| By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
Once capital of a remote Himalayan kingdom, Lijiang lays claim to inspiring the fictional city of Shangri-La.
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Similar to the idyllic mountaintop society described in the novel "Lost Horizon" by James Hilton, the Naxi people who built the city exist in exceptional harmony with their environment. Jagged unconquered peaks of the Jade Dragon mountain range protect the city from wind, keeping temperatures comfortably mild all year-round despite the high altitude.
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The Naxi beliefs call for respecting nature, welcoming outsiders and equal rights for women. The people's good health and hygiene have partly been attributed to a complex stone canal system that sends three mountain rivers coursing throughout the 1,000-year-old city.
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Lately, however, this city built without defensive walls has come under dangerous assault.
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"Our local culture, customs and the spirit of Lijiang are now seriously at risk from too many tourists suddenly coming here," said He Duan-qi, governor of Lijiang Prefecture. "We welcome visitors, but not so many. People will soon stop coming if we lose our unique character."
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With a strict ban against leisure travel to Lijiang lifted about a decade ago, the old town's 25,000 residents have recently been subjected to a flood of tourists.
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From an annual rate of several hundred thousand visitors five years ago, more than 2.6 million tourists have trundled down the winding cobblestoned streets of the old town during the first 10 months of this year. The city's 500 hotel beds have multiplied to more than 15,000 in the last three years, equivalent to about 400 new beds per month.
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The number of overnight guests during the national day and the spring festival holidays has increased from several thousand in 1996 to more than 20,000 this year, forcing tourists to seek shelter in schools, community halls and private homes.
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While tourism has brought wealth to a remote and impoverished area with no other real industry, it has also upset the city's delicate environment, injected commercialism and introduced a host of social problems.
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Residents now refuse to drink water from the public canals, complain about fees recently imposed at public toilets and frown upon thinly veiled prostitution rings that are run out of barbershops recently opened by outsiders.
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In addition to China's rapidly growing domestic tourism, city officials lay blame for Lijiang's plight on publicity generated by the city's inscription as a United Nations-designated World Heritage site in 1997.
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"We are happy that World Heritage status makes us world-famous and brings visitors," said Duan Song-ting, deputy mayor of Lijiang's old town. "But the demands of tourism have brought us so many problems."
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World Heritage sites in Asia often experience a 40 percent increase of visitors in the year following inscription, according to Richard Engelhardt, regional adviser for culture in Asia and the Pacific at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
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"Even compared to what normally happens at Asian World Heritage sites, Lijiang's tourism growth is totally out of control," Engelhardt said. "It will take at least a decade before the infrastructure catches up, but by that time, you have to wonder if they will have any authentic culture worth saving."
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Not only does Lijiang demonstrate the difficulty of successfully managing a rapid growth of tourism, but conservationists say the city's experience refutes the commonly held notion that tourism is a clean and desirable means of development.
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"People don't normally think of it that way, but if you look around here, you can see tourism is a highly damaging and extractive industry," said Edward Norton, deputy director of a Nature Conservancy project in Lijiang. "I'd prefer a uranium mine in a canyon any day over unmanaged tourism."
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World Heritage status has already attracted commercial threats that are diluting the authenticity of the very culture the United Nations intended to protect, according to Xuan Ke, a musician who was a leading promoter of Naxi traditional music for more than two decades.
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"I am glad people finally see the importance of our music after all these years, but you cannot produce good orchestras so quickly as the tourists now demand," Xuan said, referring to the six orchestras that have formed in the last 12 months. "Authentic music and so many other aspects of our Naxi culture will be killed for quick money. Just look at the crazy Dongba writing for sale on the streets."
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Pictographic characters from the Dongba script, a written form of the Naxi language, festoon a wide variety of objects in shops, from varnished wooden planks to painted textiles. Those who can read the commercially sold hieroglyphs mock the nonsensical phrases that result from a random combination of pretty pictures selected solely for their appeal to tourists.
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"The United Nations should threaten to take away the World Heritage plaque before all Naxi people leave Lijiang," Xuan said.
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While the United Nations has no plans to remove the plaque, the disruptions to the Naxi lifestyle have inspired a new program to monitor the impact of tourism on Lijiang and other World Heritage sites in Asia.
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One survey conducted last month found that more than half the shops on a main street in the old town had recently been rented to ethnic Chinese, bringing outsiders into what was once an almost purely Naxi community.
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Officials estimate that about 500 non-Naxi families have migrated to Lijiang from other tourist sites in China and opened more than 300 shops over the last 12 months. These shops, which often sell stones claimed to be jade from Burma, can be recognized by their loud television sets, bright linoleum floors and selection of semi-erotic wooden statues of nude women.
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Naxi people, on the other hand, tend to run candlelit restaurants serving local food, to open shops selling wooden panels that have been hand-carved with traditional patterns, or work as tour guides.
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After renting their aging traditional-style houses to outsiders, many old town residents have moved their families to more comfortable concrete buildings located a short walk away in Lijiang's more modern new town.
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They thereby avoid some of the nastier side-effects of tourism and the influx of outsiders. Tourists have overwhelmed the city's 38 public toilets, and newly resident outsiders have broken down customs that regulated when the city canal system was to be used for such things as drinking water, washing vegetables, cleaning clothes or dumping sewage.
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"Outsiders do not know these important procedures that kept the canal water clean for so long," said He Zi-xing, the Communist Party secretary of Lijiang county. "That is why we must encourage Naxi people to come back to live in the old town and not surrender it to other people."
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He recently moved from the new town back into a wooden house in the old town, bringing his wife, father and two children. "By living in the old town, I hope to find ways Naxi people can benefit more from tourism," he said, adding that, although many in Lijiang have benefited, tourism profits tend to be taken out of the community while residents are left having to pay to clean up the mess.
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Some of the worst offenders, He said, are tour operators who treat surrounding villages like amusement parks.
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Tourists may be the problem, but the solution lies with city residents, He added. "The most important thing is for Lijiang people to respect the old town," He said. "When that happens, I know I can retire because the old town has been saved." - THOMAS CRAMPTON is the International Herald Tribune's correspondent in Bangkok.
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