Guiyang Travel Guide

Introduction

Guizhou Province, 450km (270 miles) NE of Kunming

Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province, is a natural fortress. The capricious weather and the hostile topography, giving Guiyang the resemblance of a castle in the mist, would seem more at home in Transylvania. Few Han Chinese even knew these strange lands existed before the famed geographer Xu Xiake traveled here in 1636 as part of his 30-year trek exploring China's sacred mountains (on foot and unescorted!). Again and again he was confronted by "massive, labyrinthine heaps of rock towering wavelike into crests or busting out like petals, dizzying in their effect as they jostle and surge toward the sky!"

"Imagine a series of quaintly shaped hillocks littering a landscape that is also pockmarked with deep depressions," explained 17th-century explorer Francis Garnier. "No valleys or mountain ranges. No general sense of direction. The streams flow to all points on the compass. Every step would have led us up against some...