Jianshui's old wells, and the families who still grill tofu beside them

In Jianshui (建水, Jiànshuǐ), an old garrison town in the red-earth south of Yunnan, the day begins at a well. Women lower buckets into the Big Stone Well, carry the water home through stone lanes, and by mid-morning it has turned into tofu.

The wells that still work

The town keeps more than a hundred old wells, and many are not monuments but plumbing. The Big Stone Well (大板井, Dàbǎn Jǐng) has three round mouths under a low tiled roof, the stone rims grooved by four centuries of rope. People who live nearby still draw from it the way you would turn a tap. The water is sweet and faintly mineral, and it is what gives the local tofu its reputation.

Tofu, counted in corn

Along the lanes off Lin'an Road (临安路, Lín'ān Lù), families set charcoal grills at the doorway and lay out small cubes of fermented tofu. You sit on a low stool and eat them as they brown, and the cook keeps your tally with dried corn kernels — one kernel into a bowl for each piece you take. There is no menu and no rush. When you stop, the kernels are counted, and that is the bill.

The fermentation is local, the charcoal is local, the water is from the well two streets over. Almost nothing here arrives by truck.

Courtyards off the main street

Behind the souvenir frontage, Jianshui is a town of courtyard homes. The Zhu Family Garden (朱家花园, Zhū Jiā Huāyuán) is the grand one, a Qing-era merchant compound of linked courtyards and still ponds. The quieter pleasure is Tuanshan (团山, Tuánshān), a village a short ride west on the old meter-gauge line, where the Zhang family's nineteenth-century houses stand with their carved wooden screens and ancestral halls. Some have become small inns, run by descendants who will, if asked, show you the family calligraphy still hanging in the main room.

在建水，水井不是古迹，而是日子的一部分。