The Daning: a tributary that comes down from Shaanxi

The Daning rises in the Zhongnan Mountains at Pingli in Shaanxi and runs south through Wuxi and Wushan counties into the Yangtze. It is a first-level tributary of the upper Yangtze and the largest tributary in the Three Gorges basin; its old name was Changjiang, and it is also called Wuxi, after the county. Its tributaries include the Madu River. Because it comes down off the Daba slopes rather than along the basin floor, it arrives at the Yangtze with gorges of its own, and the last three of them are the ones Wushan sells.

Wuxi sits at the upper reaches of the Daning on the southern slopes of the central Daba Mountains, bordering Shaanxi to the north and Hubei to the east. It is 685 kilometres by road from downtown Chongqing, covers 4,030 square kilometres and has 540,000 people, and the government sits in Baiyang Subdistrict. The land is high: Yintiao Ridge reaches 2,797 metres on the border with Wushan and Zhushan. The county administers two subdistricts, nineteen towns and eleven townships. In the north-west, Hongchiba is a national forest park, a plateau of grass and cold air above the gorge country.

The county's scenic list still names the Daning old town and Ningchang, the salt town, and the river is the reason both existed: salt went down, grain and cloth came up. The cliffs above the water hold the Jingzhuba cliff-coffin group, a national key cultural relic unit. Mining has been the other work: in 2010 the county's output was mainly coal, iron ore, natural gas, salt and zinc, and Wuxi still has a river port of its own. Downstream, Wushan's coal comes from very small mines in the same mountains. The upper Daning keeps its old trades legible.