In Luoyang, I was faced with a major decision of whether or not to continue using the Dahon folding bike into the second stage of my travels around the ‘Ordos loop’ of the Yellow River, which would take me away from the north China plains and heading north up into Inner Mongolia.
To continue along the Yellow River, I would soon need to make a 90-degree turn at a place called Sanmenxia (三门峡) and follow the river north into hillier territory, as it flows through a canyon that marks the Shanxi/Shaanxi border for almost 1,000 kilometres.
Given the problems that I’d had with the bike wheel spokes and the limited range of its small battery, I decided to switch to a bigger and more robust bike.
My plan was to look for a new bike in Xi’an, then pick up where I left off on the Yellow River. Xi’an was somewhere I’d never visited and was on my ‘to do’ list because of its historical and cultural importance. But going to Xi’an would mean another temporary detour away from the river as the city lay some 100 kilometres west of the northward turn of the river, would also allow me to go to nearby Huashan, yet another one of China’s sacred mountains.
West of Luoyang, the Yellow River flowed through an area of low mountains where the river had been dammed to create the massive 100-kilometre-long Xiaolangdi (小浪底) reservoir.
Built in 2001, Xiaolangdi was the biggest dam on the Yellow River and it allowed hydro-engineers to regulate the flow of the river downstream to prevent both floods and also drought periods when sections of the river all but dried up.
I set off early in the morning from Luoyang to cycle the 45 kilometres north to the dam and hopefully get to see the dramatic torrents of water gushing out of its release chutes. Unfortunately, my efforts were in vain because I arrived at the wrong time of year. The scheduled water releases from the Xiaolangdi dam only occur for a few days in June and July each year as part of a pre-emptive flood prevention and silt purging process. So after a quick look around the dam’s museum and exhibit area, I pedalled back to Luoyang.
However, the mountainous terrain with its many gorges meant there was no road running alongside the Yellow River from the Xiaolangdi dam area for more than 100 kilometres upriver. The only option for river followers would be to bypass the Xiaolangdi reservoir area and take the main road to the next major town, Sanmenxia, the site of the last major bend of the Yellow River.
For the cyclist, this road was through hilly rural country and passed through a series of small towns that were remarkable only for the ugliness of their power stations, oil refineries, and concrete factories. The roadsides were also a depressing parade of tyre repair and truck mechanic workshops.
I didn’t make it as far as Sanmenxia on my first day out of Luoyang, but stopped at a small town called Mianchi (渑池) to check out a Neolithic archeology excavation site called Yangshao (仰韶) that gave rise to a long-running ‘missing artefacts’ story of mystery and double-deception worthy of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The story started with a Swedish geologist called Johan Gunnar Andersson who came to China in the 1920s to assist the new Republican government to locate much-needed mineral resources such as iron and coal for China’s growing industries. But Andersson wasn’t all he made out to be. While commissioned by the Chinese government, his move was actually arranged by Swedish iron industry magnates who hoped they could secure access to any iron ore deposits found by Andersson for exploitation by the well developed processing industry in Sweden.
But Andersson also had his own personal secret agenda. While officially working as a geologist, he was far more interested in archeology. He trained his assistant to be on the lookout for signs of any possible ancient relics during their geological surveys in the field. And while digging in Henan in 1921, the team did not find iron but they certainly struck archeological gold.
Andersson’s Chinese staff found shards of patterned pottery at the Yangshao site that were the first evidence of a thriving and cultured Stone Age community that once existed along the Yellow River from 5000 to 3000 BC.
The excavation of the Yangshao site and the analysis of its relics led to Andersson being dubbed ‘the father of archeology in China’. But there was an unusual twist to the discovery that purists to this day.
To find out more about the story, I cycled along a small road north from Mianchi to the Yangshao museum. It was a pleasant interlude after the eyesores of the main highway. Passing through fertile green farmland, the rosebush-lined road was adorned with monuments to the ‘Yangshao culture’ with motifs depicting the unique red-brown patterned artwork found on the pottery dug up by Andersson.
The museum display showed how the Yangshao people lived by farming in settled villages of wooden houses along the nearby river. These were relatively sophisticated communities that existed millennia before the ancient Egyptian civilisations of pharaohs. The Yangshuo people were not nomads or hunter gatherers: they built permanent villages, developed millet agriculture, had domesticated pigs and dogs and used finely crafted stone tools. There was evidence of weaving and textile production, and most of all they produced beautifully decorated pottery and figurines.
On a relatable note to me, the museum also described how the bowls and pots at Yangshao people had contained traces of alcohol. The locals had been among the first in the history of mankind to ferment a form of ale from the corn and yams they harvested. Craft beer was becoming a recurring theme on this trip.
This discovery meant re-writing all the history books about the origins of Chinese civilisation: there was clearly a sophisticated Neolithic society in existence along the Yellow River thousands of years before the earliest recorded Chinese dynasties such as the Xia. The Yangshao potteries replaced previous Chinese legends of ancient civilisation with real world evidence that extended Chinese history back to 5000 BC.
Andersson believed the Yangshao pottery was similar to that found in similar prehistoric communities in Central Asia, suggesting that Chinese civilisation may have derived from beyond the Middle Kingdom. However, there have since been other prehistoric sites found in China, suggesting that Yangshao was just one of many prehistoric communities along the Yellow River region.
