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Peter Neville-Hadley

The visit to Longzhou begins unpromisingly.
Why, the policeman at a checkpoint on the edge of the city wants to know, am I going to a little-known town two hours’ drive southwest of the Guangxi provincial capital of Nanning.
“Lüyou,” I say. Tourism.
“Mei you shenme hao wan,” he objects. There’s nothing interesting there.
He flicks nervously through the pages of my passport.
“There’s the old French consulate,” suggests the minibus driver, who has come over to see about the delay. The other passengers remain slumped in their comfy, reclinable seats.
The policeman concedes there is at least that.
He makes an extended phone call, then demands I open my luggage, which he perfunctorily inspects. He photographs my passport, my visa, and takes a portrait of me standing next to the vehicle’s number plate, before finally waving us away.
“It’s a border area,” the driver explains as we get back into the minibus.

But that was precisely what had made it interesting to the French more than a century ago, and left its spiny hills topped with fortifications long before that.
Vast numbers of tourists arrive in Guangxi’s Guilin each year to view the city’s surrounding karst peaks, or to weave between them at water level, floating down the Li River through scenery celebrated in Chinese paintings and on the back of the 20 yuan banknote.
But large swathes of the province have the same geology without the crowds. The drive to Longzhou plays tag with the Zuo River and provides a similar backdrop of spiky peaks with individual personalities in overlapping layers, each appearing mistier and paler as they recede, like the backgrounds in European Renaissance paintings. These, as the American journalist Harry Franck observed when he arrived from what is now Vietnam in 1924, “increased in savage splendour” as Longzhou was approached.
On my first visit, 20 years ago, a crowded rattletrap bus, extra passengers seated in wooden stools down the aisle and with back­ground music from assorted livestock, took a slow and winding route to deposit me at an equally battered bus station. There was only one hotel, which was being gutted even as some rooms remained available.
But the modern minibus sits only eight passengers in considerable comfort and shoots down new expressways to drop us at our desti­nations of choice. Mine is the same but now completely rebuilt hotel, where I bargain down the price of a modern, clean room.

Franck, like others who passed through in the early 20th century, sought hospitality from the expatriate population.
“I broke in toward sunset upon the quiet of the Australian Catholic deputy commissioner of customs, whose duty it was to note my entry into the country and take my word for it that I had nothing dutiable, and who offered me bachelor hospitality forthwith, since the American Protestant missionary was away on a trip, the Italian commissioner of customs was entertaining two young ladies from England and Scotland respectively, and the French consul had invited all this snug little foreign colony to dine with him that evening.”
The existence of this little Western community in what Franck otherwise conceded was a town “as purely Chinese as if it were 10,000 li from foreign influence” was down to the French. They looked to create a sphere of influence in southern China bordering their newly acquired Indochinese possessions, and dreamed of exporting goods to Guangxi and beyond.
In 1887, the Chinese allowed Longzhou to be opened as a treaty port – a place where foreigners might reside and trade. The French consulate and two customs houses opened in 1889, on land away from the crowded town across a gorge carved by the Zuo River.

The consulate was in the form of a railway station, with ramps down which to slide imports to waiting boats, and by 1902, the French had brought a narrow gauge railway line up to the border.
But China obstructed further progress, and the station never received a single train.
It’s a short walk high over the Zuo on a modern bridge to reach the former foreign enclave. On both banks, the town straggles steeply down to the water’s edge, many houses up on stilts against the river’s periodic floods. It peters out in orderly market gardens and moorings for small huddles of grey-roofed sampans that may be chartered for cruises among the peaks.
Twenty years ago, the two-storey customs buildings, with their deep balconies of fading yellow and exterior staircases showing an alarming lean, were falling into decay. The consulate-station was in use as housing. The site’s history seemed long forgotten.
But now the alien arches and neoclassical balustrades, French-style shutters and slatted doors, with railway-station benches and wicker chairs outside, are reached through a restored gate of modest grandeur, and have been reopened as a museum. It’s a green and peaceful site, filled with birdsong and the creaks of the curved exterior staircases as they are mounted.

