Chongkan: Chen Tuan's town and the yellow plain

Chongkan is a township under Tongnan district, and its claim on memory is a single figure: Chen Tuan, the Daoist master who lived through the Five Dynasties and the early Song, was born here. The town keeps the connection in objects rather than in shrines. Its sights run to the Eight-Angled Well, a statue of Chen Tuan, a Tai Chi pagoda, an old quarter known as the Tai Chi old town, the Thousand-Buddha cliff and the Jade Buddha Temple. Around them lies ordinary country: the villages of the Tongnan plain, the Fu and its tributaries, and the fields that make this one of the larger rapeseed-growing areas in China.

In spring the plain around Chongkan changes colour. Twenty square kilometres of rapeseed flower fields turn into what visitors describe as a golden canvas, and they draw thousands of people who come only for the few weeks it lasts. The flowers are planted in strips that follow the fields and the irrigation lines, so the yellow is crossed and recrossed by green and by the darker lines of paths and bunds. It is a crop rather than a landscape design, and the timing belongs to the farming calendar. What a visitor sees from the road is a working plain that happens, for a few weeks, to be worth the detour.

From the top of Chentuan mountain the plain can be read as a diagram. Laid out on the slope is a Tai Chi figure 236 metres in diameter, described as the largest in the world, placed where the circle and its dividing curve can be taken in at once. Seen from above it reads the way the symbol is meant to read: one side full, one side empty, the line between them carrying the whole argument. Chen Tuan is the reason the symbol belongs to this town rather than to any other, and the mountain gives it a place to be seen from. A village-scale monument, in other words, and a very good view of the fields besides.