Zhenyuan, the other Silk Road

The taxi drivers at Sansui wanted 160 yuan to run me up to Zhenyuan. There was no sign of a bus. I waved them off, opened DiDi, and got a quote of 70, which felt like a small victory until about a kilometre later, when the car stopped at the toll gate for the new highway and the driver turned round and asked for 100 more.

There is not much to be done at that point. I paid it. The fare then came out at 80 rather than the 70 advertised, for reasons nobody explained, so the ride cost 180 against the 150 the taxi man had been talking himself down to while I walked away. DiDi had said nothing about a toll, and I still do not know whether that is a gap in the app or a gap in my reading of it.

The driver put me down in the middle of town and I walked the last few hundred metres to the inn. Driving in Zhenyuan is very restricted, which is a good thing, the street that runs through town feels mostly like a walking street even though there is some traffic.

A town in an S-bend

The Wuyang River comes through here in a tight double curve, and the town is wrapped into it on both banks, stone houses running along the water and then climbing straight up the hillsides behind. The guidebooks call it the Venice of the East, which I think is a generous label, Venice is hard to beat. What it actually resembles is a town that ran out of flat land in the year 200 BC and has been stacking itself upwards ever since.

That means stairs. Another town full of stairs, after Chongqing. The alleys run uphill off the waterfront in narrow flights between walls, and the further up you go the quieter it gets, until you are in somebody’s yard and the tourist shops are three levels below you.

Why there is a town here at all

A place like this looks picturesque and is actually strategic. Zhenyuan is where the road into Guizhou had to pass, and everything about it follows from that.

There has been a county here since 202 BC, in the fifth year of the Han emperor Gaozu, which makes the town older than the name by some fourteen centuries. Zhenyuan itself was granted by a Song emperor in 1258, and it is not a gentle name: it means something close to pacifying the distant regions, which tells you exactly whose point of view the naming was done from.

What made it matter was traffic. This was the busiest courier station on what gets called the southern Silk Road, the route that ran from the central plains down onto the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau and onward west. Guizhou is mountains in every direction, the river is the only easy line through them, and Zhenyuan sits at the point where the practical water route gave out and goods had to change from boat to road. A town at that hinge collects everything passing in both directions, which is why a place this remote has merchant guild halls in it.

The Yuan and then the Ming made the military logic explicit, establishing prefectures and garrisons and stationing troops. By the Ming there were effectively two settlements facing each other across the water, the old government town on the north bank and the old fortification on the south. You can still read it in the layout: the administrative side and the military side, and the bridge between them.

The bridge is the thing everyone photographs, and it has earned it. Zhusheng Bridge was first built in the Hongwu years at the end of the fourteenth century, when it was known simply as the stream bridge. The river kept washing it away. What stands now is the version finished in 1723, a seven-arched blue stone crossing a hundred and thirty-five metres long, with a pavilion sitting on top of it.

I spent the first evening on and around it as the light went. It photographs well from both banks and better from the south, and it is one of those structures that looks heavier and older the longer you stand in front of it. And my hotel room was right next to it, with a balcony, so I could stare at it while having my morning coffee, too.

The cliff with thirty-six buildings on it

The second afternoon I crossed over to Qinglongdong, the Green Dragon Cave, which is the other reason to come to Zhenyuan.

It is not really a cave, it is a religious complex built onto the face of Zhonghe Mountain, directly across the river from the old town: thirty-six structures distributed along roughly three hundred metres of cliff and eighty metres of height, using the natural caves and ledges as part of the architecture rather than levelling them away. Temples grow out of the rock. Walkways run along it. From the town side it reads as a single vertical thing hanging on the hillside, which is why it gets called the Southern Hanging Temple.

It had rained, so the steps were slick, and I went up slowly. That turns out to be the right speed. An hour and a half is about what it takes to do properly.

Three religions on one hillside

The unusual thing about Qinglongdong is not the engineering. It is that Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism are all up there at once, on the same cliff, sharing a staircase.

The complex was founded in 1388, the twenty-first year of the Hongwu reign, which puts it in the first flush of Ming consolidation in the southwest, at the same moment the garrisons were going in. That timing is not a coincidence. A frontier town being absorbed into the empire gets soldiers, an administration, and institutions to make the place legible, and the cliff is where the institutions went.

What is on it: Zhongyuan Chan Temple, which is Buddhist. Wanshou Palace, a guild hall for merchants from Jiangxi, which is commerce. Ziyang Academy, a school of classical learning named for Zhu Xi, which is Confucian. The Qinglongdong halls themselves, which are Taoist. Plus Xiangluyan, the incense burner rock, and the bridge at the bottom of the whole arrangement.

The usual way this gets described is as a charming example of Chinese religious tolerance. It is probably better understood as a frontier town hedging. Traders from Jiangxi wanted somewhere to gather and to pray, the state wanted a Confucian academy producing examinable young men, and the local population wanted the temples they already had. The cliff was the available real estate. Everybody built on it, and nobody had the leverage to exclude anybody else.

It was given national protected status in 1988, and it has acquired a second nickname, the museum of Guizhou ancient architecture, which is the sort of thing a place gets called when it has survived long enough for the surviving to be the point.

After dark

One of the most spectacular events in Zhenyuan is what happens at about eight in the evening, when darkness falls. I came out of a restaurant on the far bank the second night and the entire town had turned orange: lanterns strung along both waterfronts, the bridge lit, the cliff temples lit, and all of it doubled in the slow-moving river. I walked back the long way and got in around half past eight, having photographed considerably more of it than I needed to.

The food was good and unambitious both nights. The first evening I pointed at a recommendation and got pork with something I never identified, served with rice, and ate all of it. The second I did better, fried pork and vegetables and rice at a place along the south bank, sitting outside while the light faded.

Zhenyuan is a two-night town. One night is not enough for the cliff and the bridge both, and three would be one more than the place can fill.

Zhenyuan, the practical stuff

Getting there — high speed train to Sansui, about 3 hours 30 minutes from Chongqing West. Zhenyuan is roughly 40 km further on, and there is no obvious bus at the station.
The toll gate will cost you 100 yuan — a DiDi quoted at 70 stops at the barrier for the new highway and the driver asks for the toll in cash, which the app does not warn you about. Budget around 180 all in, and note the station taxis will negotiate down to about 150. Worth taking the taxi and agreeing the total up front.
Cars stop at the edge of the old town — expect to walk the last few hundred metres with your bag, on cobbles.
It is a town of stairs — the waterfront is flat and everything behind it is not. The alleys climbing the hillside are the best part and the steepest.
Qinglongdong — allow 1.5 hours. Steps are stone and get slippery in rain.
Zhusheng Bridge — free, and the south bank gives the better angle. Sunset and the hour after are both worth staying out for.
The lanterns come on around dusk — the whole town lights up and the river goes still. This is the photograph you came for, and it is not the one in the brochures.