Mother River: Introduction

I wouldn’t call myself a ‘cyclist’, even though I’ve been cycle touring in China for many years. I just use a bike because it’s convenient, cheap, and fun. 

For my first China cycling trip in 2017, I took my Brompton folding bike down the remote Nujiang in Yunnan. My logic was that a road running alongside a river going downstream would be generally level, and going downhill overall. 

The reality proved to be a little different, with quite a lot of ups and downs, but I had a great time for two weeks cycling from the mountains of the Yunnan-Tibetan border near Bingzhongluo (丙中洛), to the sub-tropical forests and warmer climes of Liuku (六库), not far from the border with Burma’s Kachin state. 

Encouraged by this, I returned to Yunnan with the Brompton a couple of years later to ride from Kunming down the Red River (红河, Honghe) to the border with Vietnam at Hekou (河口).

During the COVID-19 pandemic I turned 60, and I lost a couple of old friends to complications of the virus. This brought on a sudden awareness of my own mortality and that I wouldn’t be able to continue hiking up mountains or pedalling down rivers in China for ever. I decided to take early retirement at the age of 62 from my job as a medical editor in Sydney, and embark on a longer trip to see more of China. 

When pondering which rivers to explore on a cycling tour, I again thought about southwest China and the three major rivers that run in parallel for a few hundred kilometres: the Yangtze, Mekong and Nu (Salween). It didn’t take me long to reject each of these in turn, because I had already explored parts of them, or in the case of the Yangtze because much of the route would be boring, running through urbanised and industrialised central China.

My thoughts shifted to the Yellow River. I knew little about it because it was in northern China, which I had seldom visited. I knew that it rose in Tibetan highlands and flowed through the loess plateau regions of Gansu and Ningxia, with a northward loop into the deserts and grasslands of Inner Mongolia. I was vaguely aware that the lower reaches of the river ran through the north China plain, and were considered to be the cradle of Chinese civilisation, hence the name ‘Mother River’. I also knew that the Yellow River had important links with the Silk Road to Central Asia and had been a key to the spread of Buddhism and Islam in China. 

I assumed the Yellow River would have been well travelled by foreigners and would have been the subject of many books and travel journalism pieces. And yet when I went looking for information, I found remarkably little, at least in English. There were articles about specific parts of the Yellow River, but not much about travelling the entirety of the river from its source in the Tibetan grasslands to its sea outlet at the Gulf of Bohai in Shandong (山东) province. 

The only Yellow River travel book I found was one by an American scholar of Chinese culture, Bill Porter, who described a road journey he made in 1991. His book, Yellow River Odyssey, focused on visits to temples and cultural sites such as Taishan, reflecting his interest in classical Chinese figures such as Mencius and Lao Tzu. Porter had travelled by car, bus and train at a time when China’s transport and tourism infrastructure were still relatively undeveloped by current standards. His descriptions of decrepit hotels and uncomfortable long bus trips reminded me of my own experiences of travelling in Yunnan in the 1990s.

In terms of walking or cycling the river, I could only find Chinese language sources about people who had travelled the length of the Yellow River.  In May 1982 a geological researcher Yang Liankang (杨联康) was reported to have completed a one-year source to sea hike along the Yellow River. More recently, China media articles from 2020 reported on a young man called Fu Xiaofeng (扶小风) who completed a ‘pilgrimage’ by walking the entire length of the river from sea to source in one year. The articles described some sections of his epic walk, but they did not provide details or maps of his exact route.

Similarly, I found a news story about a retired 65-year-old man from Ningxia called Wang Laisheng (王来生) who had cycled 6,538 kilometres along the river in 2022, from source to sea in 97 days: but again, the article gave no details of the route he followed on his ride. 

As I looked with closer attention at the maps of the Yellow River’s course, I became intrigued as to how anyone could possibly walk or cycle alongside the river for its entire course. There were some parts of the river that appeared to pass through inaccessible canyons or deserts, with no roads or nearby inhabited areas. The only way to cover these sections of the river, I guessed, would be to bypass them by travelling on the nearest public highway or tracks running parallel to the river at some distance away.

One of these inaccessible sections of the river was in Qinghai near a place I had visited a decade earlier. The Tibetan monastery town of Radja (拉加, Lajia) is located on alpine grassland in Golok territory near the mountain of Amnye Machen. It lies along an unusual 1000-kilometre backward loop that the Yellow River makes soon after it rises around the lakes of Gyaring Tso (扎陵湖, Zhaling Hu) and Ngoring Tso (鄂陵湖, Eling Hu). 

After flowing about 500 kilometres eastward from its source, the river takes a sudden 180 degree turn at a place known as the First Bend of the Yellow River, situated at around 3500 metres altitude in the marshy grasslands of the Qinghai-Sichuan border. After this major reversal in direction, the river flows to the north-west for a further 400 kilometres through a sparsely populated highland region. 

It is here that the river passes through a 100-kilometre steep-sided canyon, alongside which there are no roads and few signs of human settlements. It seemed the only way to follow this part of the Yellow River would be by boat, but the river flowing through the canyon is fast, turbulent ‘white water’. 

My research showed me that about 30 years ago, a Chinese team attempted to paddle down this section of the Yellow River on inflatable rafts, but their boats sank and seven of them drowned. More recently, an adventurer who calls himself 'Semit'  - Shen Mite (闪米特) - tackled the canyon solo on a packraft and survived, but only just. 

From this canyon the river eventually emerges into the loess landscapes around Longyangxia (龙羊峡) reservoir, where it again changes course at its second major bend, turning eastward and flowing towards Lanzhou (兰州) in Gansu province, losing a lot of altitude en route.

My map suggested there were two other difficult-to-access sections of the Yellow River, further downriver along the 1500-kilometre northward ‘Ordos’ loop that the river makes into Inner Mongolia. The first was in the section north of Baiyin (白银) in Gansu, where the river emerges from the loess plateau into the edges of the Tengger desert. Again, I could see no cycleable road near the river for about 100 kilometres until it reaches the town of Zhongwei (中卫) to the north.  

And further along on the eastern arm of this ‘Ordos’ loop into Inner Mongolia there was another section where the river passes through another canyon, this time along the border between Shaanxi (陕西) and Shanxi (山西) provinces. This was adjacent to Yan’an (延安), an area chosen for its remoteness to set up a revolutionary base at the end point of the Long March of the 1930s. There were few towns along this part of the river, and the map showed that some stretches had no road, with the main highway veering inland into the hills for up to 30 kilometres. How would walkers and cyclists follow the Yellow River at these points?

Another one of the fundamental questions I had to consider when planning my Yellow River cycling trip was which way to ‘do’ the river: travelling downstream from the source of the river near the town of Maduo (玛多) in Qinghai, or setting off upstream from the sea outlet in Shandong? 

At first glance, the ‘downstream’ option seemed more attractive because it would be an overall ‘downhill’ journey from the 4000 metres altitude of Maduo to literally sea level. But when I started to consider other factors such as the seasons of weather and the remote locality of the Yellow River source, I decided to go with the ‘upstream’ direction of travel option. 

This choice was partly because it’s not actually possible to start cycling from the ultimate source of the Yellow River, which is a small stream located in the foothills of the Bayan Har Mountains at about 4800 metres altitude on the Tibetan plateau. While there is a dirt road that runs from Maduo town for about 70 kilometres towards the source of the river, the highest point in the hills could only be reached on foot or horseback across marshy grass terrain. 

Even if this were feasible, recent articles by Chinese visitors to the area noted that the Maduo authorities have declared the entire area around the river source to be off-limits to all tourists, to avoid environmental damage to the fragile ecosystem.

Maduo town would therefore be the closest place accessible by bike to the source of the Yellow River. In my online research Maduo appeared to be a small truck stop on the highway between Xining and Yushu (玉树). Located at around 4,300 metres, it looked to be an inhospitable place for much of the year with cold weather and freezing winds that extended from September to June. 

The brief summer sees temperatures rise somewhat but this coincides with the onset of monsoonal rains. My planned mid-April start to cycling the river would not be a good time to be travelling to Maduo. In addition to this, the first few hundred kilometres of the Yellow River below Maduo flow through remote Tibetan grassland wilderness that has no major highways. 

Using Google Earth, I was able to trace the route of a road track from Maduo along the river, passing occasional small settlements at places such as Huanghe (黄河乡) and Darlag (达日, Dari). The few images available showed a bleak grassland plateau lightly populated by Golok Tibetan yak herders, dotted with a few monasteries. 

Starting a Yellow River cycle trip at the source would also mean being ‘thrown in at the deep end’, and facing the most difficult section from Day 1. Setting out downstream from Qinghai I would have to contend with cold weather, high altitude, and the lack of facilities in a very remote location. I would rather save that for the end of the trip when I had built up some experience of long-distance cycle touring. 

The other obvious problem would be how to get to such a remote ‘start point’ with a bicycle. The nearest city is the provincial capital of Xining, around 500 kilometres away. How would I get my bike to Xining? And even if I could take it by train, it would require at least a week of cycling to get from Xining to Maduo before I could even start following the Yellow River.

