Dianjiang: the peony, flower and root

Every spring the county opens its peony culture festival with a concert in the Dianjiang stadium, and the formula is unusually direct: the peonies come out, the county gathers, and a stage opens the season. Dianjiang calls itself the place of origin of the national-flower peony, a claim about the tree peony as much as about the county. The county lies in the middle of Chongqing, east of the Huaying range, with 1,518 square kilometres and a population of 950,000, and the annual mean temperature is 17.0 degrees, the mean annual rainfall 1,183.1 millimetres. Warm, wet, undramatic country: the kind of place a flowering crop is planted in rows.

The flower is the advertisement; the root is the trade. Peony root bark, danpi, is one of the county's listed local products, and it sits on the same list as stone-milled douhua, rice wine, yellow-sand pomelo and pickled melon. The county's crafts are listed beside them: a local carving, palm-bamboo walking sticks and horn pipes. A tree peony dug for its bark and one kept for its bloom are two uses of the same plant, and the county lists both. One is a festival in spring, the other a product on a list, and neither needs the other to be worth growing.

The county's own history is a sequence of merges. It was founded in the Han dynasty under Ba commandery; in the early Tang the court made the Linjiang land into Qingshui County and then renamed it Guixi County; in the early Yuan the county was merged into Fengdu, with a Linjiang inspection office set over the old county, and it was restored at the end of that dynasty. In 2024 it was included in the Chongqing main-city metropolitan area. Its land runs from 320 metres to 1,183, with ridges on the east and west and a river valley through the middle.