Hongjiang's ancient commercial town stands where the Hongjiang stream joins the Yuan river in the mountains of Huaihua. As the market where the mountain routes of the southwest met navigable water, it grew into a Ming and Qing trading city so busy that the Republican era nicknamed it Little Nanjing. Chinese heritage writing now describes it as the country's only completely preserved ancient commercial city and reads its trading houses as evidence of indigenous capitalism's first sprouting. Since 1997 it has sat inside the Hongjiang Management District, a directly administered area created after residents resisted merger with Qianyang County.
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.