I therefore decided to start my Yellow River journey at the sea.

A glance at the map showed me that the Yellow River enters the Bohai Sea on the coast of Shandong province, at an obscure spot somewhere between the cities of Tianjin (天津) and Qingdao (青岛). The nearest city is Dongying (东营), a place I’d never heard of, and which itself was around 70 kilometres from the coast. Nevertheless, I was sure this would be more ‘do-able’, and set out on the next stage of planning for how to get to the start point and how to structure my cycling journey.

With more than 5000 kilometres of river to follow, it seemed sensible to break down the trip into more manageable sections. I soon came up with three distinct stages, based on the lower, middle and upper parts of the river, each with distinct topography, history and populations.

The first stage of the lower river would take me across the northern coastal plain provinces of Shandong and Henan, from Dongying through cities that formed the historical cradle of Han Chinese culture: Kaifeng (开封), Zhengzhou (郑州) and Luoyang (洛阳). I also planned to make detours away from the river to visit places of historical significance such as Qufu (曲阜), the home of Confucius, and sacred mountains such as Taishan (泰山), Songshan (嵩山, with its Shaolin temple) and Huashan (华山). The end of this first section would be in Xi’an, which while not on the river, was a place I had always wanted to visit.

Stage 1 (click on image to enlarge)

The second stage - the middle river - would take me up the long northward ‘Ordos’ loop of the Yellow River into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, through a river canyon that marks the boundary between Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces. The initial goal would be to reach Baotou (包头) and maybe take a side trip to the provincial capital of Hohhot (呼和浩特).

Stage 2 (click on image to enlarge)

The second half of this section would take me back down south on the Ordos Loop from Inner Mongolia along the fertile ‘Hetao Plain’ (河套) of river territory beside the Tengger desert (腾格里沙漠) and into the loess plateau country and Hui Muslim communities of Ningxia (宁夏) and Gansu (甘肃), culminating in the ancient river city of Lanzhou.

Stage 3 (click on image to enlarge)

The third and final stage would be the most challenging, taking me up to the high elevations of the Qinghai plateau and navigating remote sections of the Yellow River around the major lakes and reservoirs such as Longyangxia until I reached the headwaters in the ethnic Tibetan highlands. This section would also mean negotiating the long loop of the river through remote wilderness areas, much of it without any roads or towns en route.

Stage 4: Original planned route in red vs actual route in blue (click on image to enlarge)

With each section being roughly 1000 kilometres in length, and if I were riding 50-80 kilometres of cycling a day, I estimated it would take me about three weeks per stage, including rest days. I planned to be staying in hotels or hostels along the way, based on my experience from recent cycling trips in China of being able to find and book hotels easily and cheaply using the WeChat app.

On my previous shorter bike trips in China I’d used folding bikes: either a Brompton with 16-inch wheels, or a Dahon Jetstream with 20-inch wheels. These had performed well on the roads and proved capable of carrying luggage loads of around 15 kilos. But the trips had been brief, for no more than two weeks, and had been on mostly level roads in the relatively mild climate of south-western China. When I looked at the 5,000-kilometre route along the Yellow River going up and down hills for weeks on end and into remote areas such as Inner Mongolia, I quickly realised I would need a bike with a bit more power. I decided on an e-bike.

When I told friends that I was planning to use an e-bike for touring in China, some jokingly suggested this would be ‘cheating’. I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t envisage my Yellow River trip as a physical challenge or endurance test that must be done on a pedal bike. The purpose of my bike tour was to see and experience the Yellow River up close, and enjoy it in a leisurely way. I wanted to take advantage of the slow pace of cycling and the opportunities this provides to meet people through random encounters on the road: something that doesn’t happen when you’re in a car or bus. 

At the age of 62 and with some arthritis in my right foot, using an e-bike seemed like a good way to maintain mobility while retaining the advantages of a regular bike. An e-bike would give me the freedom to detour off the main road, to stop easily to take photos or chat to people, and also to explore smaller paths and alleys in towns and villages that would be inaccessible to cars. 

However, while electric scooters are now everywhere in China, pedal assist e-bikes are uncommon. Local friends told me that people preferred the cheap and simple electric scooters (‘diandong che’ 电动车,) with a throttle rather than bother with pedalling. 

Fortunately, when I arrived in China I was able to find a suitable folding e-bike for sale at a Dahon shop in Shenzhen. The Dahon Unio E20 was similar to the manual Dahon pedal bike I had been riding for a few years, and I was able to arrange for it to be delivered to Dongying, the city in Shandong closest to my starting point at the Yellow River estuary.

That was about the extent of my planning, and in March 2025, I set out on my trip. After staying with my wife’s family in Guilin for a few days, I took the train to Qingdao, in Shandong province.

Chapter 1. Qingdao ist sehr schön 青岛 德国老城

 After the balmy spring weather of Guangxi province in the south, Qingdao was cold. I only knew two things about this coastal city in the north-east of China, and they were its beer and its German colonial heritage, neither of which I had much hope for. 

I was not a fan of the rather bland Tsingtao brand lager that used to be the only beer you could get in many parts of China. And having been disappointed by Shanghai’s ‘French’ Concession and the old ‘legation’ parts of Beijing, I didn't hold out much hope for Qingdao’s German old town. How wrong I was.

 

While now only a small corner of a city of 10 million people, Qingdao’s German quarter comprises a remarkably well-preserved and self-contained area of European colonial-era urban buildings. Like a distant cousin of the Hanseatic League Baltic cities, it was as if a little bit of Danzig or Königsberg had been replicated in the East China Sea. And all the more remarkable given that it was created in just a few years of German colonial occupation of Qingdao, from 1898 to 1914.

 arrived in Qingdao by train in early April after an almost 2,000-kilometre train ride from Guilin. The ten-hour trip on a high-speed train had cost me 1,000 yuan and had taken me from the warm climate of southern China through central Chinese cities such as Quanzhou, Changsha, Wuhan, and Zhengzhou, to deposit me in chilly Qingdao at 7 pm in the evening. The taxi drivers outside the station looked on in scorn and then curiosity as I lugged my bike through the barrier, unpacked it from its bag, and unfolded it, until I was ready to pedal away without the need for their services.

My destination was the Observatory Hotel located on top of Observatory Hill (观象山, Guanxiang Shan) overlooking the port. It took me a while to find, but it was worth it. 

The hotel was located in what was once the astrodome annex of the Qingdao Observatory. Its history was a testament to the turbulent changing control of the city during the early and mid-period of the 20th century. Originally built in solid granite by the German occupiers in 1905, the Qingdao Observatory was created to provide accurate weather and star observations for the Imperial German Navy using the port at the time. In less than a decade, control passed to the Japanese during the First World War. A decade later, they reluctantly ceded control of the Observatory to China’s new republican government.

The astrodome was added to the Observatory by Chinese astronomers in the 1930s, built to a French design. But again control was short-lived as the Japanese military occupied Qingdao in 1937 and the Imperial Japanese Navy took over management of the Observatory until their defeat in 1945. After four years back under control of the Kuomintang Chinese government, the Observatory was eventually taken over by the PLA Navy in 1949, who still maintain control of the building today. 

While the Observatory is not open to the public, the astrodome was operated as a youth hostel until 2018. Again reflecting the changing trends of China and the move away from the budget backpacker tourist market, the building has recently been converted into a boutique hotel.

I found the hotel to have retained some aspects of its old-world architecture: wooden floors and art deco window frames. The new managers had renovated the place in an ‘Asian chic’ style that I would find was common across Chinese designer hotels: light, airy, IKEA-style furnishings with modern paintings, bookshelves and houseplants and a scattering of vaguely Eastern religious icons.

The young couple who ran the place were friendly and welcoming: I was the only foreign guest they had seen for some time and they practised their seldom-used English on me. They unlocked the door to a spiral staircase that led me up to the rooftop deck area, with its sweeping views over the city. 

On my first day in Qingdao, I took my bike for a ride around the old town area. I’d expected to see a handful of preserved buildings from the colonial era, so I was surprised to see almost every house on the street down from my hotel was built in the traditional German style. Many had the classic hipped gable roof or a curved baroque facade, not unlike the Cape Dutch style seen in South Africa. Other streets had houses and apartments in a more generic Western style from the early 20th century and reminded me of the colonial-style architecture in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. 

Riding down Jiangsu Road, which had once been Bismarck Strasse, I was amazed to see the well-preserved Qingdao Christian (Protestant) Church amongst a row of opulent colonial-era houses and public buildings. Turning the corner, there were more mansions, and then the road opened out into a public square dominated by a large neo-classical government building that had once been the centre of Germany’s Qingdao concession administration. It looked far too grand for what was effectively a local council responsible for a population of less than 100,000 city dwellers. This European building was now home of the Qingdao People’s Consultative Committee. Around the corner was another government building that looked in style more like the town hall of a provincial German town— a modest Rathaus from a town in Munster. And yet now it had a Communist red star emblem above the gatehouse.

