Kangding then and now: 1929 and 2026

 I've just come back from a three month tour of western China, during which I cycled from Zhongdian (aka 'Shangri La') to Kangding. I'll do a write up of the trip at some point, as much of it passed through areas of interest for Joseph Rock nerds. For the time being, though, I will do an update on Kangding, where I finished my tour and handed over my clapped out bike to the son of my former Tibetan guide, Gong Que.

In Kangding I met up again with Professor Zhu Dan of Sichuan University, who shares my interest in the photographs of Joseph Rock. Due to bad weather we abandoned our plans to revisit Gongga Shan, and instead spent a day trying to locate the places where Joseph Rock took his photos of Kangding town. 

The photos were published in the National Geographic issue of October 1930, in an article entitled Glories of the Minya Konka (link here to pdf copy).  

 

The article describes Rock's trip in the previous year from his base near Lijiang to the mountain we now know as Gongga Shan. When exploring the surrounds of the mountain, Rock based himself in the nearby town of Tatsienlu, also known as Tachienlu or Dartsendo, and now known as Kangding. As part of his article he posted a few photos of the town: one a panorama taken from a hillside, showing the Catholic church, and the others showing the 'Thunderbolt monastery' and the 'north gate' of Kangding.

On our visit last week, we tried to find the place where Rock took his panorama photo. It wasn't easy, because Kangding has expanded greatly since Rock's day and the new developments include a range of high-rise apartments built behind Anjue Si monastery, which now block much of the view from where we believed the photo was taken.

After a bit of trial and error, we found a track on the hillside where we guessed that Rock took the photo. There was a lot of thick bush on the hillside that blocked exploration and a highway and tunnel  further up the hillside which further blocked access.

Using Google Earth, this is where we estimated that Rock took the photo, based on the location of the temple on the opposite hillside on the right of the photo, which still exists.

 

 After scrambling up a minor trail above the path, we took this photo:

 As you can see, the old Catholic church is no longer there. Local people who we later met in the new church (on the other side of the river) said the old church had been demolished in the 1970s, after surviving major fires and an earthquake in the 1950s. The site of the old church is now occupied by the Ganze government offices. There is also now a second church, St Theresa's, in Kangding 'New Town', that is located about 6km up the Yulin valley.

While researching the history of the Catholic church, Zhu Dan found many photos taken by photographer Sun Minjing in 1939. These are published in a book called Xikang: the Vanished Province (定格西康︰科考攝影家鏡頭里的抗戰西方). Here are a few of Sun's photos of Kangding:

 This one was taken lower down the hillside, probably close to Anjue Si, where the high rise apartments are now located.

 The above photo was take closer to where Rock took his photo.

 The above photo was taken from the opposite side of the valley, looking west.

 The above photo was taken from the same location as the Rock photo, but is looking to the south west, and shows Anjue Si monastery. The courtyard on the left is probably for the church. And finally, there is a photo of the interior of the church:

There is very little information online about the Catholic church in Kangding. According to Wikipedia, the former Cathedral of the Sacred Heart (known in Chinese as Zhen Yuan Tang 眞原堂 ('Cathedral of the True Origin (of Everything)'] at Tatsienlu was built by Jean-Baptiste Ouvrard in August 1912.

There are some archive reports (in French) of the Franciscan order, who ran the Diocese of Kangting until kicked out by the Communists after 1949. 

In Kangding we also looked at the small Protestant church tucked down a side street on Guangming Lu, near Anjue temple. 

 It was closed up and looked little like the old church that had been run by the Inland Mission.

 There was some information about the Protestant church in English and Chinese:

Wang Qingling: "Remembering My English Teacher – Xuan Ke"

 [This is a great tribute to the inimitable Xuan Ke, a Naxi cultural ambassador in Lijiang who championed traditional Naxi culture and led the revived Naxi orchestra. Written by Professor Wang Qingling, School of Foreign Languages, Yunnan Normal University. Kunming. It was originally published in Naren Wenyuan in 2023.]

