Fengsheng: the town that names a range

Banan counts eleven hills and ranges inside its border, and one of them is the Fengsheng range, named for the town. The old town is on the district's list of main sights, together with the Nanquan, Dongquan and Qiaokouba hot springs, the Shengdengshan and Yunzhuanshan forest parks, and the former residences of Chiang Kai-shek and Kong Xiangxi. To be a town that gives its name to a range is to be older than the label, and the administrative record supports the weight: in the 2001 adjustment of the district's towns, Fengsheng kept its administrative area unchanged.

The town is small on paper. It has nine units, the Fengsheng community and the villages of Qiaoshang, Liping, Jie, Youfang, Shijia, Qiaowan, Shuangbei and Wangjia, and the names are a short record of what a market town needed: a bridge, a street, an oil press, two stelae. Qiaoshang means on the bridge; Jie is simply the street. In a district that is 62.27 percent hill and 32.99 percent low mountain, with only 4.64 percent flat land, a town site is a decision about slope, and the names say where the flat ground was.

Banan's numbers explain why its old towns sit where they do. The district is 62.27 percent hill, 32.99 percent low mountain and only 4.64 percent flat, and its ground runs from 154 metres at Ranjiawan in Majiuzui up to 1,132.60 metres on Fangdou Mountain in Shitan, on the south-eastern border. The Wubu River and more than ten other rivers cross it, and the district's eleven ranges are part of the same folded landscape. Fengsheng's range is one of the eleven, and the town that gave it the name is a small place in a district where flat land is the scarce thing.