The ridge Fobao is approached from below, up steps cut between houses. The town sits on a ridge rather than in the valley, and the reason is practical: the flat land below is farmland, the ridge is easier to defend, and the river floods do not reach it. The street runs along the top, with houses on both sides and the ground falling away behind them. From the lower end, the grey tiles overlap like scales. The town's shape was decided by what it needed to avoid as much as by what it needed to be near. The ridge is not high, but it is high enough to change the way the town meets the river.

Three streets, eight lanes The old town is laid out as three streets and eight lanes, 2,480 metres of street, 38,320 square metres of buildings within 0.4 square kilometres. The houses are timber-framed, with suspended gable roofs and grey tiles; the streets are stone. Along the river side there are stilt houses and galleries, the upper floors carried out over the slope on posts. The scale is small enough to walk in an hour and dense enough that the walk keeps turning. A lane may end at a temple door, a kitchen, or a view down to the water. The measurements describe a town that is compact by design, not by accident; the lanes are short because the ridge is narrow.

The salt road Fobao grew on the salt road from Zigong to Guizhou. Salt moving south, and goods moving back, made a market at the junction of Sichuan, Guizhou and Chongqing. The town has been a market for more than six hundred years. The phrase “three palaces and eight temples” names the halls and shrines that this traffic left behind, set among houses that could serve trade and worship at once. A market town on a road is not a closed village. It is a place where people from three provinces had a reason to meet, and the buildings were made to receive them. The junction is still a junction, and the town still sits at the point where three provinces meet.

Rooms with other uses Some of the temple rooms are now houses. Doors open onto stone floors; a window looks into a courtyard that once belonged to a hall. The town's administrative offices have moved elsewhere, and on an ordinary day the street is quiet enough to hear footsteps change on the stone. Fobao is a national key cultural relic, listed in the eighth batch, and it holds many intangible heritage items. Protection here is not a freeze: people still live in the buildings, and the buildings still change. The question is how much change the stone street can absorb before the market town becomes a set. A relic can be repaired; a set has to be kept looking as it did.