Changsha: Orange Isle and Han treasures

The ideological birthplace of Maoism and capital of Hunan, Changsha combines a thousand-year academic past with one of central China's most vibrant nightlife scenes.

The Xiang River divides the city into two parts connected by bridges and a tourist ferry.

The Yuelu Academy, founded in 976 and among the oldest still-active educational institutions in the world, preserves wooden classrooms and courtyards where some of the most important Neo-Confucian philosophers of the Song dynasty taught.

The Orange Island, a strip of land five kilometers long in the middle of the Xiang River, hosts a gigantic carved head of young Mao Zedong, over thirty meters tall, in homage to the years he spent studying in Changsha.

The Hunan Museum houses the mummies and surprisingly well-preserved artifacts from the Han tomb of Mawangdui, including a transparent silk garment weighing less than fifty grams.

The pedestrian street of Huogongdian, in the historic center, has become in recent years the symbol of local street food, particularly the stinking tofu fried that made Changsha's cuisine famous throughout China.

A two-thousand-year-old silk dress weighing less than an egg and a thirty-meter head sculpted in 2009 tell two opposite ways Changsha chose to monumentalize its past.

The stinky tofu of Huogongdian, louder than both, perhaps remains the most honest way the city tells itself today.