Huanggang.

Dongpo Red Cliff stands at Huangzhou in today’s Huanggang. Its reddish rock gave it an identity before it became inseparable from Su Shi, also known as Su Dongpo. The Yangtze’s course and banks have changed, so the surviving cliff is no longer a simple reconstruction of the waterside setting in the poems. The stone, the later buildings and the remembered river belong to different layers of the place.

Li Shizhen was born in 1518 at Qizhou, in present-day Qichun County, Huanggang. Medicine was part of his family’s work. His name is now inseparable from the Bencao Gangmu, known in English as the Compendium of Materia Medica. The connection gives Qichun a human entry into the history of medical writing: a local physician examining received knowledge rather than simply inheriting a finished book.