Eight days in Yunnan: uphill from the flower markets to the snow line

Kunming is called the spring city because it is nearly two thousand metres up and eight degrees north of the tropics, which cancel each other out and give it a temperature of about twenty all year.

The first afternoon belongs to Green Lake, which is not a sight so much as the city's front room: tea houses, musicians, chess games, and in winter a lake covered with black headed gulls that migrate down from Siberia.

The temple ten minutes north has been here for twelve hundred years and is the largest and most active in the city, with a pond and two pavilions in the middle of it.

Eat across the road. Yunnan food is its own thing, not Sichuan and not Cantonese, and crossing the bridge noodles are the dish to start with.

Ninety minutes east of Kunming, a plain of grey limestone pillars stands several storeys high over an area of hundreds of square kilometres. It is karst that eroded vertically rather than into hills, and walking through it is like walking through a ruined city nobody built.

Go early and walk beyond the first loop. The section near the entrance is crowded and the paths further out are almost empty, which turns a photo stop into a proper morning.

Back in the city, or on the way in, a monastery up in the hills to the west holds five hundred painted arhats made in the 1880s by a sculptor who gave every one of them a different, faintly satirical face. They are the strangest and best thing in Kunming.

Pack tonight. The train to Dali goes in the morning.

Two hours northwest, climbing gently, and you arrive between a lake and a mountain ridge that runs unbroken for forty kilometres and stays above three and a half thousand metres for most of it.

Dali was the capital of two independent kingdoms, the Nanzhao and the Dali, which ruled this corner of the world for five hundred years before the Mongols arrived. The three pagodas above the town are what is left of them.

The tallest was built in the ninth century and the two smaller ones a hundred years later. They survived thirty four recorded earthquakes, including one that flattened the monastery behind them, and the reflecting pool in the grounds gives the photograph everyone takes.

Then the old town, which is small, walled and made of stone, and best in the early evening.

Erhai is forty kilometres long and the loop around it is the best day in Dali. Hire an electric scooter or a car with a driver, or take the buses up the west shore, but do not try to walk any of it.

The village to aim for is Xizhou, twenty five kilometres north, which has getting on for two hundred listed Bai houses: whitewashed, carved, with a painted screen wall facing the gate and courtyards you can pay a few yuan to walk into. Its morning market is a working one.

Shuanglang on the far shore is the other stop, an old fishing village that has become a row of guesthouses looking back across the water at the mountain, and it is the best place on the lake at sunset.

Between the two, the lakeside road runs past rice fields, fishing boats and villages where the Bai still do their own weaving and tie dyeing.

Two more hours north, climbing again, and Lijiang appears on a plateau at 2,400 metres with a snow massif filling the northern sky.

The old town is a maze of cobbled lanes and stone bridges with meltwater channels running down the middle, and it has no grid at all. The way to see it is to follow whichever lane looks quieter. If you get lost, the water flows away from the central square.

The Mu Palace on the western edge is the historical anchor: the compound of the clan who governed this valley for the Chinese court for over four hundred years, climbing the hillside in successive courtyards.

In the evening, the Naxi orchestra. Small hall, elderly musicians, and a repertoire of Taoist ceremonial music that has disappeared everywhere else.

The mountain is thirty kilometres north and takes the whole day. Buy the entrance fee, the shuttle and the cable car together and go early, because the glacier cable car has a daily cap and the queue can run to two hours by mid morning.

The big cable car climbs to a boardwalk on the edge of the glacier and the air up there is thin enough to notice on the first step. This is the point at which the gradual climb through the province pays off.

Lower down, the fir forest opens into a clearing that the Naxi called the place of death for love, after the couples who came here rather than accept arranged marriages.

Come back through the valley below, where a chain of shallow pools runs an improbable turquoise over white limestone.

Black Dragon Pool sits at the northern edge of the old town, and the view across it to the massif with a marble bridge in the foreground is the one on every poster of Yunnan. Get there at opening, when the water is stillest and the peak is most likely to be clear.

By nine the park fills with people dancing and playing chess, which is worth staying for.

Then go north. Shuhe is five kilometres out and is the same Naxi architecture as Lijiang with a fraction of the visitors. Baisha, three kilometres beyond it, was the Naxi capital before Lijiang and holds fifteenth century murals that mix Tibetan, Han and Naxi painting, with almost nobody looking at them.

Both are a short taxi, or an hour by bicycle on the flat.

Get up early on the last morning and walk the lanes at first light. Between six and eight the old town is the place it was before the coaches: people sweeping, water running clear down the channels, and nobody selling anything.

It is the best hour of the whole trip and it costs nothing, which is a reasonable way to finish a week that has otherwise involved a great many entrance tickets.

Lijiang's airport is thirty minutes south, with flights to Kunming, Chengdu, Shanghai and Beijing. The train south takes about five hours to Kunming if you would rather stay on the ground.