Guiyang has a hedonistic spirit that is common in southwestern cities, and a lively atmosphere is always floating among the towns and villages. It's hard not to be inspired by it. The cacophony of pedestrians and vendors on the streets seems to loudly proclaim that this is a city of the townspeople.

It's the opposite of the pungent aroma of life in the city. If you drive out of town, you'll always have a good view within half an hour, no matter which direction you go. The organic unity of landscape scenery and smoky air makes you stagger to feel the pulse of the city.

Guiyang is indeed such a landscape city.

1. Guiyang, anger in the face

Guiyang people are able to eat and drink 24 hours a day, and at two or three o'clock in the morning, they are still in the traffic jam. Breakfast stores open when the nightcap falls.

Dong Chong, a painter, wrote in a blog post, "This is my city, Guiyang. It's rainy, cool in summer, wet and cold in winter, and the people who live here are geniuses at eating chili peppers, drinking well and daring to eat anything. It's a small, noisy city, and all kinds of idle people often gather together without a name, for reasons of course, to drink and play."

Guiyang people love to consume, talk about fashionable seems to be a kind of **** knowledge. This feeling is not unfounded. According to information released by the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2017, Guiyang urban residents per capita disposable income of 32,186 yuan, the first breakthrough 30,000 mark, although the growth rate is higher than the national level, but the amount is still lower than the national average level of urban residents by nearly 12%; in the same year, Guiyang City, urban residents per capita consumption expenditure amounted to 26,063 yuan, compared with the national average level is also more than 1,618 yuan.

I've heard a variety of explanations for Guiyang people's spending mentality, and writer Dai Mingxian speculates that this is the effect of the massive influx of "downrivers" during the war years -- "downrivers" were a reaction to the war years, but they were also a reaction to the war years," he said.

The writer Dai Mingxian speculated that this is the influence of the influx of "downriver people" during the war period - "downriver people" is a collective term for people from the mainland who fled during the war period, because there are a large number of refugees from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the sea lifestyle they brought to Guiyang, as well as Guizhou, had a profound influence.

There are also those who say this is because Guiyang has a concentration of wealthy families in the province who have made their fortunes from resources, which can be likened to Taiyuan, and thus has driven up the average level of consumption. Others attribute it to the influence of ethnic minority cultures in Guiyang, where people value the pleasures of the moment more than the accumulation of wealth. Others attribute it directly to notions of vanity and vulgarity.

Guiyang's streets rank among China's top cities in terms of the number of food and drink outlets and the number of itinerant vendors. The best way to get a feel for the atmosphere in Guiyang is probably at the early-morning noodle shops, where people pick up bowls of noodles in a powerful broth sprinkled with red oil and flavorsome, self-help dishes filled with hot-and-sour kimchi, and then move from side to side to sit down in a crowded room, holler and then go on their way after eating.

Like the diners at the breakfast parlor, Guiyang's mountains, hills and streets are also crowded. Guiyang's vitality also lies in the stories told in the mountains.

2. Every mountain here has a story

Standing on the top of Qianling Mountain and looking south, you can see more than half of Guiyang City. The pavilion at the top of the mountain is called "Overlooking the building pavilion", "building" is the ancient name of Guiyang, the reason for a variety of speculation, most of the explanation for the same "bamboo", pronounced in two voices; Guiyang also has a Guiyang also has the nickname "Forest City", in short, this was once a place of thick forests and bamboo. Now the view is of a dense mix of old and new buildings, the city replacing the jungle, growing upward and in all directions until it hits a wall in front of another mountain.

The main city of Guiyang is situated between three longitudinal mountain ranges, the Baihuashan, Qianling Mountain and Nanyue Mountain, two irregularly shaped dams, locked by the mountains and cut by an intricate water system.

Yunyan and Nanming districts, which are overlooked by Qianling Mountain, were the two earliest urban areas in Guiyang. Yunyan takes its name from the mountains, while Nanming takes its name from the river, which has its own poetic meaning. The Nanming River flows from south to northeast, encompassing most of Guiyang. Hills are common in the city, jutting out between the buildings and creating a visual surprise, as if they were uninvited guests who arrived later and seized a place in the city. The karst topography of Guiyang is so closely intertwined with nature that it is rare among China's provincial capitals, like a bonsai in the palm of the hand of the gods.

As the provincial capital, Guiyang is a small city with a small population. But the population density in the center of Guiyang is actually very high. 2014's Guiyang City, "thinning the old city and building a new city layout plan" mentioned that the population density within the first ring of Guiyang (including the core range of the two districts of Yunyan and Nanming) is nearly 50,000 people per square kilometer. In the same year, Hong Kong's most densely populated area, Kwun Tong, was 57,000 people per square kilometer. Guiyang was once called "Little Hong Kong", and at this point, it's a bit similar.

