Lijiang Baisha Old Town,where you deserve to take a few days off
A few days ago,I made a tour to the world famous Lijiang ancient town,which is ,as is known,recognized as the World Cultural Heritage composed of Dayan Old Town,Shuhe Old Town and Baisha Old Town.Many People are tired of seeing the huge crowd in the Dayan and Baisha and would like to have a bit of tranquility and peace, meanwhile not missing the taste of old town.Yeah!The Baisha is perfect.I stayed there for a week and was deeply affected by the peaceful life of local Naxi people.The first place to visit is of course the Baisha Murals.
Baisha Old Town
And when done seeing the murals, I exited to this stretch of small stalls selling local crafts such as embroidered cushion covers, bells and dyed cloth (amongst other things).The place is literally deserted so it’s nice if you like peace and quiet. I find it hard to ever imagine this place being crowded.The guest
houses here are better looking than the ones in LiJiang Old Town.They look cleaner and larger and are more of boutique inns. You would get a lot more peace and quiet here too.Baisha is famous for their cloth. Cloth dyeing as well asembroidery.Here you will not find Flower Pastries being sold or Bongo Drums. There are no noisy shops blasting loud techno music to attract people either.Instead, along the streets you will find plenty of dyed cloth with designs of top less women and other things hanging on clothes lines suspended from poles / trees.Plenty of very picturesque cafes. I didn’t try the drinks or food but I did snap heaps of pictures coz each one was so pretty. Way too many to upload here though.The people here seem to be able to speak more English as well.This is a shop dedicated just to dyeing cloth.Further in from the entrance are rows and rows of hangiang cloth, freshly dyed.Baisha is very small and can be covered in an hour or 2, depending on how thoroughly you stop and look around. In fact, when you board a taxi and tell them to bring you to Baisha, they will most likely exclaim that “there is nothing there!”.But for someone who loves old architecture and stuff like that, it is an old treasure.
They also have old wooden crafts which is much more interesting than some of the souvenirs in LiJiang Old Town which have been mass produced.It is almost certain that here in Baisha, there is nothing to do at night. LiJiang Old Town is the most lovely of the 3 and most spend their evenings there instead.We also found the Naxi Cultural Center. The local people inside speak decent English and they patiently explain about the embroidery and more.I really wanted to take pictures of the lovely embroidered pieces which consisted of gorgeous flowers, animals and even the Monalisa, all which took between months and years to complete, but I didn’t want to feel obligated to purchase one of the their smaller Y300 pieces as a souvenir because really it would just end up in a cupboard at home.
The coNow comes the biggest highlight during my stay in Lijiang!It’s the guesthouse where I stayed called Baisha Holiday Resort.Only when you stay in such a local guesthouse will you get the real meaning of being off from work and what life is about.Yes,I truly felt it,the tranquil life in such a paradise
Baisha Holiday Resort
land.It is a local Naxi traditional style house. The two-storey houses are always made of timber and earth. They are generally constructed around a courtyard following the layout of ‘three rooms with one screen wall‘ much like the quadrangle in Beijing. This is the typical and most common floor plan. The main room facing the screen wall and the left and right wing rooms form a courtyard with a great skylight in the middle. By changing the screen wall into an extra room, another layout, ‘four rooms with five skylights’ can be achieved. The four corners of the rooms are connected, with skylights helping to bring in more light. Beside these two styles there are many other layouts, but this layout is the root of all the others.The houses are rich in ornamentation, which is mainly focused on the exterior corridor, the screen wall, the windows, and the dooryard. The corridor and the screen wall are usually decorated with marbles, while the wooden doors and windows are carved with various patterns such as flowers, birds, fish etc. and even the end of the girder is carved with animals’ heads. The dooryard is paved with pebbles in different patterns representing plants, flowers, or the Eight Diagrams to name just a few. People here are so fond of gardening that every family keeps a garden in their courtyard where you can find orchids, cuckoos, peony, bamboo, etc. granting great charms to the old fashioned house.Baisha Holiday Resort is thus perfect to accommodate the couple-days off-work people who are in desperate need to get away from the fast pace of big cities and who would like to get in touch
On the upper floor
with nature.You get up in the morning in face of sun smiling to you,birds singing with you,flowers blooming for you.
Take a deep breath of the fresh air and enjoy your breakfast after morning brushing.You will also find the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain which is the holy mountain for Naxi people just so close to you when you take a break on the upper floor with flowers around.Life can be so amazing when you take a sip of the tea whose leaves may be from the hundreds-year ancient trees in the afternoon and have a small talk with people from all over the world.At night,look into the sky full of stars sitting on the swing without thinking anything.In the yard,there are a great variety of flowers planted.The chrysanthemum,roses,galsang flower,camellia,strawberry,pear trees and so on.
Visiting Baisha is a MUST for a day when you’re in LiJiang, to catch your breath from all the hustle and bustle and going around to the tourist attractions.
