Eye on China: Paradox of China's lost paradise

Tourism in China sounds like a contradiction in terms for anybody who has lived in the country even a short time. Yet the almost scarily euphoric expression in the eyes of the middle-aged Manhattan couple I met while travelling inland shows what an intense gravitational pull China exerts.

Admittedly, we were far from the cack-handed reconstruction efforts of the Beijing city government or the toxic rivers of central and northern China. In fact, we were in one of China's last paradises, Lijiang city in Yunnan province, deep in China's south-west and next to the Vietnam border.

Lijiang and two other nearby towns, Baisha and Zhuhe, have been named World Heritage Sites by the United Nations. That is to say, they are on a par with the Egyptian pyramids, Cambodia's Khmer temples and other wonders.

This decision, made in 1997, leaves me stunned, chiefly because the Chinese concept of tourism and history is quite different to ours.

In essence, there is absolutely nothing original in the designated areas. Lijiang is a modern city with one part curtained off as the old town. The old town features shop after shop all selling minority-culture items such as pottery, clothing and silver jewellery, made with metal extracted from the local mine. Some of it is unexpectedly attractive. It's only the fact that it is present in such volume that puts me off buying it.

Almost none of the stuff on sale is actually made locally. All this demonstration of arts and crafts is made in huge factories in Shanghai and Jiangsu, along China's eastern coast.

As for the old town, I am rendered highly sceptical by the fact that the whole place was razed in an earthquake in 1996. Most of the ancient buildings, including the wonderful palace of the Naxi kings, was reduced to rubble. Quite why the UN decided to give world-heritage status to this area just after most of its historic value was destroyed is an interesting question. What's for sure is that local people tell me that the presence of adventurous backpackers who had woken up to Lijiang's beauty long before the locals is much reduced. In contrast, the presence of domestic tourists is strong.

Ironically, most of the shopkeepers and restaurateurs in the old town are not from local tribes. These tribes, known somewhat clumsily as minority peoples in China, are what draw millions of tourists to the region with the stunning alpine landscape.

Lijiang is the focus of the Naxi people, for example. There are some 300,000 of them in total, of which 250,000 live in that one area. Yet they are not the ones benefiting from the commercialisation of their cultures. The vast majority have sold their little houses bordering the three rivers that run through Lijiang to Han Chinese.

The Naxi are lousy merchants. They refuse to bargain, lose their tempers and throw out their customers, one Chinese person tells me.

The most Naxi you see are crooked old ladies wearing traditional Naxi dress, incorporating black and blue. The black is supposed to represent the fact that the women in Naxi culture work nights, as well as days. Naxi men remind me of Palestinian or African men: forced to stay at home for want of job opportunities and sliding into apathy, if not sloth. That's exacerbated by their traditional role as warriors, which created a precedent for leaving the family income to be earned by women, while they men stayed away for long periods.

The importance of military service is no coincidence: The Naxi were throughout their history squeezed between the powerful Tibetan kingdom on one side, the Bai people in Dali on the other side, and the somewhat feeble reach of the Han empire extending from the centre of the country. Ultimately, it was the Han that won out, however, crushing the Tibetans, the Bai, and toppling the local Naxi chief at the beginning of the 18th century to replace him with an official sent from the Beijing court. Still, for 400 years the Naxi had cleverly steered a course between their powerful rivals. Thus, they acquired Buddhist texts in Tibetan script to pacify their mountain neighbours, and introduced Confucian practices to pacify the increasingly powerful Han.

For me, this is fascinating. I have been very Han-centric in my approach to China. But my experience on the frontiers raises questions about terminology. Thus, Chinese is clearly an imperialist term. The Dai, Tibetans and Naxi are Chinese only through conquest. On the frontiers, the term Chinese makes little sense, and people define themselves by race. Or take the term minority people. This is adding insult to the injury of being vanquished by the Han.

The term implies that the tribes are part of the Chinese universe, but only on the margins: ie, quaint and pretty but powerless. Yet when these tribes ruled over their own kingdoms they were a vital factor in frontier politics and certainly not a minority.

* Eye on China is based in Beijing