Gateways to the South-Shiping, Jianshui, Gejiu,Mengzi

The most beautiful part of Ailaoshan, and most expertly cultivated, lies in Honghe Prefecture, between the Red River and the Vietnam border. This is also one of the most rugged parts of the province, where even on the well-paved roads the minibuses barely average 30 km per hour. Consequently, until recent decades it was a world of its own, with scarcely any Han inhabitants and no attempt at, or any real need of, government control. Other than the members of the occasional caravans, people lived largely ignorant of the existence of cities.

On the left bank (northern side) of the Red River mountains also rise at once. But they are largely too steep, rocky and infertile for cultivation. North of this range, instead of dropping off into another major river valley, the peaks and ridges gradually slide off onto the high plateau lands typical of central Yunnan. Except for scattered small mountain groups and isolated valleys, the home of Yi, Hani and Dai, the area has long been settled by Han Chinese. The major cities of the area have been centres of Han civilisation since the early Ming Dynasty, with Jianshui important even before that.

The only significant minority in these cities is the Hui, most of whose forefathers first came with the Mongols and have large neighbourhoods in the old quarters. For the minorities of Lower Ailaoshan, however, these are the nearest cities impressively bigger than their county seats. Ordinary commerce they can do in the latter, but the northern Honghe metropolises offer other opportunities like secondary schooling, vocational train¬ing or temporary contract labour. These cities are much more in the Ailaoshan people's consciousness than Kunming, considered too big and too far.

Whichever way the main highway leads that will be the city most associated with the people of a particular county. For Jinping folks it is Mengzi, site of the old caravan terminus, or Gejiu, the prefectural capital. For Yuanyang people it is Jianshui, as it is for Luchun resi¬dents, because the highway out of Luchun first bends over to Yuanyang to go north, rather than straight up to Honghe. The people of the latter county feel more of an affinity for Shiping, for a main road connects with it directly.

Shiping lies in a basin below the highlands separating it from Tonghai and the lakes to the north. It has its own lake nearby, just east of the city, called Shilonghu, which the county government has in recent years begun promoting as a tourist attraction by installing pavilions, etc. This new tourist consciousness may save what is left of the old town in the heart of the city, as well as the twisting lanes and old-fashioned brick and tile houses of the adjacent eastern and southern neighbourhoods.

The county is famous for its doufu-soybean curd, which the locals pronounce closer to dafu. Numerous downtown stalls offer snacks of this to customers in the evenings who sit around an open grill, cook the cubes to taste and dip them in sauce. In the fancier restaurants more discerning doufu connoisseurs can select from among some two dozen special preparations.

Just 50 km east of Shiping is Jianshui, in terms of architecture and historical interest the most attractive municipality in Honghe Prefecture. Here is a city that not only has retained extensive parts of its old town and historic buildings, it takes great pride in them. This attitude affects its reception of travellers. The situation is now completely the reverse of that encountered by the two 19th century French expeditions that passed through here. Jianshui people today are friendly, polite and hospitable to their guests, only anxious that they appreciate the city as much as the natives do.

Over fifty structures in the county, most of them in the city and its vicinity, are under some form of government protection and preservation. Nearly all of these are still in use, as schools, law offices, libraries, police stations, government agencies and the like. In addition, the city's old quarter has many elegant private houses in traditional style, with compound gates decorated with elaborate wood carvings. They have not been designated county monuments, but they are anyway antique, attractive and still in use.

Jianshui's most imposing building is the enormous, three-tiered Chaoyang Tower, formerly the eastern gateway to the city, with a long, high red wall at its base. Constructed in 1379, it is the grandest Ming-style gate extant in the province. A green-lawned park has been appended to the front, where city residents like to relax in good weather. On the other side of the wall Jianzhonglu heads west, lined with shade trees the first few blocks.

At the Jianxinjie intersection the lane to the right leads to the Zhu Family Flower Garden (Zhujia Huayuan) in the heart of the old town. Beside the en-trance is a long, two-story, red wooden shop house with carved doors. Pottery, jewellery, antiques and local handicrafts stalls occupy the ground floor, with a painting gallery upstairs. The Zhu Garden is a vast complex of compounds within compounds, rooms with carved screen doors, ponds, flower arrangements and a hall exhibiting large colour glossies of the county's attractions.

Past the turn-off to the garden Jianzhong Street continues west, passing Beizhengjie, which turns right towards the Linan Hotel, next to the roundabout with a new space needle. Less than a hundred metres past the Beizhengjie turn is the entrance on the right to Xuehai, the Sea of Learning, a large oval water tank in front of the Confucius Temple (Wenmiao), the most impor¬tant of its kind in the province. It was built during the Yuan Dynasty in 1325.

Two carved stone gates flank the main entrance behind the pond. The entry gate is wooden and elaborately carved and painted, with dragons winding around the two main posts. Inside the compound in front of the temple stands a beautifully forged copper incense burner, in the shape of a miniature temple, with pastoral and animal imagery as well.

Inside the temple a brightly painted statue of Confucius stands in a partly gilded wooden compartment. The walls behind are covered with portraits of the sage standing in various positions. Similar paintings hang on the walls of the two buildings on either side of the court-yard. Gilded bronze statues of Chinese deities from the Ming and Qing eras are displayed in the front room of the hall on the left. Originally the complex included more compounds, but these have been converted into, appro¬priately enough, classrooms and dormitories for boarding students.