In September 1979, I graduated from the Central Primary School in Dayan Town, Lijiang, and entered the first year of junior high school at Lijiang Regional Middle School. Our classroom was one of the school’s famous eight large classrooms. I remember one day, I saw a group of students surrounding a middle-aged man at the classroom door, so I quickly ran over. The man said, “My name is Xuan Ke, and I’m your English teacher. This is my first class at Lijiang No. 1 Middle School...” This was also the first English class for all of us in the class. In those days, in remote Lijiang, children started learning English from the 26 letters of the alphabet in the first year of junior high.

Mr. Xuan insisted on teaching in English, which was very difficult for us, who had zero English foundation. Mr. Xuan emphasized pronunciation and reading aloud. He didn’t focus on grammar or rote memorization; instead, he focused on cultivating our interest in English. His classes revolved around reading aloud, asking questions, correcting pronunciation, and explaining English culture and scenarios related to the text. Later I realized that Mr. Xuan had already adopted the communicative teaching method, which was popular in China from the mid-1990s onwards, and this was completely different from the grammar-based teaching methods that were prevalent at the time.

Mr. Xuan also paid special attention to our English handwriting; he had beautiful, flowing English handwriting. He would also tell us stories about himself, his family, Lijiang, music, painting, and many other things that seemed unrelated to English lessons. This made many people think that Mr. Xuan was neglecting his duties, but we listened with great interest, looking forward to English classes, and enjoying Mr. Xuan’s humorous and engaging teaching style.

At that time, Mr. Xuan even specially selected a few students to have extra classes on Sunday mornings in the attic on the third floor of his house, and I was fortunate enough to be chosen. There, I heard in detail the story of Locke, as well as Locke’s book “The Ancient Naxi Kingdom of Southwest China,” and also learned about Peter Gould. In the attic, he could speak freely about music, about the stories of the Naxi and Tibetan people, and about the Naxi ancient music he was compiling… Teacher Xuan also taught music appreciation classes.

In the only large classroom in the Lijiang area’s middle school at the time, he lectured students from all grades on European music, on Beethoven, Mozart… He would occasionally interject with jokes. The classroom was packed, students attentively listening to the music he played, captivated by his imaginative interpretations, and listening intently to the legendary stories of these musicians… His lectures in the late 1970s and early 1980s greatly broadened our horizons and enriched our understanding.

Later, when I was studying English at East China Normal University, I returned to Lijiang during a holiday to visit Teacher Xuan. He was holding a baby just a few months old and told me this was his daughter. I was a little incredulous, thinking he was joking. At that time, Teacher Xuan’s son, Xuan Liujin, was already around 10 years old, and Teacher Xuan was nearly 60.

I remember that day in his courtyard, he told me he was conducting a teaching experiment at Huangshan Middle School, teaching English in Naxi. He said that for Naxi students, learning English in Naxi was more direct and convenient. Because the word order of English is very similar to that of Naxi, it’s easier to understand English sentence structures in Naxi. He also said that teaching English in Chinese requires students to go through a triangle of language—from Chinese to Naxi and then back to English—making it more difficult for them; teaching English in Naxi, however, is a straight line, directly from Naxi to English and then back to Naxi.

Later, when I visited him after graduating from university, he told me he had published a paper in the *Journal of Tianjin Conservatory of Music*, proposing a theory that music originated from human fear… Professor Xuan was always forward-thinking and had a strong drive to act.

In that isolated era, in Lijiang, which was still quite isolated at the time, Teacher Xuan told us about the outside world, filling us, as young children, with longing for it. In the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, when everyone thought things from the outside world and foreign culture were superior, he tirelessly promoted Lijiang culture and Naxi ancient music. His contributions to the promotion of Lijiang tourism and Naxi culture are undeniable!

I remember when I first started working, around the Spring Festival of 1990, I took a foreign teacher from my school to Lijiang to listen to Teacher Xuan and his Naxi ancient music performance. At that time, only foreigners attended, just a few scattered listeners. The foreign teacher was very excited, specifically visiting Teacher Xuan and buying many cassette tapes, saying he wanted to give them away. At the time, I thought, “This stuff makes me sleepy, and he wants to give it away!”

