Wuzhou's flood doors: the Guangxi arcade town that learned to live upstairs

On Dazhong Road (大中路) the iron rings sit at chest height in the arcade columns, rubbed smooth on one side. Above them, second-floor doorways open onto nothing. Both are flood equipment, and both are still in place.

A street built to expect the river

Wuzhou stands where the Gui River (Gui Jiang, 桂江) meets the Xun and the two become the Xi River. For most of the last century the summer water came into the town rather than past it, and the arcade blocks answer that plainly: shophouses raised on colonnades, mooring rings bolted into the pillars at boat height, and a shuimen (水门) — a water door — cut into the upper storey so a household could step from a bedroom into a sampan.

Several hundred of these buildings still stand in the old town. The main strip has been repainted and lit for the evening; one block back, on Sha Street (沙街), the ground floors are hardware, dried fish and hairdressers, and the rings are dull with grease rather than paint.

The tea the river carried

Liubao (六堡) is a town upriver in Cangwu, and the dark tea named for it left by boat — down to Wuzhou, along the Xi River, then south to the tin districts of Malaya, where Chinese miners drank it. The route has a name, the chachuan gudao (茶船古道) or old tea-boat road, and the packaging still follows it: Liubao travels in a woven bamboo basket, meant to improve in the damp.

In the back lanes the baskets are stacked to the ceiling in rooms the size of a garage, usually one family and a kettle. A bowl comes out the colour of dark soy, tasting of wet wood and, in older leaf, of what the trade calls binglangxiang (槟榔香), betel-nut fragrance. No ceremony: stools, a thermos, a bowl for the rinse water.

A tea bred to survive a hold, a warehouse and a wet season asks little of a visitor.

梧州的水门与铁环，是这座城与西江相处多年的办法。