Hello Dali! (And Lijiang)

“Backpackers go where people aren’t.” This was said to me by a rather desiccated-looking Irishman as we sat in the courtyard of Dali’s Emerald Duck Hostel. A day earlier, tromping around the town of Lijiang in a pair of new shoes, I had managed to bruise my foot and was now holed up at this hostel, doing nothing more strenuous than drinking tea and playing pool. The Irishman’s koan of a response had come when I, making a stab at conversation, observed that, despite Dali’s reputation as a backpacker haven, I’d seen precious few.

I’d heard about Dali and the nearby city of Lijiang for several years now. They were reputed to be laid back little towns where travelers who liked getting “off the beaten path” congregated, toked up, and chilled out. I wasn’t sure what such places would look like, but I assumed they’d be rather small affairs. Moreover, I assumed they’d be full of “world traveler”-type westerners.

Such assumptions were woefully off base: Lijiang was the closest thing I’d ever encountered to a Chinese Cancun. The first indication came when I disgorged from the train alongside nearly a thousand Chinese. What followed was an hour-long wait in the station parking lot as the arrival of each new bus caused a scrum—crowds of Chinese chased the bus around the parking lot until it finally came to a halt and opened its doors, lone family members would dash onboard to secure seats and then pull in baggage through windows.

Finding my hostel was also difficult. I had reserved the most highly rated place on HostelWorld.com, a site which usually features the most obvious of places. Imagining Lijiang to be a small affair, I assumed the hostel would be rather prominent. Instead it was located down a half-constructed alleyway, on the outer edge of the old town. Yet even this still-developing warren of streets wasn’t rundown in the manner of many an urban Chinese neighborhood. Everything suggested careful planning—nor did it hurt that the air was exceptionally clean, meaning there was no omnipresent layer of dust to make even new buildings look aged.

Lijiang was the first Chinese city I’d visited where one sensed conscious zoning might be taking place. All the streets were freshly swept and composed of identical grey stones. All the houses were designed in “traditional” style and fitted with wooden signs displaying the name in Chinese, English, and the pictographic writing style of the local Dai people. The English was often laughably wrong, but, as with the inane English phrases plastered on most clothing in China, it was meant to be decorative. It conveyed a message that Lijiang was an international destination, not merely one suited to Chinese vacationers. As so often in China, the English was not there for foreigners, so much as it existed to send a message to other Chinese.

The streets were packed with Chinese tourists. Hundreds. Thousands. All snapping photos and sporting cowboy hats with the same enthusiasm I’d seen Americans do in Hawaii and Mexico. Endless rows of stores hawked knit-knacks to these travelers. There were large stores selling “authentic” local art and fabric; narrow shops decked out with Bob Marley posters, blasting the same Chinese pop-song, selling drums; and an equally undifferentiated array of shops selling local yak-jerky. A canal ran through the heart of the town and was entirely lined with restaurants, cafes, and bars. At night, the crowds swelled in size and the bars filled to capacity. By midnight, the bustle subsided a bit and was replaced by still large numbers of merrily drunk Chinese twenty and thirty-somethings.

This entire area was the “Old Town”—in the sense that it looked like a traditional village. In terms of historic value, it seemed to have as much authenticity as a Disneyland park. Although it was easy enough to get lost in these winding streets, it only took a several minute walk to emerge from the Old Town and find yourself on streets that resembled a typical Chinese city full of honking cars, banks, clothing stores, and scruffy, low-priced restaurants.

And that’s precisely why Lijiang must have seemed “magical” to many Chinese. There were no cars, no honking motorcycles, and no dirt; just pleasant views and evocative architecture. The Old Town buildings weren’t old physically, but they felt as if they were, and walking around in the morning and afternoon I really did feel as if I had stepped back in time.

I had been naïve to assume myself venturing into the back of beyond. I’d envisioned Yunan province to be removed from the rest of China and places like Dali and Lijiang—as being, as it were, twice removed. I felt as you would have arriving in Las Vegas expecting to fine yourself in a pure desert wilderness.

Over the following weeks, reading articles about Lijiang revealed to me what a true latecomer I was to the city. Over two decades earlier, the town had been targeted by the government as a tourist-development site. The crowds had only grown since then. Much of the academic literature now focuses on issues of sustainability and how locals acclimate themselves to new environment.

