Despite government hopes that it will one day become a wealthy
corridor between the coast and interior, Anhui largely lives
up to its tradition as eastern China's poorest province. It has a
long history, however, and not all of it bad: million-year-old
remains of the proto-human homo erectus have been found
here; while more recently, Shang copper mines in southern Anhui
fuelled China's Bronze Age. The province later became well known
for its artistic refinements, from decorative Han tombs through to
Song-dynasty porcelain and Ming architecture.
All this, however, has been a struggle against Anhui's
unfriendly geography. Arid and eroded, the north China plains
extend into its upper third as far as the Huai River , and
while the south is warmer and wetter, allowing for tea and tobacco
cultivation, the fertile wooded hills soon climb to rugged
mountains, and not much in the way of food can be grown there. But
it is the Yangzi itself that ensures Anhui's poverty by
regularly inundating the province's low-lying centre, which would
otherwise produce a significant amount of crops. Until recently, a
lack of bridges across the river also created a very physical
division, separating the province's mountainous south from its more
settled regions. Despite considerable improvements in
infrastructure over the last decade, including the expansion of
highways and rail links to the rest of China, development remains
muted, and Anhui seems set to enter the next century, rather
unfairly, as economically retarded as ever.
For the visitor, this is not all bad news. While neither the
northern regions nor the provincial capital, Hefei , have
much beyond their history, there are compensations for Anhui's lack
of development south of the Yangzi . Here, superlative
mountain landscapes at Huang Shan and the collection of
Buddhist temples at Jiuhua Shan have been pulling in droves
of sightseers for centuries, and there's a strong cultural
tradition stamped on the area with a substantial amount of antique
rural architecture surviving intact around Tunxi .
Relatively low pollution levels have also aided the Yangzi river
dolphin and Chinese alligator , two of the world's most
endangered animals, whose tiny populations receive some protection
in riverside reserves at Tongling and Xuanzhou
respectively.
Flooding aside - and there's a near guarantee of this affecting
bus travel during the summer months - the main problem with finding
your way around Anhui is that many towns have a range of aliases,
and can be differently labelled on maps and timetables. Rail
lines cross the province, connecting Hefei to Nanjing through
Wuhu - Anhui's major port and a stop for Yangzi ferries -
with other lines running west towards Changsha, north to Xi'an and
Beijing, and south from Tunxi to Jiangxi.