Later, Teacher Xuan became famous, and my contact with him decreased. Later still, he asked me to help translate some things, and we started contacting each other more often. Back then, whenever he came to Kunming, he would stay at the Kunming New Era Hotel. He often asked me to accompany him for meals, and the dishes he always ordered were stir-fried pickled vegetables with meat and stir-fried potato shreds. People constantly came to visit him at the hotel, and he enjoyed being surrounded by people, but he didn’t like dining with those who came specifically to see him.

During the years when Professor Xuan was surrounded by admirers, I sometimes visited him at Xuan Ke Manor. He could only squeeze in a few moments to talk to me amidst the constant stream of visitors, but I could clearly feel that his visits were genuine. Sometimes, he would ask me to tally up the amounts he had donated, and he would boast about how he maintained his usual humor in front of important figures.

Sometimes, he would tell me about his family, his worries, his troubles... Later, visitors to Xuanke Manor became increasingly rare, and Professor Xuan longed for our visits even more. I gradually sensed his aging, his loneliness, his helplessness... But he was still the eternally youthful, eternally passionate, and never-say-die Xuanke...

Next project: a 2000km walk linking up all the areas explored by Joseph Rock

I'm just back from the final stage of my 6000 km bike ride along the Yellow River from sea to source. The last 1000km was a bit of housekeeping - retrieving my bike from storage in Chengdu and ferrying it it to the in-law's place in Guilin. I travelled for two weeks through Sichuan, Guizhou (Cishui river via the Maotai valley) and the Duliu river into Guangxi. A nice trip, and my first chance to explore a bit of Guizhou.

For my next trip in retirement I am looking at doing a long distance walk to link up all the places explored by Joseph Rock: namely the Nujiang (Kawakarpo), Yading, Muli, the Yalong river, Gongga Shan and then north into Gansu to visit Zhuoni (Choni) and Zhagana.

It's only a thought bubble at the moment, but much of the 2000 km route looks do-able, and I have visited almost all these areas already at least once, so I know what to expect. The main problem is finding a way to cross the Yalong river between Muli and Jiulong, near to where I recently visited at Bawolong. There is no road on the western side of the river, but I have seen reports of a ferry operating across the river and a new bridge to service the building of the new Mengdigou hydro dam.

Timing wise, it would take about four months and I would  have to wait until spring (March-April) to avoid the bitterly cold weather at high altitudes. I'll be camping along the way and staying in hotels and guesthouses in some areas.

I'm discussing this with my Chinese friends, who may come along for some of the trip. If you have any thoughts or suggestions - especially about routes to cross from Muli to Jiulong, do let me know in the comments!

Return visit to Maidi Gangga 麦地贡嘎 and Mundon 猛董 after 20 years - reuniting with Tibetan friends

I have just revisited the 'lost' mountain of Muti Konka (Chinese: 麦地贡嘎 Maidi Gangga) in Jiulong county (九龙县), Garze, Sichuan, which I first visited in 2004. I wrote a lengthy article about my first trip, describing how I got to visit this remote place only through the help of a local official in Jiulong called Wang Qi, who is of Pumi Tibetan ethnicity. 

Twenty odd years ago he took pity on me, a hapless and disorganised western hiker, and arranged a mini-expedition to take me to his home village of Mundon (猛董, Mengdong), high up in the hills above the Yalong river canyon(雅砻江大峡谷). 

At that time there was only a rough road down the Yangwe Kong valley, which we travelled by Landcruiser to Sanyanlong (三岩龙). From there we had to ride  horses (mules) to get up the steep hills to Mundon and eventually to the lake at the base of Muti Konka.

Not surprisingly, there have been many developments in the region over the last two decades. On my trip back there in October 2025, I found that there is now a good highway into the Sanyanlong valley, and also now a rough 4WD gravel track that leads up into the hills and eventually to Mundon, via the mountain lake.

