Sisterhood Meets the Naxi People

Iona

The sisterhood started off the day with congee, rice noodles, and egg on toast on the first level of our Naxi-styled hotel. At 9am we met Evan to head to the Mu Residence; the Mu family has occupied that estate for 22 generations which brought them to the 1720’s. It was very interesting to see how the residence had been split up into a work/education area, a rec time area, and an area for praying with a temple that overlooked the city. From this view, it became evident that every house in sight was the same style with the same height and same coloured roofs. Makes you think about how big the vision and how effective it must have been communicated to have had every single house in the region built the same way, to the same height.

After lunch, we all went to the Naxi Dongba Cultural Exhibition which was a museum that had many different aspects of the Naxi culture, including their language. This is a character based system that is reliant on memorisation, kind of like chinese without the pinyin. It was very interesting to look at some of their vocabulary since the characters are basically simplified pictures (similar to hieroglyphics). Kelbs and Liz and I fell into conversation about their language and while language is hard to assess, my personal view is that a character based system such as the Naxi language is bound to become obsolete because of its dependency on memorisation. While there are currently 280.000 Naxi people in Lijiang, the population is not increasing at a healthy rate and the number of individuals who are actively learning and practising the language will decrease. While this is true, I still think it is important to fill museums with relics of the past, and host dances that are true to the cultures of different minority groups, and raise awareness with public displays. The language of the Naxi people struck me as one that will need to modernise as it will become increasingly difficult to connect to and reach those who have already modernised, and become harder to communicate with the world on an international level. This being said, there is still much value in maintaining the language as it is tied to the Naxi people’s tradition, heritage, background, and family, and this is important to remember.

Next stop was the Black Dragon Park where we saw loads of greenery around a beautiful pond space. The pace of life here was relaxed and stress free as the sun shined and the wind blew on this bright blue day.

After a nice walk in the park, it was almost 4pm and we all had some free time to walk around and hang out before meeting Evan for dinner at 6pm. We were getting hot and at risk of sunstroke at this point so we collectively decided to start our chill time in the courtyard in our hotel even though we had already checked out. For about one and a half hours we read, listened to music, texted, and enjoyed the shade. A little before dinner time we decided to get up and moving having been sufficiently relaxed. We walked the streets of Liliana and found a silver store where Kelbs purchased a beautiful silver bracelet that we are all excited about! We met Evan back at the square around 6pm, and he led us to a restaurant and ordered us great food with “chinese lemonade”- lemonade with Chinese characteristics :). After dinner, we had some more free time so we found ourselves hanging out at the hotel until we hopped in the car to drive to the airport. Our flight to Chengdu was at 10:30pm and we got through check in and security before 9pm. With a very speedy (and rather turbulent) flight to Chengdu, we got our bags and met Maya and our driver Mr. Fan who took us to the hotel for a good night’s sleep.

Chengdu here we come!