Although only 200 kilometres away as the crow flies, it took me almost a week to pedal to the loess hills of Longmen from Xi’an, because I took the scenic route.
Picking up my new bike from the Giant dealership in Xi’an, I spent half a day having it tweaked by the mechanic. He gave me some free panniers but I had little use for them because I had whittled down my kit to the basics that could be stored in four stuffsacks. I had a ‘bathroom bag’ for toiletries, a clothes bag that contained spare socks and underwear, and a gadgets bag that held all the bits and pieces needed to maintain the bike and recharge my batteries.
The food bag was the bulkiest because it held a large quantity of Yorkshire Tea bags, my Vietnamese Phin coffee pot and some coffee grounds, and a heavy bag of muesli that I’d picked up in Xi’an. The breakfast buffet offered by Chinese hotels typically consisted of steamed bread mantou to be consumed with pickled vegetables and a hard boiled egg, a bowl of noodles and some rice porridge. I preferred to start the day with a cuppa, some muesli with yoghurt, followed by a small cup of strong black espresso style coffee made with the Phin method.
After dodging the e-scooter delivery riders on the streets of Xi’an, I pedalled back along the Wei river (渭河)tributary towards Huashan. The highway ran alongside the railway, and white Hexie trains swished past on concrete stilts above the wheatfields around Weinan (渭南).
The first day was a breaking in period for the new bike, an opportunity for me to discover its capabilities and quirks. On the level road it seemed to manage about 80 kilometres of pedal assist per battery, using the lowest ‘economy’ level. It rode very well but the Selle Royale saddle was uncomfortable and left me with a sore backside after a day on the road. I wish I’d kept the Brooks saddle from the Dahon. The other niggling feature of the new bike was a beeping sensor, which the mechanic had said was a legal requirement for e-bikes in China, triggered when the ‘speed limit’ of 15 km/hour was exceeded - which was most of the time in my experience.
From Huashan I intended to visit some of the historic small towns and locations along the banks of the Yellow River on my way up north to Longmen. I was using Bill Porter’s 1991 book as a kind of travel guide to the temples and historic towns in the area, but was to find them very much changed from the neglected and empty places he described from his visits.
My first destination was the Yongle Palace (永乐宫), situated on the north bank of the Yellow River in a town called Ruicheng (芮城). To reach it I crossed the river over one of the few bridges in the region, at the site of the old fort of the Tong Pass (潼关) that guarded the strategic location where the river turns sharply east.
I was crossing into Shanxi, and into coal mining country. The road became hillier and I was soon testing the capacity of my dual batteries to provide pedal assistance over the many ups and downs of the journey.
The Yongle Gong was one of China’s most famous Taoist temples founded in 1247 and looked ancient, even though the location actually wasn't. The buildings had been relocated to the north of Ruicheng from their original site close to the Yellow River in the 1950s, to avoid being inundated by the rising waters after the construction of the Sanmenxia Dam. In Porter’s book he says he was the only visit to the temples, but they now attracted a stream of studious Chinese visitors who came to see the elaborate Taoist murals.
Located in old wooden temple buildings, the extensive floor to ceiling paintings depicted scenes from the lives of the ancient Taoist masters. The colourful and detailed scenes of bewhiskered officials paying tribute to the likes of Kublai Khan were indeed incredible, and grabbed my attention so much that I failed to see the ‘no photography’ sign until chided by a Chinese woman who snitched on me to the security guard.
Another temple that demanded my attention was the one over the hills in Jiezhou (解州), dedicated to the Chinese God of War, Guandi. After lunch in Ruicheng I took advantage of my second battery to assist me pedalling up the twisting road that crossed the Jufeng Mountain range. A new motorway cut through the hills with a long tunnel, but I crawled slowly up the hillside that was covered with hundreds of solar panels amid the fields of corn. It took me longer than expected, and when I finally reached the top in the late afternoon I was so tired that I was content to just take in the view of the plains and salt pans below, and descend slowly down the switchback road to find somewhere to stay in Jiezhou.
There was only one decrepit looking hotel on the main street, and the manager on duty at the reception was unusually frank with his advice that I would not want to stay there.
“But we have a much nicer new hotel just down the road if you want to have a look,” he said. I pedalled after his car as he led me down a side road for about a kilometre to a newly built small hotel, where the rest of his family welcomed me and helped me take the bags off my bike and up to a room still smelling of new paint. Once cleaned up I walked back into the centre of Jiezhou to see what Shanxi had to offer in terms of food. The answer was a bowl of dapanji (大盘鸡, a spicy casserole of chicken and potatoes) washed down with a cold beer.