A little past the entrance to Xuehai stand a few more elegant old buildings, for this neighbourhood was within the old city walls. One is the Zhilin Temple, a formerly important Buddhist compound from the Ming Dynasty. Of the other two historic buildings, one is in use as a law office, the other as a neighbourhood police station-examples of the Jianshui feeling for their traditional archi¬tecture. In other cities the lawyers and the police oc¬cupy new cement buildings with facades of glass and tile.

The other major Buddhist sites in Jianshui are closer to Chaoyang Tower. Southeast of the tower Guilin Lane continues two blocks to a compound of yellow-walled buildings, with carved roof-struts, around the 14-tiered Chongwen Pagoda. North of Chaoyang Tower, starting from Mashijie across the main thoroughfare and down all the side streets from here, is the largest old quarter in town.

The first turn up Mashijie goes to the Randengsi, the Lighting the [Votive] Lamps Temple, with a colour-fully ornate entrance gate and two buildings within the quiet and shady compound. A lane from here leads to the oldest city mosque, with its red wooden walls, carved doors and tiled roof. Several fancy houses lie in this quarter while a couple of the grand old mansions were expropriated and turned into a library and a primary school.

Among the county's attractions are mountain temples, classic old bridges, religious monuments, the terraced hills near the Red River and the natural phenomenon of Swallows Cave (Yanzidong), 30 km east. The most unusual monument is Wenbi Pagoda, a few km southwest. It is named for its shape, modeled on a writing brush (wenbi), but standing alone and unadorned on a barren knoll it could be, from a distance, mistaken for one of the many tall smokestacks over the kilns in the Jianshui vicinity.

The bridges, however, are more easily appreciated. They are outstanding examples of their kind and nowadays span streams that have shrunk or been rerouted. The areas are no longer so commercially active, so the motor traffic mostly keeps away and only pedestrians cross, carrying loads on their balance-poles or tending their animals, scenes that have hardly changed since the bridges were constructed.

One such bridge, slightly arched and with a tower in the middle, is Daxinggiao (Great Happiness Bridge), just beyond Qujiang town, 50 km north of Jianshui. Another, roughly similar, is Tianxiangqiao (Heavenly El¬ephant Bridge), a few km east of Jianshui. But the longest (17 spans) and most picturesque is Shuanglongqiao (Double Dragon Bridge), a few km west of the city, just past a long straggling roadside village that makes grave-stones. A three-tiered tower stands in the middle of the bridge and a smaller tower is at the end on the north bank. The stream is narrow and shallow and flanked each side by vegetable gardens. Only occasionally does a peasant cross the bridge or a pony cart trot over it. But at such moments one is transported back in time.

Though it's the capital of Honghe Prefecture, Gejiu is far less interesting. The vicinity is heavily industrialised, for Gejiu is the Tin Capital of China. The city's most prominent feature is its Golden Lake (Jinhu), but unfortunately all the buildings along its shore are drab, concrete, low-rise structures that look modeled on the early factories of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. A reduced old town still exists in the southern quarter and above it stands a two-tiered old tower that was once part of the city walls. Just beyond this monument is the Baohua Park, which houses gardens, groves of tropical tree types, pavilions and the late 17th century Baohua Temple.

The fourth of Honghe's gateway cities to the south is Mengzi, almost due east from Gejiu, though to get there from the latter requires first going north and then doglegging to the southeast. The city lies south of two small lakes on a large plain, with mountains rising to the east. The countryside sometimes resembles Wenshan Prefecture, with its lime-stone boulder-studded hills here and there and the group of tightly packed peaks that rises behind Zhacun, 10 km northeast.

Mengzi has a lake, too, on its southern outskirts and unlike Gejiu, Mengzi's South Lake (Nanhu) is the loveliest site in town. Much smaller than Gejiu's, it is nearly bisected by a long finger of land, which connects by a high, arched, marble bridge to the island where the scholar stayed whose wife invented guoqiao man, one of Mengzi's several mingcai. At the end of the other stretch of this strip of land stands a pale yellow, large, octagonal, two-story pavilion, with two auxiliary build ings in front at the water's edge. Other classical-style pavilions and rest-houses lie at different points along the water and all are reflected in the water and illuminated for a couple of hours, longer on weekends, every night.Mengzi is only partly modernised and the warren of streets adjacent to the lake makes up the older quar ter. The town becomes especially active on its Sunday market day, when minorities from the surrounding countryside, hill and plain, join the urban Han shoppers in the streets and market squares. Miao of the Mengchou branch, in colourful pleated skirts and em¬broidered jackets and belts are the most prominent.

An even more colourful group are the Yi from the eastern and southern mountains. Their women wear multi-coloured, long-sleeved, short-front jackets over knee-length tunics and trousers; the tunic and jacket fully embroidered and appliqueed, the trousers embroidered at the shins and cuffs.

On their heads they may wear a flat, heavily embroidered rectangular cloth that folds over the hair knotted at the forehead and tilts over the back of the head. Younger girls wear a silver-studded band topped by a fan-shaped crown of red pompoms mounted on the end of sticks and with long bunches of pearl and pompom tassels on each side. Older women, however, throw a large piece of cloth over the head-dress, to show that they know their youth has passed.

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