Xituo: the cloud ladder above the Yangtze

Xituo's street does not run along the river; it climbs away from it. The Cloud Ladder was built with the slope, a stair of stone steps between houses that step up the hill, and the effect from the water is a street standing on end. The houses are Ming and Qing stilt buildings, Tujia in manner, their upper floors carried out over the drop on posts. Five old buildings survive along the way, the Ziyun, Yuwang, Wantian and Ersheng halls and the Guihua garden, each a room for a guild, a god or a family. The town was called Xijietuo, covers 66 square kilometres, and was named a Chinese historic and cultural town in 2003.

Xituo is Shizhu's only Yangtze port, and that fact explains the stair. Shizhu is a hill county of 3,010 square kilometres, 321 kilometres from Chongqing, and everything it sold had to come down to the water while everything it bought had to go up. Trade here was already busy in the Qianlong reign, when the street was the loading ramp for the hills behind it. The opposite bank belonged to Zhong County, which had produced salt since the Warring States period, and the crossing had a reason beyond scenery. Across the water stands Shibao Zhai, the wooden tower on its rock in the river, which makes the two banks a pair.

The county behind the port is Tujia, and its history is one of the longest of the Tujia chiefdoms: a Song pacification office, a Ming xuanwei office, a Qing direct department in 1761, and an autonomous county in 1959. It is also the county of Qin Liangyu, the woman who ruled the Shizhu tusi and led troops for the Ming, and was made a lady of the second rank. The hills that fed the stair now feed a different trade: Coptis chinensis, a geographical indication product, and water shield, with 14,000 mu of ponds producing 14,000 tonnes a year by 2020. The stair has not changed. What comes down it has.