Zhuoshui: the covered bridge and the town behind it

A covered bridge is a road with a roof, and at Zhuoshui the roof is the point. The deck runs between timber walls, benches are fixed along both sides, and the truss above is dark enough that the openings at either end read as windows. Rain on the tiles is the loudest thing in the structure, louder than the river. The bridge crosses the Apeng, the river that also cuts the gorge listed among Qianjiang's scenic places, and the district's scenic list names a covered bridge and stilt-house group at Qiaotou village as the same family of building. In a valley that rains hard, a roof over a crossing turns a road into a place to wait.

Behind the bridge the old street runs along the bank, and the town is a township of Qianjiang District whose scenic area is rated 5A. The houses are built in the stilt manner of the district, upper floors carried out over the slope on posts, which is how the Tujia build on a damp hillside. Zhuoshui governs five communities and four villages, and one of them is Puhua, the name the district's cave river also carries. This was a river market before it was an attraction: boats came to the bank, and the bridge carried the road across instead of around. In July 1952 fourteen townships were transferred from Youyang to Qianjiang, and Zhuoshui was among them.

The Apeng does not stay on the surface all the way. South of the district seat the limestone takes the water underground at Puhua, where a stream enters a hill and comes out further on, and the passage is followed by boat. That is ordinary behaviour in this country: Qianjiang's landscape runs from 320 metres at its lowest point to 1,938.5 at its highest, and most of the interval is soluble rock, cut into gorges and hollowed into tunnels. The old town and the cave are one system, a river that is sometimes a street and sometimes a passage. Visitors read them as two attractions. The water reads them as one route.