Guiyang

The plateau around Guiyang was the country of the Yelang polity and later of Buyi, Miao and other peoples, governed at a distance by Chinese dynasties through hereditary local chieftains. A garrison and postal station stood here under the Yuan dynasty, and the town grew as a military post on the road from Hunan to Yunnan. Guizhou became a province in 1413, and Guiyang was made its capital, a walled Ming garrison in poor, mountainous country whose name means 'south of the noble mountain'.

The most famous episode of its early history belongs to Wang Yangming, the philosopher banished in 1506 to a postal station in the hills north of the city, where he arrived at the insight that knowledge and action are one. He later taught in Guiyang, and the shrines associated with him remain a point of local pride. Ming and Qing rule brought settlers, forts and repeated conflict with Miao communities, whose uprisings continued into the 19th century.

The city's modern shape came from war and industry. The Nationalist retreat inland after 1937 turned Guiyang into a refuge and supply town on the road to Chongqing, and it was bombed by Japanese aircraft during the war. After 1949 came factories, aluminium smelting and, in the 1960s, 'third front' defence plants built in the hills for safety from attack. Guizhou remained among the poorest provinces into the 2000s. Motorways carried on huge mountain bridges, high-speed railways and a deliberate push into data centres and cloud computing from about 2015 transformed the capital, which has grown enormously in population and area since.

Guiyang is a Han-majority city in a province where more than a third of people belong to ethnic minorities, and the two worlds meet here constantly. Miao, Buyi, Dong, Yi and Tujia communities live in the surrounding counties and in the city itself, and their silver jewellery, embroidery, batik, lusheng reed-pipe music and festivals are visible in markets, museums and the spring gatherings held in the city centre. Village festivals within reach of Guiyang include bullfights between water buffalo, singing contests and drum dances.

The Han culture of the province arrived with soldiers and settlers from Jiangxi, Hunan and Sichuan, and the local dialect belongs to the south-western Mandarin group. Wang Yangming's exile gives the city an intellectual claim, and Qingyan's stone town, with its Buddhist and Taoist temples beside a Catholic church and a Protestant chapel, shows the mixture that frontier trade produced.

Daily culture is shaped by climate and cheapness: this is a city of tea houses, mahjong, riverside dancing in the evening and long outdoor meals in summer, when people from Chongqing and Hunan arrive to escape the heat. Guiyang is proud of being cool, green and unhurried, aware of Guizhou's reputation for poverty and quick to point to the bridges, railways and data centres that have changed it. Drinking matters: Guizhou distils Maotai, China's most prestigious baijiu, and toasts are taken seriously at any formal meal.

About six million people live in the Guiyang municipality, most of them in the built-up districts in the basin and the newer areas to the west. The city has grown quickly through migration from the Guizhou countryside, and whole districts of tower blocks have gone up on land that was farmed twenty years ago, while the older centre keeps its tight streets, markets and low-rise blocks between the hills.

The economy has shifted from heavy industry — aluminium, coal, phosphates, machinery and the old defence plants — towards services, tourism and data. Since about 2015 Guizhou has marketed its cool climate, cheap hydroelectric power and stable geology to server operators, and large data centres have been built in and around the capital, which calls itself a big data city. Tobacco, liquor and food processing remain important, and the province's spectacular bridges and tunnels have made the capital a road hub.

Life is inexpensive and outdoors when weather allows: breakfast noodles in a shop, exercise and dancing in the parks, grilled food and beer on the street at night. Migration has left many rural families with relatives working in the city, and incomes here still trail the coastal provinces. Air quality is good by Chinese urban standards, but damp grey weather, traffic on winding roads, and the cost of housing in the new districts are common complaints.

Guizhou cooking is built on sourness and chilli rather than on the numbing peppercorn of Sichuan, and Guiyang is the best place to try it. Suantang yu, sour soup fish, simmers at the table in a scarlet broth fermented from tomatoes and rice water, a Miao dish that has spread nationwide. Chillies are usually served alongside as a dry dip of ground chilli, salt and herbs, into which boiled or grilled food is pressed.

The city's own dishes are specific. Huaxi niurou fen, Huaxi beef rice noodles, is eaten at any hour: rice noodles in clear beef broth with stewed beef and pickled greens. Siwawa, silk dolls, are thin rice-flour pancakes wrapped around shredded carrot, bean sprouts and herbs and flooded with a sour, spicy sauce. Changwang mian pairs noodles with pig intestine and blood curd in a chilli broth, and liren doufu, lovers' tofu, is grilled tofu split and filled with chilli and herbs, sold from carts at night. Zhe'ergen, the pungent root of fish mint, turns up shredded in salads and dips and divides visitors sharply.

Street eating is central. Night markets grill skewers, aubergine and tofu, boil crayfish and serve small pots of hotpot, while Qingyan is known for its trotters, tofu balls and rose sugar sweets. Lao Gan Ma, the chilli sauce sold worldwide in glass jars, was created in Guiyang and is still made in the city. Guizhou's mountains supply rice wine, and the province's distilleries produce Maotai, drunk in small cups at celebrations.