The air changes at the entrance of the Baoshan Mine in Guiyang, a county in Chenzhou that sits on some of the richest mineral deposits in Hunan. One step in, the temperature drops. The walls go damp. Wooden timbers, replaced every decade since the Han dynasty, hold up a ceiling that carries the weight of the mountain above. A tunnel railway, once used to haul lead and zinc ore to the surface, now carries visitors into the darkness where the…

There is a road that begins in the mountains of central Hunan and ends, 4,000 kilometers later, on the steppes of Mongolia. For three centuries it carried practically nothing except compressed bricks of dark tea, loaded onto horses and mules and moved in caravans that threaded the gorges of the Xuefeng Range, crossed the Yangtze at Wuhan, and pushed north through the Yellow River basin into the Gobi. That route was the Wanli Tea Road, and its southern anchor point…

A county defined by bamboo — 115,000 mu of it — where Qu Yuan wrote his Heavenly Questions and a five-course tea ceremony has been greeting guests for centuries.

Home to Asia’s largest cave, a UNESCO biosphere reserve at Badagongshan, the birthplace of Marshal He Long, and a population that is 92 percent ethnic minority.

Seven chili peppers, each no bigger than a child’s index finger, growing from the same stem in a cluster so tight they look like seven sisters huddled together. That is the Dongxi Qizimei Chili, a geographical indication product from the township of Dongxi in Cili County, Hunan. They grow only between 500 and 800 meters of elevation, where the temperature swings sharply between day and night and the soil is naturally selenium-rich. Locals say they go “up the forehead but…

A 3,970-square-kilometer county at the Hunan-Hubei border where elevations range from 42 meters to 2,098 meters, producing early-maturing mandarin oranges, organic tea, and gallnut honey.

The inspiration for Tao Yuanming’s ‘Peach Blossom Spring,’ home to a Shang Dynasty bronze masterpiece and the birthplace of the man who drafted China’s first republican constitution.

Hanshou County has two faces. One is ancient and wet, turned toward the western shore of Dongting Lake, where the Yuan and Li rivers meet and the water spreads across a landscape of marsh and reed. The other is modern and fast, turned toward the expressway. Four major highways cross this county. Two railways cut through it. The Changsha-Yiyang-Changde high-speed rail puts the county seat 30 minutes from Changde and just over an hour from Changsha. A county of 2,021…

In the spring of 1952, as the Chinese government mobilized to build the Jingjiang Flood Diversion Project in northern Hunan, the construction sites were loud not only with machinery but with song. Teams of a dozen men each pulled or lifted a heavy stone rammer called a wo, dropping it in rhythm to compact the earth of the new levees, and a designated leader would chant a line that the team answered in chorus — a call-and-response work song known…

The world’s lighter capital, producing 70 percent of global supply, along with 80 percent of red envelopes, and anchored by 600,000 merchants working across China and ASEAN.

The most famous generals in Chinese folklore are the Yang Family Generals of the Northern Song — the patriarch Yang Ye, his sons, and the women who took up arms after the men fell in battle. What is far less known is that a parallel line of Yang generals emerged from the mountains of southern China, and that the original headquarters of that southern lineage sits in a small Miao autonomous county in western Hunan called Chengbu. The Yang Official…

A 73-percent-mountain county that hosts one of China’s best-preserved Miao-Dong cultures, a forest reserve with half a million negative ions per cubic centimeter, and the origin of the April 8th Girls’ Festival.

On a mountain slope in Changtang, in the Yao township of the Xuefeng Mountains, a man wraps his head in palm fiber until only his eyes are visible. He is preparing for the Zongbaonao dance — an exorcism ritual nearly a thousand years old, first recorded in the Shaoyang prefectural gazetteer in 1074 CE, when the Song court dispatched troops to subdue the mountain strongholds of Meishan. According to the record, the Yao defenders wrapped themselves in palm bark to…

A county of 698,000 people that sits at the source of the Zi River, holds Hunan’s largest gypsum reserves, and produces indigo-dyed fabric recognized as national intangible heritage.

Changning is the kind of place that shows, in a single craft, how a city reinvents itself when its primary industry runs out. The craft is printmaking — banhua in Chinese, literally “board painting” — and Changning has practiced it since the early 1960s, when a group of local art teachers began carving rural scenes into woodblocks and printing them onto paper using the same linseed-oil ink that mechanics used for industrial stencils. Over six decades the hobby grew into…