Huaihua fills the mountainous west of Hunan between the Wuling and Xuefeng ranges, with the Yuan river running through it from south to north. Its name, dating from Song times, comes from a phrase about pacifying and transforming the frontier; its modern weight comes from the railway age, when lines from Shanghai to Kunming and from Jiaozuo to Liuzhou crossed here and people began calling it the city dragged in by trains. It is the western gate of the province and the heartland of the Dong people, who share it with Miao, Tujia, Yao and Bai communities making up nearly two fifths of the population. Its counties hold the old trading towns of the Yuan valley and the county where Japan's 1945 surrender was settled.
Hongjiang grew where the mountain routes of the southwest met the navigable Yuan river, and its intact Ming-Qing commercial quarter earned the nickname Little Nanjing. Its newest history is a merger its residents fought and lost.
Qianyang administered this stretch of the Yuan valley for centuries, and its walls, gates and stele corridor record that rank. The paperwork left for the rail town of Huaihua in the 1970s, but the county seat came back next door.
Read
The Longjin bridge at Zhijiang is a Ming-era covered bridge of the Dong country, carrying walkers across the Wushui in any weather. The county around it held the airfield where Japan's 1945 surrender in China was arranged.
ReadThe old river-port town where the Yuan river trade accumulated, remembered as China's only intact Ming-Qing commercial city.
The walled old seat of Qianyang County at the Wushui-Yuan confluence, with Ming-Qing streets and a famous stele corridor.
The Ming-era Longjin wind and rain bridge across the Wushui at Zhijiang, a covered crossing of the Dong country.
