Yuzhou: the walled seat of the Youyang tusi

Youyang was known as Youzhou in ancient times, and its walled town is the seat of that name: an enclosure inside the modern county town, with a gate, a main street, the hall of the office and the roofs of the Tujia country around it. The title mattered more than the wall. The Ran family's tusi state was granted a xuanwei office in 1314 and grew into one of the strongest chiefdoms in the Wuling mountains, taking the five Yang family chiefdoms of what is now Xiushan under its wing and holding both the Wu River route west and the Yuan River route east. A prefecture seat in this country was a licence to tax a road.

The Qing ended the arrangement between 1728 and 1735, when the court replaced local rulers with officials sent from outside, a process called gaituguiliu, replacing the local and returning to the mainstream. Tujia areas came back under central control in that span, and Youyang was reorganised as a direct prefecture in 1735, after the change. The walled town kept its shape and lost its function: the hall became an office of a different kind, the gate a marker rather than a defence, and the street a market. Chinese administrative history is full of towns that were important for one reason and then had to find another, and this is one of them.

The county around the wall has changed population in a way the wall cannot show. The 2020 census counted 607,338 residents, 83.54 per cent Tujia, 8.93 per cent Miao and 7.30 per cent Han, in a county of 5,173 square kilometres, the largest county-level division in Chongqing. The old tusi capital is now one attraction among several: the Peach Blossom Spring in the north, Gongtan where the Wu and Apeng meet with more than 200 Ming and Qing houses, Longtan and its timber streets, and 60 kilometres of the Wu River gallery. Yuzhou is the one that explains the rest, because it is where the government of all that country sat.