I cycled back uphill through the old town to see one of the main landmarks - the Catholic St Michael’s Cathedral. Situated in an open square, it looked very European and was the focus of many local tourists and couples using it as a backdrop for wedding photos. I parked my bike up down a nearby lane and popped into a café on the corner of what once would have been Friedrich Strasse, now like many Chinese cities, the main street was renamed Zhongshan Lu. Looking up the road towards the cathedral and squinting a bit to ignore the Chinese language signs, it could still have been a German town centre.

The people of Qingdao also looked different to their counterparts in Guilin. They were northern Chinese, Shandong natives, and had ruddy complexions to match the brisk offshore wind and cooler climate of these higher latitudes. To me, they also seemed a bit more reserved and composed compared to the brash and busy southern folk.

My tour continued down past the old German-built Hauptbahnhof - still in use as a railway station - and down along the shore. There was the pier where the German military landing forces had first come ashore from their warships in 1897. There were no sunbathers or swimmers lingering on the sands of Qingdao Bay in April, but there were some hardy keep-fit types doing weight lifting and other exercises on the beach. 

I pedalled round to the east and bypassed the monolithic PLA Naval museum to enter a different world of ornate European beachside villas and gardens. This was Badaguan (八大关), where in just a few years of the early 20th century, the colonists had lived a lifestyle to match those of Cap Ferret and Catalina Island. Many of the mansions were hidden behind walls, but it was possible to see their elegant designs and quirky mish-mash of features from the wide tree-lined avenues.  The large gardens were filled with neatly trimmed fir trees and blossoming plum branches, set amid landscaped gardens and lawns. 

Who, I wondered, had the wealth and taste to build and enjoy living in such residences in those brief early years of the 20th century? Were they German citizens? And if so, what was their fate after the Japanese took over Qingdao? Did they stay on or have to return to the turmoil of Hitler’s Third Reich? In modern-day Qingdao, there was no information provided about the former residents of these villas, nor of their modern-day occupants.

Badaguan marked the boundary of old and new Qingdao. Beyond the mansions and gardens lay another beach that provided the foreground to a wholly different modern city of glass and concrete skyscrapers, highway bridges, and shopping malls. I cycled into the downtown area of this new city and used my map app to locate a bakery. Ironically, despite its German heritage, European-style bread had not been available anywhere in the old town section of Qingdao. I was however, able to find schwarzbrot, pretzels, fresh baguettes, ciabatta, and Galette des Rois for sale among the trendy boulangeries and coffee shops of Zhangzhou Erlu ( 漳州二路).

Foodwise, Qingdao was my first taste of a minor culinary culture shock that I was to experience in northern China.  Being married to a girl from Guangxi, I was accustomed to a southern Chinese rice-based diet of spicy dishes that included a wide variety of fresh vegetables, herbs and sauces. When it came to lunchtime in Shandong, I could find no rice dishes. Everything seemed to be based around noodles, steamed bread, and large quantities of meat. And in Qingdao in particular, the emphasis was on seafood and beer. At lunchtime, I settled for simple beef noodles, without the usual ‘lajiao’ chilli flavour that I was used to. But for subsequent evening meals, I could not get around my perception of noodles being only a lunch item.

With its German heritage, I fancifully imagined that Qingdao might have retained some elements of European cuisine. In Vietnam the locals had taken the baguettes and coffee introduced by the French colonial occupiers and transformed them into Banh Mi and Phin cà phê. Might not the Shandongers have kept the German bratwurst sausage as part of their diet? Or developed a taste for pretzels and apple strudel? The only German legacy seemed to be the lager beer.

In the evening, I took my bike down to the imposing buildings of the Tsingtao Brewery. I had heard there was a nearby beer street where I could enjoy some local dishes washed down with freshly brewed local ale. I was right in one respect, but the food was almost all seafood, which I’m not too fond of. The street opposite the brewery was lined with restaurants, all advertising their fresh beers on tap, combined with various combinations of seafood meal deals. There were prawns, lobster, crab, locally caught fish and squid … but little else to suit my taste. 

And I was disadvantaged as a solo traveller, because the restaurants were geared up for group dining: they offered a smorgasbord range of dishes and hotpot or barbecue cooking at the table. All a bit much for me as a solitary customer. To find something suitable I had to walk a couple of kilometres down the road to find the night markets, where I ended up opting for an Indian curry.

Pedalling back up the hill to my hotel, I finished the day with a Kronenbourg 1664 beer from the local minimart, having missed out on trying the famous local brand fresh from the brewery. So no Tsingtao in Qingdao, but a French brand beer made in China under licence from the Danish-owned Carlsberg. 

Nevertheless, I was enjoying my time in Qingdao and decided to linger in the city for an extra day before setting out towards the start point of my Yellow River cycling trip.

The next morning I took the bike out for another ride around the streets of the old German town. At the bottom of Observatory Hill I went past another church and followed a street of German-style houses to the base of a similar-looking hill about one kilometre away, which from a distance had what looked like a retro-futuristic space station domes on the summit. This was Signal Hill (信号山, Xinhao Shan: formerly Diedrichsberg), which as its name suggested had been the location of the old signal tower used for communicating with shipping in the port. 

The streets such as Qidong Lu (齐东路) leading up to the top were lined with European colonial houses and apartments that reminded me of the Montmartre area of Paris. One of the space station domes in the park on top of Signal Hill housed a café that was both cosy and offered panoramic views of the city and its harbour, as well as more distant landmarks such as Jiazhou Bay (胶州湾) to the southwest and the hills of Laoshan (崂山, where Tsingtao beer spring water is sourced) to the north-east.

More immediately in view, just below the hill was the roof of a grand and gaudy European-style building that I identified as the residence of the former German governor of Qingdao. After finishing my coffee I went down to have a look. It was an extravagant three-storey yellow mansion built in an extraordinary turn-of-the-century German Art Nouveau style that my guidebook told me was Jugendstil. 

The granite and wood structure had been designed by leading German architect Werner Lazarowicz and built at a staggering cost of 850,000 marks. Legend says the Kaiser was furious about the huge expense of the building and recalled governor Admiral Oskar von Truppel to Germany to dismiss him. However this appears to be just hearsay.

As with many of Qingdao’s colonial-era buildings, the Governor’s Residence was to go through a rapid series of ownership changes and functions in the next few decades. It was taken over first by the Japanese in WW1, became an official guesthouse and Qingdao mayor’s residence in the interwar period, and was again a Japanese military governor’s residence in WW2 before becoming a Chinese government state guesthouse housing visiting dignitaries including Mao and Ho Chi Minh. It is now officially a museum and is open to the public, with the interiors reminiscent of some UK stately homes.

After a pleasant hour swanning around the swanky residence and its peaceful gardens, I took off down the hill to explore that last bit of old German Qingdao. I walked my bike down Longshan Road (龙山路) to the junction with Longkou Road (龙口路) - the view at the crossroads was quintessentially middle European: the clocktower and spire of the church on the hill above, with the yellow-painted half-timbered frontages of houses and their red tile roofs in the foreground around the square with its old cinema building and a pedestrian crossing. 

Continuing down Longkou Road, the colonial houses and apartments again reminded me of the similar tree-lined streets in Sydney’s posh Bellevue Hill beachside suburb. 

Turning up the narrow Longjiang Road (龙江路) was more reminiscent of an Old German town, something not lost on the many local tourists snapping photos of the facades now converted into cafés and craft shops. 

Down a side street was the former residence of writer Lao She. It was an unremarkable building, but the European milieu was perhaps not an unusual location for a man who had spent some of his formative years in London, where he based several of his early works on those of Charles Dickens. Lao She had been a lecturer at the nearby Shandong University, whose campus was now the Institute of Oceanography. Running alongside it, University Avenue was another tree-lined road whose residences and shopfronts would not look out of place in western university suburbs.

Back at the hotel on Observatory Hill, I took a walk around the park area that overlooked the city. In the mornings, it was the haunt of groups of retired residents who came here to do tai chi or practice their dance moves. At dusk, however, there were just a handful of younger people here to savour a few moments of the sunset.

 I said hello to one guy standing nearby and told him I was impressed with the preservation of the old town of Qingdao.


He responded: “The buildings are well looked after because Shandong people appreciate classic old things - we like to preserve historical and cultural items. Did you not see the many antique and retro shops selling old objects?” 

I asked him what it was like to grow up in a city with such a European heritage, and whether locals felt differently to people from other Chinese cities. He looked at me as if I’d asked a stupid question.

“The foreign influence in Qingdao was brief, just a few years in the last century, and the government does not want to promote foreign influence in China,” he replied.

“I never saw any foreigners when I was growing up except some Russians. That’s why I cannot speak English to you, I never had a chance to practice,” he added.



He asked me what I was doing in China, and I told him about my plans to cycle along the Yellow River.

