Current Time in Fuling, China

Fuling occupies a dramatic site in south-western China, where the clear green water of the Wu River joins the broad brown current of the Yangtze. It is a district of the Chongqing municipality, about a hundred kilometres downstream from the city centre, built on steep slopes that rise directly from the water and are covered with terraces of apartment blocks, stairways and riverside wharves. Mist often fills the gorges in winter, while summers are famously hot and humid.

Around a million people live in the district, with several hundred thousand in the built-up urban core. Fuling is best known throughout China for a single product: zhacai, the crisp pickled mustard tuber eaten with rice and noodles across the country. The plant grows especially well in the local climate, and the pickle industry, together with chemicals, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals and river trade, forms the backbone of the economy.

The area has been settled for a very long time. It was a centre of the ancient Ba kingdom, and archaeologists have excavated the tombs of Ba nobles in the surrounding hills, finding bronze weapons and ritual vessels. Under later dynasties the town prospered as a river port controlling the trade of the Wu River valley, which reaches deep into the mountains of Guizhou. In the twentieth century it remained a modest inland town until the construction of the Three Gorges Dam raised the level of the Yangtze, flooding the old riverbank streets and prompting the building of a new city higher up the slopes. Fuling also became known to readers abroad through a well-known memoir written by an American teacher who lived here in the 1990s.

Its most remarkable sight is Baiheliang, the White Crane Ridge, a long sandstone reef in the Yangtze that carried more than a thousand years of carved inscriptions and stone fish marking the low water levels of the river, the oldest hydrological record of its kind in the world. When the reservoir rose, the ridge was preserved beneath a protective vault, and visitors now descend by a long sloping passage to view the inscriptions through windows in an underwater museum, the first of its type anywhere.

Other attractions include boat trips into the steep gorges of the Wu River, the forested peaks and cool summer resorts of the Wuling Mountains to the south, temple sites in the hills and lively night markets where hotpot, spicy noodles and river fish are served late into the evening. The riverside promenades fill each evening with people walking, dancing and playing cards.

Expressways and a railway link Fuling to Chongqing in about an hour, while passenger and cargo vessels still call at its docks. Yangtze Normal University, based in the district, trains teachers and professionals for the wider region.

Fuling rewards travellers with a genuine picture of life along the upper Yangtze, combining river scenery, ancient inscriptions and the everyday energy of inland China.