Jiezhou’s Guandi temple (关帝庙) was dedicated to the God of War sometimes known as Kuan-ti or Lord Guan. It was the largest of its kind in China, and notable for its elaborate and symmetrical wooden architecture as much as the murals of the noble lord himself. One of the most common figures depicted in Chinese folklore, Guandi was the red-faced, black-bearded warrior hero. He was revered more for this reputation for taking up the fight for justice and defending the downtrodden rather than for soldiering or general-ship. He was said to embody the values of bravery, loyalty and standing up for what is noble and correct.
It made sense that his hometown of Jiezhou had the most important temple dedicated to Guandi, and it has certainly developed in popularity a lot since Bill Porter’s visit in 1991, when he appeared to be the only visitor other than a courting couple seeking some privacy. There was a line of would-be visitors when I arrived at opening time, but the large grounds of the Guandi temple did not feel overcrowded. And for a God of War, his temple was a surprisingly peaceful place, with shady trees and ponds, and even a corner dedicated to stray animals where cats and peacocks lazed on patches of fenced-off grass.
I did not linger for too long at the Guandi temple because I had a lot of ground to cover to reach the historic town of Hancheng (韩城), 100 kilometres away on the western side of the Yellow River. The journey started well with a crossing of the ancient salt lake of Xiaochi (硝池) by means of a narrow causeway. There was a wealth of bird life around this waterway that had been one of the first places in China - if not the world - where primitive people had learned that they could harvest salt and use it to preserve food. This access to reserves of food enabled the communities around Xiaochi to grow, expand and become more mobile than those which still depended on subsistence farming. The salt from this small lake thus became a valuable commodity, and the control of it ultimately led to the development of regional and later national power centres.
My map app steered me towards a road bridge across the Yellow River at the site of an ancient ferry crossing called Wuwang Gudu (吴王古渡). This gave me my first experience of loess country because after a long trip over the plain, the descent to the river was down a steep gully backed by towering cliffs of loess clay. The river ran wide and sandy at the foot of the cliff, but to my shock and disappointment there was no bridge to be seen. Peering into the distance, I could see that just a few pontoons of the old bridge remained on the opposite side of the river, where construction of new concrete bridge pillars seemed to be underway.
Wuwang Gudu consisted of little more than a car park, viewing platform, and a shack containing a restaurant specialising in the local delicacy of river carp. I asked the restaurant boss if there was another way to cross the river to Hancheng and he just waved upriver and told me there was a ‘big bridge’ about an hour away. I could not see anything on my map.
I could not face a climb back up the long steep road up the gully, so I turned my bike north and set off along the riverside road. I was already on to my second battery and estimated I had about 50-60 kilometres of power reserve remaining. I was going to need every bit.
The riverside road was new and had been built specifically as a ‘Yellow River Scenic Route’ according to the many signs and markers along the roadside. It was marked with red, blue and yellow lines down the centre, denoting a tourist road and had plenty of new infrastructure along the way, including rest areas, playgrounds, car parks and viewing platforms. But no tourists. I cycled for an hour, covering about 25 kilometres and saw few cars, no people and no villages or shops en route. I could see a bridge in the distance, but when it eventually hauled into view, it was a rail bridge. After another half an hour of peddling I could see the high rises of Hancheng town looking tantalisingly close on the opposite side of the river, but with no way to reach it.
My map showed another bridge on massive concrete stilts about 10 kilometres distant, but this appeared to carry a motorway over the river and would not be open to bikes. Even if it did, the only way to access the motorway was to make a 15 kilometres detour away from the river to the nearest intersection.
By the end of the hot afternoon my water bottles were empty and my battery down to one bar of power: I had to find somewhere nearby to rest and replenish. I eventually found a side road that led me back up the clay cliffs and out of the river plain, towards a small town called Ronghe (荣河). It had a hotel marked on the map - but would they accept a foreigner? To my immense relief, they did. Ronghe was little more than a one street village but the manageress of the Rongjia Hotel welcomed me with sympathy after she heard my story of being stranded on the ‘wrong’ side of the river. Other staff and friends gathered round to hear me deliver my now familiar spiel about cycling the Yellow River, to which they gave their thumbs up, and told me about other places in the locality that were worth visiting.
I drank a lot of water, changed out of my dirty sweaty clothes and was finally able to relax knowing that I would not be forced to spend the night out on the road.
The hotel was new, comfortable and I was one of the few residents. Relaxing with a beer after a shower and something to eat, I found myself in a scenario that I was to experience many times on the trip ahead: after a long and uncertain day on the road travelling through wilderness I would suddenly find myself ensconced in a comfy hotel, preparing to do the same thing the following day. I opened the map and began to plot a new route to Longmen, via the eastern side of the Yellow River.
