My detour to pay homage to Confucius at Qufu had taken me 100 kilometres south of the Yellow River and now I had to regain the river somehow. There were no other places of interest before the city of Kaifeng, some 250 kilometres distant, so I made a beeline for the place across the south Shandong plain. It took me two days of hard pedalling along truck-congested secondary roads.
Along the way I stopped in unremarkable small industrial towns like Juye (巨野) and Zhuangzhai (庄寨), where the people were friendly and my Gaode app led me to craft beer outlets. This was a novel and welcome phenomenon for me in China - and a sign that the government’s aim of developing a ‘moderately prosperous’ society was permeating to the grassroots towns of provincial China. It was refreshing to down a glass of cold beer after pedalling 80 kilometres on a warm spring day, and these backyard breweries usually offered German and Belgian-style wheat beers. They also produced a range of tea-flavoured brews that were not to my taste: it was like drinking cold tea mixed with beer.
On my route I passed through smaller cities like Heze (菏泽), which seemed to consist of row after row of newly built apartments, and little sign of any historical remnants or old city. Every town would have a few major shopping malls with retail outlets for expensive brand name clothes and jewellery. It was another sign of China’s move to a middle class society that even small towns now had shops specialising in selling non-essential consumer items and services: fancy teas, wellness and beauty products and a vast array of digital gadgets.
People here obviously had disposable incomes and the time and inclination to indulge in leisure and lifestyle pursuits that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. One example noticeable to me was the number of ‘professional’ cyclists on the roads. Riding high-end brand road bikes such as Specialized and Giant, and wearing lycra and expensive cycling helmets and goggles, China’s new cyclist consumers would give me a thumbs up when they saw me crawling along on my pint-size folding bike.
Zhuangzai was the last town in Shandong before crossing the border into Henan. It was here that I encountered my first hotel refusal. Despite booking online in advance, the bored-looking manager of the Homely Hotel (入家酒店, Rujia Jiudian ) told me they did not accept foreigners. I knew that government regulations now decreed that all hotels were open to foreigners, but I was too tired to put up much of an argument after a long day pedalling against a headwind. I cancelled my booking just before the 6pm deadline to get a refund, and pushed on another five kilometres down the road to stay at an ‘international’ hotel situated right next to a power station.
It didn’t take me long to get over the rejection as I found another craft beer outlet, where the staff insisted I sampled each of their new product lines and give them a consumer verdict. And as was becoming the norm with these encounters, we took a few selfies and a video clip and added each other as contacts on WeChat. “Tell the world about our beer! And leave us a good review!” they urged me as I staggered away to find some food.
I liked the people of Shandong. They had the directness and honesty of northern China, with a bit of old-world nobility and civility. Sometimes branded as stubborn and conservative in their ways, but I found Shandong folk to be friendly and unpretentious. Salt of the earth.
I can’t say I noticed an immediate change in the character of the people when I crossed over into Henan the next morning, but I certainly noticed a change in the roads. I’d taken for granted the wide and well-built highways of Shandong during my cycling of the previous week. But the last stage of my ride into Kaifeng was along a narrow, potholed road that was swarming with trucks. The road was lined with ugly motor repair yards and tyre replacement shops and I continued to battle against a strong headwind. As if to mock me, a high speed rail line ran parallel to the road, and I dearly wished I was riding on one of the smooth white bullet trains that swished past every ten minutes.
Kaifeng, when I finally made it into the city centre, was a blessed relief from the awful Henan highway. Once within the city walls I found myself in the midst of an ‘old town’ centred around a large lake. It reminded me of the centre of Hanoi and its West Lake. I also had the good fortune to alight on a cosy family-run homestay right next to the lake, where the friendly owners pointed me in the direction of a restaurant that served up the celebrated local dish of guantang bao (灌汤包).
These delicious soup-filled dumplings, similar to xiaolong bao, had made the news the previous year when students from nearby Zhengzhou started a trend of night cycling to Kaifeng to sample of the local dish. Popularised by social media videos, the night cycling dumpling quest soon went ‘viral’ with tens of thousands of students making the 50 kilometre journey. Inevitably, local authorities quickly cracked down on this ‘mass movement’ and imposed restrictions on Zhengzhou students to stop the rides to Kaifeng. The trend was certainly not evident at the half-empty Songdu Heyuan restaurant that I was directed to, where the dumplings were excellent and the cost a mere 18 yuan.
