7 Days in Liupanshui

Around 1,800 m with midsummer averages near 19.7 degrees — the 2005 Cool City — walk the 1.1-km rainbow boardwalk, then the museum of the 1960s Third-Front mining build-up that fused Liuzhi, Panxian and Shuicheng into one city.

1. liupanshui minghu wetland
2. liupanshui sanxian museum

About 30 km west, the forest park becomes Guizhou's earliest ski field December to February at around 2,300 m; Haiping's Yi town stages its torch festival on the sixth lunar month's twenty-fourth day.

1. liupanshui yushe forest park
2. liupanshui haiping yi town

Two hours south into Panzhou — turbines, horses and azalea slopes along a ridge topping out at the 2,857-m Niupengliangzi; stay for the cloud sea if the morning forecast looks damp.

1. liupanshui wumeng grassland

More than a thousand ginkgos, many over 300 years, gold from mid-October around Tuole's courtyards; then the bamboo sea and the Paleolithic Panxian Dadong cave site southeast of the county.

1. liupanshui tuole ginkgo village
2. liupanshui dadong bamboo sea

East to Liuzhi, where China's first eco-museum opened in 1998 to document the few thousand Longhorn Miao whose timber villages are the exhibit itself; an unhurried cultural day.

1. liupanshui suoxia ecology museum

About an hour west of the Liuzhi seat, a drowned reach of the Beipan river winds between cliffs — boat decks, hanging trails and the legends that tie the name to the ancient Yelang kingdom.

1. liupanshui zangke jiang

An honest neighbor-city day — the Jiucaiping massif belongs to Bijie's Hezhang county but rises just past the Liupanshui boundary; its Small Jiucaiping summit reads 2,900.6 m, the highest in Guizhou, with wild chive-flower slopes in late summer, then the evening train home.

1. bijie jiucaiping