Changde occupies the northwest of Hunan, where the Yuan and Li rivers come down from the mountains to the western edge of Dongting Lake. Known in ancient times as Wuling, it began as a Qin walled settlement more than 2,200 years ago and has carried its present name since the twelfth century. Its position made it the throat of Sichuan and Guizhou and the gateway to Yunnan and Guizhou: goods from the western mountains changed here from river boats to lake boats, and by the early twentieth century Changde was Hunan's second city after Changsha. The 1943 Battle of Changde, in which invading Japanese forces used chemical weapons, is the city's wound. Today tobacco is its biggest industry, a wall of engraved poetry runs along its riverfront, and in Taoyuan County it keeps the valley that claims to be the Peach Blossom Spring.
In 421 CE Tao Yuanming wrote of a fisherman who found a hidden village through the peach blossom and could never find it again. This is the tale, the Changde valley that claims it, and the idiom the story left behind.
Changde kept an open lake at its northeast edge and organised its newest identity around the shore. The lake, the plan that protected it, and the waterfront life it now anchors make up this story.
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The Yuan River is the old road between Changde and the western mountains, carrying boats, timber and mountain goods down to Dongting Lake. Its course, its trading past and its working present are followed here.
ReadThe scenic area in Changde's Taoyuan County that claims to be the Peach Blossom Spring of Tao Yuanming's 421 CE fable.
A freshwater lake of about 17.6 square kilometres on Changde's northeast edge, the city's recreation water and regatta course.
Hunan's second-largest river, running about a thousand kilometres from Guizhou's Miao Mountains to Dongting Lake at Changde.
