The county between the mountains

Sangzhi is the county where Hunan begins to run out and Hubei takes over. It stands on the northern margin of the province, bordered by Cili County and the Yongding and Wulingyuan districts to the south and east, and by Xuan'en and Hefeng counties of Hubei to the north. The ground is almost entirely mountain. The Wuling range arrives here in branches that cross the county as some forty major ridges holding more than ten thousand named hills; the highest point, Doupeng Mountain in the Badagongshan range, reaches 1,890.4 metres, while the lowest valley floor sits near 154. Over four hundred streams run down these slopes into the Lishui, the river that waters all of Zhangjiajie, and in these steep upper reaches the river can flash-flood, raising water levels within hours — the county has spent decades on flood-control works and the resettlement of households in the most exposed spots. The county covers 3,474 square kilometres and holds Tujia, Miao and Bai communities, with five of its townships designated for the Bai minority. Its modern borders are quiet, but its older arrangement was not: under the tusi system a Sangzhi native chieftaincy answered for these hills from Song times, until the Qing reforms of 1727 replaced the chieftains with regular officials and the county took its present name in 1729.

The most famous man the county produced is Marshal He Long, and his route out of these hills says something about how people left them. His former residence stands in Hongjiaguan township, where he also went to school as a boy; he became one of the senior commanders of the revolutionary armies and a leader of the Long March, and his home county kept its place in that history. Between 1927 and 1935 a soviet government operated in Sangzhi, tied to the revolutionary base areas that spanned the borders of Hunan, Hubei and Sichuan's edge, and the monument to the Long March of the Second Front Red Army stands in the county still, listed beside the residence among its sights. That a commander could rise from a mountain county is less surprising against the local background. The Tujia of the Wuling mountains had supplied disciplined fighting men to imperial armies for centuries under their tusi chieftains, and the abolition of native rule in the eighteenth century did not end the pattern of mountain men taking soldiering as a trade. There is a quiet irony of administration on his home ground today: Hongjiaguan is one of Sangzhi's five Bai ethnic townships, so the marshal's village is now formally seated in a community recognised for the Bai people, who share these ridges with the Tujia majority of the city around them.

Sangzhi lives in the lee of a famous neighbour. The county belongs to Zhangjiajie, a city that exists for tourism, yet the crowds funnel east to Wulingyuan while Sangzhi keeps the quieter inventory: the He Long residence, the Badagongshan National Nature Reserve, Jiutian Cave and the show caves of the Maoyan river country. The connections have improved without changing that balance — a station on the Qianjiang-Changde railway serves the county, the line that brought fast trains through Zhangjiajie West from 2019. The county's deeper asset is its Tujia inheritance, and it is specific rather than general. The Tujia, who live across the Wuling mountains where Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and Chongqing meet, are known for the Baishou dance, a collective dance of about seventy ritual gestures that traces war, farming, hunting and courtship, and for their patterned brocade, xilankapu, which once went to the imperial court as tribute. In the villages of the Zhangjiajie country the Tujia new year still arrives a day before the Han calendar's, the household's cured meat hangs above the fire pit through the long winter, and the memory survives of a chieftain-era rule that let ordinary families roof only with fir bark and thatch. Kuzhu village, with buildings of Ming and Qing date, is noted for its folk music.