It’s Complicated part 1 of 2

Our host from the Maple Leaf Inn in Lijiang met us near the city gate to walk us back to his guest house. We never would have found our way on our own. Lijiang made Dali look like a paragon of urban planning. In contrast to Dali’s perfect grid of wide streets, Lijiang was a web of meandering narrow lanes.

As we walked the streets of Lijiang my themed-village radar went off. We arrived in Lijiang at dusk and the lights were just starting to come on. Red paper lanterns hung from the eaves of the buildings. Little, open-channel streams ran right down the middle of every street which were paved with blocks granite. Dozens upon dozens of small stone bridged spanned the network of waterways. All this brick and stone was soften by an abundance of miniature weeping willow trees that gave the town a fairyland quality. Women in elaborate, bright, traditional outfits hawked their fabrics and hand-made silver jewelry from their shops.

The buildings in Lijiang managed to be even more arresting than that in Old Dali. We were closer to the Tibetan border and this was reflected in the architecture. The buildings made a lot more extensive use of wood which had all mellowed to a rich golden-rust color. An occasional horse clopped through the middle of town its shoes clicking poetically on the granite cobble stones.

It was picture perfect. In fact, it was all a bit too perfect. I felt like I was on a movie set of a Chinese period drama. It looked as if we had been plopped down in the middle of a eighteenth-century Chinese village. As I walked through, I got a sense that somewhere behind the scenes was an oversight committee who was controlling the “aesthetic integrity” of the village and was tightly dictating what the locals could and could not do with their environs. Instead of simply being able to enjoy the village at face value, I was starting to second guess everything.