storyculture-naxi

UNDER THE JADE DRAGON

We find ourselves in Lijiang, and looking north the mountain is there, still and majestic as it has always been. Thirteen snow-capped peaks lined up like the scales of a dragon lying on its side, with the highest summit at 5,596 metres never losing its white mantle, not even in summer. The Naxi call it Yulong Xueshan, the Snow Mountain of the Jade Dragon, and have considered it sacred since a time that precedes any written memory. It is from there that the water descends, flowing through Lijiang in three parallel canals, branching into dozens of streams between the cobbled alleys of the old town, filling the fountains at crossroads, watering the kitchen gardens in the courtyards. Water is the soul of this place, and the mountain is its source. To understand the Naxi means to understand this bond above all else: a people and their mountain, separated by a few kilometres and millennia of devotion.

Lijiang stands at over 2,400 metres above sea level in the northwestern corner of Yunnan province, not far from the Tibetan border. The Naxi settled here permanently around the 13th century, during the Yuan dynasty, but their origins are far older. The most widely accepted theories trace their descent to nomadic populations who migrated southward from the Tibetan plateau in the first millennium BC, settling in the fertile valleys of Yunnan where the climate was less harsh and the land more generous. The earliest Chinese written sources to mention them date to the Tang dynasty, between the 7th and 10th centuries, under the name Moxie. Over the following centuries they built small autonomous kingdoms, resisting the pressure of more powerful neighbours, Tibetans to the north, the Bai people to the east, the Dali kingdoms to the south, until, in the 14th century, the tribal chief Mude made a politically brilliant move: he offered formal allegiance to the rising Ming dynasty in exchange for internal autonomy. The Naxi thus preserved their culture, language and institutions for another three centuries, thriving as a commercial crossroads along the Ancient Tea Horse Road.

That road, in Chinese Chamadao, passed right through Lijiang. Long mule caravans loaded with compressed tea bricks set out from the plantations of Yunnan, climbed northward through the city, then faced vertiginous gorges and passes above 4,000 metres to reach Tibet, Nepal and India. The Tibetans needed tea to supplement a diet poor in vitamins; the Naxi and Han merchants needed Tibetan horses, hardy at high altitude, to replenish the caravans. It was a gruelling and vital trade, and Lijiang was its heart. The main square of the old town, Sifang Jie, the Square of the Four Quarters, was the meeting point of Naxi, Tibetan, Han and Bai merchants, where the price of tea, silk and salt was haggled over, and where in the evenings, once business was done, people danced and played music under the stars. The irregular shape of the square, even today, reflects that original function: it is not decorative architecture but a living space, built around the needs of a marketplace.

The houses lining those alleys follow a precise pattern: a central courtyard surrounded by buildings on three or four sides, double-pitched roofs of grey tiles, walls of painted red or grey wood, entrance gates decorated with elaborate carvings, flowers, dragons, phoenixes, that reveal the rank and prosperity of the family. In the courtyards there are almost always flowers: roses, camellias, hydrangeas. The Naxi have an intense relationship with flowers, to the point that a local proverb says: "If you have two coins, buy bread with one and a flower with the other." The flower market takes place every morning at dawn in the old town, and it is one of those daily rituals that no modernisation has yet managed to sweep away.

Water, as has been said, is the soul of Lijiang. The Naxi built a sophisticated water system that brought drinking water to every corner of the city, with a strict customary rule: the water of the first canal was reserved for human consumption, that of the second for domestic use and washing food, that of the third for washing clothes. Polluting the first canal was a serious offence against the entire community, punished with public dishonour. It was a system of civil engineering and communal ethics at the same time, and it says much about how the Naxi conceived the relationship between the individual and the collective.

That collective was, and still is, at least in its traditional forms, built around women. Naxi society is matrilineal: property is inherited through the female line, and in traditional families it is women who manage resources, the domestic economy and relations with the community. Men, historically, led freer and less constrained lives: they travelled along the Tea Road, traded, played music, studied. An ancient Naxi proverb says: "Men are guests in this life; women are its masters." This social structure has left visible traces in women's traditional clothing to this day. Naxi women wear a side-buttoned jacket in blue, purple or black, an embroidered apron and, on their back, a cape called Piyun decorated with seven circular discs symbolising the stars and two larger stripes representing the sun and the moon. It is said that Naxi women "carry the sky on their shoulders", an image that alludes both to the decoration of the cape and to the role they play in the life of the community. Many elderly women still wear those clothes every day, walking through the alleys with the same naturalness with which elsewhere one might wear any ordinary dress. Seeing a Naxi woman in her star-covered cape doing her morning shopping at the market is one of those sights that stays with you for a long time.

