On my walk across China in the past few years, I have passed through some of the most beautiful countryside you could hope to see anywhere, verdant valleys, hidden rivers, spectacular peaks. But the places I have liked best on my walk from Shanghai west to Sichuan have been locations that you will probably never have heard of. Which may be why they are still beautiful. Remoteness and anonymity and good things.

 

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This region, in the southwest corner of Anhui provice and the eastern edge of Hubei province, has the reputation of being one of the most remote and backward parts of China. But I found the air in the mountain valleys clean and fresh in a way that is unknown on the plains to the east. I enjoyed the melodious sound of running water, and often a deep silence, thanks to the muffling effect of the mountains and the thick forest cover.

 

Along the hillsides and the roads, there are beautiful farmhouses, many mud-brick built in the old style of Anhui farmhouses. Many people invited to sit in their doorways and drink the local tea. I also received many invitations to lunch and dinner, and always found the food to be clean and wholesome, and certainly more natural than anything on sale in Beijing restaurants.

 

I paused near a house and an old woman invited me into her kitchen, which had an old-fashioned wood-burning stove on which she made me a cup of tea with tea leaves plucked from a bush just outside the door. In the corner was a covered plastic tub of water fed by a pipe from a deep well. I dipped a small bowl into the tub and took a refreshing gulp. It tasted ... how to describe it? Soft?

 

“This is better than any mineral water in the city,” her son proudly told me. "No chemicals. It’s the best water for making tea."

 

At the heart of the Dabie Mountains is the town of Yuexi, which is bustling and booming. But the walking along the road through the mountains to the east and west of Yuexi was one of the most memorable and delightful experiences of my walk.

 

I walked at a slow pace: I wanted to make sure I experienced every view and took every photo, aiming for the perfect digital photographic equivalent of a classical Chinese painting with mountains, water, trees, and, somewhere in an insignificant corner, a humble human overawed by the wonders of Nature.

 

 

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The road immediately to the west of the massive Three Gorges dam in Hubei province, 600 km west of the Dabie mountains, is cut into the wall of the Xiling Gorge. The gorge walls are so steep that the road in many places disappears into tunnels that are sometimes more than one kilometer in length. But usually, I was faced with sheer cliff faced several hundred metres in height and then a straight drop to the water far below.

 

The Xiling Gorge, approximately eighty kilometres in length, as the most easterly of the main Gorges, had shrunk the most as the waters rose after the construction of the basic dam was completed in the year 2000. The shoals and rocks that used to be such death traps were now well submerged. The water are now more than 100 meters higher than they were before the dam arrived. But the Yangtze Gorges are still unique in their magnificence: the river demands adjectives such as ‘mighty’, and the cliffs that silently watch over it are daunting and formidable. The lonely farmhouses perched high up on the precipitous slopes of the Gorges speak to the proud independence of spirit.

 

A steady flow of large boats passed by in both directions and at any given moment, there were probably two or three boats visible: ferries and huge flat-bottomed cargo boats carrying mostly containers or coal. It was a very different scene from a century ago when the river was lower and laced with whirlpools, rocks and rapids. The boats back then were tiny – sampans and wupans (boats made of either three or five boards), and in order to get upstream the boats had to be hauled by trackers who lived and sometimes died in harness struggling up the paths and over the rocks against the flow of the river. Today, that drama has gone from the Gorges, and so has the suffering and the deaths. Only somewhat muted, the natural glory of the Gorges is still there.

 

I sat for a very pleasant half hour with a farmer who was gazing out over his steep terraces of corn and vegetables to a stunning Gorges vista. He looked so content, and also robust; the older people in the Gorges region seemed much more healthy than the average Chinese.

 

 

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The town is Lianghe is a little down deep in the mountains of the Yangtze Gorges region. The valleys through which I walked after leaving Lianghe to return to the river perhaps 40 kilometers northwards were unique and spectacular and took me from around 200 meters above sea level up to above 600 meters, before giving me an easy descent towards the town of Shazhenxi.

 

It was raining the day I walked out of Lianghe, and the mountainous landscape was drenched in the rich hues of Nature. The contrast between the dark green old leaves and the brighter new leaves on the expanses of orange trees that covered the red clay hillsides was quite a sight. The uphill trudge was wet, but seeing the valley magnificently shrouded in mist made it worth it. I tracked the Tongzhuang River and I could hear it below on the left, catching occasional glimpses of it. Above and below on the steep hillsides were the ghostly presences of old farmhouses, some with deep red mud-covered facades, that blended seamlessly and satisfyingly into the landscape.

 

Every inch of useable land was under cultivation, and the list of products in this rich region was long. Oranges were the main cash crop, but along the road, I also saw corn, green vegetables, potatoes, tea, rice, peanuts, melons, pumpkins and squash. I saw bright red chili peppers growing, and puzzled over a plant covered in what looked like dozens of tiny green peppers. I broke one open and inside were lots of white seeds; I had just opened sesame.

 

The rain began to ease as I strolled downhill. A small van stopped and three boys peered out at me curiously. Two of the joined me for the walk into the next town. We stopped off at their old high school, and I met the students and teachers. The school was called One Pen (Yizhibi) High School.

 

“Why is the school called One Pen?” I asked in English. “Only one pen in this school?”

 

“No! One pen for every student!”

 

 

 

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The city of Wanzhou is on the Yangtze River west of the Gorges, on the edge of the Sichuan basin. This river port is the place where for many, many years – hundreds and even thousands – trade met the Yangtze River, providing the connection for goods heading from the coast and central China into Sichuan and Tibet, and goods from Sichuan’s huge and verdant plains heading out to the world.

 

The British traveller Isabella Bird passed through Wanzhou in 1898 and described it as a ‘small, steep, and handsome’ walled city. The countrywide beyond the town, she said, ‘is exquisitely cultivated, and is crossed in several directions by flagged pathways, carried over ascents and descents by good stairs. These usually lead to lovely villages, built irregularly on torrent sides, among a great variety of useful trees.’

 

Wanzhou had grown enormously since the mid-1990s due to the Three Gorges dam with many farmer families uprooted and resettled in housing blocks in this city. The walls are gone, but the countryside is still exquisitely cultivated. I passed through several villages built beside streams, and I imagined they had once been pretty. I took photos of scenes that I felt sure Isabella would have seen with almost no change, as she gazed out of her swaying sedan chair, coolies fore and aft jogging along in rhythm.

 

‘The uniqueness of the neighborhood of Wan consists in the number of its truncated sandstone hills’, she observed, ‘each bearing on its flat top a picturesque walled white village and fortification, to be a city of refuge in times of rebellion.’

 

The flat top hills are still there, the same mighty slabs of earth as those in the Gorges region, but horizontal rather than jacked up at forty-five degree angles. They are remarkable, with rings of crops round their slopes, but they no longer had walled villages on them.

 

‘The scenery,’ she reported, ‘is entrancing. The valleys are deep and narrow, and each is threaded by a mountain torrent. The hills are truncated cones, each one crowned by a highly picturesque fortified village of refuge, and there were glimpses of distant mountain forms painted on the pale sky in deeper blue. Everything suggested peace and plenty. The cultivation is surprising, and its carefulness has extirpated most of the indigenous plants. It is carried up on terraces to the foot of the cliffs which support the refuges.’

 

Still the same today.