JUL 2023
A journey back to my second home town - Yun Nan. Two decades may have passed by, but the heart knows where it always belong to, and this time, with my two specicial people, we wondered on this land again.
At the foot of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, there are many traditional Naxi villages that build in stones. We rode horses to one of them - Yuhu Village.
Naxi villages are full of traditional courtyard houses, known as siheyuan.
We experienced the traditional Naxi craft of making paper. It starts with peeling the bark from trees (usually mulberry or similar). The bark is then soaked and boiled for hours to soften the fibers, followed by steaming to make them pliable. After that, the fibers are pounded into pulp—this is an important step you missed. The pulp is then mixed with water and filtered through a bamboo screen to form thin sheets. Finally, the sheets are pressed and dried in the sun, turning into beautiful handmade paper. This paper has a natural texture and is said to be very strong. We bought a few sheets as souvenirs.
Can you imagine that in this small village stood the former site of National Geographic? Joseph Rock was an Austrian-American explorer, botanist, and writer who spent decades in Yunnan during the early 20th century. He documented the region’s plants, landscapes, and cultures for National Geographic, bringing the remote Tibetan borderlands to the world’s attention.
At the foot of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain lies Blue Moon Valley, a place so stunning it looks unreal. The water here is a bright turquoise, reflecting the sky and the surrounding peaks. Streams flow into terraced pool. The cable car can take you up to the glacier area, which is over 4,500 meters high. But the sky was cloudy, and it must have been raining up there, so we decided not to go.
This Tibetan town once called Zhong Dian, is known as the mythical realm of Shangri-La in James Hilton's fiction, the paradise on Earth. In 2023, a return to this same town revealed a transformation - it had embraced the new name Shangri-La, but a paradise once felt like my own was no longer recognized...
Songzanlin Monastery, often called the “Little Potala Palace,” is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Yunnan.
