Travel to Lijiang along the Old Silk Road In Southwest China

The ancient city of Lijiang owes much of its unique character to its crossroads location on the old Silk Road also called the Ancient Tea and Horse Road or Ancient Tea Route. The Ancient Southern Silk Road starting from Burma, wandered across Lijiang, traveled through Persia (Iran) and wound its way to the Mediterranean Sea. Travelers en route brought along with their goods, their religions, their customs, their languages, their science, their philosophy and their cuisines much of which remained and blurred into local culture.

Today travelers this way continue to leave behind their culture to the consternation of the purist. In fact, many of the more seasoned explorers advise avoiding Lijiang with its western influences,  fast-food restaurant chains, faux historics structures and costumes, and flocks of Chinese and western tourists. To us, Lijiang was just the degree of exotic we wanted to explore in this region of China, and only a short distance from the place which Hilton in Lost Horizon dubbed Shangri- la.

The hotel where we stayed in Lijiang meanders around the foothills, lower ones, that run below what ultimately leads to the Himalayas and some of the highest peaks in the world.   

Lijiang is full of stories.  Stories of an orchestra that survived the communists who tried to eradicate them during the cultural revolution.  Tried to take away from them their history, their culture, their music.  It survived. And now the ancient orchestra plays with joy to visitors who come throughout China to hear them.

Other stories revolve around people who live near Dr. Joseph Rock's old house and bedeck visitors with flowers.

And others are around  exotic foods being sold in the markets and around people full of humor and casualness so unlike Beijing.  

And around a society led by women where men play instruments and lead a more leisurely life.   And where anicent 

Here we had a Dongba shaman inscribe an anniversary message in the ancient Dongba script. 

Although now crawling with tourists (mostly Chinese), Lijiang is  a World Heritage Site worth adding  to your bucket list.