Fenghuang: lantern light on the Tuojiang River

Fenghuang — the Phoenix Town — is a few streets of dark timber built straight out over the Tuojiang River in western Hunan, and it is one of the very few Chinese old towns that still looks the way the photographs promise. The houses stand on diaojiaolou, spindly wooden stilts sunk into the riverbed, with washing, strings of chillies and drying fish hanging off the balconies. Women beat laundry on the stone steps at the water's edge in the morning; by evening the whole waterfront is doubled in the current.

Crossing the river is half the fun. There are the jumping stones — a line of single stepping blocks set a stride apart that you take at a trot — a narrow wooden footbridge alongside them, and the covered Hong Bridge with its tiled upper gallery. Above the roofs, fragments of the Ming city wall and the North Gate tower look down on all of it, and a shallow-draft boat poled upstream is the calmest way to see the stilts from below.

This is Miao and Tujia country, and it shows: hand-worked silver headdresses in the shop windows, indigo batik cloth, blown ginger candy being hammered on marble slabs, and sour-fish soup, smoked pork and rice wine on the menus. The writer Shen Congwen was born here and is buried on the hillside above the river, which is why half of China arrives already knowing the place. Stay the night if you can — the day-trip coaches leave around six, and the lanterns and the black water only really work after dark.