Apropos of nothing at all, I recalled two brilliant BBC programmes from quite a while ago, the sort of thing that really ought to be on iPlayer
The first was He Dances for his Cormorants, originally broadcast in 1995, and about a Chinese fisherman raising and training cormorants to fish for him - filmed on the Lijiang river.
The other was China; Beyond the clouds, a cinema verite series about life (and death - I recall the public executions of drug dealers) in the Chinese town of Lijiang, from 1994.