Despite government hopes that it will one day become a wealthy corridor between the coast and interior, Anhui Province largely lives up to its tradition as eastern China's poorest province. It has a long history, however, and not all of it bad: million-year-old remains of the proto-human homo erectus have been found here; while more recently, Shang copper mines in southern Anhui fuelled China's Bronze Age. The province later became well known for its artistic refinements, from decorative Han tombs through to Song-dynasty porcelain and Ming architecture.

All this, however, has been a struggle against Anhui's unfriendly geography. Arid and eroded, the north China plains extend into its upper third as far as the Huai River , and while the south is warmer and wetter, allowing for tea and tobacco cultivation, the fertile wooded hills soon climb to rugged mountains, and not much in the way of food can be grown there. But it is the Yangzi itself that ensures Anhui's poverty by regularly inundating the province's low-lying centre, which would otherwise produce a significant amount of crops. Until recently, a lack of bridges across the river also created a very physical division, separating the province's mountainous south from its more settled regions. Despite considerable improvements in infrastructure over the last decade, including the expansion of highways and rail links to the rest of China, development remains muted, and Anhui seems set to enter the next century, rather unfairly, as economically retarded as ever.

For the visitor, this is not all bad news. While neither the northern regions nor the provincial capital, Hefei , have much beyond their history, there are compensations for Anhui's lack of development south of the Yangzi . Here, superlative mountain landscapes at Huang Shan and the collection of Buddhist temples at Jiuhua Shan have been pulling in droves of sightseers for centuries, and there's a strong cultural tradition stamped on the area with a substantial amount of antique rural architecture surviving intact around Tunxi . Relatively low pollution levels have also aided the Yangzi river dolphin and Chinese alligator , two of the world's most endangered animals, whose tiny populations receive some protection in riverside reserves at Tongling and Xuanzhou respectively.

Flooding aside - and there's a near guarantee of this affecting bus travel during the summer months - the main problem with finding your way around Anhui is that many towns have a range of aliases, and can be differently labelled on maps and timetables. Rail lines cross the province, connecting Hefei to Nanjing through Wuhu - Anhui's major port and a stop for Yangzi ferries - with other lines running west towards Changsha, north to Xi'an and Beijing, and south from Tunxi to Jiangxi.