Longnan is in Gansu, in Northwest China.
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Gansu · City Guide
Longnan, Where Gansu Turns Green and Grows Olives.
Overview
Why Go
Wudu grows a large share of China's olives on terraced river slopes, with the climate and the limestone that the Mediterranean cultivars want. It is the least Gansu thing in Gansu and the oil is pressed locally.
Bikou and the valleys around it are the province's just tea country, on the wet southern side of the watershed. The town was a tea and salt port on the Bailong river and the trade is why it exists at all.
The Dabuzishan cemetery at Lixian holds the tombs of the early Qin rulers, from the period before the state moved east. It was looted in the 1990s and some of the gold ornaments were returned from France in 2015.
Around twenty thousand Baima people live in Wenxian and across the Sichuan line. They are classified as Tibetan but speak their own language, and their Chigezhou masked dance at New Year is unlike anything in either tradition.
The Xixia Song inscription was cut into a gorge wall in 171 to record a road repair, and it is one of the standard examples of Han clerical script that calligraphers still copy. It is still on the rock where it was cut.
See
A limestone gorge in Tanchang with a chain of turquoise lakes, waterfalls and boardwalk, with Tibetan villages at the mouth. It is often compared to Jiuzhaigou and gets a small fraction of the visitors. A full day covers it.
Excavated tomb pits on a hillside at Lixian with the county museum holding the surviving bronzes and the returned gold. The site itself is bare ground and pits; the museum is where the story of what was lost is told.
A river port town on the Bailong with timber shophouses, tea terraces on the slopes and a Sichuan feel to the food. It traded tea, salt and timber between three provinces. The climate here is subtropical rather than plateau.
Terraced groves above the Bailong river around Wudu, planted from the 1970s and now the country's main producing area. Several presses take visitors in the autumn harvest and sell oil at the gate.
Villages up the forested valleys of Wenxian, with their own language, white feathered hats and the masked New Year dance. Homestays exist and the community is small enough that arriving unannounced is noticed.
A Han inscription of 171 on a gorge wall in Chengxian, recording a road repair in clerical script that calligraphers have copied ever since. The gorge walk to it takes half an hour and the carving is protected behind a rail.
On the Map
Approximate locations of the attractions above, across Longnan.
Eat
Cold-pressed from local fruit at harvest in October and November, sold at the presses and in town. It is green, peppery and nothing like the bulk oil sold elsewhere in China. The county carries a geographical indication.
Green tea from the Bikou and Kangxian valleys, the sole tea grown in Gansu, picked from late March. It is light and grassy and mostly drunk within the province, which is why almost nobody outside it knows Gansu has tea.
Red Sichuan pepper grown on the dry slopes around Wudu, one of the larger producing areas in China and carrying a geographical indication. It is numbing and strongly citrus, and it leaves the county for kitchens all over the southwest.
Potatoes boiled and pounded in a wooden trough until they turn elastic, served in a sour vegetable broth with chilli oil. The pounding is done with a mallet and takes real effort, which is why it is a special-occasion dish.
Do
The boardwalk runs several kilometres past the lake chain with a shuttle for the far end. Go on a weekday. Water colour is strongest in autumn when the streams run clear, and the forest turns in late October.
Harvest and pressing run through October and November and the presses around Wudu take visitors. Taste the oil straight from the run: it is far more peppery than anything bottled and it settles within weeks.
The Lixian museum shows the returned gold beside what was excavated legally, and explains the route the pieces took. It is a short visit and it is the clearest local account of what the looting of the 1990s did.
Chigezhou is danced around the lunar New Year and is a village rite rather than a performance. Ask the village whether visitors are welcome that year before travelling for it, and accept the answer visitors get.
When
Green, warm and before the rains, with tea picking from late March. The ideal window for the valleys and the villages.
Wet and warm, with landslides possible on the mountain roads. The gorges are at their fullest and the forest at its densest.
Olive and pepper harvest, clear air and autumn colour at Guan'e. The other good window and the one for the presses.
Cool rather than cold by Gansu standards, with the Baima New Year dances in the opening lunar month. Quiet and cheap.
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Longnan is in Gansu, in Northwest China.
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