But among all the peculiarities of the Naxi, there is one that has left linguists and anthropologists around the world lost for words: Dongba, a pictographic writing system still in use, considered the only living hieroglyphic script on the planet. Dongba is not a writing system in the conventional sense. It does not transcribe sounds or syllables, but concepts and images. Each symbol is a small stylised drawing, a man, an animal, a tree, a mountain, the sun, and the combination of these pictograms gives life to texts that only the Dongba priests, the shaman-priests of the Naxi tradition, can read in their full depth. Over a thousand documented symbols are known, handed down in thousands of manuscripts covering religious, cosmological, medical and literary subjects. The oldest preserved texts date to the 10th century, but the tradition is probably far older. In 2003, UNESCO inscribed the Dongba manuscripts in the Memory of the World Register. The priests who bear that name, and who take their title from the script, were central figures in communal life: they officiated healing ceremonies, funeral rites, celebrations of the agricultural cycle and rituals to protect villages from evil spirits. Today the elderly Dongba can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The same fragility threatens another Naxi cultural wonder: Dongjing music. It is a unique musical form, a synthesis of classical Chinese music from the Tang and Song dynasties with elements of the Naxi tradition, preserved in Lijiang while it died out across the rest of China. During the Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, when the Red Guards were moving through the country destroying every manifestation of "feudal" or "bourgeois" culture, something extraordinary happened in Lijiang: a group of elderly Naxi musicians hid their traditional instruments under floorboards and inside wells, wrapping them in waxed cloths to protect them from the damp. For ten years they played in secret, in houses and cellars, keeping alive a tradition that elsewhere had already been lost forever. The Lijiang Dongjing Orchestra, made up almost entirely of elderly musicians, some of whom are over eighty, still performs regular concerts in the old town today. The instruments used, from the bamboo flute to the pipa lute to the erhu fiddle, are in some cases centuries old. To attend one of their performances is like listening to a sonic fragment of medieval China.

And then there is the legend. The one the Naxi have told for centuries and that no visitor ever forgets. It tells of Kaimeijiu, a young shepherd, and Yukeshu, a girl from a well-to-do family. They loved each other deeply, but their families opposed the union: he was too poor, she was promised to another. Convinced that true love could not exist in this world, the two young people climbed together onto the Jade Dragon Mountain and took their own lives in the eternal snows, certain that in the afterlife they could love each other forever. According to Naxi belief, the mountain is the realm of Sanduo, the protective deity of the people, depicted as a warrior in white armour on a white horse, who welcomes the souls of young lovers who choose death over separation. For centuries this belief fuelled a tragic tradition of ritual romantic suicides that bewildered 19th-century Western missionaries and fascinated 20th-century anthropologists. The mountain, seen from Lijiang on clear days, has the exact shape of a sleeping dragon. Its snows reflect the light of sunset in shades ranging from gold to pink to violet. It is easy to understand why generations of young people saw in those peaks a boundary between the world and something far greater.

Sixty kilometres from Lijiang that boundary becomes physical. The Jinsha River, the upper course of the Yangtze, cuts between the Jade Dragon Mountain and Mount Haba in one of the deepest gorges on the planet: Tiger Leaping Gorge, where the waters narrow to thirty metres between walls rising nearly three thousand metres. The name comes from a local legend: a tiger pursued by hunters escaped by leaping from one bank to the other, landing on a rock jutting from the river at its narrowest point. For the Naxi that gorge was a sacred boundary, the place where the human world and the world of spirits touched. Hunters who ventured into it always performed propitiatory rites at the entrance, and the elders said that the mist rising from the river on autumn mornings was the breath of the dragons that lived in the deep waters.

Lijiang receives around twenty million tourists a year today. The old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, has become one of the most visited destinations in China, with souvenir shops, bars with amplified music, sky-high prices, and an original Naxi population that has in part left the historic alleys to move to the modern outskirts. And yet something resists, with a tenacity that resembles the character of the mountain. The Dongjing Orchestra still plays. Children still learn Dongba pictograms in some schools. Elderly women still wear the cape with seven stars. The Drum Tower at the centre of the square still marks time as it did centuries ago. And the flower market still opens every morning at dawn, when the old town is silent and the water flows through the canals without the noise of tourists.

The Naxi have lived through invasions, reforms, revolutions and now mass tourism. They hid their instruments in wells to save them from the Red Guards. They passed down their writing in secret when it was dangerous to do so. They still carry the sky on their shoulders.

Their story, however, is not a story of closure. It is exactly the opposite. The Naxi did not survive despite contact with the outside world, but because of it. They walked for centuries along the Tea Road, traded with Tibetans, absorbed Buddhism, Taoism, classical Chinese music. They took from every culture they encountered, mixed it, transformed it, made it their own. And each time they came home with something new without having lost anything essential.

This is perhaps their most precious teaching: roots are not there to hold us still, but to give us the strength to move. A tree withstands the wind not because it stiffens, but because it reaches deep into the ground. One can be open to the world, curious, permeable to everything that enriches us, and at the same time know exactly who we are. That is not a contradiction, it is a form of intelligence. It is the same intelligence that allowed a Naxi woman to wear her star-covered cape to the morning market for centuries, indifferent to fashions, indifferent to the empires that rose and fell, indifferent to the noise of a world changing at her feet.

The Jade Dragon Mountain is still there, with its eternal snows. And at its feet, the flower market opens again at every dawn.

PHOTO GALLERY