 “Shandong is the province where Chinese history and culture are strong - we have scholars like Confucius, and we have thousands of years of history of Buddhism and Taoism. You should visit the Confucius Mansion in Qufu,” he told me.

This place was already on my itinerary, I told him. But first I had to see one last remaining bit of recent colonial history in this part of the world - the former British naval base at Weihaiwei. 

Chapter 2. Navy day at Weihaiwei 威海, 刘公岛 旧英国海军基地

It’s 1973, a dull Tuesday afternoon at St Thomas Aquinas Grammar School in the northern outskirts of Leeds, and Form 1R are having History. One 11-year-old pupil is gazing out of the window over the school playing fields, daydreaming about anything except the interminable lists of dates and treaties being reeled off by the history master, Mr Bourne. Something about 1896 and the Treaty of Shimonoseki … blah … blah … and access to the ice-free naval ports of Port Arthur and Weihaiwei …. “WOODHEAD, are you paying attention, boy?!” Obviously not.

Half a century later, Woodhead is paying attention as the Chinese announcement on the high-speed train informs passengers that we are now arriving in Weihai (威海) North station. 

I had been drawn to visit Weihai because in the intervening years I had served in the Royal Navy Reserve and read with interest the accounts of British sailors who were stationed in the Far East as part of the so-called ‘China Station’. 

I was fascinated to learn that within living memory there have been British sailors who served on Royal Navy ships that exercised the UK’s extra-territorial claim to sail up China’s rivers in the name of defending British interests in the country. The British film The Yangtse Incident tells the story of how one such ship, HMS Amethyst, was attacked and disabled by artillery fire from shore batteries of the PLA in Jiangsu province in 1949.

Like most people, I knew that in the days of the British Empire, Britain had colonial naval bases in Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as stationing ships in Shanghai. But I knew little about the Royal Navy’s additional base in north China. 



Known officially as Port Edward, Weihaiwei was something of a remote outpost that was leased by the British from the Qing dynasty government in 1898 as part of a strategic move to counterbalance the German and Russian presences in nearby Qingdao and Port Arthur (Dalian, 大连), respectively. 

The navy base at Weihaiwei was actually located on a small offshore island called Liugong and was never developed as a major naval port facility. Instead it was used only as a re-supply depot and a ‘summer training establishment’. The Shandong coast had a mild summer climate compared to the heat of Shanghai and Hong Kong, and therefore Weihaiwei became a favoured ‘rest and recreation’  destination for British ships and their crews.

After the Weihaiwei lease expired in 1930 the British navy maintained a token presence on Liugong Island under a temporary 10-year agreement with the Chinese government. The few remaining personnel departed in 1940 and the base was taken over by the Japanese military soon afterwards.

I was intrigued by these descriptions of a little corner of north China under the Union Jack, and since it was only two hours away from Qingdao, I decided to pay a visit to see what remained of Weihaiwei. I’m sure my history teacher Mr Bourne would have approved.

On the way to Weihai, the train passed through the port city of Yantai (烟台). I had considered stopping there too because of its status as one of the first winemaking places in China. But the city looked a bit too industrial, and I had not been impressed with previous tastings of the local ChangYu wine brand - so I gave it a miss.

Weihai was one of those ‘small’ towns in China that has a sprawling hinterland. After disembarking at the new North Station, I faced a 16-kilometre ride into the centre through a drab 'new town' landscape. Once I arrived on the seafront, however, it was like Surfer’s Paradise. The seafront was lined with new high-rise apartment blocks, and a promenade had been landscaped with artificial trees and featured cafés, viewing platforms, and changing rooms featuring marine motifs. The Costa Del Shandong.

After spending a bit beyond my budget on the hotel in Qingdao, I opted to try the cheap youth hostel advertised in Weihai. Being off-season, I found I was the only resident in the empty building tucked down a side street two blocks from the beach, next door to a Spar supermarket. 

My woeful preparation and lack of background research for this trip became apparent when I went for a walk around Weihai and learned that it was just across the water from the Korean peninsula. A large passenger ferry docked at a jetty was the 12-hour overnight service to and from Incheon, only 380 kilometres away over the Yellow Sea. I also noticed that most of the shops and restaurants on the main street were bilingual in Korean and Chinese characters— and many of them were offering Korean products and specialty dishes.

The hostel receptionist later explained to me that Weihai was the closest point to Korea in China, and the city was a regular feature on tourist itineraries for South Koreans who came over to sample the markets and buy up cheap products. She pointed me in the direction of nearby Hanlefang (韩乐坊) where I would find the Korean Night market. It was a revelation - I arrived just as it got dark, and the market was a bustling mass of people in an outdoor plaza illuminated by neon signs advertising all kinds of dishes. I opted for bulgogi and rice - which I noticed when translated into Chinese was simply ‘barbecue beef’.

The next morning was a brisk, clear April day, and I had a pleasant ride on my bike along the beachfront. Weihai was a holiday town, and the beach was dotted with sea-themed sculptures and sunbeds. The local authorities had installed a wooden deck walkway along which were gift shops and restaurants, but few were open this early in the season. They had also put up a rustic thatched-roofed house on the waterfront as a tourist information centre.

There were quite a few locals fishing from the promenade - some using weighted nets that they flung into the clear waters. I’d been expecting the sea here to be the same muddy opaque brown colour that I’d seen when visiting the China coast further south in Fujian, but the water was clear and clean. Further on was a small harbour full of leisure craft and some powerboats being used for fishing. A woman from one of these called me over, inviting me to buy some of her fresh catch of prawns, lobster, flatfish, squid, and crabs being displayed in plastic bowls on the dockside. 

After a couple of kilometres, I had arrived in the centre of Weihai, and it looked to me like a part of Miami. The seafront was dominated by a shiny new community of high-rise condos, which could only be reached by a bridge closed off by a barrier and security guards. On the landward side was a prominent viewing platform centred around a fancy bit of modern art sculpture. There was also a swish ’cafe and bistro’, in which I got a latte and planned my excursion across to the former naval base at Liugong Island (刘公岛). 

I found the ferry terminal another kilometre along the seafront, in a massive new building and car park complex billed as the ‘Liugong Island Passenger Transport Centre’. Being a military facility, I feared that Liugong would not permit foreign visitors. But after showing my passport, I got a ticket that allowed me through the barrier to the wharf - and they even allowed me to take my folded-up bike with me.

The small ferry had only a few tourist passengers and was not dissimilar to the boats that run on the Sydney to Manly route. Standing outside the cabin at the stern under the flapping Chinese national flag, among bobbing and swooping seagulls, it took a leisurely 20 minutes to cross the few kilometres to the small island of low-lying hills.

As we docked at the wharf on Liugong Island, the island still looked like a historic naval training establishment. There were a couple of distinctly British-looking barracks with white facades and mock-Tudor black beams, now topped with a red star and the ba-yi (八一, 8-1) symbol of the PLA. I wheeled my bike off the jetty and found myself surrounded by warehouse buildings that could have been from naval dockyards in Victorian England. 

The only modern building was a large concrete structure that was a museum commemorating the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, something I knew nothing about. I should have paid more attention to Mr Bourne in 1973 when he was explaining the Treaty of Shimonoseki. 

The Chinese displays in the museum told of how the northern fleet of the Manchu Qing dynasty’s navy had been established on Liugong Island before it was defeated by the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Yalu River.

The battle had been the culmination of Japanese expansion in the region, which saw them defeat the Chinese and occupy Korea then move into Manchuria and take over Port Arthur (Dalian, 大连). The Chinese navy had been outclassed by the well trained and modernised Japanese fleet: the Chinese ships were obsolete, poorly armed and maintained, and the crews lacked discipline and training in modern naval warfare.

The displays in the museum came with a not-so-subtle propaganda message that the western colonial powers had been responsible for China’s defeat.  They implied that European countries had worked to keep China weak by preventing  it from building up a modern navy, whereas the British had provided strong support to build up the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The museum made little mention of the subsequent British acquisition of Liugong Island and its development as a northern base for the Royal Navy’s China Squadron. But the rest of the island was like an open air museum for the British colonial naval base. A road along the southern coast of the island led from the site of the old British naval barracks and sailors’ canteen and featured the Fleet Commander’s Residence, a 1920s style detached house. Further along there was an elegant beachfront bungalow described as “The Johnston Villa”.  This is presumably the summer residence of Weihaiwei’s British Commissioner, Sir Reginald Johnston.

Johnston was a notable senior diplomat and sinophile, and at one time the personal tutor to the last Emperor Pu Yi in Peking (as portrayed by Peter O’Toole in The Last Emperor). When Pu Yi was expelled from the Forbidden City, Johnston returned to the Colonial Service and in this capacity served as the final British Commissioner at Weihaiwei until 1930.

The Commissioner’s residence was next to a golf course, which appeared to be still in use by the PLA Navy. A map of the island also showed tennis courts and swimming pools, all built by the British for when Liugong was a recreation facility. In more recent times, a sailing and windsurfing centre had been established on the beach below the villa.

