Kanggu: the valley on Chengkou's list

Chengkou is the northernmost county of Chongqing, on the southern foot of the Daba Mountains, 334 kilometres from the urban area and 404 by road. Its name means city gate, for a place that stands at the door of three provinces and at the throat of four directions; it borders Shaanxi's Zhenping and Pingli to the east, Sichuan's Xuanhan and Wanyuan to the west, Kaizhou and Wuxi to the south, and Shaanxi's Langao and Ziyang to the north. It covers 3,292.4 square kilometres in 24 townships and 258 villages, has 222,600 registered residents but only 193,000 actually living there, and its seat is Gecheng.

The county's list of sights is a working list, and the Kang River is on it. Alongside Jiming temple, the Batai sea of clouds, the Two Doors of Heyu, Qinglong gorge, the Sichuan-Shaanxi boundary ridge and the Huang'anba grassland, it names the remarkable scenery of the Kang River. A valley enters a county register of that kind as a landmark rather than as a park: something people name when they describe where they are from. The county also holds the Daba Mountains national nature reserve, rich in plants and animals, which sets the terms for what any valley in Chengkou can be.

Chengkou's forest is a crop as well as a reserve. The county produces raw lacquer, tea, walnuts, chestnuts and bamboo shoots, and its medicinal crops include eucommia, gastrodia, coptis and codonopsis; its rare trees include dawn redwood, dove tree and ginkgo. The list explains the shape of the county's economy: a place of net outflow, with 222,600 registered residents and 193,000 actually living there, still sending timber, medicine and food down the roads. In 1932 the Fourth Front Army of the Red Army entered Sichuan, and in October of the following year Li Xiannian, Xu Xiangqian and Wang Weizhou led it east and took the county town; Chengkou became an important part of the Sichuan-Shaanxi revolutionary base.