Heshun's stone lanes, where western Yunnan's traders came home to build libraries

Most travellers in western Yunnan stop at Tengchong (腾冲, Téngchōng) for the hot springs and miss the town four kilometres south. Heshun (和顺, Héshùn) is a place built by men who left — traders who walked the caravan road into Burma, then sent the money back to lay stone lanes and raise courtyard houses they sometimes never lived in.

The lanes the renovation didn't reach

You enter over Shuanghong Bridge (双虹桥, Shuānghóng Qiáo), two stone spans guarded by lions, and the first hundred metres are the part tidied for visitors: tea counters, jade sellers weighing pale stones under lamps, a ticket gate that charges around 55 yuan to walk the old town. At that hour it reads like any restored Chinese village. The trick is to keep walking.

Step off the main street and the older grid holds. The lanes are paved in dark volcanic stone — Tengchong sits among dormant cones, and the rock underfoot is the same huoshanshi (火山石, huǒshānshí) that built the walls — laid in narrow runs like Dashi Xiang (大石巷, Dàshí Xiàng), grey brick gone soft at the corners, ancestral halls set behind heavy timber doors. Walk uphill toward Zhongtian Temple (中天寺, Zhōngtiān Sì) and the crowds thin within two turns, until it is mostly washing lines, a dog asleep on warm stone, and the smell of woodsmoke.

The road that made them, and the jade that came back

Heshun was a waystation on the southern arm of the old trade route, the Nanfang Sichouzhilu (南方丝绸之路, Nánfāng Sīchóuzhīlù), that carried mule caravans from Yunnan across the border to Bhamo (八莫, Bāmò) and on toward Mandalay. Men left as teenagers and came back, if they came back, as merchants — in cotton, in tea, and above all in raw jadeite, feicui (翡翠, fěicuì), the milky Burmese stone still sold by the gram in the shops at the gate. The money built the town you are standing in.

You can read the two directions of that life in a single building. The Cun family hall, Cunshi Zongci (寸氏宗祠, Cùnshì Zōngcí), fronts the lane with a pale Western-style pediment a returning trader must have seen on a Rangoon bank, then opens behind it into an entirely Chinese courtyard. Nearby, the Li merchants' house known as Wanlouzi (弯楼子, Wānlóuzi), its curved facade following the bend of the lane, kept the accounts of the Yongmaohe (永茂和, Yǒngmàohé) trading firm and now shows the ledgers, the clocks, the imported crockery. Down along the Xianhe (陷河, Xiànhé) wetland, seven roofed washing pavilions, the xiyiting (洗衣亭, xǐyītíng), stand over the water — built so the wives who stayed behind could rinse clothes out of the sun and rain while their husbands were a country away.

A library before a third courtyard

The town's pride is the Heshun Library, Heshun Tushuguan (和顺图书馆, Héshùn Túshūguǎn), founded in 1928 and still lending — one of the largest village libraries in the country, its roughly seventy thousand volumes stocked by returning merchants who valued books over a fourth wing on the house. The gate carries calligraphy from scholars of the day, Hu Shi (胡适, Hú Shì) among them, and the reading room keeps the hours a working library keeps, roughly 8:30 to 17:30. Beside it stands the Wenchang Gong (文昌宫, Wénchāng Gōng), the shrine to the god of scholarship that a town this set on examinations would naturally raise.

They sent home money for shelves before they sent it for walls.

在和顺，先有图书馆，后有第三进院子。

What the kitchens keep

Breakfast in Heshun starts with xidoufen (稀豆粉, xīdòufěn), a loose warm porridge of pea flour ladled over rice noodles or torn flatbread, a bowl running 8 to 12 yuan at the stalls off the main lane. The town's own dish is tounao (头脑, tóunǎo) — not the name's grim literal sense but a sweet, near-ceremonial bowl of glutinous rice, egg and fermented rice wine, once served to sons before they left on the caravan road.

At lunch the Tengchong staples arrive: dajiujia (大救驾, dàjiùjià), thin sheets of pressed rice cake, erkuai (饵块, ěrkuài), stir-fried with egg, tomato and ham until they colour; and, in season, songhuagao (松花糕, sōnghuāgāo), a soft cake dusted yellow with pine pollen and sold by the slice for a few yuan. A plate of dajiujia with tea runs about 20 to 30 yuan in the courtyard restaurants, and no one hurries you off it.

Getting there, and staying slow

Fly into Tengchong Tuofeng Airport (腾冲驼峰机场, Téngchōng Tuófēng Jīchǎng) — Kunming is a little over an hour in the air — and Heshun is a short taxi or the number 6 city bus from Tengchong, the four kilometres that most day-trippers treat as an afternoon and get wrong. The best beds are in the courtyards themselves: a handful of old merchant homes near the Yuanlong Tan (元龙潭, Yuánlóng Tán) pond now take guests, run by families who still keep a grandfather's brushes on the wall and pour you tea before they take your name, with rooms commonly 250 to 500 yuan a night. Come in spring or autumn, avoid the October National Day week when the lanes fill, ask for a room facing the pond, give yourself two nights rather than one, and let the town set the pace.