Former Residence of Li Qiao

At No. 6, Xiaolujiang Lane, in the historic heart of Shiping County, stands a modest residence built during the Republic of China era. The rough wooden beams and quiet courtyard of this house sheltered the early years of Li Qiao, a Yi writer born here on August 10, 1908. He grew up in an impoverished tenant farmer family, listening to the rain on the tiled roof before leaving in 1927 to pursue his education.

This structure witnessed the humble beginnings of a literary pioneer. Li Qiao carried the memories of his childhood into a life of intense physical and creative struggle. He endured the suffocating, damp heat of the Gejiu tin mines as a child laborer, an ordeal that inspired his award-winning 1930 story, Unfinished Battle. Later, he marched with the Yunnan army to the frontlines of the War of Resistance. Amid the deafening roar of artillery and the smell of scorched earth at the Battle of Taierzhuang, he wrote urgent war dispatches, including Yuwang Mountain Struggle, capturing the raw reality of combat.

In 1950, Li Qiao joined the Southwest Nationalities Visiting Delegation. He traveled into the rugged Liangshan region, where the howling mountain winds and the rushing waters of the Jinsha River shaped his masterwork. His trilogy, The Joyful Jinsha River—comprising The Awakened Land, Early Spring, and The Howling Mountain Wind—became the first long-form novels in Yi literary history. These stories of social transformation reached global audiences through English, Russian, and Japanese translations.

Today, the Shiping County Federation of Literary and Art Circles funds the active preservation of this county-level cultural relic, designated in April 2004. Visitors can stand in the very rooms where a young boy once dreamed of words, connecting the quiet of this Yunnan lane to the global reach of modern Yi literature.