Nashi/Naxi Ethnicity Dancers in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, China.

These lovely Naxi ladies perform in the square as a sort of local club and hobby. I spoke with them for a long time between routines and even sang some songs with them (in Mandarin, not Naxi!). The oldest of these dancers is 80. They were a wonderful group of old ladies. Their dances and costumes celebrate Naxi culture in the ancestral Naxi capital of Lijiang. Here they perform in the main square of the Ancient City, a marvelous enclave and a fantastic place to spend a Christmas, as we did. The Naxi ladies told me they considered the Tibetans and the Bai people as cousins but that all three of them had a common anestry through the Qiang people. The Naxi costumes are very distinct, as is the script, which is a unique hieroglyphic script, the only actively used hieroglyphic script in the world. The Naxi are a small minority, numbering around 200,000. Lijiang is the place to go if you want to encounter them and see their culture on display everywhere, including very distinct Naxi graffiti and wall art around the old lanes of the city. Shops tend to have at least two scripts over the entrace, with Chinese and the Naxi scripts prominent, sometimes joined by English.