The Tanghe is one of the 38 rivers of Jiangjin District, and Tanghe is one of its twenty-five towns. The district's Yangtze waterway runs 127 kilometres, with five national deep-water ports, and the tributaries add to it: the district counts 305 kilometres of waterway when they are included. The Tanghe is a small river by comparison, but it is the one the town is named for, and it is the reason the town is where it is. The county record lists the Tanghe among the district's old towns, with Zhongshan and Jiatan.
From the journal
Tanghe: a tributary town and its wedding custom
One of Jiangjin's twenty-five towns, on one of its thirty-eight rivers, known for a wedding custom and for the water in a forest park.
In the same city · Jiangjin ↗The river and the town
A wedding custom on the record
The district names its key folk customs as the Tanghe wedding customs and the Lovers' Stairway. The second is a path of 6,000 steps built by a man for his wife, and it has become the district's best-known story; the first is older and quieter, a set of marriage rites kept in one river town and counted by the district as part of its identity. That is how a small place survives in a large administrative record: not as a monument but as a practice, listed beside the district's citrus and its liquor.
The water in the forest park
Tanghe also appears in the district's list of scenic units, not as a town but as water. The Dayuandong forest park is made up of five separate units, and one of them is the Tanghe water area, with the Heishishan, Gunziping, Dayuandong and Qingyuan Gong units. The park covers 125 square kilometres across three towns and two townships. The same small river is therefore a town, a boundary, a wedding custom and a stretch of a forest park, which is more than most tributaries on this bank carry. The reservoir's backwater begins at Honghuaji on the main river.