Connected by road and rail to Wuhu, China, and by a new bridge and expressway to Hefei, TONGLING - Anhui's "Copper Capital" and the proud owner of a nuclear power station - marks the halfway point in the Yangzi's journey across the province. Only forty years old, Tongling is not a hard place to navigate: most of the town stretches for a couple of kilometres along Yi'an Lu , which runs south from the main bus station , past the westerly T-junction with Huai He Lu, down to a country minibus depot for departures to Jiuhua Shan. Another place of interest to naturalists, Tongling is at the forefront of efforts to save the light grey baiji, or Yangzi river dolphin , from extinction. Common as recently as the 1970s, the baiji 's catastrophic decline to an estimated two dozen animals in 1997 - none of them in captivity - is directly linked to the growth of river industries, traffic and net fishing on the Yangzi. Meanwhile Tongling has taken the dolphin to heart; there's a Baiji beer with the dolphin's Latin name, lipotes vexillifer, stamped on the bottle cap, and a two-kilometre artificial channel has been created as a reserve 40km southwest of town in the countryside near Datong . It's still empty, however, as the need to capture no less than a pair or family of dolphins - to create a core breeding population - has so far proved unsuccessful. If you're interested in the latest news, and visiting the reserve following future captures, contact the helpful, fluently bilingual Wei Xingwen of the Tongling Foreign Affairs Office (Floor 11, Yi'an Commercial Building, Yi'an Lu; tel 0562/2864396, fax 2863995); or the Chinese-speaking CTS at 45 Yi'an Lu (tel 0562/2866168, fax 2867190). For accommodation , there's the smart Wusong Binguan across from the bus station (tel 0562/2864487, fax 2862937; ¥150-200); don't confuse it with an adjacent, very run-down guesthouse of the same name.

Continuing upstream towards the border with Jiangxi and Hubei, GUICHI is the next stop for river traffic, where passengers can disembark for buses to Jiuhua Shan, clearly visible off to the south. Not much farther on, the last port of call within Anhui is the northern bank town of ANQING , both a Taiping rebel stronghold during the late 1840s, and a cultural centre famed nationally for its Huangmei opera style . Beyond here the boat takes half a day to reach Jiujiang and Lake Poyang in Jiangxi Province.