After the dramas of the missing bridge, it was a relief to have an ‘easy’ day of 45 kilometres cycling along the banks of the Yellow River. Back on the tourist route, I had dull brown clay cliffs and escarpments on my right hand side and the terraces of crops and fishponds on the river plain on my left. The river at this point was more than a kilometre wide and its water almost out of sight in the distance beyond sandbars and grassy mudflats. As was my daily routine by now, once I had found the route I put in earphones and listened to podcasts or recordings of BBC radio shows from the early 1980s: John Peel introducing his listeners to ‘new’ bands such as Joy Division and the Cure as I pedalled past farmers setting up crop spraying drones or being overtaken by Chinese sightseers in their BYD electric cars.
I never got to see the historic hutongs of ancient Hancheng’s ‘Little Beijing’ district on the west side of the river and had to make-do instead with the coffee and cake shops of modern Hejin (河津) on the eastern side. This fortified me for the final stretch into Longmen, which took me through a grim industrial landscape of power stations, railway yards and coking works.
I’d pre-booked what looked like a rather grand hotel that was close to the start of the Longmen Gorge, where the Yellow River emerges from its narrow canyon. When my bike rolled up to the entrance, I found that it was part of a run-down industrial complex at the end of a row of worker’s tenement apartments. It sat next to a railway line where freight trains disgorged coal at a sprawling industrial complex of pipes and furnaces that was stunning in its ugliness. According to my map, this was the Shanxi Sunny Coking Group whose business was “raw coal washing and sorting, coke smelting, tar processing and gas production.” This spectacular eyesore sat right next to one of China’s greatest natural wonders, the Dragon's Gate.
Just a few hundred metres down the road was a place of national legend where historically there was supposed to have been waterfalls marking where the Yellow River emerges from the Longmen gorge into the Shanxi floodplain. The silver carp native to the Yellow River were said to migrate up to this point, with the strongest leaping up the falls into the gorge beyond where the spawning grounds were. In Chinese mythology the Jade Emperor had said that any carp strong enough to leap the falls would be transformed into dragons. This in turn led to the saying: “leaping the Dragon's Gate” being used to describe those students who successfully passed China’s imperial examinations. This later became an idiom used widely across the Confucian societies of East Asia to describe the attainment of success and advancement through perseverance and hard work.
The real world Dragon’s Gate is now blocked by a dam with a railway line running over it. The migrating carp must still be present in the river, as evidenced by the fish restaurants along the riverbank at the base of the dam advertising them as dishes. If and how they still manage to leap up to the higher reaches of the Yellow River was not made clear.
Beyond the dam there is a sudden transformation from the industrial lowland to a wild forested gorge. I bought a ticket at the Longmen Scenic Area Tourist Centre that gave me access to the hillside around the gorge, and paid an extra fee to ride an outdoor escalator under a plastic canopy to take me up to the top of one of the hills.
It was midweek and there was hardly anyone about when I reached a platform that led to a few unattended fairground rides. Beyond that was a wooden walkway that led up to other attractions such as a slide and a glass-bottomed bridge over a gully. The ‘amusements’ were a tawdry distraction from the remarkable views below. To the south was the wide river with its sandbanks surmounted by a long suspension bridge. The railway lines and factories now looked like parts of a model train set. To the north was the first - or final - bend in the Longmen Gorge. Rocky cliffs dropped vertically to a narrow thread of green water. The river here was no longer yellow, shallow and silty, but clear, deep and its still surface broken only by a small sightseeing launch.
The tourist path continued round a corner from where it emerged as a cliff trail spiralling around to the summit of a distant pinnacle. It was labelled as the Hero’s Track, and my fear of heights meant I was too cowardly to walk it.
I returned downhill by a different route of many steps, passing a Buddhist grotto until being disgorged out onto the busy highway, where an Anti-Japanese Martyrs Monument had a statue of soldiers rising on a flat bottomed craft entitled “Wang Zhen’s army rushing across the river”.
The monument was a reminder of the large-scale battles that took place between Japanese and Chinese forces in southern Shanxi from 1938 to 1941. At this time, preceding Pearl Harbour and the Japanese expansion into SE Asia, six Japanese army divisions inflicted heavy losses on Chinese forces on the eastern side of the Yellow River in Shanxi. However the Japanese were not able to push their forces across the river or to extend their invasion west of the river into Shaanxi, where Xi’an was under Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) control and Yan’an further north was the base for Mao’s Red Army.
Back at the edifice of the Longmen Hotel I chatted with the staff who were eager to tell me about the local legends and inform me that I was the first foreigner they had seen in the area. News of my visit must have travelled fast on the local grapevine because the waitress in a worker’s canteen where I went for dinner told me: “Welcome. You must be the Englishman we have all heard about.”
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