Back in the centre of the naval administration block, there was still the old Masonic Hall and even the remains of the British-built church. However, much of the centre and western sections of the island were off-limits and presumably still in use as military facilities.  There was a decommissioned Chinese submarine alongside that was open to the public - but when I tried to go inside, I was told that entry was not allowed for foreigners.

Having seen everything there was to see on this small island, I took my bike back to the ferry wharf to wait for the next boat back to Weihai. 

An older Chinese man sitting opposite me was eyeing my bike with interest and gave me the thumbs up. He told me he was an engineer and scrutinised my e-bike with a professional eye, asking some technical questions about its function and performance. 

When he learned that I was from the UK, he asked me if I had visited the museum about the Sino-Japanese War. 

“That was when China was weak, but not any more,” he said. “Now we have a strong navy. We need one to resist America.”

He gestured out over the bay: “America is surrounding China. They have bases just over there in Korea, and (pointing further south) in Japan and in the Philippines, and they are still in Taiwan … America is trying to contain China from all directions,” he said.

I grew wary of which direction this conversation might be going, though the man wasn’t hostile, just giving me a little lecture.

“China is a peaceful country and always welcomes foreign guests with good intentions,” he went on. “A lot of Koreans come here for the seafood in Weihai. Have you tried it? It is very fresh, the best in China …”.

I was relieved when the ferry docked and I was able to leave,  carrying my folded-up bike on board the boat  to head back across the water.

Back in Weihai, there wasn’t much else to see of what had once been Port Edward. It was hard to imagine this had once been a British leased territory with its own courts, postage stamps and even a Weihaiwei Regiment of local soldiers serving under the British Crown. As if in rebuke and to assert its Chineseness, the seafront now had an array of statues of Chinese cultural and historical figures, most of whom I had never heard of. I turned my bike around and pedalled back to the youth hostel, to ready myself for the next day’s train trip to the mouth of the Yellow River. 

Chapter 3. Delta departure: oil pumps and birdlife 黄河口生态旅游区 - 东营

In its lower reaches, the Yellow River meets the sea on the Shandong coast, but it wasn’t always so. Over the years, the river has changed course many times due to being blocked by the accumulation of silt and flooding. Until the 19th century, the river ran further south, emptying into the Yellow Sea south of the Shandong peninsula. But in 1855, there was a flood-driven breakage known as an ‘avulsion’, which saw the Yellow River’s course shift dramatically to the north, creating a new outlet 400 kilometres above the Shandong peninsula, emptying into the Bohai (渤海) Sea.

It was at this estuary that I arrived in April 2025 to start my bike journey along the Yellow River. The nearest town was Dongying (东营), some 70 kilometres from the coast, to which I travelled by train from Weihai, changing at a town called Zibo (淄博). 

Dongying was an unremarkable petroleum industry town that sat on top of the second-largest oil field in China. Local people claimed that it was the birthplace of military strategist Sun Tzu. 

After a night in a cheap hotel, I put my folding bike into the back of a taxi and told the driver to take me to the closest place to the river outlet that I could find on the map: the Yellow River Estuary Ecological Zone.

After an hour’s driving across a flat plain of marshland and canals, the taxi dropped me off outside a large new visitor centre. When Bill Porter visited here in 1990 there was nothing but marshland flat and his driver was able to take him out to the estuary along a dirt track until they turned into mud.  But in 2025, like many of China’s natural sightseeing spots, the Yellow River estuary zone had been turned into a regulated tourism operation in which visitors are required to buy a ticket and then transported on shuttle buses along a set path of sightseeing stops. 

This put paid to my plans of starting my bike ride at the exact spot where the Yellow River empties into the sea. Arriving at the park entrance barrier with my bike, a security guard blocked my way and directed me in the direction of the ticket office. I would have to travel the first nine kilometres of the Yellow River like everyone else, on a shuttle bus. At least I got a half-price ticket because I was over 60. 

So I chained up my bike in the car park and climbed aboard an electric cart that carried me and two other passengers along a service road over a treeless plain of wetland mud intersected by canals. There was plenty of birdlife to see along the way: pheasants, ducks, gulls and storks nesting on top of telephone poles. The river, however, remained elusively out of sight beyond a low embankment. 

A strong breeze was blowing over the estuary and I was almost shivering by the time the bus driver announced: ‘xia che!’ [下车, ‘get off’] at the last stop.  A modernist glass cube building that was the ‘estuary zone management centre’ stood alone in an otherwise featureless flat landscape.

I leaned into the wind and walked over to a concrete platform that provided a view over the final stages of the Yellow River. It was disappointing to find that even here it was not possible to ‘see the sea’. The river was a few hundred metres wide at this point and flowed off into the distance between low banks lined with grass and bushes. The Bohai Sea was somewhere over the horizon. 

The white-capped waters of the river were a creamy brown colour, reflecting its high silt content. I learned in the Visitor Centre that the sediment had been carried here from far inland China, where erosion of the loess plateau deposited fine particles of sand and clay into the river. Over time, huge amounts of this silt washed up on the sides of the river and accumulated to form embankments. When the river levels rose in spring and overflowed these dykes, the subsequent flooding caused devastation across the surrounding plains, hence the ‘China’s Sorrow’ epithet being bestowed on the river. 

At the end of the viewing platform was a jetty where a couple of motor launches bobbed up and down on the choppy waters. They were offering sightseeing tours along the river, but the rough waters made me decide the wharf was far enough for me. The handful of other visitors must have shared my reluctance because we were all soon getting back onto the waiting electric passenger cart to trundle back to the park entrance. 

With a day’s cycling ahead of me, I also opted to skip the Bird Museum at the visitor centre, and I was relieved to find my bike was still outside the entrance where I’d left it in the car park. There were now two larger touring bikes with panniers parked next to my small Dahon. The riders were a pair of older Chinese guys who told me they’d just arrived at the estuary as part of the long-distance trip they were making down the coast from their home in north-east China. When I told them I was aiming to cycle along the length of the Yellow River, they looked at my folding bike and laughed with incredulity: “It’s too small!”

I responded by saying I was confident the little Dahon should at least be good enough to get me across the plains of northern China, as far as Xi’an. Once there, I could reassess what kind of bike I would use for the more challenging hillier route up north into Inner Mongolia.

 After an obligatory selfie and adding each other as contacts on WeChat, the two touring cyclists gave me the thumbs up and wished me: “Yi Lu Shun Feng!” (一路顺风, ‘have a nice trip!’). And so, with a feeling of trepidation, I set out on the first part of my Yellow River cycle tour. With a wave from the security guard, I exited the car park onto a long, straight road heading back in the direction of Dongying.

It was a chilly spring day, and I was pleased to note that I had the wind on my back, coming off the sea. I was also glad that I’d brought warmer clothes with me from Guilin. The route initially took me down a long, straight, treeless road through reedy marshland. There was little other traffic on the road, and I was able to continue my bird spotting with sightings of avocets and hoopoe, which were common here but rare species by UK standards. 

After a few kilometres, the bike route diverted away from that of my earlier taxi journey, down a minor road that my map showed would run alongside the Yellow River. In reality, I only got occasional glimpses of the river because it was hidden beyond rough farmland, with the view blocked by dykes and lines of trees.

The terrain was completely flat, and I got my first real experience of how the Dahon e-bike performed in long-distance use. A fully charged battery would have a range of up to 80 kilometres according to the manufacturer’s manual. But my previous experience with e-bikes made me sceptical of any such claim. A more realistic daily range would be about 60 kilometres on one battery, I found.  

I didn’t have a cycling helmet but instead wore a broad-brimmed hat because as an Australian I worried more about the sun and skin cancer than a skull fracture. I would later add a pair of gloves after the backs of my exposed hands turned deep brown within the first week of cycling.

After an hour or so of pedalling alongside irrigation channels and empty fields, I stopped at a small village to find a restaurant that offered a bowl of beef noodle soup for 12 yuan. Back on the road, I became nervous when I realised I was passing an army compound, inside which soldiers were drilling in formation and yelling out “sha!” (杀! ‘kill!) slogans. I pulled my scarf up to cover my face and hastened my pace in case someone suspected me of being a foreign spy.

There were a couple of long concrete road bridges that spanned the Yellow River before I eventually reached the outskirts of Dongying. Suddenly, the road merged with another and became busy with traffic, and I had to pay attention to the cars and vans now rushing past me.

At a third bridge, I turned south and headed away from the river, towards the centre of Dongying. It was a raw industrial town with the local economy based on oil extraction and processing. A huge oil refinery covered several blocks and filled the air with acrid, sickly fumes. Beyond it, I came across the first of many backyard ‘pumpjack’ oil installation stations that I’d later see dotted about the region. Located incongruously in front of an apartment block, the pump’s horsehead beam was bobbing slowly up and down like a dinosaur bird pecking at the ground.

By late afternoon, I was pulling back up to the door of the Jufeng Hotel, where the reception staff welcomed me back like an old friend. 

