7 Days in Yuxi

An hour north of town, Fuxian Lake drops to a maximum depth of about 158.9 m and stores some 20.6 billion cubic meters of water — more than any other lake in China — in water clear enough to see stones on the bottom from a boat.

1. yuxi fuxian lake

At Maotianshan, geologist Hou Xianguang cracked open a slab in 1984 and found a 518-million-year-old Cambrian marine world — more than 280 species now cataloged. The UNESCO listing came in 2012, and the modern museum below the hill lays out the whole story.

1. yuxi chengjiang fossil site
2. yuxi chengjiang fossil museum

South to Tonghai, where Xiushan's temple courtyards stack up the hillside under cypresses said to date to the Song dynasty, and the county town keeps one of Yunnan's larger Confucian temples, founded in the Yuan era. The hill's plaques have earned it the tag "a sea of boards and couplets".

1. yuxi xiushan
2. yuxi tonghai confucian temple

The Lijiashan museum on the hill above Jiangchuan explains the bronze-burial culture unearthed here from 1972 — the famous ox-and-tiger table altar came out of these tombs — and Xingyun Lake, connected to Fuxian by a short canal, closes the afternoon.

1. yuxi lijashan bronze museum
2. yuxi xingyun lake

About two and a half hours west to Xinping county, where the Ailao range climbs toward 3,100-meter peaks. The Shimen gorge funnels a river between slab walls, and the Nanen waterfall drops in stepped curtains — overnight in the river town of Gasa.

1. yuxi ailao shimen gorge
2. yuxi nanen waterfall

The Longxi manor above Gasa is a Republican-era fortified estate of the local Tusi line, its courtyards pinned against the mountain; below, the Gasa market street belongs to the Flower-Waist Dai, whose narrow tube skirts turn market day into a color study. Back over the hills to Yuxi for the night.

1. yuxi longxi manor
2. yuxi gasa town

Composer Nie Er (1912-1935), who wrote China's national anthem in 1935 and died that year in Japan at 23, came from a Yuxi family — the residence and the music square by the river form a factual circuit, then the markets, then the train north, half an hour or so to Kunming.

1. yuxi nieer former residence
2. yuxi nieer music square
3. yuxi city markets