Baima Longtansi

This guide to Baima Longtansi in Lijiang opens with the sound of a spring that has run at the foot of Lion Hill since 1754, when the city's prefect Fan Haoren ordered a small temple built above it. It traces how three stacked stone basins, for drinking, washing vegetables and laundry, have stayed unpoliced for generations under an unwritten agreement among Naxi families. It also follows the temple's harder history: burned during the wars of the 1850s, rebuilt by villagers in 1882, then turned into a schoolhouse for seventy years until the 1996 earthquake changed everything again. Listen for how a place with no gate or fee still runs on trust.