“We don’t see many foreigners in Dongying; you are our first foreign guest,” beamed the young manager. “If you need anything, let me know,” he added, giving me his business card.

Not wanting to leave my bike outside the hotel overnight, I folded it up and carried it as discreetly as possible to the lift and up to my room. 

Shortly after I was startled by a sudden knock at the door. When I opened the door, a female hotel clerk stood smiling and proffering a bowl of fruit. “Ni hao - compliments of the manager,” she said.

I hoped the rest of my tour would be as easy as this first day on the Yellow River.

Route map: Yellow River Estuary to Dongying (click on image to enlarge)

 

Chapter 4. Hot springs and Jinan pancakes 东营 - 高青 - 济南

 I knew little about the first city on my route, Jinan (济南), except that it was known as the ‘city of springs’ - and that it was too far away to get there in one day by bike. My map showed no other major towns en route along the Yellow River, but it did show there was a hot spring complex at a place called Gaoqing (高青), about halfway to Jinan, although some distance from the river. I made that my goal.


Passing through the outskirts of Dongying on side roads, I was still in the oilfield territory and came across many small pumpjack installations in the most unlikely places, including children’s playgrounds and in backyards of residential apartments. 

Once I was out of town, I entered a flat semi-rural landscape that would have provided pleasant cycling under blue skies if not for one thing: trucks. The road was choked with the heavy tractor-trailer combinations (半挂车). They roared past me every few minutes, often travelling in groups of four or five, and often far too close for comfort. To add insult to injury, the trucks would often give a startling blast on their air horns as they passed.

The highway I was riding on was a secondary road as it had been superseded by a recently built multi-lane motorway that ran parallel to it. The toll road motorways excluded bikes like mine and other small vehicles, but the old secondary roads were still clogged with trucks and other large vehicles, whose drivers presumably did not want to pay the added expense of a toll.

Nevertheless, the route took me along some pleasant rural roads with occasional glimpses of the Yellow River. Riding atop the embankment running alongside the river, I passed orchards and crops of vegetables that looked like spring onions and cabbages. I was also surprised to see fields of grain, because my preconception of rural China was of rice paddies. 

The weather was sunny and mild, ideal for cycling - and also for picnics, judging by the large number of local people who were lolling in hammocks or sitting around small barbecue arrangements by the riverside. 

I’d expected this part of the China trip to be running through industrial areas with lots of factories and air pollution, but instead found myself pedalling through a rural landscape under blue skies, that might almost have been in central France. The trees were in blossom and there was some kind of fluff floating in the breeze. On one section of the river path, I had to cover my face with my scarf because there were caterpillars dangling down from threads from the trees.

The hot springs complex at Gaoqing was a sprawling array of grand buildings, like one of the more garish Las Vegas hotel strips. And yet, like most of the hotels I stayed at in provincial China, the room cost less than the price of a bunk bed in a Sydney backpacker hostel. I’d pre-booked online but was nevertheless apprehensive that hotels like this in non-tourist areas might refuse to accept me, as a foreigner. 

The reception staff were certainly surprised to see me, but became more relaxed and assured when they realised I spoke some Chinese. They struggled to read the English language in my passport and so we worked together to obtain the details they needed to input for the online police registration form. 

“Which one of these is your surname?” they would ask, pointing at my passport names. “What is this month ‘O-C-T’?”.

I would soon learn to have all the relevant information ready for hotel reception staff: the most important of which seemed to be a Chinese phone number. 

An official Public Security Bureau sign on the reception desk listed the onerous rules for hotel registration, and warned of big fines for providing false or incorrect information. The cartoon figures of a policeman and policewoman on the poster also warned hotel residents against engaging in the ‘Three Evils’ of drugs, gambling and prostitution on the premises. 

There were also warnings about scams, and more worrying for me, a stern instruction from police to uphold national security and be vigilant for anyone trying to ‘steal state secrets’. The hotel staff, however, did not seem to view me with suspicion.

The hot springs were actually just a couple of pools of greenish water in one wing of the hotel, enclosed in a glass conservatory. I had the main pool to myself except for one other older man who asked me if I was Russian. I told him who I was and about my plan to cycle along the Yellow River, in response to which he reeled off a list of places I should visit along the way. Unfortunately, I could barely understand a word of what he said because of his strong Shandong accent. As usual in such situations, I just nodded to him and offered an occasional “shi ma?” (是吗？‘is that so?’) which seemed to keep him happy.

Refreshed from my soaking in the pool, which had also removed the grime from the road, I went to look for something to eat. There weren’t any restaurants on the streets around the hotel, only basic barbecue stalls offering skewers of various meats, seafood and vegetables. 

I had to walk for half an hour through the warm evening air to find a restaurant that served up anything I recognised. Still uneasy about the notion of eating noodles for dinner, I opted for the basic staple of stir-fried egg and tomato. The friendly lady owner brought out her children and their friends to see me, the exotic foreigner. And in a ritual I would learn to experience on a daily basis, they all asked if they could take a selfie with me: “her ge yin ma?” (和个影吗?)

Route map: Dongying to Gaoqing (click on image to enlarge)

The next morning I set off early towards Jinan on a route along smaller roads that I’d chosen as a way to avoid the truck traffic on the main highway. The road followed a small canal-like waterway, the Xiaoqing river (小清河), that ran from Gaoqing almost all the way into the city of Jinan some 120 kilometres away. It was a good choice, because it was quiet and scenic.

My pedalling took me through a pleasant rural landscape of wheat fields under sunny skies for the whole of the next morning. For lunch, I stopped at a small town called Weiqiao (魏桥), where I found a halal (清真, qingzhen) restaurant offering beef noodles. The owner became enthused when I told him I was aiming to cycle to the upper reaches of the Yellow River.

“That is where we are from! We are not locals from Shandong, we are Muslims from Kanbula in Qinghai province. You definitely must visit there, it is a beautiful place,” he told me. I had heard of Kanbula, but did not know it was a Muslim area. I made a note to do more research about the area and to make it a stop-off on my ride later on the trip.

Back on the riverside road, I was in a good mood and counting down the kilometres towards Jinan when I heard a horrible sound of metal twanging from the rear wheel, like someone plucking a guitar string. One of the spokes had come loose. I made a temporary repair with adhesive tape, and continued to pedal on as carefully as possible towards Jinan, still some 40 kilometres away. Fortunately, I was able to reach the city without further mechanical problems, but the broken spoke was not a good omen for a bike that I had expected to carry me a thousand kilometres along the Yellow River into the centre of China.

Jinan was a big industrial city of 10 million people that had a modern city centre, bustling with shopping malls and side streets crammed with restaurants. I checked into a cheap hotel right in the downtown area opposite the Baotu Springs and bought myself a couple of German beers from the supermarket as a reward for completing the day’s 120-kilometre ride with a broken spoke.

The next morning I was lucky to find that a small city like Jinan had a Dahon specialist bike shop, where the friendly manager fixed my broken spoke for 150 yuan ($20). A bargain, if it kept me cycling. 

With the rest of the day off in Jinan, I wanted to go see the springs for which the city was famed. But first, I had a lunch date with some social media ‘fans’.

I had been posting about my Yellow River tour on Xiaohongshu, and had got a lot of comments and suggestions from people who lived along the route. A female follower in Jinan called Xizi invited me to lunch to try some local cuisine. I accepted, but when I arrived at the fancy restaurant she suggested, I began to fear that I might be walking into a scam, like the ‘tea house’ tricksters I’d heard about from foreigners in Shanghai.

"Never go to an unfamiliar restaurant with an unknown female who you’ve just met online,” the victims warned. ‘You will get a massive bill and be forced to pay up by local thugs,’ they said.

My fears were misplaced. Xizi and her two friends turned out to be delightful and generous company and the best young ambassadors for Jinan and Shandong.

The restaurant they chose was a place that specialised in Shandong ‘Lu Cai’ (鲁菜) cuisine, which I initially misheard and thought they were ordering fish dishes (‘Yu Cai’, 鱼菜). But once they corrected me and adapted to my basic grasp of Chinese, we settled in for a marvellous lunch. 

We started off with self-made pancakes comprising a paper-thin wrap into which we added a range of fillings including scallion, pickled vegetables, baked dough spirals, and spicy sauces. This was followed by an array of dishes that included creamy soup, home-style tofu and a variety of local vegetable and beef dishes mixed with noodles. All quite different from the spicy foods with rice that I was accustomed to having in Guilin.

Xizi and her friends told me about the cycling trips they’d done locally and about their travel to places such as Thailand and Nepal. And they had lots of questions about my trip, what gear I had brought, and what my tips were for trekking and cycle touring. 

“We don’t see many foreigners in Jinan. It’s our first opportunity to talk with you and share your ideas,” they said.

They presented me with a few small gifts, and we parted after an hour or so, with me having a much greater appreciation for Shandong food and the gentle but warm hospitality of Shandong folk. 

