Guiyang is a city at once in the center and on the fringes. Draw a line on a map between Chongqing and Nanning, now one from Kunming to Changsha –they meet at Guiyang. The city features traits of the outlying four: wild, ethnic Kunming; subtropical Nanning, GDP-obsessed Changsha, and precipitous Chongqing. Yet rather than a reputation for combining the best of the Southwest, Guizhou’s dubiously conferred “poorest province in China” title saddles Guiyang with a rep as a backwards jerkwater, a wannabe hub in which you recover from your plane/train ride before boarding the bus to go see the Miao up in the hills.

But a Guiyang ren can proudly flourish his palm at a main street resembling any second tier city’s, depressingly so to the tourist, comfortingly so to the resident. There, turning a nose up at the swarm and clatter, is the Giordano boutique, the glowing jade Parksons sign, a UBC or some-such faux Starbucks. A parvenu KFC – a Walmart. But the weather is always mild, if capricious, and the mountain air and sunshine do much to counteract the ill winds and waters of nearby coal-mining, or any of the thousand maladies that plague a city of almost four million.

A broad, peaceful river through a high mountain plateau is part of what sets Guiyang’s people apart from their billion-odd kinsmen. Guiyang’s Nanming River wanders off from the Wujiang, so that all pre-industrial transport south of the Yangzi, east of the Mekong, and west of the Li naturally became its purview. However, so steeply does Guiyang heave up and spread from the Nanming’s banks that the port bustle natural to Old London or Hamburg must necessarily be slowed to a pace that allows for much calf-stretching and pausing for breath. Guiyang ren, therefore, are keen to float off and see the world, and turn a coin from that which passes through, but not at the price of an enlarged heart from huffing and puffing up acute slopes the livelong day.

Besides, up in the mountains, unregulated by ‘mountain time’, the sun rises and sets hours later, in so-called standard time. The lao tai tais one slumberingly registers exercising at 5:30 am in Beijing don’t even start clucking until 8 am in Guiyang. Similarly, the sidewalk munching and swilling that commences in Beijing at 6 pm, and then only in fine weather, doesn’t begin until 8 or 9, regularly winding down at 1 or 2, year-round thanks to the southern sun and jungle valleys below. This out-of-sync yet pleasant rhythm no doubt accounts for much of why those from Guiyang are misperceived as ‘a little behind’.

Then there are the marvelous Miao. The name itself is as crude an appellation for this diverse and distinct group as ‘Indian’ is for Arapahoes, Cherokee, and other First Nations. There are green, white, and black Miao, Kho Xiong, Hmu; but we blur them together the way they blur together Swiss and Uruguayan, our monotonously similar costumes and comical noses and deep-set eyes, always peering through cameras or standing in front of one. They don’t take offence at the term ‘Miao’, however; they’re far too sanguine and present-focused. Plus they have the cheery composure of people who take it for granted they could kill you in a fair fight. In Laos, the Miao are known as the Hmong, the only guys who could beat the only guys the Americans couldn’t beat, one of whom reminded us a few years ago in the Wisconsin woods, who stalked and dispatched a platoon of great white hunters under the impression taking potshots at one of those crazy little yellow people would make for good sport.

These Miao were the folks happily farming the rugged terraces of karst-ridden Guizhou for millennia, until Qing Dynasty prosperity pushed the Han into a land long consigned to the uncouth, un-Confucian Minzu. Another sad parallel with Native Americans can be found in the resultant dispossession and oppression of the Miao, although there are far more left of them, far more thriving than the former, but whether due to the resilience of the latter or the less-aggressive nature of the Han is up for debate. Today, the Miao and other minorities such as the Dong make up between two-fifths and one-half of Guizhou, although less than one-fifth of its capital. Nonetheless, their mark on the local land and spirit is much like that of the Native Americans on the Wild West’s, leaving the usurpers a little less stiff and a lot more earthy.

