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Northwestern Yunnan Province is where you will find the world famous Lijiang Old Town or Dayan, home to the Naxi minority people! "Dayan" literally means a "great inkstab", a graphic description of the town's location on the rich flatland fed by the Jinsha River and surrounded by green mountains.
The Lijiang old town is famous for its orderly system of waterways and bridges. The water flow is diverged into the city through channels. Strolling through the town, you find water your constant companion, flowing merrily either in a stream at your side or in tunnels beneath your foot. Unlike the roads in China's modern cities, streets here wind naturally along streams and around hills.
The town has a history going back more than 800 years and was once a confluence for trade along the old tea horse road. During the Yuan Dynasty, Kublai Khan came to what is now Lijiang in 1253, in his expedition to conquer China. This explains why many names of places in the Naxi languages are transliterations from the Mongolian language.
By taking advantage of its geographic location, the town has served as a center of economic and cultural exchanges between people of the Tibetan, Han, Bai and Naxi ethnic groups. Since the Qing period, the town, itself a major producer of handicraft articles, has been the distribution center for goods produced in northwest Yunnan. Tibetans send their woolen textiles and medicinal herbs here for shipment to other parts of China, and tea and articles for daily use from Xishuangbanna and southern Yunnan are sold to Tibetan areas via the town.
During the Second World War, the Flying Tigers - a group of American pilots voluntarily helping China in fighting the Japanese - built the Basha Airport in the Lijiang area to implement what is known to historians as the "Hump Operation." And along with the airport came banks and companies, and consequently, the area became prosperous.
The old town of Lijiang differs from other ancient Chinese cities in architecture, history and the culture of its traditional residents the Naxi people. This rich Dongba culture boasts the "Naxi Dongjing Music", a living example of Tang and Song Dynasty art. Dongba culture refers to Naxi ancient culture with a long history of nearly a thousand years. Dongba hieroglyphs is the Naxi language in written form, the only existing pictographs in the world, still in use.
Lijiang undoubtedly ranks among the most beautiful ancient towns in China. Lijiang old town (including Dayan, Baisha and Shuhe old towns) was registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997. Since then, the local government has taken more responsibility for the development and protection of the old city. Lijiang's tourism also boomed, and travellers from around the world flooded in.
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