Home / Background / Further reading

Where all of this comes from

The sources behind everything on this site — what we checked, what we could not verify, and what simply does not exist. Free-to-read material is marked and linked.

Why this page exists. Almost nothing written in English about Xingyi cites anything. We wanted to know what was actually known about this place, so we went looking — and then decided to publish the list rather than quietly mine it. Everything below we have checked exists. Where we could not verify something, it is not here. Where a source is free to read, we say so and link it.

Start here, if you only read one

Jodi L. Weinstein, Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion. University of Washington Press, 2013. Open access — free to read in full.

About the Zhongjia, the historical name for the Bouyei, from the abolition of the native chieftains through to the Nanlong Uprising of 1797, which began in what is now Anlong County in this prefecture. It is the only scholarly book in English that is substantially about the people and events of this specific corner of Guizhou. It is the backbone of our history page.

Read it free on Manifold →

The landscape

An honest note about Wanfenglin's standing. We could not find a single Western peer-reviewed paper about Wanfenglin specifically. In the international karst literature the reference sites for this landscape are Guilin and Libo — Libo, in eastern Guizhou, is described in the World Heritage documentation as the world reference site for cone and tower karst. Xingyi is genuinely under-studied. You will see it called “the world's most typical cone karst” and “a museum of cone karst” in a great deal of Chinese tourism material; we went looking for the source of those phrases and could not find one — no scientist, no paper, no document — so we do not repeat them.

The fossils — where Xingyi really is world-class

This is the part of Xingyi's international standing that rests on published science rather than on slogans, and it is the basis of the UNESCO citation.

Type locality: Langwu Hill, Lüyin village, Dingxiao, Xingyi — the Zhuganpo Member of the Falang Formation, Middle Triassic, roughly 242 to 237 million years old.

History

Two things tourist material commonly gets wrong. The Liu family manor is a national-level protected site — in the seventh batch, 2013. He Yingqin's former residence is not; it is provincial-level, listed in 1999. And Xingyi holds four national-level protected sites, of which most visitors hear about one: the Liu manor, the Wantun Han-dynasty tomb group, the Lutun stone memorial archways, and the Xingyi section of the old Yunnan–Guizhou tea-horse road.

Xu Xiake

The quotation almost every page repeats is not his. The couplet about how, of all the peaks under heaven, only here do they form a forest, does not appear in his diaries; Chinese sources that use it hedge it with xiangchuan, “it is said”. What he did write, at Huangcaoba in 1638, is on our geology page — and it is more interesting, because it is a comparison rather than a compliment.

The Bouyei language

Travellers — and their conspicuous absence

We went looking for the nineteenth-century Western travellers who passed through here. Almost none did. Isabella Bird, E. H. Wilson, George Forrest, Frank Kingdon-Ward, Archibald Little, William Gill and Eric Teichman all went around Guizhou — up the Yangtze into Sichuan, or west into Yunnan and Tibet. Guizhou was the province you crossed to get somewhere else, and the great travellers largely did not cross it. That is a substantial part of why this landscape has no English-language reputation.

A trap worth knowing about if you go source-hunting yourself. Two towns on the Yangtze — Kuei-fu (Fengjie, in Sichuan) and Kwei-chow (Zigui, in Hubei) — are romanised almost identically to Kweichow, the province. Both sit on the gorges run that every Yangtze traveller took. Claims that this or that famous traveller “reached Kweichow” usually turn out to be one of those two towns. We were caught by it twice while researching this page.

What does not exist

Being straight about the gaps is part of the point of this page.

If you want to go further than this page. The National Centre for Philosophy and Social Sciences Documentation (ncpssd.cn) indexes Chinese journals and shows titles, authors, journal, year, pages and abstracts without an account; only full text needs a login. It is where most of the Chinese citations above were checked. Searching it needs a real browser — the results are drawn by script and do not appear to simple fetching tools.
Corrections welcome, and we mean it. This page will have errors in it. If you can correct one, or add a source we have missed — particularly anything in Chinese that we could not reach from outside the mainland — write to hello@visitxingyi.com. We will fix it and credit you if you would like.

Last checked July 2026. Links to third-party sites are provided for reference; we have no relationship with any of these publishers.