Displays tell the history of the consulate and its operation, and list the 35 consuls in post between February 1889 and October 1950, when it closed for good. Photographs show elegant men with vast moustaches posing formally in brocaded jackets, or more casually out hunting with dog, gun and solar topi, or boating on the river.
Others show contemporary Chinese officials, and there are sepia images of ordinary life at the time: boatmen on the river and women in the rice fields or weaving clothing at home.
The station remains forlorn and is used for administration.
The consuls and customs officers never had much to do. Far more goods left China for French-controlled territory than came the other way.
The town is now surrounded by great walls of high apartment towers capable of housing thousands. But if modern-day trade has now grown to support this expanded population, no one is able to say.
“It’s a border area,” is the only explanation offered.

The foreigners’ work was interrupted in February 1930 by an ill-judged uprising partly led by then Longzhou resident Deng Xiaoping (who would become China’s leader in 1978). This is celebrated in a disproportionately grand Revolutionary Museum, opposite the bus station. The mini-revolution was over in weeks.
The French reacted to assaults on the consulate and Catholic mission with bombing raids that aided the troops of local warlord Li Zongren to regain control. Much of the population fled south, and the town was left in ruins.
But among the maps of military manoeuvres and other material on the later, brief Japanese occupation during World War II, there’s much on daily life in the 20th century at the Revolutionary Museum, and on the fortifications dotting mountaintops towards the border.

A local bus or 5km taxi ride west of the town brings you to the ancient defences of Xiaolian Cheng, where signs in Vietnamese hint that the cliffside walls and other hilltop fortifications are now used to attract invaders from the south, rather than keep them out.
The winding climb up into the hills is rewarded first with cave temples with ornate painted facades, their interiors liberally furnished with stalactites and stalagmites. One space contains the crumbled remains of a still-worshipped Buddha figure, artfully spotlit by a shaft of sun through a ceiling hole, as well as an elaborate nine-dragon screen and other carvings.
A path beyond leads along narrow ridges to extended fortifications such as a miniature Great Wall, and two barbettes, or circular stone gun platforms, with 360-degree views, attendant administrative quarters in neatly carved stone and ammunition storage caves that are baldly utilitarian in contrast to the fairy-tale scenes of the caves below.

Birds of prey circle overhead, defensive walls lead away until overwhelmed by greenery and there are panoramas of pointy peaks, clustered particularly thickly in the direction of Vietnam, forming a natural barrier.
When the Chinese eventually built a line from Nanning to the border it was standard gauge, and bypassed Longzhou completely. But now concrete pillars stride across the landscape, and giant machines gnaw at mountainsides, heralding the arrival of yet another high-speed rail link.
A century and a quarter after the first French attempts, Longzhou will finally get a functioning railway station, although as with the old consulate and customs buildings, it hardly seems likely there’ll be the traffic to justify it.
But this is a border area.


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We skipped Guilin’s karst hills and visited Longzhou in Guangxi, China instead – and this is what we found

An aerial shot of the Zuo River in Longzhou, Guangxi, China. Photo: VCG

Despite Longzhou’s rapid modernisation, some ancient housing, lifted on stilts against seasonal flooding, still survives along the banks of the Zuo River. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

The views from the fortifications at Xiaolian Cheng, near Longzhou, are of karst scenery similar to more famous examples near Guilin, but with scarcely another visitor to be seen. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

The historic building of the French Consulate in Longzhou, Guangxi, China. Photo: Shutterstock

Sampans and wupans still operate on the Zuo River in Guangxi’s Longzhou, and can be taken for cruises between the region’s spiny peaks. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

Longzhou’s Revolutionary Museum celebrates a short-lived uprising in 1930, which ousted French consular staff and missionaries alike, until bombers based in what is now Vietnam assisted the local warlord to regain control. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

Grottoes on the climb up to border fortifications at Xiaolian Cheng, near Longzhou, contain waterworn rock and carved shrines behind ornate painted entrances. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

More architectural features on the climb up to border fortifications at Xiaolian Cheng, near Longzhou. Photo: Peter Neville-Hadley

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PostMag

Travel

Guangxi’s little-visited Longzhou is a former French treaty port that offers all the karst peak sights and historic insight of far-more crowded locales


Guangxi’s little-visited Longzhou is a former French treaty port that offers all the karst peak sights and historic insight of far-more crowded locales.
