A county for twenty-five years, and the post office it left behind

Dongxi was a county seat for twenty-five years. A Danxi County was set up here in 619, the second year of the Wude era, and in 644 it was reduced to a town. The site was good enough to keep: the town stands in the south-central part of Qijiang, about 40 kilometres from the county seat, with Tiaotai township of Xishui County in Guizhou across its southern edge. Its jurisdiction now covers 157 square kilometres, and the historic core covers about 3.5 square kilometres with more than 15,000 residents in the town centre. That ratio, a dense core inside a large rural township, is what a former county town looks like long after the county left.

The town's best-known building is a post office. The Ma Xiangyue minxinju is described as the oldest post office in the south-west, and it stands among buildings that record the same traffic: the Nanhua Palace and the Wantian Palace, both preserved, and the site of the Kuomintang Central Military Advisory Council after it moved to Dongxi. In 2005 Chongqing listed the town as a municipal historical and cultural town; in 2007 the Ministry of Construction and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage approved it as a Chinese historical and cultural town. In 2012 Yongle village, in the same township, was named among the first batch of Chinese traditional villages.

The road is older than any of the buildings. A Sichuan salt road more than 2,200 years old runs through Dongxi, part of the network that carried salt from the Sichuan wells south towards Guizhou, and a town at a crossing on that road needed palaces, lodgings and a post office as much as walls. The trade explains the town's shape: a street along the water, guild buildings for merchants from elsewhere, and a hinterland of villages supplying the road. It also explains why a place that stopped being a county in 644 could keep building into the twentieth century, and why its record is a commercial one.