I travelled courtesy of botanist Professor Zhu Dan of Sichuan university, who organised the trip with his usual skilled driver Jiang Yong, and accompanied by anthropology expert Professor Wang Liang, of Nantong University. 

It took us just over two hours on a smooth tarmac road to get to Sanyanlong, via the Wuxu Hai (伍须海) road - the lake has now been developed as a tourist attraction, with several guesthouses in the village, but the gatehouse to the location appeared to be closed to visitors when we passed.  Because it was dark I did not get to see much of the Druderon Pass and Kangwo Shan mountain this time round, but I got good photos on my first trip.

The village of Sanyanlong is almost the end of the road before the valley runs down to the Yalong River. It is now a bit more developed that the collection of wooden houses that I saw 20 years ago - there are a few concrete buildings and even blue neon decorated street lamps. Last time I had to lodge with locals but now there is a hotel - the 'Mengdong People's Guesthouse' (猛董家人酒店) - although we opted to stay at a more informal simpler homestay place run by a Pumi family, which had four-people rooms. 

The reason for this was that we wanted to keep a low profile in regard to county officials, as my colleagues did not have permission to accompany a foreigner into this area. The ruse did not work because we received a visit from the local cops the next morning after we had finished breakfast, and had to do a bit of explaining as to what we were doing in the valley. It all got sorted amicably after our driver flashed his official-looking badge from the Sichuan government.

We had a late dinner in Sanyanlong and the local people were very friendly, although one bloke was a bit too friendly after having had a bit too much to drink. The locals were mostly Pumi people and they were fascinated to see the photos I had taken twenty years ago - although none remembered seeing me. They recognised my guide/sponsor Wang Qi in the photos and said he had now retired from his official post as head of the education department in Jiulong and had moved to Chengdu. The police we met the next morning also said they knew Wang Qi and even said they would pass on my phone number to him! 

The next morning we got in the Landcruiser and set off to try find the new road/track that according to the map would take us up to the mountain. We missed the turnoff on the first attempt, and ended up driving half the way down to the river, until we met a local bloke who told us - among other things - that there was now a ferry service running on the Yalong river between the Sanyanlong valley and Maidilong and Bawolong. He also put us in the right direction for the mountain road, to which we backtracked about a kilometre to a bridge. The road was good tarmac initially, with a series of switchbacks until it reached a ridge. This then led west to the village of Lawaling (which I visited on my previous trip). 

After opening a gate across the road, we stopped at the village, but there appeared to be almost nobody around. We found one nice old lady who chatted to us and tried to sell us some songrong mushrooms. There was a great view far down into the canyon to the river from her back yard, similar to a photo taken by Joseph Rock. 

Walking further up the road we met a couple of guys sorting potatoes and bits of dried mushroom/fungus, who  told us the road was now good to get up to Muti Konka, the lake called Chang Haizi (长海子), and beyond to Mengdong.

Beyond Lawaling the road was just a gravel track and after an hour of twists and turns and a few false trails we arrived at the lake beneath the mountain. On my 2004 visit this had been an idyllic setting of an alpine lake with with blue water reflecting the white snowy peak of the Muti Konka mountain and its ridgeline. There had been just a single stone hut occupied by a family of yak herders. In 2025 there were now a handful of Chinese sightseers who had also arrived by 4WD. This time the weather was cloudy and it was raining, so we had no views of the mountain, or even of the lake. There were now a couple of concrete buildings at the lake, and some construction was going on to build a bigger structure, which I assumed would be a visitor centre.

After dodging a truck delivering some stone materials, we chatted to a local guy who turned out to be the same bloke who had been here 20 years ago. He was wearing one of the traditional Pumi yak-hair smocks, edged with red wool. He said he remembered me from my 2004 visit and remarked that my article and the publicity around it had led to a surge in visitors to the lake, for which he was grateful!

