Chiyou and the hall of the Nine Li at Pengshui

Pengshui's seat stands at 245 metres on the Wu River, and the Jiulicheng compound is built on the slope above it as a fort rather than a museum: a wall, a gate with the name of the Nine Li on it, and halls that present their leader. The county it stands in is 43.41 per cent Miao and 9.97 per cent Tujia, with 270,000 Miao and 90,000 Tujia counted in 2010, and 54.2 per cent of it is forest. The complex is recent building, and it makes no attempt to look old. What it does is give a majority that has usually been described by others a facade of its own, under a name that comes out of the oldest layer of Chinese writing.

Chiyou is the leader of the Nine Li in Chinese myth, a tribal chief remembered for fighting the Yellow Emperor, and the sources disagree about him in a way that is itself the story. The Records of the Grand Historian has him rebelling after the Yellow Emperor defeated the Yan Emperor and being beaten at Zhuolu; the Lost Book of Zhou has the two emperors killing him together; the Classic of Mountains and Seas has him making weapons and attacking first. What the traditions share is his defeat and his skill: he is said to have made metal weapons, and he was worshipped as god of war and of weapons. Legend has his severed head become a grove of blood-red maples.

The hall stands where two origin stories meet. Tang-dynasty legend makes the Miao descendants of the Nine Li led by Chiyou, and Miao communities in south-east Guizhou and Rongshui still sacrifice first to Jiang You at the drum festival and sing an epic of Bang Chiyou in southern Guizhou. The Tujia, the county's other named people, are usually traced instead to the Ba state that held this country before Qin took it in 316 BC. Modern scholarship has been blunt about the first story: the idea that Chiyou is the Miao ancestor was argued by a French sinologist at the end of the Qing and hardened into doctrine later. A hall can hold both stories. It cannot settle them.