Shuangjiang: nine streets on the south bank of the Fu

Shuangjiang means two rivers, and the name is literal: the Hou stream and the Fu stream wind around the town on either side before they join the main channel. The town stands on the south bank, about ten kilometres north-west of Tongnan town and 168 kilometres from the Chongqing urban area, close enough to reach in a day and far enough that nothing in it was tidied for visitors. It was built in the early Qing and came under Tongnan county in 1912. In 2003 it was named among the first group of Chinese historical and cultural towns, which is a listing of streets and houses rather than of monuments.

The town keeps more than twenty complete Qing dwellings, and two of its sites are under provincial protection. Beside them run nine old streets, among them Middle Street, Upper Street and Lower Street, and more than twenty historic buildings in the plain Sichuan and Chongqing residential style: deep eaves, timber frames, narrow frontages set straight on the street. That fabric is the point. A street of this kind survives not because any one house is grand but because the houses were built to the same measure, so the line of them still holds together and the street still reads as a street from end to end.

The list of sights is short and specific. There is the Yang family residence, the old home of Yang Angong and Yang Shangkun. On the river street, at the T-junction, there is a tea house. The Yuwang Palace, which was the Huguang guild hall, stands close by, and there is the former residence of the general Bai Chongxi, together with a carved group of chrysanthemum stones. National highway 319 and the expressway to Suining pass through the town. None of it is spectacular; the achievement of Shuangjiang is that the whole ensemble is still standing in the place where it was used.