Our official PROC guide, Mr Chu, giggles nervously, his wispy black beard fluttering. We are in Lijiang, the city in Yunnan province, western China that  survived a crippling earthquake in February 1996. 

It was a big one (seven on the Richter scale) and Mr Chu has just told us that 300 people died in it. As an aside, he admits the figure was at least 1000  - 'governments you know,' he says, 'they don't always tell the truth' - and I later find somewhere else, the toll was actually more like 2000, which still seems low given the town's current population of two million. 

In fact about 80 percent of Lijiang was flattened in the quake, a tragedy as this town has stood since Genghis Khan's son Kublai established it as he passed through  in 1235AD.  Little wonder that UNESCO decided the year after the earthquake to preserve what was left and named it a World Heritage site.

As we slowly negotiate the many steep stone stairs to the Yu Fong, or Jade Peak, Lama Monastery, our guide stops us.

"See there! This tree is 500 years old," he tells us, "it blooms 21 times every year, and bears more than 20,000 flowers in two colours. Every year."

No wonder he is proud of it.

It's hard to imagine a camellia tree surviving for half a millennium, yet there it is, its gnarled lichen-covered branches intertwined like a difficult puzzle. A Chinese puzzle, maybe - for here we are, near Lijiang, deep in the south west of China, 2100 kilometres from Beijing (as everywhere in China is measured) in Yunnan province, where not only the trees are old.

Five hundred years ago, during the reign of Emperor Chenghua of the Ming Dynasty, when this camellia first burst through the soil, Lijiang was already a bustling city, its government buildings in the eastern quarter two hundred years old.

At the top of the monastery stairs a dignified monk dressed in a crimson robe greets us, offering a platter of walnuts and apples, pine nuts, still in their brittle shells and a saucer of fresh honey. His braid-trimmed cap is also red, pointed at the top like an elf's, and with triangular side flaps pinned up like impish ears. Silently and solemnly he presses his hands together and wishes us a gentle welcome. From his place on the porch, the view across the gardens extends to a horizon of bare, folded hills, pale blue and green in the afternoon light.

Inside, the monastery is like so many we have seen already on this trip, dark and eerie until the shadows resolve into prayer mats and brilliant silken patchwork wall hangings, and the light of the yak butter lamps flickering at the altar pick out the shapes of dusty scrolls and holy books filed on high shelves.

Lijiang is home to the Naxi (pronounced 'nashi') people, originally nomadic herdsmen, and one of the many minority groups in China. The women wear broad-sleeved blue and white jackets with buttons and cords on the back, and aprons and sheepskin shawls, for this area is high, around 2600 metres, and the roughly bitter winds whip their cheeks to a constant redness.

The Naxi love to sing and dance, and one night we attend a cultural show in the city and watch as a young man, dressed in a flowing goatskin vest and a woollen hat trimmed with hawk feathers, pipes music for the dancers. Nearby another plays an antique single string violin, its whining melody blending with the percussion and other string instruments.

A dance troupe of young women in long white trousers topped by yellow pleated aprons and red and white blouses clap and sway, and the braver tourists try to join in and copy the moves of the Alili, a famous Naxi dance.

And then a calligrapher comes on - the first time I have ever witnessed writing as a performance art - enthralling the crowd with deft pictograms from the Naxi's over 1000-year-old script.

Lijiang is officially known as Dayan Town meaning, literally, a 'great ink well', because of the town's location on rich river-fed flatland surrounded by green mountains. What remains of the old town is rich too, with a mix of unusual half-timbered or brick-and-tile houses with carved doors and painted windows, and interlaced by an intricate web of canals and river tributaries, which in turn are crossed by interminable timber bridges.

We walked along the cobbled streets pausing to admire a brilliant skein of chillies drying in the sunshine outside a top floor window, or an old man in a sheepskin hat seated in a doorway, smoking a slender pipe as long as his arm. Women rinsed dishes in a canal as we passed, and children peeped out of shopfront doorways.

There is much to see around Lijiang too. The Grass Meadow was carpeted with pink, blue, yellow and white wild flowers when we visited in October. At the bottom of a gorge packhorses were saddled ready for trekkers, but our destination was the cable car which rises abruptly about 300 metres so that by the time we reached Snow Mountain Meadow, at an elevation of 3100 metres, we were in cloud.

The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain range, fifteen kilometres from Lijiang, looks like a gigantic snow-draped dragon, 5596 metres above sea level. Its 13 peaks dominate the Lijiang basin, and around 7000 kinds of plants can be found here as well as 400 types of trees in 20 primeval forest communities. It is a wildly beautiful place.

In spring, azaleas turn the mountainsides into an avalanche of brilliant colour. Wild ass, the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, the lesser panda, a forest musk deer, clouded leopard, pheasant, and a spotted, yellowish civet cat all call the Snow Mountain home.

Eight kilometres north of the city, in the ancient Baisha quarter, there are 13th-century religious buildings with remarkable murals that offer insights into Naxi culture. Mr Chu explained to us that the local people still have arranged marriages, but that often the young people run away, or commit suicide, rather than marry someone they have not chosen.

Here also another unique custom prevails. Women in this matriarchal family tradition may have seven or eight lovers, and save their strength by calling in the 'uncles' to look after the resulting children.

In this mountainous region, formerly home only to bears, deer, and wolves, now resort-style chalets and hotels are opening up as skiing and tourism takes over. At one stop someone passed around a card from a local hotel advising us that they had the added lure of 'heating beds'.

While I was grateful that the earth didn't move for me while I was in Lijiang, I swear I felt a tremor. Not one that hinted of destruction, I am glad to say, but a shiver of things to come. Of new industries and opportunities. Of change and growth and stability.

Some things will never change, though. That ancient camellia tree will stand, you can be sure, endlessly blossoming and turning the ground beneath it pink with its petals

Forever.