Longli Ancient Town

Longli Village is situated where Jinping County is contiguous with Liping County. The village is surrounded by continuous green mountains. It is 44 km from the county town of Jinping, 32 km from the county town of Liping, and 16 km from Liping Airport. A high road stretches to the village. Longli Village has a history of more than 600 years. It was first built in 1392 (during Ming Dynasty).

The court built a town here and dispatch soldiers from areas south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River (Jiang Nan in Chinese, including the present southern Jiangsu and Anhui provinces and northern Zhejiang Province) to garrison as well as open up the place where only minorities had been living. There still remain the ancient city walls, city gates, streets and 60 ancient civilian residential houses. The Ming Dynast folk customs of the area south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River still remain today due to the geographical remoteness and the poor transport conditions. The local people are still singing dramas, singing folk tales and playing dragon lanterns, as they did hundreds of years ago. Longli Village is also one of the three Guizhou Bio-system Museums, the joint venture of Norway and Guizhou (the other two are Zhenshan Village in Huaxi County and Tang’an Village in Liping County, and the venture was officially started in 2000).