He took us into his 'kitchen' where we sat down to have some butter tea and yak yoghurt. Then I was introduced to his wife who also remembered me from 2004 and pointed out that she was the one in my photos milking a yak! 

Since it was raining, we remained in the kitchen for an hour or so, chatting about the changes to the area. The couple told me that they now had  a lot of visitors to the lake, who came mostly by 4WD, as there was now a circular circuit road through the mountains, to and from the Jiulong valley road. They said the new construction was for a bigger yak pen, not a guesthouse. We posed for lots of photos and videos and added each other as WeChat friends.

Jiang Yong then drove us up from the lake to Mengdong village, which took about an hour along the new gravel track - a trip we had previously done with horses. It wasn't a great road, but not that bad either. The weather was very cloudy and foggy, and sadly we did not get to see the great clear views over the canyon that I had enjoyed on my previous visit. 

On arriving at Mengdong, we found that it was deserted. The tiny temple was still there, but  the previous five or six buildings appeared to have been demolished, and there was nobody present at the one remaining home. There were a couple of out buildings and a couple of temporary marquee-type tents, bit not a single souls at the hamlet that had previously been home to two or three families, including children. We could only speculate that this was simply too remote a spot for subsistence farming. We'd also learned that the school I had previously visited in Sanyanlong had closed, with local children now educated by boarding at ''good' schools in Jiulong, which were able to attract higher  quality teachers and have better facilities than the basic place that I'd seen in this remote valley.

With little to see and nobody to talk to, we didn't linger for long at Mengdong. It was about 3pm when we got back in the Landcruiser and crawled and twisted back along the gravel track' over the ridge back to Chang Haizi. 

Prof. Zhu Dan, me, Prof. Wang Liang, driver Jiang Yong

We did not stop here on the return trip, but continued on back in the direction of Sanyanlong. We took a couple of wrong turns and had to backtrack until we found the right road, which seemed to be of much poorer quality o the return leg. So it was a relief to regain the tarmac road as we neared Lawaling, and to descend to the Sanyanlong valley and 'speed' back to Jiulong.

No longer worried about the attention of local officials, we checked in to a posh hotel costing 300 yuan a night and had a great hotpot dinner to celebrate our success in getting to the mountain. 

We found the lost monastery of Baron Gompa (八窝龙 寺庙) near the Yalong River (雅砻江) canyon

 I've just returned from an exciting trip to western Sichuan with my friends Professor Zhu Dan (Sichuan University Dept of Botany) and Prof Wang Liang. We visited the Yalong River (雅砻江) canyon for the first time and located the site of the small monastery Baron Gompa that was photographed by Joseph Rock in 1929 for his article about Gongga Shan ('The Glories of the Minya Konka') in National Geographic (click here to view pdf). 

The trip also saw us revisiting places such as the Gongga Shan monastery and the Yulongxi valley, to where I first travelled in 1994 - and to see the many changes that have taken place there. Similarly, we revisited the mountain of Muti Konka and the hilltop hamlet of Mundon in Jiulong county, which I visited on a trip in 2004. Amazingly, I was able to meet up again with the yak herders who hosted me at the remote mountain lake and also the family of the Tibetan official Wang Qi who had guided me to this remote spot 22 years ago. 

Map (looking from west to east) of our route from Jiulong to Bawolong.

It's been a long-held ambition of mine to visit the Yalong River canyon, which was described by Rock as having mile-high cliffs and taking 'five terrible days' to cross, down and up again, on his journey from Muli towards Gongga Shan. His lofty-worded article is full of superlatives about the grandeur of the canyon, and the Yalong river remains a remote and unvisited place because the steep sides and lack of any terraces mean that there is still no road running along some sections of the river south of Xinduqiao. The only way to access the river is via a rough road that snakes over the 4000m high hills from Jiulong.

We began our journey from Jiulong after we had already visited Gongga Shan and Mundon  - more about those trips in later articles (suffice to say that we got glimpses down into the Yalong canyon from near Mundon, where the views were similar to the those photographed by Joseph Rock). 

