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Why this landscape looks like this, what has happened here, and where we got it all from.
Most travel writing about Wanfenglin stops at the view. The peaks are photogenic and the photographs do the work, and so almost nothing gets said about why the landscape is shaped like that, why anybody lives in it, or what has happened here.
These pages are our attempt at the other thing. They are longer than a guide needs to be, they cite their sources, and where we do not know something we say so. If you only want to know when to come and where to sleep, the rest of the site does that and this section is skippable.
Two hundred and fifty million years ago this was a tropical seabed. This is how that became a rice paddy — and why the villages sit exactly where they sit. Includes what Xu Xiake actually wrote when he stood here in 1638, which is not the line everybody quotes.
Xingyi was called Nanlong until 1797. The name changed after a Bouyei rising was put down, and it was awarded as a commendation to the side that won. Almost no visitor is told this.
The reading list: karst science, the Triassic marine reptiles that are Xingyi's real claim on world attention, the 1797 uprising, the Bouyei language, and the nineteenth-century travellers who went around Guizhou rather than through it. Free sources marked and linked.
Food and what is actually on a Xingyi table; the Bouyei in more depth once we have better sources than we currently do; and the Ming garrison corridor that ran through here and that nobody has studied. If one of those is your field, tell us.