Beautiful Scenery and Vietnam Gateway

Water Pagoda built 1621, close to Chongzuo

Chongzuo (simplified Chinese: 崇左; Chongzuo City 崇左市;pinyin: Chóngzu, Zhuang: Cungzcoj) is a prefecture-level city in China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Chongzuo's population is 2,260,000. 88% of the people belong to the Zhuang ethnic group. The rest include Han, Yao, and other ethnic groups.It is home to one of China?s largest Zhuang populations. From here you can also enter Vietnam . It is China?s biggest manganese producer and the world's biggest producer of bentonite. Other industries include export infrastructure, paper, forest products such as timber and turpentine, building materials, pharmaceuticals, and electronics manufacturing.

Location of Chongzuo

Karast hills close to Chongzuo

Detian Pubu  Detian waterfall

Chongzuo is famous for its beautiful natural scenery. The most famous attraction is Detian Waterfall in Daxing County along the border with Vietnam. The best time to see the waterfall is in July. There is a geusthouse there now where you can stay .It is the second largest waterfall along a national border after Niagara Falls and was one of the crossing points for China?s army during the brief Sino-Vietnamese War ( 中越戰爭 )

        Sino-Viet War Memorial                          Entertaining the troops during the war

 Nearby there is the Tongling Gorge accessible only through a cavern from an adjoining gorge. Rediscovered only recently, it has many species of endemic plants, found only in the gorge, and used to be used as a hideout by local bandits whose treasure is occasionally still found in the cliff-side caves. West of Chongzuo city, there are several forest and animal preserves, some with minor tourist facilities.

Entering Vietnam

Pingxiang (凭祥市)

The town of Pingxiang is in the Chongzuo adminstravie area and is a staging area for onward transport to Vietnam . An early morning train or bus from Nanning will get you there in a day, from there you can catch a ride to the Friendship Pass ( Youyi Guan ) to the Vietnamese border .

Friendship Pass

From there you can continue onward to the Vietnamese town of Lang Son . This is the area where the Chinese army entered Vietnam during the short Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 .

Zhuang Culture 壮族

Chongzuo is one of the earliest centers of Zhuang culture. The Zhuang are an ethnic group of people who mostly live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. Their population, estimated at 18 million people, puts them second only to the Han Chinese and makes the Zhuang the largest minority in China. There is an indigenous Zhuang language, which has been written with Zhuang logograms based on Chinese characters for over a thousand years, and now is officially written in Roman letters. Important sites dating back to the stone age have been found here. Along the Ming River at Huashan is one of the largest groups of pictographs in China and in the world. On several cliff faces are hundreds of large red pictographs depicting a large battle. The red pigment is still bright and vivid and individual figures, weapons, and animals are easy to distinguish. The cliffs, part of the sacred Frog Mountain, were important site to the early Zhuang.

The Zhuang are of Tai origin, a people who migrated south from central China roughly 5000 years ago. The Zhuang settled in what is now Guangxi while other Tai peoples moved to Yunnan. It is suggested the Tai peoples migrated for food purposes, as the culture developed a unique irrigation system which was useful for growing rice. As the soil was terrible for this purpose in Central China, the Tai sought out more fertile plains. However, it is highly probable that struggles with emerging Chinese states that rapidly gained power with Mesolithic (Bronze Age) weapons had something to do with this. Long struggles with China to avoid destruction (as they were "barbarians") led Tais around 1100 AD to migrate south from Southern China to create the Lao, Thai and Shan peoples of Indochina, and even as far away as Assam, India.

History of the Chongzuo area

The Sino - French War

In 214 BC, during the Qin dynasty, Chongzuo was part of the Xiang(象郡) commandry. Chinese general Feng Zicai beat back a French attack here at the Battle of Zhennan Pass in 1885. Sun Yatsen fired the first canon shot of the anti-Qing revolution in Chongzuo in 1907. In the 1930?s, after fomenting rebellion in other parts of Guangxi, Deng Xiaoping helped organize the peasants and workers here during the Longzhou rebellion and eventually formed the Red Army's 8th Army. Later, in 1979, the Chinese army invaded Vietnam from here.

The areas under Chongzuo administration are :

Chongzuo has 1 city, 5 counties, 57 towns, 72 townships, 146 residential communities, and 1,724 villages.

City:

    * Pingxiang (凭祥市)

Counties:

    * Ningming (宁明县)

    * Longzhou (龙州县

    * Fusui (扶绥县

    * Daxin (大新县

    * Tiandeng (天等县

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