Zunyi does not advertise its charms subtly. The first thing visible from the main road is a heroic statue of Mao Zedong, arm extended, overlooking a square that is always busy with people who are decidedly not thinking about the Long March. The revolutionary heritage is real — this is the city where, in January 1935, the Communist leadership convened a conference that changed the course of Chinese history, installing Mao as the effective leader of the Party after the disastrous failures of the earlier strategy — but the city’s relationship to that history is both sincere and slightly museum-like, which makes it interesting in a different way than it was perhaps intended.
The Zunyi Conference Site is the necessary first stop, housed in the same building where the three-day meeting took place. It is a two-storey colonial-style structure, European in its form but thoroughly Chinese in its current meaning, kept in pristine condition and surrounded by complementary revolutionary museums and preserved residences of the Party leadership who slept there briefly in 1935 before the March continued north. The guides speak only Mandarin, but the quiet of the building — the plain wooden floors, the bare rooms with their arrangement of chairs around a table — communicates something about the severity of the historical moment that does not require translation.
What I found more interesting than the revolutionary pilgrimage circuit was the old city quarter that surrounds the conference site, a network of lanes with pre-revolutionary merchant houses, tea houses, and the kind of ordinary urban life that exists entirely outside tourist awareness. I spent a morning in the old market near Xiansi Lane, where women from surrounding villages sell dried mushrooms, mountain herbs, and fresh river fish from bamboo baskets, and where the noise and smell — the sharp green smell of crushed herbs, the iron smell of fresh fish, the general hubbub of commerce conducted at full volume — was entirely, satisfyingly unreconstructed.
Zunyi is in northern Guizhou, which means it sits at the edge of the minority culture zone and partakes of a more generically Guizhou food culture rather than the specifically Miao or Dong preparations of the south and east. But Zunyi has its own culinary distinction: the lamb noodle soup called yangrou fensi, which I ate for breakfast and then again for lunch because it was exactly what this city demanded — lamb braised until the meat falls from the bone, rice noodles in a dark, deeply flavored broth, a spoonful of chili oil, a scatter of spring onions. The restaurants that serve it are open from five in the morning and close when the soup runs out.
The other thing Zunyi produces is Moutai — the baijiu distilled in the town of Maotai, thirty kilometers west along the Chishui River. Guizhou baijiu is among the most intensely flavored spirits produced anywhere, a sauce-aroma style that smells of fermented grain and dried fruit and something mineral and ancient. The Moutai distillery is a significant pilgrimage for Chinese visitors; I found the industrial scale of the operation less interesting than a small family distillery I found in Zunyi’s old quarter, where an elderly man was producing something similar in a ceramic pot setup that had not changed materially in a hundred years. He poured me a cup. It tasted like time and fire. I bought a bottle.
When to go: Autumn (September to November) gives clear weather and is free of the summer rainy season. Spring is also good, though March can be cool and grey in this northern section of the province. The revolutionary tourism draws domestic visitors throughout the year and peaks around national holidays; the week around October 1st (National Day) brings enormous crowds to the conference site.