Tourist Experience in Lijiang—The Capital of Yanyu

Abstract

ABSTRACTGender relationships play an important role in the tourism experience. Modern leisure tourism offers people a chance to escape from their daily life and seek sexual encounters or intimate relationships while traveling. This paper explores tourist experiences of their encounters through an empirical study on the Old Town of Lijiang, a leisure and romantic destination that has earned the reputation of “the capital of Yanyu”. Data on gender interactions and attitudes were collected through observation, interviews with visitors, and web-based content analysis. It is found that “the capital of Yanyu” has been constructed as a liminal space away from the daily pressure and social norms, and is full of freedom, leisure, and romance, and can promote interpersonal interactions and communication. The patterns of tourists’ gender interactions and attitudes about Yanyu show that gender relationships in Lijiang differ from the everyday life. Most visitors do not deliberately seek love affairs or sexual encounters, but they enjoy being in a romantic state in this ambiguous place. Compared with sex/romance tourism between tourists and local people discussed in the previous literature, Yanyu in Lijiang often refers to relatively free and easy interactions between male and female tourists. It does not necessarily connote sexual relationships but does show a change in social attitudes and behavior toward sexual relationship.