Yizhang is a county of the Nanling mountains, in the middle of the range at the southern foot of Qitian Ridge, near the northern border of Guangdong. Its county town sits right on the border between the two provinces, and the national highway from Guangzhou to Beijing passes through the middle of the town, so the road south has run through Yizhang for as long as there has been a road between the capital and the coast. The county covers 2,142.7 square kilometres, and its far south reaches toward Mangshan and the high peak of Shikengkong, which stands on the interprovincial border some fifty kilometres south of the county town at 1,902 metres. The county's own name is an old one, changed to Yizhang in 976 to avoid the personal name of a Song emperor. It is, in short, a county of passes, a place whose geography is the crossing of the mountains, and its towns grew where the routes through the Nanling came out of the hills. Its eastern and southern borders meet the counties of Guangdong, and the old highway still threads the county town.
From the journal
The passes into Guangdong
Yizhang sits in the mountains on the Guangdong border, where the routes south have long crossed the Nanling. In 1928 Zhu De's uprising survivors found refuge here before marching on to Jinggangshan, and the Guangzhou-Beijing highway still crosses the town.
In the same city · Chenzhou ↗The passes in the mountains
The road and the refuge of 1928
Yizhang's position made it a place of passage, and in early 1928 it became a refuge. The troops of Zhu De, the survivors of the Nanchang Uprising and of the Little Long March and the Battle of Shantou, came into the county and found shelter with the local warlord, with Chen Yi beside him, neither man daring to reveal his identity at the time. It was from here that a rested and reinforced communist column marched in April to the Jinggangshan mountains to join the survivors of another uprising. So the county's roads served a double purpose: the old highway for the goods and travellers of the border, and, in that one season, a hiding place and a staging ground for a revolutionary army. The pass, in other words, let people through in more than one direction, and Yizhang's place in the larger history comes from the time it gave shelter to that column on its way east. The county's mountains are also the source of its natural history, for the Mangshan forest at its southern tip gave science the pit viper and the horned toad that bear the mountain's name.
The border county now
Yizhang today is a county of the southern margin, its economy modest and its landscape the mountain border. It administers fourteen towns and five townships, including Mangshan Yao Ethnic Township in its far south, and its county seat is Yuxi Town, with the national highway from Guangzhou to Beijing still passing through its centre. The great natural asset of the county is Mangshan Mountain National Forest Park, the forest at the southern tip, and the 1,902-metre peak of Shikengkong rises on the border south of the town. The mountain is also the place from which the Mangshan pit viper and the Mangshan horned toad were described as new species. Around these the county keeps its older work, the border town on the highway and the Yao township under the forest, a place whose identity remains bound to the mountains it sits in and the border it carries. The county seat at Yuxi remains a border market on the road, and the Yao township under Mangshan keeps the county's ethnic plurality, the Yao counted among its recognised minorities, a county of passes and forests rather than of cities.