丽江黑龙潭

This guide to Black Dragon Pool in Lijiang follows Joseph Rock, the Austrian-American botanist who arrived in 1922 to hunt for a blight-resistant chestnut and ended up staying twenty-seven years, based in a village near this very pool. It traces his odd standing among his Naxi neighbors, his one close friendship with a local magistrate who died in 1933, and his habit of returning to this exact bank again and again with a glass-plate camera. You'll hear how the pavilion and pool around you were rebuilt and even relocated piece by piece over the following decades. Stand at the water's edge and wait for the wind to settle, the way he did.