Dongchuan District Travel Guide

Dongchuan District (simplified Chinese: 东川区) is a district under the jurisdiction of Kunming Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China. Dongchuan was upgraded to a city in 1958. In 1998 Dongchuan city was merged into Kunming city and became one of its districts. Dongchuan borders with Sichuan province.

Dongchuan, a rural place in the Wumeng Mountainous area, about 180km north of Kunming  (Yunnan Province), is one of the most attractive destination for Chinese photographers for its red soil.

Although discovered in the mid 1990s, the exact location is kept secret among few Chinese photographers who scooped award-winning photos here. Beside, the place is to small to named on the web, therefore it is not mentioned in even well known travel guides like LonelyPlanet and Rough Guides until recently.The brilliant red soil, the yellow buckwheats and the dramatic skies make the region around Dongchuan a paradise for photographers.

Speaking of Red Soil, the scenery is in fact centralized around Huagou(means colorful valley) of Xintian Township, which is about 50km away from Dongchuan County seat. Those locations are too small to have a name. Locals simply call it 109, 110...the number on the kilometer marker along the road. 109 is almost the highest point on the road, which branches here to another small hamlet. From all around 109 glorious vistas stretch to Guizhou and Sichuan. Dongchuan, as the crow flies not more than 20 kilometres away, is barely visible in the valley far below.

Administrative divisions
Copper Capital, A-wang, Wulong, Hongtudi, Tangdan, Tuobuka, Yinmin'ge Town and Shekuai Village

Geography
The area of Dongchuan is, according to some websites, 1858 km², but some websites claim 1674 km². The highest point is 4344 meters high, and lowest is 695 meters. As of 2000 Dongchuan has a population of 275,564. As of 2006, the population was 302,000.

The area around Huagou in the Wumeng mountains, has become famous through photographers who discovered the unique local landscape and its Red Earth scenery in the 1990s.

Copper
The Dongchuan mineral resource is rich and it has one of six biggest coppers bases in China. It is verified that there are 3.35 million tons of copper, accounting for a third of the copper reserves in the province.