Jiuzhaigou

The valley was known for centuries only to the Tibetan families who farmed and grazed it, a group of Amdo-related communities whose nine villages gave the place its Chinese name, Jiuzhaigou, the valley of nine stockaded villages. The wider county lay on the frontier between the Sichuan basin and the Tibetan world, an area of Tibetan and Qiang settlement controlled loosely from garrison towns to the south and crossed by trading and tribute routes. Local belief held the surrounding peaks to be deities, and the lakes were treated as sacred.

Outsiders arrived in numbers only in the 1960s and 1970s, when logging crews began cutting the valley's old-growth forest. The discovery of what the loggers were working in reached provincial officials in 1975, when a forestry survey urged protection, logging was halted over the years that followed, and the Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve was established in 1980. Protection deepened quickly, with UNESCO World Heritage listing in 1992 and biosphere reserve status in 1997. Villagers were prohibited from farming and logging and turned instead to tourism.

Growth after that was extraordinary. Roads improved, an airport opened on the high plateau in 2003, and visitor numbers climbed into the millions each year, with the county town and the strip outside the gate rebuilt around hotels. On 8 August 2017 a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the area, killing about twenty-five people, damaging roads and buildings and altering some of the valley's formations, including the Nuorilang Waterfall. The park closed to visitors until March 2018, reopened with limited access while repairs went on, and now admits a capped number of visitors a day on timed tickets.

The county's population is mixed: Tibetan, Qiang and Han, with the Tibetan communities of the valley belonging to the eastern edge of the Tibetan cultural world rather than to Lhasa's. Prayer flags cross the streams, mani walls of carved stones stand at path junctions, and prayer wheels are turned by the water itself in wooden mill houses. Tibetan Buddhism and the older Bon tradition both have followers here, and the peak above the Zharu Valley is circled on pilgrimage rather than climbed.

The Qiang, one of China's smaller recognised minorities and concentrated in this part of northern Sichuan, keep their own new year festival, stone-built tower houses in villages across the region, and traditions of embroidery and reed-pipe music. Much of the Qiang heartland further south was devastated by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and cultural preservation has been a public priority since.

Tourism has reshaped local culture as much as it has funded it. Song and dance evenings staged for tour groups, souvenir stalls selling yak-bone jewellery and amber, and hotels built in Tibetan style are part of the economy, and villagers in the valley now earn their living from visitors rather than from land they are no longer permitted to farm. Families still hold weddings, new year gatherings and temple days on their own terms, and visitors are expected to be quiet and respectful around houses and shrines inside the park.

Fewer than one hundred thousand people live in the county, spread thinly through narrow valleys, and the town is small enough to cross in a few minutes. Almost everything turns on the park: hotel and restaurant work, driving, guiding, selling souvenirs and produce, and the construction that goes on whenever the road or the gate area is upgraded. Outside the season the strip of hotels near the entrance empties and many businesses close.

Beyond tourism, households keep barley, maize and potatoes on terraces, raise yaks, cattle and pigs on the upper pastures, and gather honey, walnuts, sea buckthorn and mushrooms from the forest. Public money pays for roads, schools and resettlement housing, and many younger people leave for Chengdu and other cities for work and study, returning at new year.

Life is governed by altitude, weather and the tourist calendar. Mornings begin early, with buses and staff heading to the gate before dawn in the autumn peak; winter is quiet, cold and slow. Landslides and snow can cut the mountain roads for days, and earthquake risk is a constant background — the county was rebuilt after 2017 with that in mind. Balancing visitor numbers against the fragility of the travertine formations and the water that makes them is the central argument about the area's future.

Eating here divides between what local households cook and what restaurants near the gate serve. Tibetan homes rely on tsampa, roasted barley flour kneaded with butter tea into a dough, on yak meat dried in strips or stewed, on yoghurt and hard dried cheese, and on po cha, the salty butter tea drunk through the day. Qiang and Tibetan families both brew barley or highland barley liquor for festivals and guests.

Restaurants outside the park are mostly Sichuanese, run by incomers from the lowlands: hotpot bubbling with beef tallow and chilli, twice-cooked pork, mapo tofu, and bowls of noodles for breakfast, generally toned down for visitors who cannot take the heat of Chengdu cooking. Yak hotpot, yak-meat skewers grilled over charcoal and whole roast lamb are the local variations, the last usually served at group dinners with music.

The mountains supply the rest. Wild mushrooms appear after summer rain, walnuts and honey come from the lower valleys, and sea buckthorn berries are pressed into a sharp orange juice sold everywhere in the town. Highland barley is baked into flat breads and biscuits, and dried apples, plums and yak jerky are the standard things travellers take away. Tea is drunk constantly: green and jasmine in the Han restaurants, butter or plain brick tea in Tibetan houses.