So you can understand why Qianling Mountain, just north of the First Ring Road, is so beloved by Guiyang residents, like the Pacific Hill in Hong Kong's Central District, which is so close to the city that even when people plan for it, fix it, build it, it stays there, along with the trees, the grass, the flowers, and the birds, and ultimately, it becomes the people's dependence.

Since the 1990s, China's devastating urban construction has changed the local culture and fabric of life immensely, said Liu Zhaofeng, chief engineer at the Guizhou Provincial Academy of Architecture and Planning. "Guiyang is a city defined by its mountains and water, unlike many cities on the plains that are defined by their streets and alleys, and when the streets and alleys are gone, the city is dead. Guiyang as long as the landscape skeleton is still there, there can be relied on to realize the renaissance of the city."

Guiyang is not only surrounded by a mountain system, but also disperses or aggregates many hills in the middle of the city, and "every hill has a story."

The Forest Park, to the southeast, was established in 1960 on Zhou Enlai's instructions. In the park there is the monument "Tuyun Pass", built in the Song Dynasty, was one of the 14 ancient passes around Guiyang, but also "from Hunan to Guiyang, the most important channel, at that time (1939-1946) the Red Cross Society of China Ambulance Corps Department, the Ministry of Military Affairs At that time (1939-1946), the Chinese Red Cross Society Ambulance General Department, the Military Administration Department wartime health personnel training institute and the Army 167th Rear Hospital, the U.S. Army's 27th Field Hospital were all relocated to the Tuyunguan Pass, with more than 3,000 staff members and medics, treating millions of sick and wounded".

In 1508, Wang Yangming was exiled to Longchang as a post master in Xiowen County, Guiyang City, where he came to realize the Tao of Longchang and put forward the doctrine of "unity of knowledge and action," which was the closest Guiyang ever came to traditional Chinese Taoism. During the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, the Yangming Shrine was built at the southern foot of Fufeng Mountain in Guiyang City, which is connected to the Daozhen Shrine built during the Republic of China period in honor of Yin Zhen, a scholar of the Eastern Han Dynasty, as well as the Fufeng Temple, which was built in the Qianlong period.

3. Fragments of Guiyang's history

Guiyang has many stories, but few have left detailed records.

Guizhou is a province with a rich distribution of ancient human sites, and among the sites that have been discovered so far, the Paleolithic Age is the most numerous, with northern and western Guizhou and central Guiyang being the most dense, usually distributed along rivers; it decreases to the Neolithic Age, and becomes sporadic by the Shang and Zhou Dynasties. Some scholars hypothesize that Guizhou was warm in ancient times, with a large number of vegetation and animals, which made it easy to collect and hunt, and the karst topography provided convenience for cave dwellings. When mankind's mode of production transitioned to agriculture, these conveniences became disadvantages.

The "place names" of the Southern and Northern Dynasties were a combination of the three Shu names that had been imported during the Han Dynasty, and the Han generals and local chieftains. A more specific example is Gu Cheng, who violently pacified the Miao border, whose sixth-generation descendant, Gu Liangxiang, fled into the Miao border because he could not bear the thought of leading the Ming army into the south of Guizhou and slaughtering innocents, changed his name to Bundi, and took the name of a Miao woman, Wen, which is passed down to the present day by the father's and son's names.

In 1282, the Yuan Dynasty built "Shunyuan City" as the beginning of Guiyang. Shunyuan Castle was built with earthen walls and covered an area of only one square kilometer, equivalent to a customs post.

Guiyang really developed as a city during the Ming Dynasty.

Previously, most of the accounts of Guiyang are found in the literature, and there are very few real physical objects, and a great deal of physical evidence still remains after the Ming and Qing dynasties. In the early Ming Dynasty, the Ming army pacified Yunnan, need to borrow Guizhou, so the construction of stagecoach routes, along the way to the army, a large number of immigrants. Guiyang, because of its central location, became the hub of the stagecoach route, forming the prototype of the current Guiyang City, since then Guiyang and Guizhou really into the mainstream of Chinese history.

Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, the relative geographic location and scope of Guiyang's central city has remained virtually unchanged. The old Guiyang Prefecture has nine gates and four pavilions, the foundation of which was laid in the Ming Dynasty. The Zilinan, the Grand Cross and the Fountain are roughly coordinated by the West Gate, the City Center and the North Gate of the old city.

