大理：谁决定它变成什么样

Dali's terrain is easy to understand.

Cangshan is to the west, Erhai to the east, and the old town and villages are packed onto a narrow strip of flat land between them.

That structure determined how local people lived for over a thousand years: water and timber from the mountain, crops on the flat, fish from the lake.

Today it also determines something else — where visitors can go, and where they can stay.

The owner of my guesthouse isn't local.

He used to work in finance in Shanghai, more than twelve hours a day.

One year he came to Dali for a week off, and after going back he kept thinking about Cangshan.

The next year he quit and moved here.

There are a lot of people like this in Dali; locals call them new Dali people.

Most of them come from big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Some open guesthouses, some do craftwork, and some just work remotely from here.

They've brought cafés, bookshops and a different rhythm of life.

They've also brought rising rents and a certain cultural tension.

The owner admits this himself.

He said: we made the old town better-looking, and we also made it more expensive.

The old town is the core area where the Bai people live.

The Bai have lived around here for over a thousand years, with their own language, architecture and festivals.

The easiest thing to recognize is the houses: white walls, grey tiles, painted decoration and inscriptions over the gate.

The walls often carry a four-character phrase, like "honesty passed down through the family" or "the beauty of Cangshan and Erhai".

The characters are decoration, and they're also a family's introduction of itself to the street.

The next day I cycled around Erhai.

The road has the lake on one side and the mountain on the other, with villages all the way along.

I stopped at one village, and an old man invited me into his courtyard for tea.

Bai hospitality uses three courses of tea.

The first is bitter, the second is sweet, and the third has ginger and Sichuan pepper in it — a complicated taste.

The old man summed it up: one bitter, two sweet, three aftertaste.

Bitter-then-sweet is a common idea; it's the third course that matters.

Aftertaste means that once you've known the bitter and the sweet, you still have to judge for yourself what your life tastes like.

After the tea, he pointed at the lake and told me something else.

Over the past decade or so, more and more guesthouses opened around the lake.

Household waste water went straight into Erhai, and the water quality clearly declined.

Around 2017, the government began a large clean-up, closing a great many lakeside guesthouses and restaurants.

Later it drew ecological protection boundaries, and some villagers and business owners were required to move back from the shore.

I asked what he thought.

His answer was very practical.

The closures did cost a lot of people their income; that's true.

But when he was small you could drink the water of Erhai directly, and later you couldn't, and now it's a bit clearer again.

He said: water takes many years to get better, and only a few years to get worse.

That sentence states a complicated policy problem very clearly.

The cost of environmental protection lands on specific people, while the benefit is shared by everyone, including people who come later.

The lake was quiet that afternoon; you could see the villages and the mountain on the far shore.

At dusk I went back to the old town.

The streets were crowded, music playing in the bars, a queue outside the rose-cake shop.

The bustle of the old town and the quiet of the lakeside switch over within a single day.

A lot of people criticize the old town for being too commercial.

The criticism has a point, but the income from that commerce also supports many local families.

The real question isn't whether there are tourists, but who gets to decide what this place becomes.

On the morning I left, I looked at Cangshan again.

The clouds were in a completely different place than on my first day.

The guesthouse owner was right: the mountain here is different every day.

In an era when everyone is short of time, choosing to look at the same mountain every day is itself a decision.

If you could move somewhere like Dali for a year, would you go?