Heishixia means Black Stone Gorge, and the name is a description of the rock rather than a piece of poetry. The gorge lies in southern Qijiang, in the hills that run down to the Guizhou border; the district's south side meets Guizhou, and the Sichuan-Guizhou Railway crosses the district. Qijiang covers 2,747.8 square kilometres and holds 1.22 million people, and it was formed in 2011 by merging Qijiang County with Wansheng District. Nanchuan lies to its east, Jiangjin to its west and Banan to its north, so the gorge sits in a district that is a border as much as a place.
From the journal
Black Stone Gorge, and the rock that names it
Southern Qijiang is limestone, dolomite and coal; the gorge is the district's geology seen from inside.
In the same city · Qijiang ↗A name made of stone
The mineral ground
What the district records about itself is its rock. Limestone and dolomite, pyrite, quartz sand, rare earths and natural gas are all listed among its resources, with coal seams proven at 2 billion tonnes and limestone reserves given in enormous volume. The geology has preserved other things too: an ornithopod-dominated dinosaur tracksite in the Lower Cretaceous Jiaguan Formation is the district's entry in the fossil record. A gorge in ground like this is a cut through a sequence, and the black of the name is what stone looks like where water runs over it year after year.