The Five-Foot Road and Its Stone Passes

A 2024 Yunnan government cultural PDF records about 350 metres of surviving Five-Foot Road at Dou-sha Pass in Yanjin, around 1.7 metres wide. It places the road beside Stone Gate Pass and Yuan Zi’s cliff inscription, in a narrow corridor between rock and river valley.

The site’s chronology is layered. The PDF describes Stone Gate Pass as a stone-built military enclosure founded in the Sui period. It dates Yuan Zi’s inscription to the tenth year of the Zhenyuan era, 794, when the Tang envoy passed through on a mission to confer a title on Nanzhao ruler Yimouxun. This inscription is a firmly located episode in the route’s long history. It does not prove that every surviving paving stone belongs to the Qin-era road tradition.

The earliest road tradition is larger than the surviving pavement, and the available cultural account does not assign every stone to one construction phase. The most secure anchors are the measured surviving stretch, the Sui-era gate described in the site record and the Tang inscription fixed to the cliff. Together they turn the gorge into a sequence of evidence rather than a single timeless monument.

The pass is also a meeting point between infrastructure and settlement. The cultural PDF records 123 surviving dwellings in Dou-sha town and places the old road, gate, inscription and cliff burials in the same small corridor. These are not interchangeable attractions: a road records movement, a fortified gate controls a passage, a text commemorates an envoy, and a settlement shows how people lived near the route. Reading them together makes the gorge legible as a lived landscape rather than a single monument.