Deqin, Beneath Sacred Kawagarbo

Deqin is the last town in Yunnan on the road north toward Tibet, a string of buildings at around 3,400 metres above the Lancang — the river that becomes the Mekong. Nobody comes for the town. They come for what stands across the valley: Meili Snow Mountain, whose main peak Kawagarbo rises to 6,740 metres and remains unclimbed, protected both by Tibetan belief and by the 1991 disaster that killed seventeen Sino-Japanese climbers. It is one of the great sacred mountains of Tibetan Buddhism, and pilgrims still walk the multi-day kora around its base.

The view is the event. From the chortens at Feilai Temple, travellers wake before dawn in the cold to watch rizhao jinshan — the first sun striking the summits and turning the whole thirteen-peak wall gold for a few minutes. Cloud wins often; the months from October to March give the best odds. Below, the Mingyong Glacier pushes unusually low into forest and is reachable on a half-day walk up from the village.

The serious trek is Yubeng, a pair of villages hidden behind a pass and until recently unreachable by road, with day walks to the Sacred Waterfall and up to the Ice Lake beneath Kawagarbo's face. Guesthouses are simple, meals mean yak, barley and butter tea, and altitude deserves respect. Getting here means the Yunnan–Tibet highway from Shangri-La, now tunnelled beneath the 4,292-metre Baima pass, about two and a half hours of mountain road that are half the reason to go. Beyond Deqin the highway carries on toward Markam in Tibet; the road up from Shangri-La is the finest overland run in southwest China.