At the southern foot of the Yulong Snow Mountain, 2,700 meters above sea level, lies Yushuizhai. Historically known in the Naxi language as Gejike, meaning "a place for white cranes to play with water," this 34.3-acre sanctuary was once a wild hillside. Today, it serves as the spiritual origin of the Naxi people.

The story of this sanctuary is bound to its water. A sacred spring, flowing at an average of 0.5 cubic meters per second, emerges directly from the roots of two 1,000-year-old maple trees. The cold, sweet snowmelt cascades down natural dikes to form the Three-Stacking Water of the Sacred Dragon. These three waterfalls—the Appearing Dragon, the Playing Dragon, and the Farewell Dragon—feed terraced pools where golden trout swim. The American scholar Joseph Rock drank from this very spring during his twenty-eight years of study here.

Human hands have carefully shaped this landscape. In 1997, a Naxi entrepreneur named He Changhong began transforming the former trout farm into a cultural preservation site. Builders raised traditional timber and log cabins, known as muleng, without using heavy masonry. Inside these dwellings, the central hearth crackles with fire, while nearby workshops preserve the ancient art of pounding mulberry bark into thick, fibrous paper.

At the heart of the village, the Dongba Shiro Temple stands near the water source. Its wooden brackets are carved with ancient pictographs, a writing system inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2003. Nearby, the Altar of the Nature God features a sacred pond dominated by the gleam of a 9.6-meter-tall golden statue of the deity Shu, depicted with a human head and a serpent's body.

Authorized Dongba priests reside here, burning juniper incense and chanting low, resonant prayers at dawn. Under a gnarled walnut tree, young apprentices use charcoal to copy the ancient pictographic script onto handmade paper. They maintain a delicate covenant with the natural world, keeping a thousand-year-old heritage alive through daily practice.