Chángdé

The Chángdé culture belongs to north-western Hunan, on the west shore of Dongting Lake and the lower Yuan River, a region known in antiquity as Wuling. Rice farming here is ancient, for Pengtoushan has yielded the earliest known settled rice village in China, dating back some 8,000 years.

A Han county, Linyuan, was established in the second century BCE; from it the Wuling commandery watched the mountain tribes of western Hunan. The Tang seat was Langzhou, and the name Changde dates from 1117, when the Song created Changde county. Long the gateway to Guizhou and Sichuan, its river markets handled the rice, timber and tung oil of the Yuan basin.

Its speech is a Hunan branch of Southwestern Mandarin, bordering the Xiang dialects, and under the Qing the prefecture passed from Huguang to the new province of Hunan in the 1660s.