Skip to content
Read the Places
BooksBrowseAdd a book
← Back to the book

Border Town

Shen Congwen's lyrical pastoral is set in the little ferry town of Chadong, on a river in the far west of Hunan near the borders of Sichuan and Guizhou, where the orphan girl Cuicui lives with her grandfather, the old ferryman, and comes shyly of age between two brothers who both love her. The real West Hunan landscape is the whole book: the rope ferry over the green stream, the white pagoda above it, the little riverside town and its dragon-boat festival, and the encircling hills.

The ferryman

The ferry crossing

Chapter 1

For fifty years the old ferryman has pulled travellers across the green river on his rope ferry, taking no pay he can help, and raising his orphaned granddaughter Cuicui in the little hut beside it. The crossing, humble and faithful, is the still centre of Shen's vision of a simple, decent world already passing away.

Chapter 1

inspired by The old ferryman and Cuicui work a rope ferry across the stream by the town of Chadong; the crossing is drawn from the real river ferries of far West Hunan and sited there, near the border with Sichuan.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Stop 1 of 4

Read the Places

An open atlas of the real places in novels, in the order the story happens.

Explore

  • All books
  • Browse by country, author, era
  • By city
  • Open for adoption

Contribute

  • Add a book
  • Source on GitHub
  • Open issues

Credits

Book data CC BY-SA 4.0. Code MIT.

Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors. Historical maps © National Library of Scotland.