The City of Lijaing

The city of Lijaing is great it has the feel of any small mountain town catering to tourist, but the buildings are in Na'li (?) style. They are made of wood with very ornamentally carved screens over the doors and windows. My hotel is smallish but beautiful, it has deep reddish brown wood furniture (maybe antique) with brass fittings and the window is tan with a lattice work screen.. I would send pictures but I switched computers and don't have image editing software on this laptop.

My guide yesterday was great his English was good and he spoke both his ethnic Na'li and Mandarin. We walked all around the narrow twisting stone brick streets and alleys of of "Old Town". All of the buildings are in the traditional Na'li style; red painted wood with tan lattice or carved window and door screens and Chinese style grey clay tiled roofs. Every house has a garden court yard.

There are 3 large canals, fed by clear mountain streams; with a series of of small open drainage systems that run along the streets. Orange and yellow carp can be seen everywhere. Two main squares served as meeting and market places. To wash the market places; they used to block the canals, flood the squares and sweep everything into the canals each evening. Also between 8am and 10am no one was allowed to put anything into the canals so people could get drinking water.

Society here is maternal, within the family, because the women do all of the work so they make all of the decisions for the family. I don't know what the men do. Also my guide Li Shuang said that education was greatly stressed during the time Ming and Qing Dynasties and several scholars came from here. Slogans about education are all through out the city. My next guide is coming soon got to go.