Hefeng · Pingshan Gorge

OVERVIEW

Clear water glowing between narrow cliffs

A narrow boat carries you into a limpid valley where cliffs, stilt houses and Tujia villages scatter across a much larger mountain system.

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The colour of the water is not a filter; it is rock, depth and the day's light finishing the job together.

— Once the boat enters the narrows the sound concentrates. Look up and there is cliff; look down and the stone grain is still visible under the water.

HIGHLIGHTS

Clear water by boat

Watch the water colour and the rock walls change at slow boat speed.

Tujia hill villages

Leave the main gorge for the slope villages and their stilt houses.

HISTORY

Four Centuries of the Rongmei Chieftains

Pingshan sits in Rongmei township, Hefeng county, where the Rongmei chieftains lived for more than four hundred years and built an extensive ducal seat on the mountain. Over a hundred sites survive — the Pingshan seat itself, the Wanren and Wanquan caves, the Xiliu fort, along with bridges and stelae. In the modern era this became red ground too: He Long moved in and out of Hefeng seven times, and the largest Red Army rear hospital of the Hunan–Hubei border region, with its armoury and clothing works, still stands in these hills.

GETTING THERE

How to arrive

GOOD TO KNOW

Before you go