The old town next to the new capital

The walls came first, in 1552, when the Ming court ordered a fort thrown up at Zhenxi and a garrison posted to hold the road through the Wuling country. The place grew into Qianzhou, a military town that the Qing reorganised in 1704 as the seat of a subprefecture, run from these walls for the surrounding valleys, and the temple followed the rank: the Confucian temple inside the town was begun in 1729 and finished in 1733 — a late foundation for such an institution, marking how far imperial administration had finally reached into the western hills. Its later history is the town's own. Burned in the Miao uprising of 1794, rebuilt in 1801, repaired and enlarged through the nineteenth century, the temple was wrecked in the Cultural Revolution until only the great hall, the semi-circular pool and the Zhuangyuan bridge survived, and then restored at scale in 2007. Its plan survives complete: facing south, near 4,900 square metres of brick and timber laid out on one axis from the screen wall through the Lingxing gate, the pool, the Dacheng gate and the great hall to the shrine behind. In 2013 the state listed the temple among the nationally protected key relics of China.

The capital arrived next door and eventually took the name. When the empire fell, the subprefecture became a county — Qian County in 1912, renamed Qiancheng County a year later because Shaanxi already had a county of that name — and the county kept its seat at Qianzhou until 1952, when the new government moved the administration to Suoli, the market town downstream that is now Jishou's centre. In 1953 the county itself was renamed Jishou, from the Miao name of its new seat, a word explained locally as the place that raises you. Jishou's rise was administrative first and infrastructural after: chosen as the capital when the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture was established in 1957, made a county-level city in 1982, reached by the Jiaozuo-Liuzhou railway with its station here in 1978, and served again by the Zhangjiajie-Jishou-Huaihua high-speed line in 2021. The prefecture built its institutions in the new town — the university founded in 1958 among them — and Jishou became the transport, commercial and educational centre of the autonomous west. The two towns now face each other across a short stretch of valley: the walled seat that lost the government, and the market town that became a city.

The two towns divide the work between them, and the division keeps tightening. Jishou spreads as the prefecture's capital, and its growth has lately turned back toward its old neighbour: the Qianzhou new district is being developed with the city's municipal offices moving into it, so the administration that left in 1952 is returning to the ground it left. The old town, for its part, has become the heritage address. The restored temple anchors it, and its side halls have found second careers as exhibition spaces — one now houses a display on the anti-Japanese resistance of the war years, another a hall of Xiangxi's notable people and generals — while the temple's own twentieth century, when the girls' section of a wartime national middle school occupied its courts and it served after 1946 as a primary school, is part of what the guides now tell. The university that grew up in the new town remains the only comprehensive university of the whole Wuling mountain region, and its students live a short ride from walls their institution's founders would have known. The visitors who come for the axis and the gates arrive from the new city, across a distance that once separated a county's government from its garrison.