Located in the southern Guizhou province and bordering the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region, the Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture covers an area of 26,195 sq km. With the Buyi and the Miao as major ethnic groups, its population totals 3.97 million.
Qiannan has a subtropical humid monsoon climate with plenty of rain, no extremely hot summer or bitterly cold winter. The average annual precipitation totals 1,100-1,400 mm. Qiannan is rich in natural resources, replete with mineral resources such as phosphate, coal, silicon, antimony, zinc, iron, crystal, opal, marble and diabase. Reserves of phosphate amount to more than 1 billion tons. It is one of the most important phosphate fertilizer production bases in Asia.
Transportation in Qiannan is very convenient. The Guizhou-Guangxi Railway, the Hunan-Guizhou Railway, State Highway 320 (Shanghai-Ruili) and State Highway 321 (Guangzhou-Chengdu) run through the autonomous prefecture and its subsidiary counties. They also extend to major cities such as Guiyang, Nanning, Changsha and Guangzhou. In addition, Libo Airport, 8 km from the prefecture’s downtown area, operates scheduled flights to the cities of Guiyang, Kunming and Nanning, and to some cities in Southeast Asian countries.
