Yunnan
Discover Yunnan
Introduction
Yunnan is the south-western corner of China, bordering Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, and it is the most biologically and culturally varied province in the country. Twenty-five of China’s fifty-five recognised ethnic minorities live here, more than half the total, and the landscape ranges from tropical rainforest in the south to snow peaks above six thousand metres in the north-west.
The classic route runs up through the north-west. Kunming, the capital, sits on a plateau at nineteen hundred metres with a climate so even it is called the spring city. Dali, on a lake between mountains and the Cangshan range, was the capital of the Bai kingdom of Nanzhao and keeps its old walled town. Lijiang, further north, is a UNESCO-listed Naxi town of cobbled lanes and water channels, and beyond it the Yangtze cuts the Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the deepest in the world and a two-day walk along its rim.
South of Kunming the country changes: the rice terraces of Yuanyang, carved by the Hani over more than a thousand years and UNESCO-listed, and Xishuangbanna on the Lao border, which is culturally Dai and closer to Thailand than to Beijing. Pu’er tea comes from here. The rains fall June to September; the rest of the year is the season.