Daxu, an isolated area of peace
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If you like traveling, you will like Shangrilá. A different book from trips, in which the protagonist, the author who offers you this information about Beijing, penetrates in some of the most remote regions of China. In this succession of mountains that spread to the south of Sichuan and the northwest of Yunnan, inhabited by related peoples of some form with the Tibetan culture, as the Yi, the Moso, the Naxi or the Bai. Following the track that the always damned Yi mark, it will finish bottled in the Shangrilá search. |
Daxu is a small village placed to the shore of the river Li, not far from Guilin. During last centuries, before the railroad was constructed, it was one of four most important ports of the river Li. Most of his inhabitants were devoting themselves to the commerce and his market was famous in all the south of China. Then, with the construction of the railroad, the fluvial transport was done more and more scarce, plunging Daxu in a decadent siesta. Since it is the only one of the villages placed to the east of the river, until now it has escaped from a massive tourist development.
In Daxu, whose central area is still well preserved surprisingly, an attentive visit will allow us to know numerous details of the everyday life in the region during the first half of the XXth century, still there stay numerous traces of his prosperous past. Discolored for the continuous moisture of the tropic, the courtyards of the houses, and his rooms often showed by his kind residents, they hide treasures of the craft and the Chinese traditional decoration.
In Daxu there are still celebrated frequent fairs and markets during which his brown streets fill with life, peasants come from the nearby villages fill with colors the sober city, like a fleeting reminiscence of the activity of last times.
If he visits one day without market, the people is calm. With his narrow, solidly cobbled streets, his wooden houses aligned on both sides, each one with his courtyard and his traditional structure. At the edge of the same ones are his inhabitants: the simple people who combines his traditional works with the modern activities. Some of them have turned into occasional guides of their own houses or handmade business, and it is not strange to find the carpenter in his works, to the pharmacist, to the dentist or to the one that smokes the fish.
In general Daxu breathes peace, and his visit is always a good opportunity to know this rural China that always seems to escape.
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