Yibin holds a geographical distinction of considerable poetic weight: it is the city where the Yangtze River technically begins. The confluence of the Jinsha River and the Min River at Yibin’s Three Rivers confluence creates the Yangtze proper — and this point, where China’s greatest river comes into being, gives Yibin its celebrated title as “the First City of the Ten Thousand Li Yangtze.” For anyone who has travelled the Yangtze’s length downstream through the Three Gorges and the great lake plains to Shanghai, arriving at Yibin — where the river is young, fast, and narrow — creates a genuine geographical resonance that the river’s other great cities cannot offer.

The Shunan Bamboo Sea, 80 kilometres south of the city, is China’s largest bamboo scenic area — a landscape of over 27,000 hectares of native bamboo forest covering the rolling hills of southern Sichuan in an unbroken green canopy that moves in waves when the wind blows, exactly as its name suggests. The bamboo is not planted in neat cultivation rows but grows in the dense, multi-layered tangle of a native forest, and the experience of walking the paths through it — the light filtering green through the canopy, the sound of bamboo rubbing against bamboo, the cool air even in midsummer — is genuinely unlike any other natural landscape in Southwest China.

Yibin is also inseparable from Wuliangye — the five-grain baijiu distilled from sorghum, rice, glutinous rice, wheat, and corn in fermentation pits that have been maintained continuously since the Ming Dynasty, and whose distinctive rich, layered fragrance has made it one of the two most celebrated baijiu brands in China. The Wuliangye distillery’s industrial tourism programme gives visitors access to the ancient fermentation pits and the full production process of a spirit whose cultural significance in Chinese gift-giving, relationship-building, and formal celebration is difficult for outsiders to overstate.