Lijiang
Snowmelt enters the town, splits into three, then into more, and passes every door.
The town sits on the basin south of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, at about 2,400 metres. There is no wall and no straight street, and the drain under the flagstones is the water. It enters from Black Dragon Pool to the north, splits into three, divides again into lanes, and passes every door.
- Region
- Yunnan · Lijiang
- Basin
- About 2,400 m
- Water
- Black Dragon Pool divides into three channels: east, middle, west
- Earthquake
- February 1996, magnitude 7.0
- Listed
- 1997, World Cultural Heritage
The Mu family held this ground as appointed tusi from the Yuan dynasty on, at their strongest under the Ming. The usual explanation for the missing wall is that the character for Mu set inside a box becomes the character for trapped, and no tusi would accept that. The plainer reason is the terrain: mountains and a river on three sides, few approaches, and an authority that came from the court rather than from a garrison. The water was the thing that had to be managed, and the town has rules for dividing it from the top down.
Three-eye wells
One spring, three basins: drinking water at the top, vegetables in the middle, washing at the bottom. They sit side by side, a stone slab apart, and there is usually a queue.
Sifang Square
The open ground at the centre, shops on four sides, several streets fanning out from it. It was the trading floor of the tea-horse road; the morning market still sells vegetables.
Mu residence
The tusi's compound, built against the hill, facing east, on an axis 369 metres long. It burned in the late Qing; what stands now was rebuilt on the same site in 1999, in the Ming manner.
The water runs a metre or so below the street, under the steps, and the bottom is visible. On the stretch above, nobody is washing vegetables, so it is clear.
The frame stood, the walls came down
In February 1996 an earthquake of magnitude seven hit Lijiang. Some houses came down. Many did not, and the ones that held were mostly timber frames: posts standing on stone bases, not buried; beams and columns joined with mortise and tenon, no nails in the joints. When the ground moves, the timber works inside the joint, the frame sways and comes back. The earth wall is only infill: it can crack and be re-rammed. If the frame stands, the house stands. Most courtyards you walk into now were repaired this way after the quake, and the new earth still shows against the old at the foot of the wall.
Water at your feet, and the rules with it
The town’s water does not run in pipes. It runs in open channels beside the streets, below the level of the flags, visible and audible. The spring leaves Black Dragon Pool and enters the town in three channels, east, middle and west, each taking a street and dividing again into lanes that pass every door. Which branch serves which house, and in what order, follows rules, because the people downstream also need water.
The three-eye well is that system at its smallest, and the easiest place to read it: one spring, three basins stepping down. Drinking water from the top, vegetables in the middle, clothes at the bottom. The basins sit a stone slab apart. In the early morning there is a queue; whoever comes first fills the top one, the next person squats at the middle, and nobody steps up a level.
Water goes downhill and the use steps down with it. Nothing has to be enforced; the slope does it.
Stand by a well for a few minutes and the whole arrangement is plain. The paving is local stone, worn flat over centuries, bright in rain and slippery underfoot.
One colour of roof, and it is grey
From the west side of Sifang Square a path climbs Lion Hill. It is short and steep, and at 2,400 metres there are a few stops on the way. Stop halfway and turn round: the whole town’s roofs open out below, ridge after ridge.
The grey comes from the kiln. The tiles are unglazed, fired too cool to vitrify, and come out blue-grey. Laid one over the next, they give the town a single colour. The walls between courtyards are low, so from halfway up the roofs run unbroken to the foot of the hill.
Light decides whether you see the tiles at all. In the morning the sun comes in from the east at an angle, and every channel of tiles throws a line of shadow that can be counted. At midday the light falls straight down, the grey goes flat, and the tiles disappear.
The old town was rebuilt as it had been after the 1996 earthquake and listed the following year. Over the next two decades guesthouses and shops moved most of the original residents out.