Furong Zhen: a thousand-year-old town balanced on a waterfall

Furong Zhen is built on the lip of a waterfall, and that single fact explains the whole place. The Wangcun falls drop around sixty metres in two stages straight through the middle of the village, and the Tujia stilt houses are pinned to the rock on either side of them, so a walkway runs behind the curtain of water with the town's timber underside overhead and spray coming at you sideways. It is the rare view that photographs badly and overwhelms in person.

The town is properly old — two thousand years of it, as the river port of Wangcun on the Youshui — and the Five Li Stone Street still drops to the old wharf on worn flagstones, past Ming and Qing shopfronts, a Tujia chieftain's hall and a bronze pillar cast in the tenth century. It took its current name from Hibiscus Town, the 1986 film shot here, and the rice-tofu stall the heroine ran is still selling mifu — cool, wobbly, chilli-topped rice tofu — to everyone who turns up.

Most travellers see it as the stop between Zhangjiajie and Fenghuang, a couple of hours from each, and a few hours is genuinely enough to walk the street and the waterfall galleries. But it repays an overnight: once the coaches go, mist collects in the gorge, the stilt houses light up above the falls, and the terraces and the noise of the water are more or less yours. Wear shoes with grip — the stone stays wet all year round.