The past twenty years of development has not been led by the local Dai minority, but rather by Chinese migrants who rent property from the locals. I was informed by the President of the Dai Student Association at Chendu’s Minority People’s University—which is to say an overly-friendly twenty year old who monopolized my time for five hours on the train—that his people are “lazy” and “bad at business.” Such castigations of one’s own people are par for the course in China—and practically pro-forma in Xi’an—but I imagine it’s hard to be “good at business” when it’s the new arrivals who have all the investment capital.

The writing about Lijiang was all very earnest, reading it was like eating vegetables. The academic writing on Dali was a bit more fun in so far as it all sounded a bit grumpier. Titles included "Dialectics of Authentication: Performing "Exotic Otherness,” and could often be summed as: Foreigners come to Dali to experience other cultures, but are really just experiencing an Otherness consciously produced by the locals for their consumption (and for the locals profit.)

If one really expected Dali to be “authentically” off the beaten path, then I suppose such critiques might be dispiriting. But I’d heard of it strickly as a backpacker hangout where foreigners went to chill out and enjoy easy access to the massive amounts of pot produced in the surrounding mountains. In this respect, Dali did a fine job of meeting my expectations. What this thumbnail sketch fails to mention, however, is that Dali itself is gorgeous, located between a range of mountains and a vast lake. There’s a reason all those folks choose to chill out here and not another location.

One arrives in the “real” Dali—a typical, albeit pleasingly small and clean, Chinese city—and must take an hour long city bus ride to “Dali.” Compared to Lijiang, this Dali is still undeveloped. What development is occurring is more slapdash. Most of the streets have the same, sun-baked, dusty feel I’d seen in Mexican cities. A couple central streets have been fixed up nicely and one main street, exploding with merchandise, attracts the highest concentration of Chinese tourists. A single block running perpendicular is the focus of the foreigner-friendly cafes and bars. About halfway through the day my foot started to seriously hurt, forcing me to sit down at one of these cafes. The whole street was fairly quiet, only a few tables occupied. Here and there local women sat idly, occasionally wandering over to offer me pot.

When I ultimately limped back to the hostel, I found the majority of guests hanging out in the courtyard. The owner was a rather silent Kiwi who Chinese wife managed the place and whose mother-in-law cared for their kid while he played pool. Throughout the day, a succession of locals popped in for a game—most seemed to have lived quite some time in China and had acquired that Graham Greene-quality of dissipation one learns to expects from ex-pats.

Among these was my Irishman who claimed Dali as his home-base, but was constantly on the move traveling to Turkey, Thailand, etc. in order purchase fabric for his t-shirt business—call me a cynic, but I suspected that his flights around the Golden Triangle and Europe’s main drug entrepôt might be more than circumstantial. As for his thoughts on the nature of backpacker-ness: Lijiang and Dali are good examples of how doomed such a life-style is. Obviously, the mythic backpackers of several decades past didn’t get away from “people,” they got away from their own people, and the notion that somehow the people they did encounter were not “people,” but rather something more natural, primal, uncorrupted, and, ultimately, decorative, is the dark-side of a backpacker culture that many (myself included) tend to romanticize.

At least in this sense, the disappearance of “off the beaten path” may be a good thing: You can’t travel to Lijiang and Dali and tell yourself that you’ve transcended tourism, nor can you be too certain that’s a bad thing.

Stuff By Other People:

Ateljevic, Irena, and Stephen Doorne. "Dialectics of Authentication: Performing "exotic Otherness" in a Backpacker Enclave of Dali, China." Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. (2005).

Su, Xiaobo, and Peggy Teo. The Politics of Heritage Tourism in China: A View from Lijiang. London: Routledge, 2009.

Bingaman, Eveline. What Is Culture in Lijiang?: Discourses and Life in a Tourism Setting in Southeast China. , 2009.

Hall, Derek R. Tourism and Transition: Governance, Transformation, and Development. Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK: CABI Pub, 2004. Internet resource.

Wang, Yu. Naxi and Ethnic Tourism: A Study of Homestay Tourism in Lijiang Old Town. , 2002.

White, Sydney D. "The Political Economy of Ethnicity in Yunnan's Lijiang Basin." Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. 11.2 (2010).

Yiyi Jiang (2009): Evaluating eco-sustainability and its spatial variability in tourism areas: a case study in Lijiang County, China, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 16:2, 117-126

Notar, Beth E. "Producing Cosmopolitanism at the Borderlands: Lonely Planeteers and "local" Cosmopolitans in Southwest China." Anthropological Quarterly. 81.3 (2008): 615-650.