screen wall": rooms on three sides of a courtyard and a white wall on the fourth to throw light back in. Bigger houses have "four buildings and five courtyards".
Look up at the gable ends for a carved wooden fish. Fish live in water, and a town of timber fears fire. The red buckets and hooks you see on street corners are for the same enemy.
The Hengyugong house, in the same family since 1875, is open as a museum of Naxi home life and has been free since 2010.
The Mu family governed Lijiang as hereditary chieftains for twenty-two generations. In 1382 the first Ming emperor gave the chief Ajia Ade the Chinese surname Mu. In 1723 the Qing (1644–1912) court replaced the chieftains with appointed officials.
What you walk through today was rebuilt in 1998 after the earthquake, with a World Bank loan, along an axis about 369 metres long. It follows the Ming layout; the buildings themselves are new. When the old mansion was destroyed is told differently in different accounts.
Behind it Lion Hill rises above the town. The five-storey Wangu Tower on top gives the view at the head of this page: grey roofs to the south and east, the snow mountain to the north.
Two traditions go by this name. Dongjing music came from Daoist ritual in central China and survived here after it faded elsewhere. Baisha Fine Music is a local suite for mourning. Old instruments are played by old men, many of them over seventy.
The musician Xuan Ke (1930–2023) gathered the players into a concert orchestra and took them to Britain in 1995 and to Bergen in Norway in 1998.
Baisha is a village nine kilometres north of the old town. The Mu family lived here before they moved to Dayan, so this is where Naxi rule began.
The murals are in three halls: the Liuli Hall of 1417, the Dabaoji Palace of 1582 and the Dading Pavilion. On one wall Tibetan Buddhist, Chinese Buddhist and Daoist figures sit together, painted by artists of several peoples. The largest painting measures 3.68 by 4.89 metres.
The halls are dark and the paint is fragile. No flash, and in most rooms no photographs at all.
Shuhe, four kilometres north-west of the old town, was a stop on the tea-horse road, known for its leather workers, who made the boots and harness the caravans needed.
Cross Qinglong Bridge, a stone bridge built in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Walk up to Jiuding Dragon Pool, the spring that feeds the village. Then find a three-eye well and see the rule in use: the first basin for drinking, the second for vegetables, the third for laundry.
Joseph Rock, an Austrian-American botanist, lived in a village below the snow mountain for much of the time between 1922 and 1949. He collected plants, photographed the Naxi for National Geographic and compiled a dictionary of Dongba script.
Peter Goullart, a Russian who ran cooperatives here in the 1940s, described the market, the wine shops and his neighbours in Forgotten Kingdom (1955).
James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon (1933) invented Shangri-La. One account says Rock's magazine articles were among Hilton's sources. Several places in Yunnan and Sichuan claim to be the original; Hilton never came to China.
Zhang Yimou's film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005) was shot in and around Lijiang. The television dramas A Metre of Sunshine and Mu Mansion (2012) did much to bring Chinese visitors here.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1253 | Kublai Khan's army passes through; the Naxi chief submits | The friar William of Rubruck sets out from Europe for the Mongol court |
| 1382 | The Ming emperor grants the surname Mu | About now the Bible is first translated into English |
| 1601 | The Five Phoenix Pavilion is built | Matteo Ricci is allowed to live in Beijing; Shakespeare is writing Hamlet |
| 1639 | Xu Xiake visits as the guest of Mu Zeng | Japan closes its ports to the Portuguese |
| 1723 | Chieftain rule ends; officials are sent from outside | J. S. Bach takes up his post in Leipzig |
| 1922–1949 | Joseph Rock lives and works near Lijiang | 1922: Tutankhamun's tomb is found in Egypt |
| 1996 | A magnitude 7 earthquake | Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, is born |
| 1997 | Listed as World Heritage, together with Pingyao and the gardens of Suzhou | Hong Kong returns to China |
| 2003 | Dongba manuscripts join the Memory of the World register | The human genome is read in full |
One line to remember: no wall, three streams, and a script made of pictures.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The rulers here were the Mu family. The character for Mu, 木 (wood), with a frame drawn round it becomes 困, “trapped”. So, the story goes, the Mu chieftains would not build a wall round their own name.
Source: Local folk tale
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel and news reports, not the site's own notices.
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