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A
street in Lijiang.
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Snow-capped
mountain scenery.
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The
ancient town of Lijiang.
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Lijiang in southwest China’s Yunnan Province is a land bursting
with exotic ethnic cultures and stunning natural scenery. It is
located on the upper reaches of the Jinsha River, near the borders
of Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet Autonomous Region. Its territory
of 20,600 square kilometers is home to a population of 1.12 million,
comprising 23 different ethnic groups. During the Han and Tang
Dynasties, Lijiang was a key distribution center on the southern
Silk Road, and a stop-off point on the Tea-Horse Trail. But it
was little known to the outside world until Russian doctor Peter
Goullart described this place of peace and tranquility in his
1955 book, Forgotten Kingdom. For a place that’s been inhabited
by humans for more than 100,000 years, the past decade might seem
trivial. But for Lijiang it was a process of rebirth.
At 5:14pm on February 3, 1996, an earthquake measuring 7.0 on
the Richter scale shattered Lijiang, breaking up its fields and
destroying its houses in a matter of minutes. The earthquake caused
17,366 casualties, leaving 309 dead and 4,070 seriously wounded.
Almost all the houses in the city were damaged, and some were
totally destroyed, leaving 200,000 people without a home. A total
of 1.07 million people were affected by the disaster, and economic
losses were estimated at RMB 4.6 billion. The disaster was exacerbated
by 2,529 after-shocks.
Memories of this havoc are etched in the mind of He Weinan, an
80-year-old native of Lijiang. “I was watching TV, when the
room suddenly started to shake. “I didn’t realize what
was happening – it was only when the TV set fell off the
table that I ran out of my house.” Within minutes, He’s
house collapsed, and his son, who failed to escape in time, suffered
a broken leg. But his family was lucky compared with his neighbors;
many were bereft of loved ones.
A decade after the devastating earthquake, some of the journalists
who had reported it returned to Lijiang to mark the tenth anniversary,
only to find that the city they had described in their reports
as “shattered,” “wrecked,” and “destroyed,”
was to their eyes unrecognizable.
Now one of the country’s hottest destinations among European
tourists, and a “city of harmonious human settlement,”
Lijiang, a place with three world heritage sites, is counted among
the 100 most visit-worthy cities on earth.
“Ten years ago, Lijiang was an isolated Naxi city,”
says He Zixing, Party secretary of Lijiang. An ethnic Naxi himself,
He was magistrate of Lijiang Naxi Autonomous County when the earthquake
occurred. He believes that the dark cloud of the disaster had
a silver lining: it inspired the locals to look towards the future,
and to “transform a huge calamity into an opportunity for
huge development.”
On December 26, 2002, China’s State Council raised Lijiang’s
status to prefecture-level city. Its Naxi Autonomous County was
split into the Gucheng District and Yulong Naxi Autonomous County.
A new seat was built for the latter, the only Naxi autonomous
county in China.
In the past decade, Lijiang has earned three enviable world heritage
titles. Its three parallel rivers, its Naxi Dongba manuscripts,
and its status as an ancient town were all recognized by UNESCO,
giving the city’s tourism sector a massive boost. There are
now more than 4,000 registered tour guides in Lijiang, and some
36,000 people are directly employed in the sector. Meanwhile,
another 80,000 tourism-related jobs have been created. Tourism
generates more than half of the local tax revenues, and Lijiang
Airport has become the busiest feeder airport in China. What’s
more, a number of artists and entrepreneurs have settled down
in Lijiang, propelling local economic growth and cultural development.
Lijiang has also carried out a massive forestry project. It now
has 1.6 million hectares of forested land, or 136,667 hectares
more than it had at the time of the quake.
After 10 years of hard work, Lijiang has built out of the earthquake’s
devastation a city that fuses the ancient with the modern. Its
GDP is rocketing ahead at an annual rate of 9 percent, and fiscal
revenue is now a fourfold RMB 400 million. Farmers have seen their
net income soar by 11 percent, while urban residents have on average
8 percent more disposable income in their wallets every year.
Lijiang attracts some 4 million tourists annually.
Most of the people in Lijiang have left the pains of the earthquake
in the past. He Weinan says that all the families in his village
have built new homes, and equipped them with modern electric appliances.
In recent years, some of the villagers have even bought cars.
When another villager Mu Benheng sees the photo of his flattened
home that was taken immediately after the 1996 quake, he has mixed
emotions. He’ll never forget the trauma that his village
suffered ten years ago, but now that he runs a successful B&B
for urban tourists, he’s far too busy to give it much thought.
“There’s no point in dwelling on the troubles our village
experienced in the past,” he says. “The future is much
more important.”
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