Cattle on a mountain pasture

Nanshan Pasture is the high grassland of Chengbu Miao Autonomous County, in the far southwest of Shaoyang, where the Snow Peak mountains and the Nanling range come together and the land rises to peaks around two thousand metres. The county's grassland covers 91,000 hectares, about a third of its land, and of that some 63,000 hectares is a single stretch of pasture, grass that can carry around 87,000 head of livestock. The peak called Nanshan, the south mountain, rises to 1,940 metres above the valleys, so the pasture is high country, cooler and wetter than the lowland around it. It is one of the largest pastures in south-central China, and from it the region draws the dairy and meat that feed the province. The grass, in short, is the base of the county's livestock, a high meadow kept for the cattle that graze it. The county's average height is nearly seven hundred metres, and its rivers, the Zi, the Wu, the Qu and the Xun, all rise within it, so the pasture is the high ground where several waters begin.

The pasture's cattle feed a dairy that is a pillar of the county's industry. Chengbu's dairy is one of its main economic supports, producing some 7,000 tons of milk powder and 12,000 tons of liquid milk in a year, and the county's livestock also supplies meat, with the animal husbandry and fishery output of the county counted in the tens of thousands of tons. The county itself is a Miao autonomous county, one of the five in China, and the Miao make up the large majority of its people, some sixty-four percent, so the pasture is a Miao landscape, its grass and cattle part of the county's working life. The herd and the people are bound together: the grass supports the cattle, the cattle support the dairy, and the dairy supports the county, a small mountain economy built on the high meadow and the animals that graze it. The dairy's milk powder and liquid milk are the pasture's finished goods, and the meat of the herd adds to the county's output, so the grass is turned into food in the county's own plants.

The pasture now sits inside a national park. Chengbu holds the Hunan Nanshan National Park, one of the country's first ten national parks, and the high grassland is part of that protected landscape. Tourism has grown alongside the dairy: the county's scenic sites received well over two million visitors in a recent year, and the park, with its high grassland, its reservoir and its other sights, is the county's main draw. The place is thus balanced between two uses, the working pasture that feeds the dairy and the protected park that draws visitors, and the grass carries both. Chengbu remains an economically poor county despite its resources, a national-level poor county, so the pasture and the park are its chief assets. It is a high meadow that must serve at once as a farm, a park and a livelihood. Visitors now number in the millions each year, drawn by the national park and its grassland, and the pasture carries both the dairy that feeds the county and the tourism that is beginning to support it, a high meadow doing double duty as farm and park.