Penetrating the crisp early morning air are the sounds and scents of a village stirring awake: the grunt of pigs in their pens, the smell of fresh animal dung, glimpses of life shuffling inside house courtyards, the rustle of flowing water and Naxi folk music playing from outdoor speakers.
I am in a remote village in Yunnan province, China. It is built on a rock outcrop in the lower half of a river gorge. Three sides of the outcrop are sheer cliffs and the last side slopes down the hill towards the jade-green Jinsha River in the valley below. Across the river, the terrain rose steeply to mountainous heights.
The village clings to the stone outcrop, a tight mass of dwellings, alleys and stairways cascading toward the river. A skirt-like defensive wall runs the length of the village between its two opposite gates. Baoshan Stone Town is split into two clusters, where a dense, cliff-bound core and a newer spillover on the adjacent slope connect at a narrow pass.
Fewer than 1,000 people live here.It has a history that stretches back to the middle of the Tang Dynasty (7th to 10th century CE), when a group of Naxi, one of the 56 recognised ethnic groups in China, established the village on the rock outcrop.
Baoshan is protected by its remoteness, the mountainous terrain and the natural defences of its location. The Naxi of Baoshan Stone Town have lived in self-sufficiency for centuries, growing a variety of crops to feed themselves and their livestock by terracing the hillsides. A cleverly engineered irrigation system feeds water into the village and the fields. Walnuts are harvested for their oil for cooking.
The houses and much of the furniture are made of stone, even beds, kitchen tops and benches.
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The roof courtyard narrows to a bridge leading to a round, walled lookout tower
Alleys between houses are narrow, rocky flights of steps. One of these meanders upwards, passing sturdy houses with courtyards where animals are often kept and open views to the highest point in the inner village.
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At the top is a broad, open, paved courtyard with a low wall around its periphery. At its furthest point, it narrows at a person-width opening to a narrow wooden bridge over a gap to a round, walled beacon tower on a rocky cliff. It is a lookout point to the terrain behind the village.
Triangular embrasures puncture the peripheral wall. These were for defence, says Mr He, our local guide. He makes a motion of shooting a weapon through the embrasures and of throwing missiles over the top of the wall onto imaginary attackers below.
A Naxi who has lived in the village all his life, he runs the guesthouse where I am staying in the inner village. He is also the local veterinarian and guide to visitors who want to go hiking or exploring the surrounding countryside. He is small, lean and muscular, with a cheerful demeanour, a good set of teeth and a complexion the colour of walnut.
With the help of my guide Jerry, who understands the local Naxi dialect, he recounts the local legend of how invading Mongols had come across the Taizi pass, crossing the Jinsha River on their way to conquer Lijiang and Dali.
The Taizi Pass is not very far from the village. In 1253, Mongol forces under Kublai Khan crossed the Jinsha River on rafts and inflated leather bags. They would conquer Yunnan on their long and bloody campaign to conquer all of China. In 1270, the Mongols founded the Yuan Dynasty, the first foreign dynasty to rule the country. Centuries later, the village’s isolation persists until a road changes everything.
The circuitous route
As recently as 2019, there was no proper road to the village. Blogs, travel websites and reviews highlight the difficulty of travel to Baoshan, with hiking recommended for the last dozen kilometres due to the deplorable conditions of the rutted track.
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Since then, a new tarmac road has been built that snakes down, through twists, bends and hairpin turns in the mountainous terrain, to a small parking lot in front of the entrance to the outer village.
The road has changed the lives of the villagers. The relative ease of travel has brought a trickle of visitors and guest houses have been set up, including a small luxury one. It is much easier to travel to the nearest town, 22km away, for government business, services and provisions.
Before the road was paved, travelling the distance was an ordeal for any vehicle.
This stairway is typical of the alleys in Baoshan village
On foot, it was a very long walk.
There is an alternate, shorter and much hairier route, however. From Baoshan, villagers can skirt the river valley along its contours to the next nearest village, Yanke, at a similar altitude and 5km away in a straight line. From Yanke it is a 700-800m ascent of the river gorge escarpment to the top and another 7km by road to the town.
This is once the path the villagers took, walking high above the Jinsha River, before making the steep climb for the walk to the town. He would conduct a guided hike of the shorter, alternate route, which is now hardly ever used.
Stony path
In the morning, we drive for two hours on a road as twisted as an intestine, up from the side of the river valley where Baoshan is to the top of the escarpment where the road straightens out. We pass the provincial town, a cluster of buildings with street markets, a police station and government offices.
Continuing past the town, we drive down a narrow road and stop near a bend on the road.
We reach the top of the river gorge and walk to the lip. The land falls precipitously away into the yawning hollow of the gorge. Far below, the Jinsha River glistens.
We begin descending the near-vertical escarpment on a zig-zagging, narrow foot trail. The vegetation veers from scrubby grassland with low bushes to forest cover. Far below, there are glimpses through trees of the gorge. We descend sharply and the village of Yanke comes into view below us.
It is shaped like the prow of a boat, parting waves of layered, terraced fields that descend to the riverside.
He breaks into song, a high-pitched Naxi tune he used to sing when he herded goats this way in his childhood. He stands, with the ease of surveying home terrain, the vast porcelain-blue sky above and the land rippling away in large, smooth waves to the river below and rising again opposite majestic cliffs.
Baoshan is built on a vantage point with a view of terraced fields, valleys and mountains behind
A spur of bare rock thrust out from the hillside. Ladders of welded rebar bolted to the rock allow the descent of the steepest sections.
Two hours after starting, we reach flat ground and stand in a grassy patch under a spreading tree above Yanke village, craning our necks and squinting eyes upwards to where the sun glints against the top of the rocky escarpment we have descended from. We have packed lunch boxes with us and sit in the shade of the tree to eat.
The green river is several hundred metres below. This is the end of the first section, the descent. The second section is along the contours of the gorge, back to Baoshan Stone Village. It would be easier and less perilous. Or so we think.
The terrain is open, with low, scrubby trees, cacti and tall grasses. I could see the scalloped surface of the green water, sparkling in daylight. The narrow path is crumbly underfoot.
He skips along like a child on a ramble, sure-footed as a mountain goat, pausing to clear loose pebbles and rocks from the path to make our passage easier.
It is late afternoon on the long and sometimes harrowing trail when we approach a bulging cliff jutting out over the river. A long time ago, a channel had been painstakingly carved by hand into the edge of the cliff, skirting it high above the water.
On one side of the path is the cliff face. On the other, a sheer drop to the gleaming, indifferent river, a few hundred metres below. Turning back is not an option. There is no other way.
The path is quite broad and mostly even. I tread across without looking towards the river, around to the other side. It is a distance of several hundred metres, where another 45-minute hike on the slope leads to the terraced green fields and the comforting silhouette of Baoshan Stone Town.
The Naxi of Baoshan used to walk this perilous route as a matter of daily necessity. For a few hours, I have walked in their footsteps — across sheer rock, through silence, past crumbly slopes into the heart of a village shaped by stone and by the will to endure.