Then there are the sunny dispositions and distaste for being indoors all day of any people who enjoy almost perpetually fine weather. Not that one can gad about town in a t-shirt every day – unless he has the tough, freckly hide of a Hibernian. Mountain winds can blot the sun and dispel a torpid afternoon in a matter of moments, as they can in Kunming. But Guiyang’s vertical orientation offers proactive climate choices. Cloying or dank weather by the river can be escaped by struggling up along a steep path for fifteen or twenty minutes; when the higher peaks of the Miaoling range come into view, you can stop sweating and start wondering whether you should have packed a windbreaker.

Mild environs and the leisure it breeds leave their imprint not only on the Guiyang lifestyle, but also its industry. Traditionally, its two most famous products are tobacco and moutai, the silkier, pricier, but no less deadly sister of bai jiu. Coal, aluminum, and chemicals are its three necessary-evils, while machine and textile manufacturing keeps many employed, a legacy of Chairman Mao and his chary wish to seclude China’s industry from easy attack. The otherwise wholesale proliferation of such busy-ness has been hampered by Guizhou’s prosperous tourism, leaving Guiyang like one in possession of a golden goose with which he is nurturing a pillow-stuffing concern.

The dilemma has resulted in a felicitous turn. 2001 saw Guiyang come in third nationwide for acid-rain severity, in a field bristling with rapidly oxidizing competition. Guiyang government did an about-face, and in 2003 China’s Environmental Protection Agency designated it a pilot city for development of a ‘circular economy’ – think green and sustainable, with Chinese characteristics. A horde of pocket-protected Tsinghua experts sauntered in to advise on key investment projects and infrastructure construction, chanting their New Age mantra: “reduce, re-use, recycle”. A year later, with factories turning their formerly devastating phosphorous exhaust into profitable formic acid, and green belts being planted to ring the outskirts, Guiyang won the title of “National Forest City”, an honorific much cited, as is its tourism moniker, “China’s Summer Resort City”.

The resultant boost to enterprise with a green tone to it has been encouraging, but don’t expect a Chinese Brussels anytime soon. Investment in exotic fruit products and organic fare has intensified, as well as production of the herbs and tinctures dear to traditional Chinese medicine. The growing legions of young sustainable business mavericks, should they bring their naïve energy to China, would do well to make at least an extended stay in Guiyang to explore the possibilities.

Aside from that, and the aforementioned industries, Guiyang has the obligatory hi-tech economic development zones, a baker’s dozen, and the corollary trumpeting about jet-packing its citizens into a hi-skill, hi-pay, hi-flying near future. In reality, the army of grads minted each year at Guizhou University have the same lack of practical knowledge and need for remedial training to be found from Xiamen to Harbin, to be inculcated by any foreigners wishing to take advantage of low-cost staff. Still, operating costs are low even by Chinese standards, and a brown-out is the last of a capitalist’s worries, thanks to the plethora of hydroelectric infrastructure, enough to have allowed a surfeit of 34 million kilowatt hours to be sent to Guangdong in 2006.

Sightseeing should rightly occupy a great deal of any foreigner’s time in Guiyang, even if not the purpose for going in the first place. The cornucopia of placid lakes, dense woods, manicured gardens, and haunting karst valleys draw endless busloads year-round; a good sampling of this splendor can be found here . Then again, sweeping vistas and time-worn temples often seem paltry recompense for having suffered the indignities of a tout-sourced mini bus ride over indifferently-kept mountain roads. The minority people, however, are always rich reward. The costumes and dancing are on par with that to be found in Lijiang or Dali, as are the stage-managed attempts to part you from your tourist dollar. But unlike the buxom Bai or sing-song Naxi, the people lumped together as Miao, and the Dong as well, proffer a brand of unaffected hospitality that fifty years of commercialization has marred but a little.

