As others have said, a lot of touristy places in Yunnan are organised in a way so that locals can go there for free, but domestic and international tourists have to pay. It is to various degress possible to avoid these tourist fees, some examples:
Lijiang has an 'Old Town Protection Fee', 80 kuai. You have to have the receipt for paying this fee if you want to enter the Jade Peak Monastery, the Black Dragon Pool Park, see the Baisha Frescoes, etc, but in the Mu Family Mansion ticket office they will not ask for it.
Bingzhoungluo in Nujiang River Valley have an entrance ticket for the Scenic Area, 100 kuai, that is enforced via a road checkpoint. Local drivers (found in Gaoshan) can make you pass for a local or hide you in minivans with dark windows, and just drive through this checkpoint without being stopped. You will then never have to pay this fee as long as you stay north of the checkpoint.
The huge monastery complex in Shangri-la has an entrance fee of ~100 kuai that is enforced via a road checkpoint very very far down the road, even buses are stopped. If you are a westerner it is impossible to pass for a local, and the only way to avoid paying is to approach the monastery on foot from the mountains or so. The monastery itself has absolutely no ticket control. You can talk the checkpoint people into letting you enter the monastery area two days in a row if you show them your tickets from last day and tell them that you only want to photograph the villages beyond the checkpoint, but it'll take some mandarin and persuasion skills. You can then enter the monastery at leisure.
The Mingyong glacier and Yubeng national park in Deqin have an entrance fee combined with entry ticket that is enforced by a road checkpoint (~60 kuai). Because this checkpoint is located next to the bridge over the Mekong, and the entrance fee is included in the entry ticket to Mingyong/Yubeng, it is probably almost impossible to avoid, but you could theoretically do the long, long treck down into the valley from Feilai Si, find a bridge over the Mekong without a checkpoint, walk/hitchhike up into the valleys, and then sneak into Yubeng/Mingyong before the ticket boots open in the morning.
While these fees might feel like robbery to a certain extent (I got fucking furious by the checkpoint in Shangri-la), they do make a little bit of sense if you think about it; the locals have to be able to go to their monastery for free. Sure, I'm from Sweden where like all tourist sights are free, so I don't approve of having to pay at all, but if we disregard that for a moment, at least it's good that they organize it in such a way that the locals don't have to pay. From that perspective, I think this kind of fees is a better idea than just making everything inside the tourist area ridiculously expensive due to tourism taxes or something.
