Memories are fickle beasts.  When I look at my photos from my 2019 trip to Lijiang, I see that it was a beautiful city with intriguing narrow water channels and narrower streets.  However, what I remember - at least on an emotional level - is that Lijiang was an old town that once had a soul, but it is now a fiction, a mere pretty setting for a sanitized version of Chinese history.  Lijiang is not a city; it is a souvenir shop.  

There are other cities in the world that long ago pushed out their residents and now exist almost exclusively for tourists.  Venice and Cesky Krumlov being just two examples of cities that are no longer alive.  However, even if Venice and Cesky Krumlov have no real residents left, they still have something authentic about them, e.g., the buildings.  And their shops are not so bizarrely identical.  I am convinced that I got lost in Lijiang, less due to its winding maze of streets, but more due to the fact that the shops seem to repeat itself on a loop: Jade store, scarf store, drum store, dongba paper store, tea store, jade store, scarf store, drum store, dongba paper store, tea store.  

What is heartbreaking about Lijiang is that the death of its authenticity was not inevitable but engineered.  In his informative article "Why Lijiang deserved its World Heritage status — and what happened next", Jim Goodman explains that after the 1996 earthquake and the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation: 

"It turned out the authorities had their own idea of what a Heritage Site should look like. That view didn't stress preservation so much as transformation. Apparently they thought that recognition as a Heritage Site gave them the right, even the duty, to recreate Dayan [Old Town of Lijiang] as an idealized version of itself... a policy that eventually resulted in the removal of all the Naxi living in the Naxi old town...

The business assault next targeted the undamaged houses, aiming to turn these into commercial establishments as well. Naxi home owners initially resisted, especially the older generation, but already tourists from all over China were flooding Lijiang... Within a few years every family had agreed to move out and every old building in Dayan had been torn down and rebuilt as a guesthouse, restaurant or souvenir shop. They all employed traditional architecture, but one far fancier than the original houses. The only parts of Dayan left intact and authentic were the Old Stone Bridge and the paving stones."

To be fair to Lijiang, when I visited it in 2019, there were pockets where remnants of local life or a sense of authenticity existed.  Some people still washed their clothes and vegetables in the wells/pools, and the Zhongyi Market (photo) had retained its vibrancy.  Indeed, Lijiang was an interesting place, and there were alleyways in which you can actually escape the hyper-consumerism.  The reason that I am not more kind in my recollection is likely because I had such a high expectation of it. I was so incredibly excited to experience Lijiang that I had planned my trip to China around it, expecting to be transported to a place where time stood still.  Unfortunately, Lijiang was not the memorable experience that I had dearly hoped for.  However, because I planned my trip around Lijiang, I did hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge, which unexpectedly did become the memorable experience that I sought.

For its fictional beauty, I give Lijiang three stars.