Baoshan Stone Town, located in the Jinsha River Grand Canyon in the north of Yulong Snow Mountain, is about1100km away from the ancient capital Lijiang. It is famous for being built on a mushroom-shaped rock. With a total area of about 0.5 square kilometers, there are more than 220 families and more than 800 Naxi villagers. Stone Town has cliffs on three sides, and the east slope goes straight into Jinsha River. Only two novice villages, east, west, north and south, can enter and leave.
Probably in the late Sui and early Tang Dynasties, a Mosuo man moved here from Yongning, Ninglang. They went through hardships, built steps and terraces along the hillside with hard-working hands, and built them layer by layer from the depths of the canyon, directly leading to the soil slope two or three kilometers away from the valley. This kind of ladder has turned the barren hills around Baoshan Stone Town into fertile fields where villagers can grow food crops on their own, providing rich and colorful material conditions for people who live and multiply here for every generation. On 1993, Baoshan Shizhen was listed as a key cultural relic protection unit in Yunnan Province.
The residential buildings in the city are stacked on top of each other, bearing the skills handed down from generation to generation by folk architects. The types of buildings are integrated with the advanced technologies of other ethnic groups in China and improved. The wall is decorated with cement bricks and other contemporary building materials, and the Bai architectural type with three squares and one shadow wall is also added. But on a large scale, it still retains its own unique folk customs. In the village, many houses have fish-shaped hand-carved ornaments under the eaves. According to the old man in the village, this object is used to exorcise evil spirits. The old ancestors thought that houses were all made of wood and were afraid of fire. Fish dominate water, and water can kill fire, so they decorate fish under the roof to prevent the yard from catching fire. In fact, when building their mansions, senior officials in ancient times decorated a wooden fish under the roof of the house to better establish their own integrity and self-discipline. This kind of personal behavior was widely spread to Naxi village and became the representative of water and fire.
The villagers live a leisurely and harmonious life, are warm and friendly to outsiders, and talk easily. Through further understanding, it is found that the villagers have stored China traditional culture with a long history and obvious characteristics in the fields of festivals, costumes, weddings, funerals and celebrations, and daily life.
The Naxi people in Shishou Town, Baoshan still keep a variety of traditional theme activities such as worship and festivals. In addition to traditional Naxi themed activities such as offering sacrifices to the gods of nature and offering sacrifices, there are also festivals such as "respecting cows" and "calling the gods of the valley". The ceremony of offering sacrifices to "Bu" conveyed the core idea of green ecology, that is, human beings live in harmony with nature and cannot ask too much from nature to avoid the problem of resource exhaustion. Sacrifice is usually held twice a year, once in June of the lunar calendar, called "Tabu"; Once in the seventh half of the lunar calendar, it is called "Bojing". Every year after planting rice in May of the lunar calendar, whenever a family feeds buffalo, the protagonist needs to wash the buffalo horn, that is, wash the whole body of his own buffalo, especially the buffalo horn, feed it with food and grass, and hang bright red silk or cloth on the buffalo horn, which means to give the cow red and express comfort and reward to the cows who work silently. After the rice is harvested, a festival of "Crying for the Soul of the Valley" is held. Naxi men and women in the village shouted "Oh, Lulei! Oh, Lulei! " Then sing "Pray for Ji" and look forward to a bumper harvest.
Most women wear the traditional costumes of the Naxi Chinese nation, wrap Hohhot with a long white cloth, and tie the rest of the cloth on the left back and hang it. This traditional Hohhot way is rare in the surrounding villages, but it is still well preserved in Stone Town. A woman always wears a scarf behind her back. Shawls can not only keep warm from the cold, but also pave the way for their backs. Its pattern design has rich and colorful cultural connotations. The above pattern design is called "Bagtu" in Naxi language, which is the little frog god in Naxi Dongba culture and art.
In recent years, more and more young people go out to work, but the old people still continue their traditional way of life in the historic Stone Town, maintaining the traditional farming of sunrise and sunset. In Shicheng people's homes, we can often see the life scenes of grinding grain with a stone mill, beating rice with a mortar, winding textiles with thread and using a shuttle loom. The daily transportation in Shitou Town, especially the transportation of food crops and organic fertilizer, still adopts the way of people carrying horses. The culture and art of caravan continue here, and the smell of roasted wine drifts in the inclined shaft for a long time. Villagers' weddings and funerals are all about helping each other, and some folk customs with a long history are still continuing in the catering industry. When a local red event is held, the commonly used ingredients should not be milky white, such as bean products, chicken breast and potatoes. If applied, it is considered unlucky. Most of the ingredients used to receive guests are crispy meat, steamed ribs, big meat, tube bones and so on.
Stone Town in Baoshan is a thousand-year-old Naxi Castle integrating natural scenery and natural landscape. It is a village where the original ecological resources and the long-standing traditional culture of China blend together, and everything has maintained its original appearance since ancient times. There is no noise in the village, and there are not many tourists to disturb it, only leisurely old sheep and love horses. Living in the village for a few days, sometimes I will meet three or five sporadic tourists and take photos to watch; The children in the primary school are reading aloud and echoing in Stone Town. This is also a truly dangerous beach, a fresh folk museum.