And so it goes, until the light comes on and you realize that almost everything in this old town - rebuilt painstakingly from a devastating earthquake in 1996 - is "manned" by the women folk.

It is not only the Naxi women who run the economy in these parts. The same goes for the spectacular mountainous region known as Tiger Leaping Gorge.

I was met by a 50-something grandmother from the Bai minority group, who was to be our mountain guide, after a bumpy ride in a minivan along a hazardous rocky mountain road.

Our guide had infinite patience as she waited for me to struggle forward on the steep and at times perilously narrow ledge perched above the raging Yangtze River below. She had time to light up a cigarette and make a phone call on her mobile each time I stopped to catch my breath in the thin mountain air.

When at last I climbed onto the rocky promontory named Tiger Leaping Rock, from where the legendary tiger leapt across the Yangtze at its narrowest point, my guide explained that accompanying me was just a short and welcome break for her.

With her absentee husband away working she was the only person on her farm planting and harvesting the wheat, corn and vegetables and tending to a menagerie of two horses, six pigs and a few chickens and ducks.

Nowhere else is woman power more pronounced in this southwest province of China than in the small farming communities of the Mosuo ethnic group, dotted around the pristine and beautiful Lugu Lake, set high up in the Xiaoliang mountains, on the border between northwestern Yunnan and southwestern Sichuan.

Mosuo is not called "Women's World" for nothing - it is, after all, the only surviving matrilineal community in China. Every tourist has a sketchy idea of how this "country without fathers and husbands" has existed for thousands of years.

You learn from the guidebooks that each Mosuo household is an extended matrilineal family, all of whose members are related to each other on the mother's side, headed by a grandmother.