Donglan is in the northwestern part of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region at the southern edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, and near the middle reaches of the Hongshui River. It has the city of Hechi’s ,Jinchengjiang district to the east, Fengshan county to the west; Dahua and Bama counties to the south, and Nandan and Tian’e counties to the north and is 308 kilometers from the city of Nanning, the capital of Guangxi, and 130 km from Jinchengjiang, an important area for northwestern Guangxi. It covers a 2,437-square–kilometer area that is home to the Zhuang, Han, Yao, Miao, Dong, Maolan, Mulam, Buyi, and other ethnic groups and has more than 300,000 people.

This is considered a “red” area, one that was crucial place in the history of the Chinese Socialist movement and was a birthplace of the peasant revolutionary movement and the Baise Uprising, as well as the Youjiang Revolutionary Base, and home of the 7th Div, Chinese Red Army. It is the birthplace of Wei Baqun, leader of the movements, founder of the base and the division, a member of the Executive Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic, an outstanding general who gave his life and his youth for the Party and the country and made a distinguished contribution to New China. The county also has a lot of folk culture, including epic poems of the Zhuang people and the copper drum customs that are popular among the Zhuang and Yao. It has hundreds of antique copper drums, the largest collection in the world, and its copper drum art was one of the first folk arts to be given State protection. There are three masterpieces that exemplify copper drum culture -- the Frog Singing Party, Rice-Husking Dance, and Yao Monkey Drum Dance -- that are known both in China and abroad for their primitive simplicity, boldness, lack of constraints, and expressiveness.

Donglan has a mild, subtropical climate with cool summers and moderate winters, abundant precipitation, and plenty of sunshine. The Hongshui River, Guangxi’s main river, runs through Donglan for 115 kilometers. The forest coverage is above 76 percent, or more than 3 times the national average and it has been called a “pure land in the world of mortals” and certainly deserves its reputation as China’s greenest ecological county and one of its 10 Most Beautiful rural areas. It has green mountains and clear water and air that is fresh and clean, hundreds of times cleaner than in the big cities. As a result it is also considered a great destination for improving one’s health and enjoying a leisure time. It is rich in mineral resources in its unique karst formations and other natural products with a good reputation, such as chestnuts, hemp, glutinous black rice, camellias, black chickens, black fragrant pigs, anise, tung-oil, and non-glutinous rice. Authorities have called Donglan the home of Chinese chestnuts, the home of black chickens, the home of longevity in China, and a “National Retirement Base”.