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Guiyang
Guiyang is one of China's least visited provincial capitals and it has an aura of being one of the poorer big cities in China. The city has a feel of decay - like Chongqing - but does not have the luxury of a dynamic modern business and commercial centre - unlike Chongqing. Guizhouren often comment that Guizhou is "somewhere else", a land that exists between the borders where other bigger provinces end. Similarly, its capital, Guiyang feels like a "somewhere else" city: there is little reason to come; if you want to see what much of China looked like in the 1970s and early 1980s, come to Guiyang.
However, this doesn't mean that Guiyang is boring or not worth visiting. It is a friendly, charming city, eternally busy, and interesting for just being "southern Chinese". It, like Chongqing again, is not a cycling city: there is barely a level piece of ground in the entire province, and the provincial capital must squeeze itself rather awkwardly among the karst limestone crags that rise from the ground over much of the area. On the final approach into Guiyang's grungy little airport, your aircraft wil skim across the top of a number of these crags, many of them being eaten away industrially for limestone and marble. But ultimately, there seems to be no real reason for Guiyang to be here. There seems to be no strategic position, no valley to guard, no river to defend, no crossroads for a market: Guiyang just seems to have appeared out of the green mossy hills and the leaden grey sky to proclaim itself as the most important city between Chongqing and Kunming.
The airport does not provide the best approach to the city, as the visitor may be forgiven for thinking that war has been declared during the flight. The countryside is simply littered with derelict commercial and industrial complexes, and the Chinese penchant for building poor-quality roads is at its apogee here in Guiyang.
Historically, Guiyang was a wooden city, its drab concrete appearance having developed largely as a result of China's strategy to develop industry away from the coast 'behind the mountains' in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the wooden buildings have been swept away, but everywhere there is evidence of the older structures - usually dilapidated - sueezed between slabs of concrete and more wiring than the backside of a hi-fi system.
Guiyang was originally settled during the early part of the 13th Century, during the Yuan Dynasty becoming a city during the Ming Dynasty. It remains one of China's smaller provincial capitals, with a population of just 850,000. The official statistics give it a population greater than 3 million but this includes, as always, the surrounding administrative area.
Earlier than that, the area was inhabited by the Yelang people; seemingly the shortened name of "Zhu" for Guiyang comes from that time as well: old names stick around in China.
Climatically, don't expect much blue sky and fluffy clouds in Guiyang or even Guizhou for that matter: a combination of a subtropical monsoon climate and considerable heavy industry creates an almost constant grey hazy, mushy lead-grey sky. Your holiday snaps will need a lot of digital mastery to make them look bright and cheerful here.
Guiyang has a few specific places worth seeing and once you have worked your way past what some websites call "sites in Guiyang city" (remembering again that a 'city' in China includes its administrative hinterlands, often bigger than a US state or a European country), you will find most are easily accessible.
QianlingShan starts almost in the city centre, just a few metres from the top of Yuanshu Lu (go straight where the street bends to the right after the Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel). Inside are hundreds of hectares of thickly forested slopes, and the Qing Dynasty Hongfu Temple up on a peak. The park has a number of "nice views" created for those who are unable to decide themselves whether somewhere is a nice view unless it is marked as such and given a cute name. The park is also home to several troops of macaques.
Towards the eastern side of the city centre is Guizhou's architectural landmark, the three-storied, 20 metre high Jaixu Pavilion, built in 1598 to honour those who studied hard to pass the incredibly difficult Imperial Examinations. It is reported that three scholars who passed with flying scholars lived near the pavilion. The outside is beaautiful, the inside of note mainly if calligraphy is your thing.
I don't know the current state of the Guizhou Provincial Museum, but I am visiting Guiyang again in November and will find out then. It is reported to have a number iof displays on Guizhou's rich anthropological diversity.
