LIJIANG LIVES ON

Our official PROC guide, Mr Chu, giggles nervously, his wispy black beard fluttering. We are in Lijiang, the city in Yunnan province, western China that survived a crippling earthquake in February 1996.

It was a big one (seven on the Richter scale) and Mr Chu has just told us that 300 people died in it. As an aside, he admits the figure was at least 1000 – 'governments you know,' he says, 'they don't always tell the truth' – and I later find somewhere else, the toll was actually more like 2000, which still seems low given the town's current population of two million.

In fact about 80 percent of Lijiang was flattened in the quake, a tragedy as this town has stood since Genghis Khan's son Kublai established it as he passed through in 1235AD. Little wonder that UNESCO decided the year after the earthquake to preserve what was left and named it a World Heritage site.

Yet despite this, 21st-century Lijiang is alive and well, the earthquake already a blip in the past. It's all in the perspective of the thing. If the earth's geology puts a fault line under your city, and your history spans the better part of a millennium, then there would have been other shakes and quakes. This was yet one more, and the resilient Lijiang residents, simply propped up their walls and roofs, rebuilt, and returned to work.

The article goes on the describe a visit at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where the lama greeted us with a huge bowl of apples, pine nuts still in the shell, and fresh honey. In the grounds a 500 year old camellia tree was bowed with blossom.

A cable car jaunt to the Snow Mountain, then horse trekking beyond, meals in a Naxi family restaurant, and time to wander along the canals of this Chinese Little Venice, are more activities here in this town which still shows large cracks and uneven places.

And the fact this story might never have been written as I got lost in the dark, with no Chinese words, no hotel address, and only a tripod for protection.

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©Sally Hammond 2006

Picture Credits: ©Gordon Hammond 2006

(Sally and Gordon Hammond travelled as guests of Thor Adventure)

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