Danba Watchtowers and Jiaju Village

Major National Historical And Cultural Site; Jiarong Tibetan Stone Watchtowers Of Danba, Some Over A Thousand Years Old, With The Terraced Village Of Jiaju Beneath Mount Murdo · Danba, Sichuan

In the valleys where the rivers of western Sichuan cut down off the Tibetan plateau, the Jiarong Tibetans built towers - square, octagonal, some with twelve corners, rising twenty and thirty and occasionally sixty metres from the slope, laid up in dry stone and mud by builders whose names are gone and whose work has outlasted a thousand years of earthquakes. Nobody is certain what they were all for: defence against raiders is the obvious answer, but they also held grain, marked the birth of a son, and advertised a family's standing, and the village of Suopo alone still has something like eighty of them standing. A little way up the valley is Jiaju, where white-and-ochre painted houses are scattered across a green terraced slope beneath the sacred peak of Murdo, and which Chinese National Geography once called the most beautiful village in the country. Both are lived in. Neither is a museum.

Jiaju and Suopo, Danba County, Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Danba, Sichuan, China

The villages are lived-in settlements and their lanes are open at all hours. Jiaju is managed as a scenic area with a ticket office keeping roughly 8:00-18:00 and an internal shuttle; Suopo and Zhonglu are informal and charge little or nothing. ALTITUDE IS 2,000-2,600 METRES and the drive from Chengdu is 7-8 hours of mountain road. ROADS CLOSE FOR LANDSLIDES IN THE RAINY SEASON AND SNOW IN WINTER - check conditions before setting out. Blossom season is late March and April, when accommodation books out.

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