Jianshui's old wells, and the families who still grill tofu beside them

In Jianshui (建水, Jiànshuǐ), an old garrison town in the red-earth south of Yunnan, the day begins at a well. Before eight, women lower steel buckets into the Big Stone Well, carry the water home through lanes worn smooth by centuries of feet, and by mid-morning it has turned into tofu, browning over charcoal on a stool by someone's front door.

The wells that still work

The town keeps more than a hundred old wells, and many of them are not monuments behind railings but working plumbing. The Big Stone Well (大板井, Dàbǎn Jǐng), on the western edge of the old quarter along Xilin Street (西林街, Xīlín Jiē), has three round mouths under a low tiled shelter, the stone rims cut with deep rope grooves after four centuries of drawing. There is no ticket booth and no fixed hour; people who live nearby come and go through the day, and if you arrive at dawn you will queue behind them. The water is cool, sweet, and faintly mineral, and locals will tell you plainly that it is the reason Jianshui tofu tastes the way it does. A few streets over, the Little Stone Well (小节井) and the twin-mouthed wells tucked into residential lanes still serve the households around them, each with its own reputation — one for tea, one for tofu, one that old cooks swear makes the best rice.

Walk the lanes and you learn to read the wells. Some are single round shafts; the grander ones, like the Big Stone Well, spread their mouths so several people can draw at once without knocking ropes. Stone tablets beside a few of them record the Ming and Qing dates when they were dug or repaired, the characters softened almost to nothing. Nobody performs any of this for visitors. A man fills two buckets, hooks them to a shoulder pole, and is gone up the lane before you have finished looking.

Tofu, counted in corn

The grilling clusters in the lanes off Lin'an Road (临安路, Lín'ān Lù) and thickest of all near the Big Stone Well itself, where several families have grilled for generations. A cook sits behind a shallow charcoal grate laid with dozens of pale, thumb-sized cubes — grilled tofu, kǎo dòufu (烤豆腐) — fermented for two or three days until they take on a faint tang, then set over the coals until they puff and split and go gold at the corners. You take a low plastic stool at the edge of the grate. There is no menu. As you eat, the cook drops a dried corn kernel into a small bowl or tin for each piece you lift, one kernel per cube, and when you stop the kernels are counted and multiplied out. Reckon on roughly two jiao to five jiao a piece, so a filling sitting comes to ten or fifteen yuan and a heavy one rarely past twenty-five.

You eat them dipped in whatever the household mixes — usually a dry chilli-and-Sichuan-pepper powder (干蘸, gān zhàn) or a wet dip loosened with soy, chilli oil, garlic and coriander. The best moment is the first bite of a cube that has just split open, the outside crisp and the inside still hot and custardy. Some stalls also sell the raw white blocks stacked in baskets to carry home, but the ritual is the sitting: you brown your own if the cook lets you, you talk, the kernels pile up, nobody hurries you off the stool.

The fermentation is done in the courtyard, the charcoal is local, the water is from the well two streets over. Almost nothing here arrives by truck.

Courtyards off the main street

Behind the souvenir shopfronts, Jianshui is a town of courtyard homes, and the layers of its history stand within a few minutes' walk. The Zhu Family Garden (朱家花园, Zhū Jiā Huāyuán), just off Jianxin Street (建新街), is the grand one — a late-Qing merchant compound of more than forty linked courtyards, still ponds and carved eaves, now partly a guesthouse and partly open to visitors for around fifty yuan, most mornings from about eight-thirty. A short walk northeast, the Confucian Temple (文庙, Wénmiào) opens onto a wide reflecting lake called the Sea of Learning; it is one of the largest such temples in China after Qufu's, and worth the hour it takes to cross.

The quieter pleasure lies west of town at Tuanshan (团山, Tuánshān), a village reached on the restored meter-gauge tourist train from Lin'an Station. There the Zhang family's nineteenth-century houses stand largely intact, blue-brick walls giving onto courtyards with carved wooden screens, painted beams and ancestral halls where the family calligraphy still hangs. Several have become small inns run by descendants, who will, if you ask over tea, tell you which room was the grandmother's and which screen was hidden through leaner decades. Between the two towns the double-arched Twin Dragon Bridge (双龙桥, Shuānglóng Qiáo) carries seventeen spans across the confluence of two rivers, a good place to be at the end of the afternoon.

Getting there, and one thing not to do

Jianshui sits about three hours south of Kunming by high-speed rail; trains from Kunming South run to Jianshui East station through the day for roughly seventy to ninety yuan, and a local taxi or bus covers the last few kilometres into the old town for a handful of yuan. The old quarter is small enough to walk, and the wells, the grills and the Zhu Garden are all within it. Come early — the tofu families light their coals not long after dawn and the well lanes are at their best before the day-trip coaches arrive around ten. The mistake to avoid is treating the corn-kernel tally as a gimmick to photograph and skip: sit down, order nothing because there is nothing to order, and simply keep eating until you are done. That is the whole custom, and it only works if you stay on the stool.

在建水，水井不是古迹，而是日子的一部分。