ANSHUN is an attractive country town 100km from Guiyang on the rail line to Kunming, established as a garrisoned outpost in Ming times to keep an eye on the empire's unruly fringes. Later a stage for merchants treading the difficult roads between central China and Yunnan, it became a centre for distributing opium between the 1880s and the Communist takeover in 1949, but today the emphasis is on subsistence farming, textiles and tourism, with the town acting as a base for tours to the nearby Longgong Caves and Huangguoshu Falls .

Anshun is centred around two main streets, Zhonghua Lu and Tashan Lu. The maze of twisting alleys off from here are lined with dark wooden houses and packed with scenes typical of healthy rural commerce: horses hauling cartloads of coal, market crowds bargaining over bags of ducks and neat piles of fresh cabbages, shops selling cheap clothes and every imaginable plastic household utensil. For specific targets, seek out the Xixiu Shan Pagoda , a short Ming-dynasty affair now hidden behind buildings northwest of the Zhonghua Lu-Tashan Lu intersection; or Wen Miao , a six-hundred-year-old Confucian academy with a finely restored, carved stone gateway, hidden away at the top end of town.

New arrivals are likely to find themselves 1km southeast of all this, either where the road from Guiyang crosses Zhonghua Lu at the long-distance bus station , or 500m farther south at the train station . Coming in on the dawn train, you'll be met on the platform by touts for tour buses to the caves and waterfall, which depart from outside the train station between about 6 and 8am. Leaving , buses depart twice an hour for Guiyang until 5.30pm; there are also daily buses to Xingyi, Lupanshui and Yunnan, and trains to Guiyang, Lupanshui and Kunming. Long-distance travel is best booked a day in advance.

Attractions in Anshun

Neighboring Areas: Yunnan, Sichuan, Hunan provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

Population: 2.40 million

Area: 9,268 sq km

History: being the throat way between Qian and Dian since ancient times; also the collecting and distributing center for goods to the west Dian; having the fame of that, "the stomach of Qian (namely Guizhou province), the throat of Dian (namely Yun'nan province), the lips and teeth of Shu Yue (namely Sichuan and Guangdong province)"

Climate in the west section of the subtropical monsoon zone, a plateau monsoon climate with clear humid feature; without cold winter and hot summer; cloudy with less sunshine; with frost free period of 280 days

Average Temperature: 15C annually

Rainfall: plenty of rain, annual average precipitation of 1200 mm; concentrated in summer; average humidity of 86 percent

Mountains: Mt. Miaoling

Rivers: the Sancha River; Beipanjian River; Dabang River; Getu River, the Huanguoshu Waterfall; the Hongfeng Lakes