Current Time in Dengzhou, China

Dengzhou is a county level city in the southwest of Henan Province in central China, administered by the prefecture of Nanyang. It lies on the fertile Nanyang basin, a broad plain enclosed by the Funiu Mountains to the north and the Tongbai range to the east, close to the border with Hubei Province. The climate is warm temperate and monsoonal, with hot wet summers, cold dry winters and a growing season long enough for two harvests a year.

The municipality has a population of well over a million, spread between a compact urban centre and a great many farming villages. Dengzhou is one of the leading grain producing counties in Henan, itself the most important agricultural province in China, and wheat, maize, cotton, tobacco and oilseed dominate the landscape. Food processing, textiles, machinery and building materials form the industrial base.

The area has a very long history. It takes its name from the ancient state of Deng, a small polity of the Zhou period whose bronzes and tombs have been excavated nearby, and it was an important administrative seat under successive dynasties. Han dynasty tombs in the district have yielded large numbers of decorated bricks and stone reliefs depicting banquets, acrobats, chariots and mythological scenes, and Dengzhou is regarded as one of the richest sources of this distinctive Han art.

The name most closely associated with the city is that of Fan Zhongyan, the great Song dynasty statesman, reformer and writer who served as prefect here in the eleventh century. It was in Dengzhou, at the Flower Islet academy he founded, that he composed his celebrated essay on the Yueyang Tower, with its famous injunction that the scholar should be first in worrying about the world's troubles and last in enjoying its pleasures. The Chunfeng Pavilion and the restored academy grounds commemorate him, and the essay remains one of the best known passages in classical Chinese prose.

Other places of interest include the Fusheng Temple pagoda, the old city walls and moat, the Han cultural exhibition halls, and the countryside temples and market towns of the district. Dengzhou also holds a notable position in modern engineering geography, since the middle route of the South to North Water Diversion Project, which carries water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir to Beijing and Tianjin, enters Henan through this county, and the canal and its parkland embankments have become a local landmark.

Transport is provided by expressways connecting the city to Nanyang, Xiangyang and Zhengzhou, by a railway station on the line running south towards Hubei, and by the high speed services available at Nanyang. Local buses and coaches serve the surrounding towns.

Education centres on secondary schools with strong provincial reputations, teacher training and vocational colleges, while university students generally travel to Nanyang or Zhengzhou.

Dengzhou is significant as an agricultural heartland of central China, as the setting for one of the most quoted texts in Chinese literature and as a key point on the great water transfer that supplies the capital.