This store's main allure goes beyond the printed word to a purveyor of creative cultural products that blend Altay's age-old motifs with newfangled approaches.

Birch bark — emblematic of the region's flora — covers notebooks. Cartoonish portrayals of Altay large-tail sheep's jiggling rumps appear on everything from statuettes to night-lights to augmented-reality fridge magnets with moving parts. These local livestock store fat in their hyper-inflated rears to survive the mountains' merciless winters, and their extravagantly bouncy behinds have become a beloved symbol of Altay.

Travelers also buy neck pillows that look like loaves of naan, bookmarks featuring the area's prehistoric petroglyphs that seem to uncannily depict flying saucers — replete with cockpits, portholes and tractor beams — and plushies of Ale.

Ultimately, Five-Hundred Li Folk Street not only presents, but is itself, art. It dazzles like the gems found in meticulously crafted mosaics that adorn its studios' walls and the surrounding mountain wilderness in which their raw forms lie buried.

To stroll along this walkway is to travel between these representations — refined and rough, micro and macro, seasonal and everlasting — that don't just portray but manifest Altay.

It's like a snow globe that you can walk into and, in doing so, become part of its glittering suspension, seen not behind glass but underfoot and overhead.

It's where a place named for gold reveals that its true wealth isn't extracted from ore but from the land experiencing itself through you.