Seventy kilometres west of Lijiang, SHIGU (Stone Drum) is a small place named after a tablet raised here in the eighteenth century by one of Lijiang's Mu clan to mark a particularly bloody victory over Han Chinese armies. Broad and not too rough, the Yangzi River makes its first major bend here, deflected sharply to the northeast towards Tiger Leaping Gorge, having flowed uninterrupted in a thousand-kilometre arc from its source away on the Tibet-Qinghai border. Part of the Red Army chose this point to ford the Yangzi during the Long March in April 1936, breaking through Nationalist lines under the guidance of the spirited Communist general He Long. There's a small guesthouse (¥30-75) in Shigu, and it's a pretty area to spend a spring day walking around.

 

For the adventurous, buses run 100km northwest beyond Shigu through a beautiful, little-explored area which still lacks any tourist infrastructure. The road follows the Yangzi to the halfway town of Jiudian , and then bears west past the slopes of Hengduan Shan and Xinzhu Botanical Garden - basically just a protected natural hillside boasting over three hundred species of trees, some of which are estimated to be a thousand years old. WEIXI town marks the end of the road, of interest for nearby villages inhabited by the Pumi , a Tibetan race forming one of China's smallest nationalities.