It was only 200 kilometres away as the crow flies, but 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. After four weeks on the road I was now a more experienced cyclist. I whittled down my kit to the basics that could be stored in four stuffsacks. There was 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, some ground coffee, and a heavy bag of muesli that I’d picked up in Xi’an.
The food bag was needed because I could not stomach the free breakfasts offered by Chinese hotels. Steamed bread mantou, noodles and rice porridge just did not appeal first thing in the morning. 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 a Vietnamese ‘Phin’ drip pot.
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 provided power assist to the pedals for about 60 kilometres per battery. The bike rode very well, but the saddle was uncomfortable and I wished I’d kept the Brooks leather saddle from the previous bike. The other annoying feature of the electric bike was a regular beeping noise that came from a speed sensor that I could not switch off.
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), said to be the site of China’s answer to the Sistine chapel, located 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 Yellow River turns sharply eastward. This was also the tripoint of three provinces Shaanxi, Henan and Shanxi.
I was crossing from Shaanxi (west of Shan) into Shanxi (east of the mountains) 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 (Palace of Eternal Joy) was one of China’s most famous Taoist temples, founded in 1247 and looking ancient, even though the location wasn't. The delicate wooden temple 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 had been the only visitor to the temples in 1991, but in 2025 they 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 Kwan-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 general. He was said to embody the values of bravery, loyalty, and fighting for what is noble and righteous, something like Shakespeare’s concept of comradeship and loyalty depicted in the line about “we happy few, we band of brothers” in his play Henry V.
In Guandi’s story, as described in the famous historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he was one of three young men who swore an oath of loyalty to each other in a peach garden, which they honoured until death. And just as King Henry exalted the virtues of loyalty and fighting for a good cause, Guandi’s story was taken up by China’s rulers and used as an example to follow.
But beyond soldiering, Guandi’s reputation as a hero extended into other areas, such as taking up the fight for justice and defending the downtrodden.
His likeness was displayed by ordinary people who saw him as a divine protector who vanquishes evil spirits and upholds righteousness and integrity. With his reputation for having memorised Confucian classics, Guandi was also adopted by scholars as a god of literature. His virtues of trustworthiness and upholding a lifelong oath were valued by merchants as qualities essential for commerce and professional relationships. Hence why Guandi shrines and images are still displayed in shops, restaurants and businesses to this day.
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 young 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.
The importance of salt to the people of Yuncheng was recognised by a temple to the gods of the salt lake. Situated on the northern side of the lake, the temple paid homages to the deities that represented the three essential elements required for the production of salt: rain to provide water for the lake, plus wind and sun for evaporation to dry out the salt.
My map pointed 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 here ran broad 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 more than a kilometre away to the opposite bank, I could see that just a few pontoons of the old bridge remained where construction of new concrete bridge pillars on the western side 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.
It was late in the day and I did not have the energy for a strenuous ascent back up the long, steep road up the gully, so I turned my bike north and set off along the riverside road. My battery was low and I knew I was going to need every bit to get me to my destination across the river.
The riverside road was new and had been built specifically as a ‘Yellow River No 1 Tourist Route’ according to the many signs and markers along the roadside. It was marked with red, blue, and yellow lines down the centre 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 pedalling, I could see the high rise buildings of Hancheng town looking tantalisingly close on the opposite side of the river, but with no way to reach it.
More pedalling and there was another bridge on massive concrete stilts about 10 kilometres distant, but this appeared to carry a motorway over the river and was not 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.
Late in the hot afternoon, my water bottles were empty and my battery was down to the last bit of power: I was desperate and had to find somewhere nearby to rest and replenish. Eventually, I found a side road that I followed 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, this was scenario 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.
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| Route map: Huashan to Ronghe (click on image to enlarge) |
After the dramas of the missing bridge to Hancheng, it was a relief to have an ‘easy’ day of 45 kilometres cycling along the banks of the Yellow River. Back on the ‘Number One Tourist Road’, 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 channel at this point was more than a kilometre broad but the brown water was almost out of sight in the distance beyond mudflats and grassy marsh.
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 had arrived in coal country.
I was looking forward to staying in a rather grand-looking hotel that I’d booked close to the Longmen Gorge where the Yellow River emerges from its narrow canyon. But when I arrived on my bike, I found the hotel to be on the fringes of an ugly and sprawling power station complex, located amid an estate of run-down tenement apartments for factory workers. The hotel itself was nice but it was right next to a railway line where freight trains rolled in to disgorge coal amid a sprawling dystopian complex of pipes and furnaces that was simultaneously awesome and terrible.
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 legend where historically there was supposed to have been a narrow gap and waterfall marking where the Yellow River emerged from the Longmen gorge into the Shanxi floodplain. The silver carp native to the Yellow River were said to migrate up to this point, but with only the strongest being able to leap 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 a powerful dragon. This in turn led to the saying: “leaping the dragon's gate” (鲤鱼跳龙门), to describe the students who successfully passed China’s imperial examinations. This phase later became a metaphor used across Asia to encourage 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 is anybody’s guess.
Beyond the dam, there is a sudden transformation from the industrial lowland plain to a wild forested gorge. I bought a ticket at the Longmen Scenic Area Tourist Centre that gave me access to the steep 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 the trail.
It was midweek and there was hardly anyone about when I reached a platform that led to a few unattended fairground rides. Beyond there was a wooden walkway that led up to other leisure attractions such as a slide and a glass-bottomed bridge over a gully. The ‘amusements’ were a gaudy distraction from the remarkable views below.
To the south was the wide river with its sandbanks spanned by a long suspension bridge. The railway lines and factories below 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 not feeling heroic enough to walk it.
The monument was a reminder that the Yellow River here at Longmen once formed the front line between Japanese and Chinese in 1938. Three years before Pearl Harbour, the Japanese army had invaded and occupied Shanxi on the eastern side of the Yellow River. They tried several times to cross the river but the western side was defended by the Nationalist army based in Xi’an and Communist forces in Yan’an, and the Japanese repelled.
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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| Route map: Ronghe to Longmen |
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