Thirty years ago, I travelled to Lijiang, an ancient city in the northwest of China’s Yunnan province in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. Lijiang’s old town is a tangle of intersecting waterways, arched stone bridges, and cobbled streets. Just north of the city – about five hours by road – is Lugu Lake, and the villages of the Mosuo, one of the world’s oldest continuing matriarchal societies.
Back then, before Lijiang’s UNESCO world heritage listing brought planeloads of tourists, the Sino-Tibetan borderlands were an out-of-the-way place, and difficult to reach. I took a slow boat from Hong Kong, then travelled overland, sleeping on straw mats on riverboats, and the back seats of buses, using a quickly acquired and entirely pragmatic Mandarin vocabulary to negotiate China’s then emerging industrial cities.
