Before dawn, the Tuojiang River carries a thin skin of mist, and the wooden houses along its banks seem to stand on the water rather than beside it. A woman crouches at the stone steps and beats her laundry against them, the sound carrying flatly across the current, as her grandmother’s did. Somewhere upriver, a boatman’s pole knocks against a hull. For one hour, before the buses arrive from Zhangjiajie, Fenghuang Ancient Town belongs to the people who live in it. Photographers have made this place famous. Search for it, and you will find the same image a thousand times over: stilt houses, red lanterns, mist on water. What you will rarely find is an answer to the simplest question the town raises.
Everyone calls Fenghuang the most beautiful town in China. Almost nobody can tell you what its name means. That answer turns out to be the key to everything else here. It leads to a wall built to divide a people, to a history recorded in silver rather than writing, and to a novelist who saw much of the world and asked to be buried above this one small river. Let us begin with the bird.
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