Lijiang sits in the northwest corner of Yunnan Province at 2,400 metres, where the Tibetan plateau begins to rise and three of Asia's great rivers — the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Salween — flow in near-parallel canyons just a few dozen kilometres apart. The city divides into two very different worlds: the ancient cobblestoned old town of Dayan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, and the sprawling modern city that has grown around it. Arrive with this distinction in mind and Lijiang rewards you enormously; conflate the two and you may wonder what all the fuss is about.
Dayan's charm is in the details — stone lanes channelled by clear streams diverted from the Yulong River, wooden Naxi merchant houses built without a single nail using mortise-and-tenon joinery, stone bridges worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic and horse caravans on the Tea Horse Road. The Naxi people, who built and still largely inhabit the old town, developed one of the world's only living pictographic writing systems, Dongba script, and their ritual music tradition is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
Due north, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain dominates the horizon — thirteen peaks rising to 5,596 metres, permanently snow-covered and sacred to the Naxi. Cable cars reach a high plateau at 4,506 metres, genuinely cold and genuinely dramatic on a clear morning. The mountain's meadows and gorges fill out several good half-day excursions. About an hour's drive further north, Tiger Leaping Gorge cuts one of the deepest chasms in the world; the two-day high trail along its rim is among the finest walks in China. Southward, Shangri-La is five hours by bus through dramatic mountain scenery, and Shaxi — a beautifully preserved caravan town on the ancient Tea Horse Road — is three hours south and sees far fewer tourists than Lijiang itself.
The old town is inescapably commercial in its centre, full of souvenir shops and tourist restaurants. But push into the less-visited northern and western quarters, where Naxi families still hang laundry from the same wooden balconies their grandparents used, and the authenticity holds up. The Black Dragon Pool park, just north of the old town, frames a classic view of the snow mountain reflected in the water on cloudless mornings — worth the early alarm.