Current Time in Hechi, China

Hechi is a prefecture-level city in the north-west of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. It covers a large area of steep karst hills, deep river gorges and limestone caves, drained chiefly by the Hongshui River, and shares its northern boundary with Guizhou province. The administrative seat is Jinchengjiang District, a compact town set among green peaks that give the whole region its unmistakable scenery.

The prefecture is home to roughly three and a half million people, although the built-up urban core is far smaller. What makes Hechi distinctive is its ethnic composition, since the great majority of residents belong to minority nationalities. The Zhuang are the largest group, followed by Yao, Miao, Dong, Maonan and Mulao communities, and the last two live almost nowhere else in China. This concentration of cultures gives the area an importance in Chinese ethnography far out of proportion to its population.

The region entered Chinese records during the Han dynasty but remained on the margins of imperial control for centuries, governed indirectly through hereditary local chieftains. That system lasted until the Qing period, which helps explain why traditional customs survived so strongly. In the early twentieth century the hills around Donglan became a base of the peasant movement led by Wei Baqun, and the area is remembered in modern Chinese history for its part in the revolutionary campaigns of the Right River valley. Hechi was reorganised as a prefecture-level city in 2002.

Visitors come above all for the landscape. Bama Yao Autonomous County has become famous throughout China as a place of exceptional longevity, and the villages along the emerald Panyang River, together with the vast Baimo Cave, attract streams of health-minded travellers. The Qibainong depression in Dahua is one of the most dramatic karst basins in the country, while the Jiuwan Mountain reserve protects rare forest and wildlife. The Longtan Dam on the Hongshui River, among the largest roller-compacted concrete dams ever built, has created a long reservoir now used for boat trips.

Cultural life revolves around music and craft. Hechi holds the richest collection of ancient bronze drums in the world, instruments still sounded at festivals in Donglan, and the spring song festival held on the third day of the third lunar month fills market towns with antiphonal singing. Yizhou District is linked to the legend of Liu Sanjie, the folk singer celebrated in Chinese opera and film, and small museums explain local embroidery, silverwork and dress.

Access has improved sharply in recent years. Hechi Jinchengjiang Airport opened in 2014, the high-speed railway between Guiyang and Nanning stops in the prefecture, and expressways now link the valleys that were once reached only by winding mountain roads. Hechi University, based in Yizhou, provides teacher training and regional higher education.

The local economy rests on non-ferrous metals such as tin, zinc and antimony, on sugar cane and mulberry cultivation for silk, and increasingly on hydropower and tourism. Hechi is worth knowing because it shows a side of China that is rural, mountainous and culturally plural, where scenery and living tradition are equally striking.