Guiyang was once known by the ancient name of "Black Sheep Turnip", which is said to come from the Yi language. In the poems of the Miao near Guiyang and Huaxi, "Geluo Gesang" is a recurring term, with "Geluo" referring to Huaxi and "Gesang" referring to Guiyang, and "Geluo Gesang" referring to Guiyang. "Gelo Gesang" is the name given by the Miao people to the Guiyang area.

Guizhou is a hundred Yue, Baipu, Miao and Yao and Qiang ancestors fusion and differentiation of the place, just to find the traces they left in Guiyang, the sporadic evidence obtained are very vague. Before the Yuan Dynasty and up to the Yelang and place names, Guiyang's local history is largely blank, unable to link up a continuous picture.

It wasn't until after the mid-Qing Dynasty that Guiyang's Han population surpassed its minority population, and it gradually became a Han-dominated city. Like all human history, this process involved both spontaneous mobility and civilization. In front of Guiyang's famous Jiexiu Lou, there were two iron pillars, forged from weapons collected by Governor Ertai during the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty, when he pacified the Miao uprising, and by Governor Lebao during the Jiaqing period, when he pacified the Buyei uprising.

4. The "unified" migrants

In the past hundred years, the most profound changes that have affected Guiyang have been related to population migration: first, the population that fled from the war during the war period; second, the population that moved in after the founding of New China for the industrial construction; third, the population that moved in after the "three lines of construction"; and third, the population that moved in after the founding of New China for the industrial construction. The third is the large number of enterprises that moved in during the "Third Line Construction".

According to the first national census in 1953, the population of Yunyan and Nanming districts was only 270,000, which was 10% of Beijing and 4% of Shanghai in the same period. In 1953-1960, 250,000 people moved into the area, and 180,000 people moved in during the 1958 labor recruitment campaign. 1964-1978, the "third-line construction" netted more than 200,000 people. By 1982, Guiyang's population had increased to 1.32 million (790,000 in Yunyan and Nanming districts).

After 2010, Guiyang had attracted public attention with several mega-projects - urban complexes, the largest of which, Huaguo Park, according to the Guiyang Evening News, has a population of more than 500,000, an average daily flow of 1 million, and an average daily traffic flow of 310,000 vehicles. Passing through there, like pigeonholes of skyscrapers adjacent to the piece, cruising among them as experiencing the AR version of science fiction movies. The throughput of just one development in Hua Guo Yuan can be compared with several major migrations since the founding of New China.

Guiyang's economic vitality has benefited from the policy tilts of the central and local governments, with the blueprints and achievements of eco-civilization and big data as far as the eye can see. Jing Yaping, deputy director of Guizhou's Big Data Center Administration, said in a public speech in 2017: the return index of college students in Guizhou province ranks seventh in the country, and 217 percent more college students return to the province to start businesses than those who go out of the province to start their own businesses; and Guiyang is one of the youngest cities in the country, second only to Shenzhen; Guizhou's GDP grew by 10.2 percent in 2017, with a growth rate of the country's top three for seven consecutive years. The province, once known for its poverty, now seems to be on the verge of a turnaround.

History always echoes.

The construction of highways and railroads compared with the laying of stagecoach routes; urbanization has absorbed a large number of people compared with the historical wave of migrants; and when Foxconn dug out three mountains and built its data center in a cave in the Guian New Area, it could not help but remind people of the military factories that were relocated to the mountainous areas of Guiyang in the "Third Line of Construction" period. -- As industrial civilization turns toward the Internet, Guiyang's natural geography is once again playing to its strengths, as if echoing the Paleolithic era.

The people of a place are characterized by an oversimplified description that borders on prejudice and is not far from fallacy. But the shaping of people by the environment is again evident, and will be embedded in you, manifesting itself as the years go by. Dai Mingxian spoke of Guiyang people - you can say that all Guizhou people - with the character of the mountain people: they do not do anything to publicize, so the good mountains and good water and good talent is not known to the outside world; they are straight and stubborn, with the dialect is "bullock", when this for the bullock, it is not a good thing. "When this noun categorized for cattle is used as an adjective, its connotation has a subtle change, containing a rich and vivid image.

Today's Guiyang people, dating back one to two generations, are known as immigrants. But put the timeline longer, which city is not made up of immigrants? Those who continued to flow to Guiyang from tens of thousands of years ago to the present day were eventually unified in caliber by sour soup, chili peppers and good wine, transformed by the low-key, humid climate, and shaped into personalities by the mountains and rivers that surrounded them.

If the Ming Dynasty is the beginning of modern Guiyang, then this "bullish" city is in the midst of 600 years of change.

This article is adapted from the book Guizhou, with additions, deletions, and changes to the original text.