Lijiang

At 2,400 metres in the highlands of northwest Yunnan, Lijiang is the storybook capital of the Naxi people — a maze of cobbled lanes, willow-shaded canals and grey-tiled rooftops that has stood for more than 800 years, with the glaciated wall of Yulong (Jade Dragon) Snow Mountain rising 5,596 metres behind it. The Old Town of Lijiang was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, and it rewards slow, curious wandering: with a self-guided audio tour in your ear, every bridge, courtyard and carved doorway starts to explain itself as you walk.

Lijiang grew rich as a caravan stop on the Tea Horse Road, the mule trail that carried Yunnan tea toward Tibet, and its character is still that of a crossroads — Naxi, Han, Tibetan and Bai influences layered into one town. Famously, it never built city walls: legend says the ruling Mu family refused, because boxing the character for "Mu" inside a wall turns it into the character for "trapped." Instead, three spring-fed streams from Black Dragon Pool thread the town into hundreds of channels crossed by stone bridges — the reason Lijiang is nicknamed the Venice of the East.

The lanes converge on Sifang Street, the old market square where Naxi grandmothers still circle-dance in the evenings. From there, the audio guides lead you up Lion Hill to Wangu Tower for a rooftop-and-snow-mountain panorama, and into the Mu Mansion (Mufu), the chieftains' palace so grand it is called a "mini Forbidden City." Listen for the story of the Dongba script, the Naxi pictographic writing — the only hieroglyphic system still in living use anywhere in the world.

Lijiang is also a base camp for some of China's grandest landscapes, each with its own narrated stop:

• Yulong Snow Mountain and Blue Moon Valley — cable cars climb toward the glacier, above a valley of impossibly turquoise pools.
• Tiger Leaping Gorge — one of the world's deepest river canyons, where the Jinsha (upper Yangtze) thunders between snow peaks.
• Shuhe and Baisha ancient towns — quieter UNESCO-listed siblings of the old town, Baisha famed for its Ming-dynasty murals.
• Lugu Lake — a high alpine lake on the Sichuan border, homeland of the matrilineal Mosuo people.

Come in spring or autumn for clear mountain light, start early before the lanes fill, and let the audio guides turn a pretty stage set back into a living Naxi town.