Kaifeng seemed to get a lot of negative reviews from travellers, decrying it as an industrial city with a fake recreated ‘old city’, but I enjoyed my day off exploring the landmarks. My homestay was right next to the lakeside Lord Bao Memorial Temple (开封包公祠), where the early morning tai chi groups were practising. I chose to have my morning latte further north at another lake, Panjia Hu (潘家湖), close to the Longting Park (龙亭共园) .
East of the lake was a delightful warren of hutong-style back streets which I passed through on the bike on my way to see the famous Iron Pagoda (Tieta, 铁塔). It wasn’t really iron, but its brown glazed tiles made it look metallic. Built during the Song dynasty when Kaifeng had been one of the largest cities in the world, the Iron Pagoda’s tiles were imprinted with Buddhist figurines. The ones at ground level had had their faces and heads chipped and scraped off, presumably during the Cultural Revolution. But the remaining 50 metres of the tower contained a huge variety of different images that must have taken years to finish.
I visited another tiled pagoda of a very different kind on the south edge of Kaifeng’s old city. The Fanta (繁塔) pagoda was a squat hexagonal structure hidden behind a jumble of scruffy workshops and wasteland. Up close it was a wonderful example of old world China. Enclosed within a small white wall and with a few gnarly trees for shade, the stone pagoda was covered with tiles, each of which had a small statue of a Buddhist figure within a circular frame. At one time these brown tiles had been painted in lively colours, and a few had been restored to their original condition and displayed by the steps leading up to the pagoda.
There were figures playing lutes and flutes, blowing into shells, squeezing an accordion-like instrument and tapping on small drums. The Buddhist Beatles. The inscription said the pagoda had been built by hand by a single monk in the Song dynasty. It had been made as a repository of Buddha relics and later and later been part of a temple complex that housed 400 monks and teachers.
On a more modern musical note there was a group of local schoolgirls using the pagoda forecourt to practice their K-Pop dance moves and recording themselves on their phones. Overhead, a procession of military cargo planes were also practicing their moves , performing formation flypasts from the nearby Kaifeng airport.
To finish the day I cycled back north to seek out an obscure monument mentioned by Bill Porter in his Yellow River Odyssey book from 1991. I found the statue of the ‘river-controlling iron rhinoceros’ (治江铁犀牛) in an unattended small park on the north east outskirts of Kaifeng. Mounted on a plinth under a small roof, the ornamental rhino was cloaked in a robe and festooned with red ribbons. An inscription next to it described how the iron rhino had been installed by Henan governor Yu Qian (于谦) as part of his river defences programme in response to numerous episodes of disastrous overflows and floods that left Kaifeng wallowing in a ‘yellow soup’.
The governor built up the river embankments, installed regular watchtowers and maintenance teams and dug moats, canals and breakwaters to divert river floodwaters away from the city. He also had the iron rhino statue erected facing the river to satisfy the local legend that the floods were caused by a river monster. According to traditional beliefs, iron was a strong ‘earth’ element that could conquer the ‘water’ element.
Unfortunately, neither the strengthened defences nor the superstitious statue was enough to prevent repeated flooding, and the rhino was washed away on two separate occasions. Nevertheless it was recovered, installed in a riverside temple and became a place where locals came to pay respect to the former governor and his efforts to control the river.
In the 1930s the iron rhinoceros was removed by the invading Japanese army, who planned to melt it down for scrap iron to make weapons. But the rhinoceros was saved when local people banded together to raise money and pay a bribe to the officials of the ‘puppet collaborationist regime’ to have the statue saved and hidden away until after the war. For whatever reason, the Kaifeng authorities chose to leave the iron rhino as an uncelebrated monument to the city’s long-lasting efforts to resist floods - and invaders.
The next morning, before I left Kaifeng I had to make a final stop to see what I could find out about one of the city’s most unusual historical episodes - its Jewish community. There are records of Jews living in Kaifeng from the time of the Song dynasty, as early as the 12th century. At one time numbering as many as 2000 people, the Kaifeng Jews may have been merchants who travelled along the Silk Road from Persia. Some may have come from the coastal cities of China where there were also communities of merchants from the Middle East until the 16th century.
At one time Kaifeng had its own synagogue, but it had disappeared by19th century as the Jewish community gradually assimilated with the local Chinese population. In recent years some Kaifeng residents have claimed to be descendents of the Jewish community and a few have even migrated to Israel based on their Jewish identity.
One of the key pieces of evidence of the Jewish presence in Kaifeng are stelae (stone tablets) dating from the 15th and 16th centuries which are inscribed with the names of Jewish residents and describing the granting of land to build a synagogue. The stelae were reported to be kept at the Kaifeng Museum, so I cycled out to far west of the city to see the recently opened new museum.
