Xishuangbanna Travel Guide

In the southwest of China and at the southern most tip of Yunnan Province, there is a picturesque, fertile and mysterious land - Xishuangbanan. In the Dai language, "xishuang" is "twelve" and "banna" is "one thousand pieces of land", thus "Xishuangbanna" can be directly translated into "twelve thousand pieces of land". As a matter of fact, it refers to the twelve regions that are under its administration. With Myanmar to the southwest and Laos to the southeast, Xishuangbanna has a boundary line of 1,069 kilometers.

Covering an area of 19,700 square kilometers, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture is composed of one municipality and two counties. The highest point in the region is 2,429 meters above sea level whereas the lowest is only 477 meters. Dominated by a tropical rainforest climate, the average temperature of Xishuangbanna is 21°C.

The capital of Xishuangbanna Prefecture is "Jinghong", which means "the City of Dawn" in the Dai language. It is 692 km from Kunming. There are more than ten nationalities including the Dai, the Hani, the Jinuo and the Bulang, etc in its land. There live over 5,000 species of plants and hundreds kinds of rare and valuable birds and animals in its 20,000 square kilometers tropical virgin forest, thus Xishuangbanna is noted as "the Kingdom of Plants and Animals" and "An Emerald on the Tropic of Cancer".

The Dai people is good at singing and dancing and believes in the Buddhism, the Buddhism temples are scattering over every village. The village of the Dais mostly builds by the water, circling with bamboo fence and covering with the fruit trees, so as to set up the independent courtyard one by one. The Water-Splashing Festival, namely the New Year's Day by the Dai calendar will be celebrated every year in the 6th month of Dai calendar (on April 13 - 15 by the solar calendar). The rich and colorful activities attract numerous tourists from home and abroad.