Hunan & Guangxi

Hunan was the heartland of the ancient state of Chu, whose poet-minister Qu Yuan is said to have drowned himself in the Miluo River around 278 BC — the origin story of the dragon-boat festival. The Han tombs at Mawangdui near Changsha, opened in the 1970s, preserved the body of the Marquise of Dai, silk paintings and early texts. In 214 BC the Qin cut the Lingqu Canal at Xing'an to join the Xiang and Li rivers and push armies south into what became Guangxi. Changsha's Yuelu Academy, founded in 976, made Hunan a centre of Confucian learning.

In the 19th century both provinces were at the centre of the Taiping Rebellion: it broke out at Jintian in Guangxi in 1851, and it was Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army that eventually crushed it. Hunan then became a forcing house of revolutionaries. Mao Zedong was born at Shaoshan in 1893, studied in Changsha and led the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1927, and Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai and Hu Yaobang were also Hunanese. Changsha was burned in 1938 and fought over repeatedly in the war with Japan, and Guilin fell in 1944.

Guangxi became a Zhuang autonomous region in 1958. Its border with Vietnam, the scene of the Sino-French War of the 1880s and a brief war in 1979, is now a busy trade route, and both provinces have been transformed by high-speed rail and tourism since the 2000s.

Hunanese speak Xiang dialects and are known across China for a stubborn, outspoken temperament that is often linked, half-jokingly, to their love of chillies. Changsha exports popular culture: Hunan Broadcasting System and its Mango TV streaming platform are both based in the city. The western hills, Xiangxi, are home to Tujia and Miao peoples, with silver jewellery, stilt houses and the novelist Shen Congwen's Fenghuang.

Guangxi's largest group is the Zhuang, China's biggest ethnic minority, whose language is related to Thai. Around a third of Guangxi's people are Zhuang, and the Yao, Miao and Dong live in the northern mountains. The Zhuang Sanyuesan festival, on the third day of the third lunar month, is a spring song festival, and the story of the legendary Zhuang singer Liu Sanjie was turned by Zhang Yimou into an open-air show on the Li River at Yangshuo. Dong villages around Sanjiang keep wooden drum towers and covered wind-and-rain bridges.

Across both provinces the dragon-boat races at Duanwu are a major event, and Mao's birthplace at Shaoshan remains a pilgrimage site for Chinese tour groups.

Hunan has about 66 million people. Changsha, with around 10 million, is a fast-growing capital known for its nightlife, tea-drink chains and construction-machinery makers such as Sany; Zhuzhou, Xiangtan, Yueyang and Hengyang are industrial and river cities. Much of the countryside still grows rice, and Hunan was the base of Yuan Longping's hybrid-rice research.

Guangxi, with about 50 million, is poorer and more rural. Nanning, the capital, is a gateway for trade with Vietnam and Southeast Asia; Liuzhou builds cars, including the small Wuling vans; Guilin lives largely on tourism, and Beihai on the coast is a port and resort. Guangxi grows most of China's sugar cane, along with tropical fruit.

Life in the cities runs late: Changsha's food streets and bars fill well after midnight in summer, and Guangxi towns gather over breakfast rice noodles. Many young people from both provinces work in Guangdong's factories and send money home, leaving older relatives and children in the villages.

Xiang cuisine, Hunan's cooking, is hotter than Sichuan's and without the numbing peppercorn: fresh and pickled chillies, smoked and cured meats, and sour flavours. Duo jiao yu tou is a steamed fish head buried in chopped salted chillies; hongshao rou, red-braised pork belly, is sold as Chairman Mao's favourite; la rou is smoked cured pork stir-fried with garlic shoots or chillies. Changsha's street snacks include black, deep-fried stinky tofu, and the cooking of western Hunan leans to the sour, salty flavours of its minority peoples.

Guangxi's signature is rice noodles. Guilin mifen, the city's rice noodles, are an everyday staple; Liuzhou's luosifen, river-snail rice noodles with fermented bamboo shoots, is notorious for its smell and is now sold in packets nationwide. Lemon duck, sour and spicy from pickled lemon, is a speciality of Wuming on the edge of Nanning, and sour flavours run through Zhuang cooking.

Hunan's tea includes Junshan yinzhen from an island in Dongting Lake and the dark tea of Anhua, while Guangxi is known for osmanthus, whose scent gives Guilin its name, and for mild rice wines.

In north-western Hunan, Zhangjiajie's stone pillars fill the Wulingyuan Scenic Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the Bailong lift climbs a cliff face to Yuanjiajie, the Golden Whip Stream path runs along the valley floor, and nearby Tianmen Mountain has a cable car, a cliff walkway and a natural arch. Further south, Fenghuang's wooden stilt houses line the Tuo River below old town gates.

Changsha offers the Hunan Museum with the Mawangdui finds, Yuelu Academy at the foot of Yuelu Mountain, and Orange Isle in the Xiang River with a giant sculpture of the young Mao. Mao's birthplace at Shaoshan, the Yueyang Tower over Dongting Lake and Mount Heng, the southern of China's five sacred peaks, are within reach.

Guangxi's karst peaks crowd the Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo, a stretch included with Guilin's karst in the South China Karst UNESCO listing. Guilin has Elephant Trunk Hill and the Reed Flute Cave; Yangshuo has Moon Hill and the Yulong River. North of Guilin, the Longji rice terraces climb the slopes around the Zhuang village of Ping'an and the Yao village of Dazhai, and Sanjiang's Chengyang Wind and Rain Bridge crosses a river among Dong villages. In the far south-west, the Detian waterfall spills across the Vietnamese border, and the Zuojiang Huashan rock paintings are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.