Travelogues, even those characterized by geographical facts and realistic descriptions, are often read as allegories. With the exception of pilgrimage records, Chinese travel writings seem to focus on China proper. Journeys to foreign lands and encounters with foreigners hardly concerned the literati, and few showed awareness of the non-Han people. But the impression is hardly comprehensive. For example, there are many travel records in the Ming-Qing period about China's borders, written by officials in exile and magistrates of local offices, as well as travelers. These areas, such as the northwest and the southwest, became part of the empire at a relatively later time and had a population of multiple ethnicities. Chinese travel records about these areas inevitably involve the observation, interpretation and representation of the non-Han by the Han. They also reflect the author's own cultural identity. Even now, the southwest insinuates a double association; it is both a desolately barbarian land and a mysteriously utopian terrain. The seeming contradiction in the image of southwest China already existed in many of the Ming-Qing records. This article takes as an example Dianqian tusi hunli ji (memoir of my marriage to a chieftain's daughter in the Dian-Qian area), an early Qing travelogue/memoir, and, using other documents and images of the southwest as reference, discusses how the Chinese author made ritual and its regulating power the center of everyday life, and how the idea of a highly ritualized domestic life served to encourage cultural interpretation and complicate his cultural identity.