Rather than be corralled to a Potemkin native village by an enterprising Han tour guide, you can easily get lost on a rutted road that gradually becomes more vague and intersected by footpaths. When you happen upon a village with an air more of rustic simplicity than impoverished neglect, and the locals are smaller, sprightlier, and more brightly attired than any heretofore come across, then you have hit multi-cultural paydirt. On their frequent festival days there will be bull-fighting, not the Spanish variety which pits man against beast and necessitates skilled murder, but two horned heroes, each representing his respective village, butting it out for the pride of his bipedal compatriots. Dixi opera is also an event for the adventurous to eagerly anticipate, much less sedate than its Beijing counterpart, with the audience usually as inebriated and rowdy as any at the vitiated spectacles now known as rock concerts.

Back in town, there is still much to divert the foreigner, enervated from a day’s hundred frustrations involved in harnessing the world’s emerging superpower. The weather is almost never an excuse not to saunter around Guiyang’s downtown amongst the laid-back throngs.

Leave the bourgeoisie zombies to munch their KFC behind the fluorescent plate glass window and go find some Qian fan, the native cuisine of Guizhou. Unless you’re comfortable feeling like Marie Antoinette at a Madame Lafarge mixer, stroll on past the fly-blown establishments with lots of ‘1’s, ‘3’s, and ‘5’s on their signage. Also to be avoided are any restaurants that have invested heavily in giant fluorescent fauna and tall young ladies standing listlessly in the front entrance. When you find the happy medium, there will be al-fresco seating, highly desirable in a city frequently warm enough to make the inside of a crowded restaurant unwholesome. You will almost certainly be approached by a shoe-shiner of minority extraction, too open-faced and toothy to easily brush off. Such a one makes excellent pre-dinner entertainment, as they possess pre-industrial charm, Mandarin as tortured as yours, and shine you up with such dispatch and élan that only a blackguard would send them off with the customary one kuai. Ambitious ones ask for five –give it to them anyways, in gratitude for the great meal you’re about to enjoy.

Qian cuisine, like all others Chinese, has not been unscathed by Sichuan’s ubiquitous red chili pepper. Nonetheless, the manifold herbs native to Guizhou were ages ago assorted and assigned proportions by which to be culinarily employed. Bitter, pungent, sour, none of these adjectives does justice the sublime effect the herbs in Qian food have on previously unstimulated regions of the foreign tongue. Such herbs in a bowl of sour fish soup [suan tang yu] balance out the chili pepper, transforming the familiar sinus-clearing effect into a whole-body tingle which leaves one ready for a night’s leisure, rather than a postprandial snooze.

There are the familiar domesticated parks endemic to all provincial capitals to stroll in afterwards, but the pajama-clad seniors and awkwardly canoodling couples make for only temporary diversion. Off of main drag Zhonghua Lu, on Yan’an Lu, a bustling night market draws the curious and idle. The embroidered crafts and local semi-precious stone jewelry will delight the China newbie, as will his general effect on the vendors and crowds, that of an escaped, shaved albino gorilla [“Hullo? Hullooooooh..heh heh.”] If the newbie blanches at the Qian fan he can try his luck on the snack street that is Shaanxi Lu, although the profusion of skewered creatures with more than four legs, or none at all, will most likely have him retracing his steps to where he passed that KFC.

Perhaps it is the lack of reasons to hole up in a bar, or the fact that FDI growth was actually negative in 2006 and 2007, that there is scarcely a foreign fraternity grog shop to be had in Guiyang, apart from the customary soul-less approximations on offer at finer hotels everywhere. But the Guiyang ren do refer to their town as “little Shanghai”, and not for resembling China’s cynical clearing house of coolie labor. You can find some of the better-known bars and discos here , but be advised: many patrons may exhibit deplorably low levels of English comprehension, and the brash expectation that you comport yourself as one who respects the Chinese rank and file.

Whatever you do with your night life, during the day don’t forget shades with unquestionable anti-UV powers. The sun smiles on Guiyang, sparkling off the murky river, spectacles, and watch faces so intensely that cataracts are a common affliction. Other than that, your chief danger in Guiyang is rapidly forgetting why you were supposed to leave. Ask Piotr, local lao wai fixture, who visited to escape SARS and has ostensibly yet to be given the all-clear.