It is well known that the peripheral dialects of a language are often the most conservative. Lijiang, the centre of the Naxi area, has been a Chinese garrison town since the 13th century; since UNESCO granted it status as World Heritage Centre in 1997, the old town of Lijiang rapidly became a touristic hot spot, and many Chinese from other provinces are coming to work in Lijiang and settle there. The necessity to go to remote villages to look for conservative dialects of the language (and speakers who are not bilingual) is therefore especially strong in the case of Naxi. The possibility to go to the faraway village of Fengke (Fv Kho in Naxi) was opened to me by a Naxi friend who had acquaintances in this village; the language spoken there was hardly comprehensible to him at all. In 2004, after I had acquired some first-hand knowledge of some varieties of the better-described dialect area of Naxi (see the page on the village of A Ser), I organised a field trip to Fengke; it confirmed that this dialect opened new perspectives for the comprehension of the Naxi languages (see, for instance, a paper on Naxi phonemics, which draws on data from several dialects). Here are some pictures of the journey towards this village located on the banks of the Yangtse River.

众所周知，离开语言文化中心聚集地越远的地区，其语 言特色会保存得越为完整。丽江市作为纳西族的文化与政治中心，自元代以来就与中原地区有密切的关系，1997年成为联合国文化遗产以来，更加速了其作为旅 游热点的速度，所以其城市与农村之间的语言差距又较世界上其它少数民族地区的城乡差别更大。因此，到丽江地区如果只到丽江市进行调查是远远不够的，必须深 入到旅行者足迹罕至的更边远地区，才能对语言的全貌进行一个相对客观的研究。

例 如，奉科乡位于离丽江市较远的北部地区，2004年我来到这一地区进行调查，发现其语言中确实有许多值得研究的现象(我的相关论文可以在这里下载)。

The road from Lijiang to Fengke : from an altitude of 2000 m to nearly 4000 m to cross mountain passes, then down to about 1200 m. One day on earth tracks during the rain season. The driver kept smiling but he was somewhat worried about his trip home on the day after.

Where the road stops, the journey continues on foot. Heavy luggage is horse-carried. (Prefer rigid suitcases.)

For this journey, the Board of Education of the town of Lijiang let me have a four-wheel drive with an experimented driver. As a way to reciprocate, I gave one day of English classes in the high school closest to Fengke and when I came back to the town I presented my research at a continuing-education meeting of school teachers of the Lijiang District , an occasion to set out to interested Naxi speakers the purpose of my research.

In Fengke, the houses used to be in the Tibetan style, with a flat roof.

These houses are being abandoned, replaced by sloping-roof houses, in the style of the old town of Lijiang, and of old-style Bai and Chinese houses.