City of Lijiang is located in the north of Yunnan surrounded by Szechuan, Myanmar and Tibet. Its history can be traced back to a city in the era of Ming Dynasty that developed as a trading center of West southern route of Silk Road.　The City is located in the valley that leads to the sacred mountain for the Naxi, Mountain of Jade Dragon Snow. Clear streams are running all over the City, which are important source of water. The scenes of blooming rape blossoms and early blooming cherries around the City made me think of pretty villages of old time Japan.

The old district of Lijiang was registered as a World Heritage in 1996 as "The Old Castle of Lijiang". I had an impression that it is just about to break as a great tourist town. Mr. Wang says, ﾒThe buildings of Lijiang that flourished as a trading city were originally designed so that their first floors could be the open spaces where people gathered and their dwellers lived on the floors upper than the second floor. Now those open spaces for communications among people have come to be souvenir shops, cafes and restaurants. As his word describes, here we can see the rows of shops where we can get handicrafts and taste food of various ethnic minorities living in Yunnan. They say as many as 3 million people visit this small city annually and to accommodate these tourists, international high-rise hotels are lined up on both sides of the streets in its new urban district.

The souvenirs include products made of cloth, accessories made of carved silver or Chinese jewelry stones, antiques the peoples of minority once used, snow tea or pu-erh tea both of which are special products of Yunnan and so on. Above all, they have every skill of excellence for cloth production such as weaving, coloring, embroidering. The use of colors and the pattern designs have, to my wonder, something in common with the cloth produced by Inca's descendants living in the Andes in South America.
Thinking on it, I felt as if I were finding the traces of our ancestors' great trips that finally reached South American continent through Aleutian Islands, Eurasian Continent and North America. Maybe the DNA concerning beauty has been firmly handed down.

Now in China, the problem of the gap between the rich and the poor brought by the difference in economic development between such rapidly developing coastal areas as Beijing, Tsingtao, Shanghai, Guangzhou and the deeply inland western areas is getting more and more visible.
Being in such a condition, Lijiang is sure to make a great development as a tourist city. I personally think, however, what the minority peoples living near Lijiang must lose in exchange for money. When I think about my own country Japan that has become the second greatest economic power in the world, sacrificing a lot of valuable traditional things, I can't but feel some pain in my heart even though I myself am a sightseer.