In a Landcruiser driven by the intrepid Jiang Yong we headed west from Jiulong, initially following the road towards Wuxu Hai (lake), which is now a tourist attraction, although the place appeared to be closed to visitors when we passed by the official entrance gate. The route then took us up into the forested hills along a decent quality road that twisted over two high passes before descending towards the Yalong River: it took us about two hours before we started making the final descent towards the river. 

Sadly, it was a cloudy day, and we only got a hint of a view of the mountain to the south - I'm guessing this was the same Kangwo Shan that Rock described as seeing when he crossed the Druderon Pass. 

We stopped on the switchback road down to Bawolong to ask local people if they knew about the location of the monastery that Rock described as Baron Gompa, 'north of Baurong [Bawolong]', but they could not help. 

We also stopped to snap the great views of the Yalong river far below the road. The river flows at about 2000m altitude, and the descent from the pass was another 2000 metres, confirming Rock's statement that the canyon is at least a mile deep. Looking down into the canyon we could see there was a construction site on one of the few terraces next to the river - presumably related to the building of new dams along the river. 

This was confirmed when we finally hauled in to Bawolong, where there were new accomodation blocks for the construction workforce of the Mengdigou Hydropower station (孟底沟水电站) and dam, which the signs said was expected to be completed in 2030. 

According to the Chinese media, the Mengdigou project has just sealed the river to build the dam, and will combine hydropower and solar power.

With this massive building program on its doorstep, the village of Bawolong was no longer an isolated and quiet Tibetan riverside village. The main street was a surprisingly ordinary looking collection of restaurants, shops and official buildings in the usual concrete style. We stopped for an hour to have some lunch, which we washed down with a few sips of craft beer, after our walkabout revealed that even in this remote spot there was a craft brewery. 

Ironically, after coming all this way, we found that there were few good views of the Yalong River to be had from the village of Bawolong itself - it was too deeply embedded in the canyon. We could see a jetty where a flat-bottomed vehicle ferry was said to run a service down to connect with the Sanyanlong valley. There was no road going south  - the sides of the twisting canyon were simply too steep to allow one.

We therefore got back in the Landcruiser and set off in a north-east direction to see if we could locate the site of the Baron Gompa. We had seen no significant villages or settlement  on the road into Baolong, but there had been one or two houses by the roadside, and we stopped at one of these to ask the local farmer if he know of the site of an old temple. 

He directed us towards to village of Baitai (白台), which was located in the hills above from the road, about five kilometres away. At the turnoff for Baitai, another couple of locals confirmed there had been an old temple in the area and directed us up a rough dirt track beyond Baitai. It was tough going, even for the Landcruiser, and we followed a couple of false trails until we returned to a small side track near the village. 

After twisting up the hill track, we found a flat area that looked like it might be the site. The site was now surrounded by a high fence of wire and sticks, but there were some ruined buildings on the opposite side that looked like the might once have been the monastery. 

Site of the Baron Gompa above Baitai village - this image shows the outlines of the ruined buildings.

Professors Zhu Dan and Wang Liang went to find a way through the fence while I walked around to investigate the remains of the walls. Up close, there was no way to tell if they had once been part of a monastery or perhaps more recent farm buildings - there was so little left of them. Just some packed earth walls and wooden window frames, most of which were overgrown with grass and bushes.

After examining the site from various angles, Prof Zhu Dan declared that it was indeed the site of Baron Gompa. He got us to climb over the fence (there was no gate or door) and after pushing through wasit-level grass we found a corner of the enclosure where the view matched the perspective of Rock's photo of Baron Gompa. We could see the same small hills and slopes, only with the monastery buildings now absent. Similarly, the tall pine and spruce trees in Rock's photo were no longer there.

The local people were unable to tell us anything about the history of the monastery, only that it had not been there for decades. One said there had been two stone lions remaining at the site, but we could not locate them. In his article, Rock says little about the Baron Gompa except that it was a place where his mule train made an overnight camp on his way back from Gongga Shan heading towards Muli and his home near Lijiang. His photo shows his tent pitched alongside one of the buildings. 