I tried to walk off the heavy lunch by visiting the Baotu Springs Park (趵突泉) where water from artesian wells bubbled up into ponds set amid classical Chinese buildings. The park had a memorial hall to one of China's most famous female poets, Li Qingzhao (李清照), of the Song dynasty. Her early writing from the 10th century was said to conjure up images of a playful youth and the simple delights of being among nature. The delicate words seemed very touching and incisive for such an ancient writer. I could not help thinking that in my home country of England there was no poetry in our own language from this era, and certainly none from women. We only had the ‘manly’ Viking verses of characters like Beowulf written in indecipherable ‘Old English’ that had warrior themes of fighting, glory, loyalty and death.

And yet at the same time, here was a female poet whose words sensitively portrayed her personal feelings of sadness and yearning for her home country that she experienced when forced to flee from the north to south China during an invasion of Shandong in the 10th century. In her poetry she used sophisticated literary techniques to convey nuances of emotion and meaning. Whereas in England, women did not even have the ability to read and write until many centuries later, with no female poets emerging for another 600 years, even after Shakespeare’s time.

Jinan was also famous for its night markets at Furong Jie (芙蓉街), where food stall offered all kinds of snacks I’d never seen before. Youxuan hot crispy pancakes, braised pork belly and egg in soy sauce with rice (把子肉), and even a special kind of dark fried stinky tofu that was dedicated to the national football team. But since I’d just stuffed my face with Shandong food at lunchtime, I just used the narrow alleyway as a thoroughfare to get to the city’s other landmark, the ornamental lake of Daming Hu (大明湖). 

Passing along the restored historical canal street of Qushuiting (曲水亭), this provided me with my first experience of seeing China’s Hanfu (汉服) traditional costume culture up close. There were rows of shops dedicated to hiring out garments for people of both sexes to dress up in a modern interpretation of Han clothing. The Hanfu shops also provided makeup and hairstyling, and their customers could be seen walking up and down the lanes, posing for photos by the waterside.

In Yellow River Odyssey, Bill Porter says that on his visit to Jinan in the winter of 1991, the park around Daming Lake was almost deserted. He hired a rowing boat on the lake and paddled out to an island where, in the year 745, the writer Du Fu (杜甫) and the regional official and esteemed calligrapher Li Yong (李邕) were said to have spent an evening together in the pavilion enjoying a banquet and drinking wine with other scholars 

During this soiree Du Fu was inspired to write one of his most well known poems, in which he expressed his satisfaction at being at home in the natural environment of Jinan and among the company of its cultured scholars. The poem also sums up the feelings of regret and humility at having to leave the company of such esteemed dinner companions. A couplet from the poem is reproduced on the pavilion that still stands on the island today. In translation, it reads "This pavilion on the right of the sea is ancient; in Jinan, there are many distinguished scholars”.

I had previously seen Du Fu’s old house in Chengdu and presumed he came from that city. My visit to Jinan taught me that there was much more to this wandering writer from 1300 years ago. 

In the spring of 2025, Daming Hu was anything but deserted: it was busy with young people strolling around the lake, which was hemmed in by high-rise office buildings. At the entrance gates, there were passenger trikes decorated with fairy lights and blaring out modern Mando-Pop. I wondered if Du Fu would still find it a location for a pleasurable experience to share a dinner with distinguished guests.

Reading Porter’s description of the city highlighted to me just how much Jinan had changed in 30 years: on his visit, there had been only one makeshift bridge over the 1kilometres wide Yellow River to the north of the city, with road traffic passing unsteadily over a pontoon arrangement based on barges. Back then, the city residents had to help pile up sandbags along the riverbank at this time of year to prevent the high spring season water levels from overflowing and flooding the streets. Now, the river levels were regulated by a system of multiple dams, and there were numerous modern road and rail bridges spanning the Yellow River at various points around Jinan.

After reading further chapters of Porter’s book, I decided to follow his example and make a detour south from the Yellow River to visit Taishan (泰山) and Qufu (曲阜), the heartland of Confucian tradition.

Route map: Gaoqing to Jinan

 

 

 

Chapter 5. Shandong scholars and sacred mountains 济南 - 泰山 - 曲阜

 Taishan wasn’t on my list of ‘must see’ places in China, but it definitely is for many Chinese, going by the more than 8 million visits a year reported for the most easterly of China’s ancient sacred peaks. Despite being only just over 1500 metres in altitude, Taishan has a lofty reputation in the national psyche of China, just as Mount Olympus has for Greece or Machu Picchu for the Incas. It is the place to go to see the sunrise and to visit the viewpoints that also attracted and inspired Confucius and China's first Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

Located about 60 kilometres south of the Yellow River at Jinan, I took a detour on the back roads to Taishan over the hills, across which the pedal assist of the e-bike came in very handy.

The first half of the journey was spent simply trying to escape the nightmarish traffic of Jinan, and in particular avoiding being hit by the swift electric scooters that rushed up silently from behind me. 

The minor road that I followed literally ran out just out of the city limits, at a place called Wohushan reservoir. The road was unfinished and simply ended at some waste ground under a motorway flyover, across which I had to push my bike to join up with another road that took me up into the hills. I enjoyed perfect clear skies, sunshine and 20-degree temperatures as I ascended a gentle incline into what was rustic farmland holiday villa territory. 

The villages on the northern slopes of Taishan must have been designated for tourism because they had been prettified with flowers and had refurbished water channels lined with willow and plum trees, their stone buildings scrubbed and smartened up to appeal to sightseers, of whom I saw none.

Maybe it was because it was midweek in the off-season, but I had the picturesque lanes and villages all to myself. If I was a serious scholar of classical China I would have stopped at the ancient Buddhist Lingyan monastery (灵岩寺), one of the four great temples of China, and established in the Qin dynasty. I could have seen its famous Tang dynasty Thousand Buddha Hall (千佛殿) with its 40 lifelike statues of Arhats posing with different expressions conveying joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. I could also have seen the octagonal nine-storey Pizhi Pagoda (辟支塔) built in the 11th century and the 1600-year old gingko trees. 

The Ming dynasty scholar Wang Shizhen said, "If you visit Mount Tai but don't go to Lingyan, then you haven't truly toured." This means that I missed out on touring because I bypassed the temple, because I was intent on reaching the West Gate of Taishan and finding somewhere to stay. After surmounting a modest ‘pass’, I freewheeled down the narrow road zigzagging through rocky scrub terrain, passing orchards and clusters of beehives that could have been rural Italy or Greece as much as northern China.

The road eventually bottomed out and I arrived at a new tourist precinct with a wide avenue that led me to a near-empty car park and one of the official gateways for Taishan mountain park. The crags of the western side of the mountain loomed above me. The hotel I had pre-booked lay just beyond the entrance gate, but nobody stopped me from entering the park to find the idyllic setting of the Taohuayuan (Peach Garden) Guesthouse. I checked in without any fuss, and again appeared to be one of few, if any, guests. The manageress showed me to my tatami-style room and then retired back to her snoozing on a lounge chair in the hallway.

After a simple dinner of stir-fried egg noodles at an empty snack bar near the gatehouse, I retired with a bottle of Kronenbourg to the hotel garden to enjoy the late afternoon and evening sun amid birdsong and the croaking of unseen frogs in the garden’s pond and artificial backyard stream.

The reason for the relative seclusion and tranquility of the Peach Garden Hotel was that the vast majority of visitors to Taishan enter at the south gate via the nearby city of Tai’an (泰安). I only realised this when I ascended the mountain the next day as one of the few users of the cable car from the west gate. Feeling somewhat self-satisfied after having again secured a senior citizen’s discount on my ticket, I emerged from the summit station to be swept up in a mass of people equipped with trekking poles and hired red overcoats, all intent on reaching the summit at the Jade Emperor Temple a little further along the trail. 

Most visitors to Taishan aim to walk the thousands of steps up from the main temple complex on the south side, and the ones around me must have set off very early in the morning to have reached this high point by 10 m. I went along with the boisterous crowds, soon feeling tired after ascending just a few flights of the stone steps whose edges had been worn smooth by the passage of millions of feet.

It was a perfectly clear morning with blue skies and there were excellent views in all directions from the multiple viewing points around the table-like flat summit of Taishan. Once I ascended to the Jade Emperor Temple I could look down to see a continual wave of additional visitors ascending up the long series of stairways from the Tai'an direction. 

I was standing on one of the most important spiritual sites in China. This Taoist temple was dedicated to the Jade Emperor, the supreme ruler of Heaven in Chinese mythology, and had been a place of worship dating back to the Han dynasty. 

Why was it so important? Bill Porter’s book told me that in Chinese mythology, the world was created by a primordial being called Pan Gu, who when he had carved out a space between heaven and earth’ lay down to rest forever. His feet became the sacred mountain of Huashan near Xi’an, his abdomen became the central sacred mountain of Songshan, near Luoyang, and his head became the eastern sacred mountain of Taishan. Since the head was the most revered part of the body, Taishan became the most revered mountain of all the sacred peaks. I would visit all these mountains as part of my Yellow River tour.

