Jianshui lies in the Honghe prefecture about 220 kilometres south of Kunming, and it was a frontier garrison town and later a trading centre on the route to Vietnam. Its old town survived the twentieth century relatively intact, with the walls, gates, temples and merchant houses of the Ming and Qing still in place, and it has become one of the most rewarding historic towns in Yunnan.
The Confucius Temple
The temple here was founded in 1285 and is one of the largest Confucian temples in China, second in scale to the one in Qufu. It is arranged along a long axis with the usual pools, gates and halls, including a hall of great achievement with a statue of Confucius and tablets for the sages, and a large collection of stone steles. The grounds are generous and planted with ancient trees, and the cypresses in the main courtyard are said to be several centuries old.
The Zhu Family Garden
The Zhu Family Garden is a large residential compound built by a wealthy merchant family in the late Qing, with more than two hundred rooms arranged around linked courtyards, plus gardens, ponds, ancestral halls, a theatre stage and a private school. The architecture is elaborate, with carved timber screens, painted beams, lattice windows and stone paving, and walking through it gives a clear sense of how a prosperous Chinese merchant household was organised and how it separated public, family and servant space. The family's fortunes collapsed in the twentieth century, and the restoration is recent.
The town and its craft
Elsewhere there is the Chaoyang Tower, a surviving gate tower at the east end of the main street, the Twin Dragon Bridge with its seventeen arches across the river a few kilometres west, and a narrow-gauge railway line with a small steam-hauled tourist train that runs from the town station to a nearby village. Jianshui is also known for purple pottery, made from local clay and finished with a distinctive dark brown-purple surface, and workshops and shops around the old town sell teapots, jars and cups.
Practical information
Jianshui is reached by high-speed rail from Kunming in about two hours, plus a short taxi ride to the old town. The Confucius Temple and the Zhu Family Garden each charge admission and are open all day. Allow a full day, ideally with an overnight stay, so you can walk the old town in the evening after the day trippers have left.
