Libo County is a county of southern Guizhou province, China, bordering Guangxi to the south. It is under the administration of the Qiannan Buyei and Miao Autonomous Prefecture.

Geography

The county is located in the remote southeastern corner of the prefecture, on the border with Guangxi. Two local sites, Xiaoqikong (小七孔) and Dongduo (洞多), notable for their spectacular karst formations, form part of the multi-site South China Karst UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2007, which is an area about 550,000 km2 in extent.

Administrative divisions

Libo County is divided into 1 subdistrict, 5 towns and 2 ethnic township:

Languages

Southwestern Mandarin, Mak, Ai-Cham, Bouyei, Sui, and Numao are spoken in Libo County. Sui is spoken primarily in Shuiyao Shui Ethnic Township 水尧水族乡.

Transportation

The Qiannan Libo Airport, opened in late 2007, has capacity to receive planes of the Boeing 737 class, and to handle up to 220,000 passengers annually. However, the $57-million facility is rather underutilized so far. According to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) statistics, 151 paying passengers flew into or out of the airport in 2009 - which was a 98% drop compared to the previous year (7886 passengers), and placed the airport the last in list of the nation's 166 airports by traffic volume. Currently four airlines use the airport.

Flora

The karst environments in Libo County consist of the following types of forests. Common angiosperm genera include Beilschmiedia, Cryptocarya, Casearia, Diospyros, Pittosporum, Acer, Carpinus, Ulmus, Viburnum, Prunus, and Rosa. Protected wild plants in Libo County include Handeliodendron bodinieri, Mussaenda anomala, Taxus chinensis, Paphiopedilum emersonii, Paphiopedilum barbigerum and Paphiopedilum micranthum, Pinus kwangtungensis, Pseudotsuga sinensis, Pseudotsuga brevifolia, Calocedrus macrolepis, Tetrathyrium subcordatum, Trachycarpus nana, Emmenopterys henryi, Liriodendron chinense.

Climate