One of the biggest tourism destinations in Yunnan without an airport has just jumped into the queue. The Yunnan Civil Aviation Bureau announced that construction will begin next year on Lijiang Lugu Lake Airport, according to a Kunming Daily report.

Lugu Lake (泸沽湖) is located in the northeast of Lijiang prefecture, approximately 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the city of Lijiang. It is generally reached from the Yunnan side by bus or car from Lijiang, with mudslides and flooding often making roads impassable.

The lake straddles the border between Yunnan and Sichuan provinces at an altitude of 2,685 meters and features eight islands and several beaches and bays. It is popular with domestic tourists for its mountain and lake views as well as for the local Mosuo (摩梭) people, who are officially listed as a subgroup of the Naxi (纳西族) people and are best known as a matriarchal society, a label which can be misleading at times.

Mosuo women are the heads of households – they make business decisions and property is passed down along the female line – but Mosuo men hold political power in society, which prevents the Mosuo from being a true matriarchal society.

The Mosuo are also known for their 'walking marriages' (走婚), in which women choose male partners to visit their bedroom after dark. The man typically returns to his own home early the next morning.

Although the majority of walking marriages tend to be long-term, Mosuo women have been misleadingly portrayed as sexually promiscuous to domestic tourists, many of whom visit Lugu Lake looking for more than clean air and mountain vistas.

Lijiang Lugu Lake Airport will receive an initial investment of 900 million yuan (US$132 million) and will offer flight services to Kunming and Guangzhou. The airport is projected to handle between 1.5 million and two million passengers annually. The airport's construction will reportedly coincide with a local government plan to build the area into a 'tourist town of matriarchal society'.

Lugu Lake image: zol.com.cn

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UK newspaper The Guardian is reporting that the controversial plan to dam Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge (虎跳峡) has been scrapped.

The sparing of the gorge and its 100,000 inhabitants – who would have been forced to relocate to much less hospitable terrain – may be the biggest win to date for mainland environmentalists. The victory may only be a pyrrhic one, as other portions of the Yangtze River's upper reaches, known in Yunnan as the Jinsha River (金沙江) are under consideration for hydropower projects.

Tiger Leaping Gorge is where a roughly 15-kilometer stretch of the Jinsha runs between 5,596-meter Yulong Snow Mountain (玉龙雪山) and 5,396-meter Haba Snow Mountain (哈巴雪山). The gorge features 2,000-meter cliffs leading above intense rapids that are not considered navigable.

The area has traditionally been home to more than 100,000 residents, most of whom are from the Naxi ethnic minority. Since opening to foreign tourists in 1993, the gorge has seen a steady increase in tourist visits, which has led to road improvements and construction of several guesthouses along the 'high road' above the river.

The decision to spare the gorge from being dammed and filled will likely benefit tourism to the area, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the Three Parallel Rivers Protected Areas. However it is unlikely to be the end of new hydropower projects, as it is thought that damming the Jinsha could prevent the flow of silt downstream to the Three Gorges Dam.

Silt is considered a threat to the navigability of the Yangtze, which is expected to be able to handle increasing levels of containerized sea-going barge traffic as far west as Chongqing in the coming years.

Some officials are also proponents of using the damming of the Jinsha to flush out the pollution that has accumulated in Kunming's Dianchi Lake, which is one of China's largest and most polluted freshwater lakes. China's second-largest hydropower project at Xiluodu began construction in November of last year.

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