All this attention has helped walking marriages hit a new stride beyond even the Mosuo. Another minority in the area, the Pumi, always practiced conventional marriages. But people like Jama, a 26-year-old Pumi who pretends to be Mosuo while rowing customers in her canoe, has forgone a wedding in favor of a walking marriage with her boyfriend. While nursing their 14-month-old son by the lake, she explains that "if I decide my boyfriend isn't worth it, we'll split up, so we don't fight like married couples do." Locals say walking marriage is spreading quickly among the Pumi but, significantly, only in Luoshui, where tourism has piqued interest in Mosuo culture.

With the Mosuo constantly on show, there's no longer a clear curtain between what's staged for the tourists and what's real. Mosuo women, for instance, only began putting blossoms in their headdresses a decade ago when plastic flowers first arrived. Curious tourists asked what they meant and the Mosuo concocted an answer: many flowers means seeking a lover, one flower signals a steady love, no flowers means buzz off. But what started as a charming reply to visitors has become common practice. "Cultures always change, and with tourism it happens faster," says Zhou Huashan, a researcher who has lived beside Lugu Lake for two years and has written a book on the Mosuo. A reborn pride in their culture, though, pervades. Only in the most heavily visited areas do young Mosuo women wear their traditional costumes—even in the rainy season when tourists stay home.

Seeing the money to be made from Mosuo tourism, the government has tried to grab a piece of the action. Officials in Ninglang county, which includes much of the Mosuo's territory, last year built the garish Mosuo Village Hotel on the lake. Most travelers, however, prefer to stay in the real village, where the hotels tend to be family-run, instead of in a government-built facsimile. Frustrated, the county has built a tollbooth outside Luoshui to collect $5 from each person entering what should be a public place. "They might have some other plans to develop this area," says village chief Celi Pingcuo, "but we hang together and help ourselves."

Of course, as the area becomes more popular there's a danger that it will get overrun and be spoiled. A recent event in a remote Mosuo village hinted at what's to come. On the final night of a three-day funeral for a family's matriarch, Mosuo men in sheepskin cloaks danced around a fire to frighten away ghosts. Suddenly, two tourists barged in and, at their own invitation, slipped into skins and joined the sacred ritual. No visitor had ever shown up like that. Still, none of the locals seemed to mind this incursion. And one of the two, a doctor from Shenzhen named Wang Lianghua, was enraptured by what he saw on his trip. "There are a lot of lies about the Mosuo," he says, "and a lot to learn from their culture."

As for Namu, she's back—and poised to cash in on Mosuo mania like everyone else. Though she now lives in Beijing, she recently returned to her childhood village of Zuosuo with a plan to build her own guesthouse there. Sitting in a small local restaurant, eating a bowl of soup filled with chicken feet, she discusses her future with her Chinese business manager. First, he says, he'll arrange to make her the "cultural ambassador" for the popular Red Mountain Pagoda cigarettes. Then, the cigarette company will pave a road to her guesthouse. From Beijing, he adds, she'll be able to steer tens of thousands of visitors a year to the area, and "we'll monopolize all the scenic attractions around the lake."

Namu, now 32, nods but remains noncommittal. "I have mixed feelings," she says later. "We need tourism so that [BRACKET {local}] people will stay and not move to the cities," but she knows that all this development could spin out of control and wreck the calm beauty of her homeland. Still, her grandiose plans have at least brought her close to her family again. Her mother—no longer estranged—will run Namu's guesthouse. The prodigal daughter has returned.

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