His article describes the area thus: "a scenic wonder of the world, this region is 45 days from the nearest railhead. For centuries it may remain a closed land, save to such privileged few as care to crawl like ants through its canyons of tropical heat and passes in blinding snowstorms ...". In the 21st century we became some of the privileged few to have revisited the region.

Mother River: a 5000 kilometre journey through China from the sea to the headwaters of the Yellow River - by Michael Woodhead

At the age of 62, Yorkshire-born Michael Woodhead took early retirement from his job in Sydney to make a journey through China that no outsiders have done before. Taking an electric bike from the Yellow River’s outlet on the Shandong coast, he spent three months following the course of the river up to the headwaters on the Tibetan plateau, some 5000 kilometres away.  

On the way he travelled through the cradle of Chinese civilisation on the North China Plain, across the grasslands of inner Mongolia, through the deserts of Muslim Ningxia and up through the loess landforms of Gansu into the highlands of Qinghai. He visited places frequented by Confucius and Lao Tzu and the ruined cities of lost civilisations such as the Tanguts, wiped out by Genghis Khan. 

Travelling slowly off the beaten track he was able to see the changing face of 21st century China, from the world’s largest solar power park in Qinghai to the craft beer bars set up by young entrepreneurs in the towns of rural Henan.

Reaching the headwaters of the Yellow River at almost 4000 metres altitude amid the swampy grasslands of the Tibetan plateau, he retraces part of the Long March route where modern Chinese engineers are building a high speed rail line and Tibetan nomads are switching from yak herding to glamping sites. 

Being able to speak Mandarin Chinese, Michael was able to meet and chat to many local people and hear their stories about life along the Yellow River in 2025.

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE.  North China Plain, Cradle of Civilisation

1.    Qingdao ist sehr schön                     

2.    Navy day at Weihaiwei              

3.    Delta departure: oil pumps and birdlife            

4.    Hotsprings and Jinan pancakes                

5.    Shandong scholars and sacred mountains            

6.    Kaifeng and the river opposing rhinoceros            

7.    Hanfu and broken spokes in Luoyang            

8.    The road that inspired the Tao Te Ching             

PART TWO. Looping Into Inner Mongolia

9.    Interlude in Xi’an: old capital, new bike            

10.    The missing bridge to Dragon’s Gate                

11.    Into the canyon and the Hukou falls                

12.    An old soldier on the road to Old Ox Bay            

13.    Pedalling the Hetao plain to Baotou             

14.    Punctures on the desert road                 

15.    Into Ningxia and a lost civilisation                

16.    Entering Gansu: loess is more                 

PART THREE. Up To The Headwaters On The Qinghai Plateau

17.    Visa run from Lanzhou                     

18.    Meeting the Mongolian Muslim knifemakers of Jishishan    

19.    Marmots on the closed road through Kanbula        

20.    Solar farms and fake salmon at Longyangxia         

21.    Gonghe cops send me to Qinghai Lake            

22.    Seeking a Plan B in Xining                     

23.    Craft beer in Little Mecca                     

24.    Reaching the First Bend in the rainy season            

25.    Epilogue: To Chengdu across the Long March grasslands

 

Postscript: final thoughts on my Yellow River cycling trip 

           

Mother River: Introduction

I wouldn’t call myself a ‘cyclist’, even though I’ve been cycle touring in China for more than a decade. I like to think of myself as someone who just uses a bike because it’s convenient, cheap and fun. 

For my first trip in China I took my Brompton folding bike to ride down the remote Nu river (怒江, Nujiang) in Yunnan, reasoning that a road running alongside a river would likely be mostly level, and that going downstream I would be going downhill, on average. The reality proved to be a little more complicated, 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), a stone’s throw away 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 while I dodged the infection, 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 would not be able to continue hiking up mountains or pedalling down rivers in China for much longer. I decided to take early retirement at the age of 62 and embark on a longer trip to see more of China. 

