Fenghuang

Fenghuang grew out of a frontier garrison rather than a market. The mountains of western Hunan were Miao country, governed indirectly through hereditary chieftains, and imperial control was repeatedly contested; from the Ming period the state built forts, garrison towns and a long stone barrier through the hills to separate and police the Miao districts. A garrison was established here under the Ming, and under the Qing the walled town — then called Zhen'gan — became a centre of frontier administration; the walls and gate towers above the Tuo River were rebuilt in that period.

Rebellion shaped the following two centuries. Major Miao risings in 1795–1806 and again in 1854–73, the second of them centred on this county, were suppressed from garrisons like this one, and the town's soldiering tradition outlived the empire: an unusual number of republican-era generals and officials came from Fenghuang, among them Xiong Xiling, who served as premier of the young Chinese republic in 1913. Its other famous son is the writer Shen Congwen, born here in 1902, whose stories of boatmen, soldiers and small-town life in western Hunan made the region part of modern Chinese literature.

Isolation preserved the town. Poor roads and a marginal economy left the timber houses, walls and lanes largely unredeveloped through the 20th century, and when domestic tourism grew from the 1990s Fenghuang found itself with something rare. Restoration, guesthouses, a ticket system and a nightlife strip followed, and the town now draws very large numbers of visitors — success that has brought long arguments about crowding, commercialisation and how much of the place belongs to the people who live in it.

The county is part of the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, and both peoples are strongly present. Miao culture shows most visibly in dress: indigo cloth, dense embroidery and heavy silver neck rings, headdresses and bracelets, worn at festivals and sold, in lighter versions, in the town's shops. Silver working, batik dyeing and embroidery are genuine local crafts with long histories here, even where much of what is sold is made elsewhere. Tujia traditions include brocade weaving and the hand-waving dance.

The town's literary reputation rests on Shen Congwen, whose spare stories of ferrymen and garrison towns gave the region an identity in the national imagination; his childhood home in the old town is one of its best-known attractions. Painters and photographers have followed the same landscape, drawn by an exceptionally well-preserved town of Ming and Qing architecture.

Everyday manners are those of rural Hunan: blunt speech, generous hospitality, strong rice wine pressed on guests, and chillies at every meal. Ancestral worship, village temples and lunar-calendar festivals still order the year in the surrounding hills. The gap between the staged culture of the lanes — costume hire, song-and-dance shows, souvenir silver — and the working life of the villages is wide, and locals are frank about it.

Fenghuang County had a registered population of about 428,000 in 2015 and a resident population of about 364,000, more than half of them Miao or Tujia, spread through mountain villages and small townships; only a fraction live in the county seat, and fewer still inside the old walls. Many of the houses in the historic core are now guesthouses, shops or restaurants, with their owners living uphill in the new town.

Tourism dominates the local economy, in guesthouses, restaurants, boats, silver and embroidery shops, photography and costume hire, performance and guiding. Away from the river the county lives on farming — rice, maize, rapeseed, chillies, tobacco, kiwi fruit and citrus on terraced slopes — along with forestry and remittances from family members working in Guangdong and Zhejiang. This was one of the poorer parts of Hunan, and poverty-alleviation programmes over the last decade reshaped roads, housing and village schools.

The daily rhythm splits in two. Residents are up early, when the lanes are quiet and the river steams, and the market and schools set the morning; visitors fill the old town from late morning, and the bar strip runs loudly until the small hours. Crowding at holiday peaks, noise, rising rents and the balance between conservation and commerce are the constant local arguments.

Western Hunan cooking is sour as well as hot, and Fenghuang's kitchens show it. Sour flavours come from vegetables, fish and pork packed with rice bran and salt and left to ferment, then fried or stewed; sour-soup broths, pickled chillies and pickled radish appear on almost every table. Chillies are fresh, dried, pickled and chopped into salted pastes, and the heat is direct rather than numbing.

The best-known local dishes are blood duck, duck jointed and cooked with its own blood, ginger and chillies until the sauce coats the meat; soured fish from the river stewed with pickled vegetables; smoked and cured pork hung in kitchen smoke through the winter and then stir-fried with garlic shoots or bamboo shoots; and stewed local beef with chilli. Rice noodles in a hot, sour broth are the standard breakfast, and deep-fried stinky tofu is sold from carts as it is throughout Hunan.

The old town's sweet trade is ginger candy, pulled and cut by hand in shop windows and sold in paper packets, alongside walnut cakes, sesame brittle and glutinous rice cakes pounded in stone mortars. Villages distil maize and rice wines, and mountain tea, wild mushrooms, bamboo shoots and kiwi fruit come down from the hills to the county market.