Like many Chinese public buildings the new museum was a colossal and imposing edifice, designed to impress. Set on a wide open square, it had high sloping walls and pyramid-like stone corner turrets, like something from an alien planet in a sci-fi film. However, after going inside through an airport-style security check the interior of the museum was cramped and claustrophobic. Only a few of the halls were open, and these displayed dull exhibits of pottery and diorama recreations of the ancient capital. A couple of rooms had some Buddhist statues and examples of stelae, but I could find no mention of the ones recording the Jewish community, not even replicas or rubbings. I went to the information desk to ask about them, only to be told that they had no such display in the museum.
Disappointed and puzzled, I left the museum to collect my bike that I’d locked up on the roadside outside the entrance. Next stop, Zhengzhou.
With a population of 11 million people, Zhengzhou is one of those Chinese megacities that most people have never heard of. It took me more than two hours to pedal through its sprawling suburbs into the city centre, passing the guarded gateways of universities and futuristic high-tech factories (they make iPhones here) and also some weird real estate developments that had weird wedding cake buildings that looked like churches but weren’t.
There was little of the industrial haze that I’d expected of such a big city, and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky, making me uncomfortably hot in my dark ‘winter’ clothing. With little to see in Zhengzhou, I took a day off to do some housekeeping and admin.
At China Post I packed up some of my warmer clothes and other excess items into a cardboard box and mailed it all back to the in-laws in Guilin, for which I was charged only 25 yuan. Then I took myself off to one of the many new shopping malls and bought myself a ‘summer collection’ including a light linen short sleeve shirt and a new pair of trainers. The supermarket in the basement also reflected Zhengzhou’s status as a big city, with a fish and seafood department that resembled an aquarium, and a food section offering a huge variety of choices. I got a resupply of muesli and could not resist buying one of the fresh baguettes from the bakery.
The weather was too hot for any serious cycling around the city, so I confined myself to a trip out on the Metro to see the Yellow River on the northern edge of Zhengzhou at Huayuankou (花园口). The river here was much wider than it had been in Shandong, and the road bridge was so long it seemed to stretch almost to the horizon.
The riverside park was a flat expanse of patchy scrub that was presumably at some times covered by river water. There were food stalls, donkey and camel rides and families sitting in the shade of stunted trees having barbecues. There were even motorboats offering trips out on the slow moving muddy brown waters.
There was also a small memorial at Huayuankou to commemorate that this was the ‘ground zero’ site for one of China’s worst disasters, the man-made floods of 1938. It was at this spot that the river’s embankments were breached on the orders of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石). He blew up the dykes to create flooding in a desperate bid to halt the advance of the Japanese army on Zhengzhou.
The river waters poured out across the Henan plain from this location and did succeed in bogging down the Japanese army, at least temporarily. But over the next few months and years the flood waters continued to spread over a wide area and into surrounding provinces, resulting in the deaths of more than 800,000 people. Some lives were lost due to drowning but most were caused by starvation and disease as the rising waters swamped huge areas of farmland, destroying crops and displacing almost four million people.
Breaching the embankment at Huayuankou effectively changed the course of the Yellow River for several years, with its waters flowing south to join the Huai river. The river flooding - and the devastation of farmland - continued on an annual basis for almost a decade until the embankments were finally repaired in 1946.
It took many years for the lower Yellow River plains to recover from the damage caused by the floods, and there were longer term consequences. The loss of farmland in Henan meant it was one of the areas worst affected by the famine triggered by the agricultural collectivisation policies of the Great Leap Forward. In his book Tombstone, the author Yang Jisheng described how one in eight people (including his father) had died of starvation in the town of Xinyang (信阳), near Zhengzhou, between 1959 and 1961.
When I visited the Yellow River Museum located near Huayuankou there was little mention of the 1938 floods or famines. It was an uninspiring collection of photographs of dams, a few maps and some cabinets containing shards of pottery. There was a model of a flat-bottomed Yellow River raft, but otherwise the museum seemed to be designed as an educational exhibits for school parties rather than anyone with a genuine interest in the river.
One display in the museum aimed to show visitors that Chinese president Xi Jinping took a special interest in the river. It highlighted his visit to Zhengzhou during which Xi talked about the ‘Yellow River spirit’ and how it embodied China’s history, inheritance and the links between different ethnic groups and cultures living along the course of the river.
Protecting the ‘Mother River’ was part of Xi’s grand plan ‘for the great rejuvenation and sustainable development of the Chinese nation’, the museum display stated.
It quoted Xi urging officials to ‘do a good job’ in ‘studying the river, promoting ecological protection, water conservation and high-quality development’.
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