Tongwei County is located in the middle of

Gansu Gansu is a provinces of China, province in Northwestern China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeastern part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibetan Plateau, Ti ...

province, the People's Republic of China, with east longitude between 104°57' and north latitude between 34°55' and 35°29'. It is under the administration of the

prefecture-level city A prefecture-level city () or prefectural city is an administrative division of the China, People's Republic of China (PRC), ranking below a province of China, province and above a Counties of the People's Republic of China, county in China's ...

Dingxi Dingxi ( zh, c=定西 , p=Dìngxī), also known as Longyou ( zh, c=陇右, p=Lǒngyòu) is a prefecture-level city in the southeast of Gansu province, People's Republic of China. As of the 2020 census, its population was 2,524,097 inhabitants, of ...

. Its postal code is 743300. The total population at the end of 2009 was 458 thousand, including agricultural population of 405.8 thousand which accounts for 88.6% of the total population, and the total number of households were 110.1 thousand, including 87.5 thousand rural households that account for 79.47% of the total households. Tongwei County is thus an area that is predominant on agriculture. Due to the loess landscape with steep gullies, the roads and rural settlement layout is very unevenly distributed.

History

According to archaeological findings, people inhabited in Tongwei county four to five thousand years ago. Pottery of Yuanyu culture and

Qijia culture The Qijia culture (2400 BC – 1600 BC) was an early Bronze Age culture distributed around the upper Yellow River region of Gansu (centered in Lanzhou) and eastern Qinghai, China. It is regarded as one of the earliest bronze cultures in China. ...

has been found in Tongwei. The area has been an administrative county since the 3rd year of Yuanding (元鼎三年, 113 BC). Tongwei is the well fortified borderland for many Chinese dynasties from Qin to Han, thus known as ''The Land of Thousand Forts'' (千堡之乡). Tongwei county was formally created in fifth year of Congning era, Northern Song dynasty (1106 AD). It suffered extensive damage and saw 73,000 deaths during the 1718 Tongwei–Gansu earthquake. During

Great Chinese Famine The Great Chinese Famine () was a famine that occurred between 1959 and 1961 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962. It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest ...

, at least 80,000 people died from famine.

Administrative divisions

Tongwei is divided into 14 towns and 4 townships. ;Towns ;Townships

Climate

Economy

Up to 1000MW of wind energy capacity is installed in the county. Natural resources include geothermal (hot springs), granite, marble, andesite, ferrite and kaolin. The county has a grain output of 1.2 million tonnes as well as growing significant amounts of corn, potato, other grains and fruit trees. Recently, Tongwei has become the largest grower of

honeysuckle Honeysuckles are arching shrubs or Vine#Twining vines, twining vines in the genus ''Lonicera'' () of the family Caprifoliaceae. The genus includes 158 species native to northern latitudes in North America, Eurasia, and North Africa. Widely kno ...

for traditional medicine. The county's GDP was 1,441 billion, and 3146.86 yuan per capita, rural per capita net income was 2259.27 yuan, the two are all lower than the average of the entire province, and the economic development is relatively backward. It is one of the 18 drought counties, 23 provincial 'deep poverty counties', and 41 national help-the-poor counties. As of 2017, 17.% of the population still lived in poverty.

References

Official website (Chinese)
{{authority control County-level divisions of Gansu Dingxi

History

Administrative divisions

Climate

Economy

See also

References