When pondering where to go on my big tour, I first thought about the three major rivers that run in parallel for a few hundred kilometres in southwest China and which I had already explored to some extent: the Yangtze, Mekong and Nu. It didn’t take me long to reject each of these in turn, because I had either already explored parts of them, or in the case of the Yangtze, because much of it seemed to run through parts of central China that were heavily urbanised and industrialised or obliterated by the massive Three Dams project.

Then 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 arose 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 lower reaches of the river running through the north China plain 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 was well travelled and had been the subject of many books and travel journalism pieces. And yet when I went looking I found that remarkably little had been written about it in English. There were some 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 outlet to 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 journey he made along the river 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. Bill had travelled by bus and train at a time when China’s transport and tourism infrastructure were still basic, to say the least. 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, only Chinese language sources had any accounts of people who had travelled the length of the Yellow River.  China media news 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 certain 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 along the river in 2022, from source to sea in 97 days: but again, it had no details of the route he followed on his ride. 

And as I looked in more detail 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 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 Ragya (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, the river takes a sudden turn north 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 bend, 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. 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’. 

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 turns eastward and flows towards Lanzhou (兰州), in Gansu province, losing a lot of altitude en route.

My map suggested there were two other hard-to-access sections of the Yellow River, further downriver along the 1500 kilometre northward 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 on the southward part of this Yellow River 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 by Mao and his Red Army general as 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?

One of the fundamental questions I had to consider when planning my Yellow River cycling trip was which way to ‘do’ the river: downstream from the source of the river near the town of Maduo (玛多) in Qinghai, or 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 weather and the remote locality of the Yellow River source, I decided to go with the ‘upstream’ option. 

This was partly because it’s not actually possible to cycle 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 km towards the source of the river, the final section would have to be done on foot or horseback across marshy grass hills. Even if this was 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.

The nearest place accessible by bike to the source of the Yellow River would therefore be Maduo town, which is a small truckstop on the highway between Xining and Yushu (玉树). Located at around 4,300 metres it appears to be an inhospitable place, with long, cold winters and freezing winds that extend from September to June. While the temperatures rise somewhat in the brief summer, this coincides with the onset of monsoon rains. My planned mid-April start to cycling the river would not be a good time to be travelling to Maduo. Further to that, the first few hundred kilometres of the Yellow River beyond Maduo flow through remote Tibetan grassland wilderness with 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’, having to contend with extreme cold weather, high altitude and the lack of facilities in a very remote location. If anything, I would rather save that for the end of the trip when I had built up some experience. The other obvious problem would be how to get to such a remote ‘start point’ with a bicycle. The nearest city is Xining, around 500 kilometres away, and that would require at least a week of cycling.

I therefore decided to start my Yellow River trip 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 four distinct stages, based on topography, history and culture of the inhabitants.

The first section 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 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 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 section would take me up the long northward loop of the Yellow River into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, along a canyon that marks the boundary between Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces. The 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 third section would take me back down south 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 fourth and final section 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 Qinghai Lake and Longyangxia until I reached the headwaters in the 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 would be riding 50-80 kilometres of cycling a day, I estimated it would be 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 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 road and proved capable of carrying loads of around 15 kilos. But the trips had been brief, for no more than two weeks, and had been on mostly level roads, covering 50-80 kilometres a day in the relatively mild climate of south western China. When I looked at the 5000 kilometre route along the Yellow River route 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 oomph. 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 should be done on a pedal bike. The aim of my bike tour along the Yellow River was to enjoy it, 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 to people who are using cars or motorbikes. At the age of 62 and with 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 also give me the freedom to park easily in most places and even to take it into a hotel room for safekeeping. 

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 I was able to find a suitable folding e-bike for sale at a Dahon shop in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. The Dahon Unio E20 was similar to the manual Dahon pedal bike I had been riding for a few years, and 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 off for China. After staying with my wife’s family in Guilin for a few days, I took the train to Qingdao, in Shandong province.