Located at the highest point on Taishan, the Jade Dragon Temple was the place where China’s emperors came to perform the sacred Feng and Shan sacrifices—rituals to honour Heaven and Earth, and also to mark their coronations. One of the first to do so was China’s first great emperor Qin Shi Huang, back in the century beyond 200 BC. It was possibly Qin Shi Huang who erected an unusual stone stele outside the temple, which has no words written on it. Some archaeologists have speculated this was because Qin believed no words could describe this sacred spot. However, I learned that other academics believed the No Words Stone may have been erected during the subsequent Han dynasty.

In the temple itself were two pavilions: from one there was a view of the Yellow River, named after the female deity of Taishan, the Primordial Princess of Rainbow Clouds. The other pavilion provided a view of the rising sun, and it had once been the place where pilgrims would stay overnight to see in the first light of the new dawn. It could not accommodate the many hundreds of visits who now come to see the sunrise on Taishan

For that, I hiked across to the weather station on the north-eastern side of the summit to find the spot called Riguan peak where many modern visitors make for in the early hours to await the sunrise.  

I then hopped over some crags to a spot marked as “Viewing Lu (Shandong) State”, where Confucius is supposed to have been inspired to make his profound saying that “from high on the mountain the world looks small”.

“Master Kong” came to Taishan to pay his respects to heaven and seek inspiration in nature, because it was not far from his home town of Qufu, some 70kilometres to the west. The actual observation attributed to Confucius by Mencius was that when he first ascended the East Peak, his home state of Lu appeared small, and when he climbed further to the summit, the entire world became small. 

The wisdom of these simple but profound words can come from different interpretations relating to putting things in perspective. As you go higher and further in learning and cultivation, you gain a wider view of things: the higher you rise, the further you can see. It can also mean that as you push yourself higher, your perspective expands so that matters and challenges that once seemed overwhelming now seem smaller and less significant.

The perspectives from the summit of Taishan were indeed grand in all directions, but so was the size of the crowds. It was no longer a place for solitude and Confucian contemplation, and I did not linger for long. There were food stalls and trinket sellers, and overpriced guesthouses offering rooms for 1000 yuan a night for anyone who wanted to be up early for the sunrise. 

I thought about trying the walking trail back down the mountain, but the path was blocked off by a security guard who told me brusquely that would-be hikers needed to download an app and register their ID details before being allowed onto the trail, just in case they got lost or had an accident. I opted instead to go back down the cableway.

This time I shared the cable car with a mother and daughter who eyed me warily and must have assumed I did not understand Chinese. They made a few quiet comments about my presence, speculating on what ‘this American’ was doing alone at Taishan. I didn’t correct them about my nationality. 

The other occupant, an older woman, then spoke up to say that she was from Taiwan and that she was familiar with Americans, of whom she said there were many in Taiwan. Ignoring my presence, the lady from Taipei went on to enthuse to the mother and daughter about all the places she had visited around China. 

She listed all the places she had visited: Beijing, Xi’an, Huashan, Emeishan, saying how wonderful they were. “Much more scenery and history than we have in Taiwan,” she said.

The Taiwanese woman then told her captive audience that high living costs were high in Taiwan and wages were low, but she was able to enjoy travelling because she worked hard and was good at business. I was glad when we reached the end of the cable car ride and could escape her self-important boasting.

(Looking south) Jinan to Taishan (click on image to enlarge)

To follow up my visit to Confucius’ viewing point on Taishan, the next day I made an excursion a further 90 kilometres south to Qufu, the hometown of ‘Master Kong’ (Kongzi, 孔子) who lived there in the sixth century BC. This was the era of the Zhou dynasty, whose capital cities lay between present day Xi’an and Luoyang - two places that I would soon be visiting just off my Yellow River route.

It was a simple ride across Tai’an and down a major highway until I reached the curved city walls of the place where descendents of the Kong clan still made up the majority of the 200,000 town population.

To be honest I didn’t have much interest in Confucius, but since the culture of Confucianism seems to back in official favour in China, I thought it would be worth a visit. And after reading a bit about the history of Confucius I was also fascinated by the family continuity of someone who had lived in the same era as the Old Testament prophets.  I was amazed to learn that the direct lineal descendant of Confucius had lived in Qufu until just a few decades ago when he had fled to Taiwan to become an official in the education ministry. It was as if the heir to the family of Prophet Isaiah or Ezekiel had living descendents in Palestine who were working in the civil service.

 Most westerners haven’t even heard of the Zhou dynasty. But it was one of the key periods in the development of classical Chinese civilisation: it was the time when different philosophies such as Confucian thought, Daoism and legalism emerged. It was also a long era, spanning many centuries, when different states were at war with each other, prior to the emergence of a unified China in the later Qin dynasty. 

I was reminded of the famous line about European civilisation spoken by Orson Welles character Harry Lime in The Third Man film: “In Italy, for years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance . In Italy they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”.

From Taishan it was a simple bike ride across Tai’an and down a major highway along level countryside until I reached the curved city walls of Qufu, the place where descendants of the Kong clan still made up the majority of the 200,000-strong town population.

After reading a bit about the history of Confucius, I became fascinated by the family continuity of someone who had lived in the same era as the Old Testament prophets (551–479 BC).  I was amazed to learn that the direct lineal descendants of Confucius had continued to live in Qufu for 80 generations until just a few decades ago, when the immediate family fled to Taiwan and the latest son in the ‘Kong’ lineage became an official in the education ministry. It was as if the heir to the family of Prophet Jeremiah had living descendants in Jerusalem who were working in the civil service.

I knew little about Confucius. Like many westerners, my perception of him was of a wise scholar and sage who guided the emperor and his officials on how to govern and with cryptic pronouncements about the correct way to do things. There are numerous false statements attributed to him, and when I was growing up his name was often used in sarcastic jokes that began: “Confucius he say …” that ended with a blindingly obvious bit of common sense, to make fun of people who made simple mistakes.

The reality, as I learned in Qufu, was that Confucius was neither well known nor particularly successful during his lifetime, when he was a provincial official in what was then known as the state of Lu in Shandong. His ideas about the importance of governance, education and family relations garnered little attention or influence even his own state of Lu - hence why he gave up his position and went travelling for 14 years with a few followers in a fruitless bid to seek another ruler who would be receptive to his ideas.

Confucius' teachings were only taken up widely many centuries after his death after being interpreted by other greats such as Mencius. 

The town of Qufu was something of a Confucius theme park, but in an authentic way. Within the city walls, I rode around the tree-lined streets to pay a visit to the Kong Family Mansion and the adjacent Confucian Temple. There were many Chinese visitors, but the vast scale of the complex meant that it never seemed overcrowded, and the atmosphere was respectful and subdued compared to the crowds of Taishan. I didn’t know enough about the history of Confucius to appreciate the many steles and memorial halls in the grounds of the temple complex, but I saw enough to observe that the reverence for Confucianism and its values was genuine and not just some superficial state-backed hero worship or superstition campaign.

My ignorance about Confucius meant that I had perceived his legacy to be little more than ‘obey your father/boss and do a lot of rote learning to pass exams’. Why, then, had his teaching persisted for thousands of years? 

When looking in more detail at his writings, it’s more understandable why the values, morals and behaviours he promoted would resonate with so many people - and still remain relevant in our modern age. The ‘five virtues’ are universal values that someone like me raised as a Christian would recognise from the Bible: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness.

Treating others with compassion, empathy and generosity, for example, is the same message we were taught from the Gospels that said “Do unto others as you would have them do to you. “ Or as Confucius put it:  "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself." 

Similarly for values such as humility, honesty and taking the moral course of action rather than one that would benefit you personally. And does it not say Honour Thy Father and Mother in the Bible. Perhaps the main difference for me was how Confucius taught that these values should be applied in governance and not just for the individual. It seems obvious, but who would argue that politicians should behave ethically, earn the people's respect and govern fairly, putting public welfare above personal interest. As Confucius said: "If the ruler is upright, all will go well without orders."

I saw some of these values on display during my visit to the Confucius family tombs, set in a large area of tranquil forest park in the northern part of Qufu. For a national cultural landmark, the actual tomb marker at the Confucius grave site was remarkably humble and austere. There were just a few visitors paying respects at the stone tablet that was not behind any barriers and could be approached and touched by hand.

(Looking south east) Jinan to Qufu

 

And perhaps not surprisingly for the hometown of a scholar of virtue and education, the people of Qufu seemed to have a noble, genteel bearing. I went to a bike shop to have another troublesome wheel spoke attended to, and the owner gave me a patient explanation of the problem and what I needed to do about it, refusing any payment for the adjustment he made. After I thanked him, he also advised me to avoid the touristy restaurants around the city wall and gave me the address of a local restaurant where I could sample some genuine Qufu home cooking. And so at the simple eatery just a few doors away, I got to sample some ‘Kong family’ smoked tofu and local Qufu pancakes for just a few yuan.