Lijiang, canals under a snow peak

Lijiang sits at 2,400 metres on a Yunnan plateau, and its old town of Dayan is one of the few Chinese historic centres never walled: the Naxi chieftains of the Mu family, the story goes, refused to draw a square around their own name. What they built instead was a maze of cobbled lanes and channels fed by the Yuquan spring, water running beside every street, crossed by more than three hundred small bridges. Come at seven in the morning, before the day-trippers, when shopkeepers sluice the flagstones and the roofs are all grey tile and woodsmoke.

The Naxi still shape the place. Their Dongba script is the world's only living pictographic writing, and you will see it painted on shopfronts and studied at the Dongba Research Institute; Naxi orchestras play Tang and Song court music on instruments passed down for generations. Visit the Mu Family Mansion, rebuilt in Ming style on the hillside, and climb Lion Hill for the roofscape. At Black Dragon Pool, the Deyue Pavilion and its arched bridge sit, when skies are clear, under a mirror image of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, a 5,596-metre massif of thirteen peaks that is rarely climbed and whose summit is off-limits to visitors.

Go further out and it only gets better. Baisha village keeps Ming murals blending Buddhist, Taoist and Dongba imagery; Shuhe is a quieter old town on the tea-horse road. A cable car climbs Jade Dragon to the Glacier Park at 4,506 metres, and Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of Asia's great two-day treks, begins a couple of hours north. Eat Naxi grilled cheese, baba flatbread and chicken hotpot before continuing across China.