Shaoyang (邵阳), formerly called Baoqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest corner of Hunan, bordering Guangxi to the south, with a recorded history of 2,500 years. The Zi River and its tributary the Fuyi run through the prefecture, and the Shao River joins the Zi at the city itself, which grew as a commercial and transport town on that water. It is one of Hunan's major forest areas, with just over forty percent of its land under trees, and it holds both the danxia cliffs of Langshan in Xinning County and the high grassland of Chengbu, where the Nanshan Pastures supply the province with dairy and meat. For all its size and its far-travelled merchants, Shaoyang remains a large-population city with a comparatively small economy.
Langshan is a Danxia mountain of red sandstone in Xinning County, part of the China Danxia World Heritage site. Water carved the rock into peaks and lanes across 108 square kilometres, the Fuyi River runs beneath them, and the site is now a 5A attraction.
Nanshan Pasture is the high grassland of Chengbu where cattle graze and the dairy is a local industry. The grass can carry some 87,000 head of livestock, it feeds a dairy of thousands of tons of milk a year, and the pasture now lies inside a national park.
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