Fenghuang (Phoenix Town)

Ming-Qing town on the Tuojiang River in western Hunan. Stilted wooden houses, stone bridges, lit dramatically at night.

Fenghuang Ancient Town — Phoenix Town — sits on the western bank of the Tuojiang River in western Hunan, at the edge of Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. The town developed during the Ming and Qing dynasties as a military and commercial centre on the border zone between the Han-administered lowlands and the Miao and Tujia minority territories of the western Hunan highlands. Its defining architectural feature is the diaojiaolou — wooden stilt houses cantilevered out over the river, their lower floors resting on wooden piles in the water, their facades facing the river with wooden balconies — a building type shared across the Tujia and Miao cultures of the western Hunan and Guizhou uplands.

The town's literary association is with the 20th-century writer Shen Congwen, who was born here in 1902 and whose fiction — drawing heavily on the river-town and minority culture of western Hunan — made Fenghuang a name known in Chinese literary culture before it became a tourist destination. Shen Congwen's former residence is preserved in the town and visited by those who know his work.

The current visitor experience is substantially commercialised. Entry to the town has been free since 2016, but a combined site ticket covers the principal heritage buildings — temples, the former prefectural offices, city wall remnants, and residential houses. The riverfront strip of diaojiaolou houses has been converted entirely to guesthouses, restaurants, and bars. The nightly illumination of the river facades is the canonical tourism image: lanterns and LED lighting reflect in the Tuojiang, and the scene is photographically effective if compositionally familiar from many similar images. The authentic life of the town, to the extent that it survives, is in the side lanes away from the river. Allow two days; combine with Zhangjiajie for a western Hunan circuit of five days from Changsha.