What happened next to the Yangshao relics is a story that remains unclear and disputed to this day. They were divided into two lots, with Andersson taking tens of thousands of relics such as the finely painted pottery back to Sweden, where they remain to this day in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities that he set up in Stockholm. The remaining relics that were retained in China were packed up and sent off in several shipments first to Peking, and later the new capital, Nanjing between 1926 and 1937. They were last seen in the Geological Survey Museum in Nanking just before the city was attacked and occupied by the Japanese. After that, the Yangshao pottery disappeared.
Did the Japanese forces plunder the museums after their notorious ‘Rape of Nanjing’ that saw the slaughter 300,000 of the city’s inhabitants in late 1937? Or were the artefacts destroyed in the widespread destruction of the city, disappearing in the same way as the ‘Peking Man’ relics of Zhoudian, which were lost after being sent to Peking during the Sino-Japanese War?
A few ‘lost’ crates were found by staff at the museum in 2002, but the vast majority of the initial collection is still missing, including a unique human-faced ceramic shaman head.
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| Route map: Luoyang to Mianchi (click to enlarge) |
Returning to the present day realities, the following day took me from Mianchi 60 kilometres further along the river to Sanmenxia, with further frustrations due to continuous hills and mistakenly cycling onto a ‘no bikes allowed’ motorway.
Sanmenxia was the location of another major dam on the Yellow River, but after my disappointing experience with the dam at Xiaolangdi, I opted to skip a visit. It sounded like bad news anyway. Built in the 1950s with assistance from the Soviet Union, the Sanmenxia dam soon began to be blocked up by accumulation of silt— the very thing that the Yellow River is known for. The dam lost much of its water storage capacity to sedimentation and was rebuilt in the 1960s to enable sediment to be flushed out. The dam has continued to be plagued by complications such as accumulation of toxic heavy metals.
With increased flooding such as the event in 2019 caused by global climate change, the flushing of sediment has led to environmental problems further down the Yellow River. With hindsight, it can be seen that dam projects may address one problem such as flooding, but create others such as sedimentation, pollution and population displacement.
After a late lunch in the centre of Sanmenxia, I got back on my bike and headed west, once again following the Yellow River for the last few kilometres of its east-to-west section across the North China Plain.
I was nearing the spot where the Yellow River enters the plain from the massive ‘Ordos Loop’ that it makes through Inner Mongolia . This part of the river consists of a massive rectangular loop with three straight sides where the river flows around 600 kilometres north, then east and then south. Ahead of me was the southeastern corner of the loop, near a place called Tongguan, located at the intersection of Henan, Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces.
It’s here that the river's southward flow is blocked by the Lüliang Mountains, forcing it to turn east. It then flows through a narrow corridor between the hills called the Hangu Pass, which my guidebook told me was the site of a historic fort that had controlled the ancient road between China’s capital at Xi’an and the important cities on the eastern plains..
Late in the day, I arrived at the Hangu Pass feeling exhausted after pedalling seemingly uphill for most of the afternoon, and I was desperate to find somewhere to stop and stay for the night.
It was getting dark by the time I eventually found the ‘Hangu Pass tourism service complex’ down an obscure side road from the main highway. It proved to be an unsettling example of the ‘build it and they’ll come’ overcapacity in tourism facilities. From a distance, the tourism complex appeared to be a newly built and modern-styled collection of accommodation blocks, restaurants, shops, and landscaped parklands.
But up close, after cycling through the unmanned main gate, I passed block after block of deserted and neglected buildings, among which I searched desperately for any sign of life. The car park was all but empty, and I began to panic that I had made the mistake of trying to stay at an abandoned hotel. According to my map, the nearest alternative accommodation would be about 12kilometres away in the town of Lingbao.
Just as I was about to give up hope, I came across a woman who directed me towards the very last building at the end of the drive, which to my relief was a hotel. I appeared to be the only guest. As she checked me in, the manageress explained that the hotel complex development had stalled after being built just before the Covid-19 pandemic and was still awaiting the final opening of some key visitor centre buildings and other tourist attractions.
The next morning, I was grateful to have the electric pedal assist to power me up the hill out of Hangu Pass. Pausing to look back over the valley I could see how the Yellow River acted as a barrier on one side and the Lulian mountains on the other, meaning the Hangu valley was the only flat bit of ground on which to travel from the capital in Xi’an to the towns of the east such as Luoyang. However I couldn’t see the part of the valley that previous visitors in ancient times had described as being like a passage so narrow that only one horse-drawn carriage could pass through at a time, and even the horses cannot ride side by side.
With its strategic location controlling east-west travel, Hangu Pass became a key military post, where it was said the narrow bottleneck meant that "one man can hold the pass against ten thousand" (一夫当关，万夫莫开). The pass was fought over by warring states for centuries, even into the 20th century.
In 1944 it even acted as a barrier to block the advance of the Japanese who had recently taken Luoyang. The battle of Hangu Pass that took place while the western armies were launching their D-Day assault on the beaches of Normandy, saw the Chinese forces defeat those of the Japanese. It marked a high water turning point in the war, by saving the city of Xi’an and Shaanxi province from occupation.
Hangu Pass had a much more ancient historic significance as the source of one of the foundations of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching. According to legend, this was the place where the philosopher Lao Tzu (老子) had been prompted to create his famous treatise. Like me, he had been travelling along the road in the direction of Xi’an from Luoyang, where he had been an official in the court of a Zhou dynasty ruler.
Disenchanted with the decline of the state, he was heading west, intending to escape the corruption and become a hermit. However when he reached the hang Pass, the head of the guard recognised him and urged Laozi to rest and set down his wisdom in writing before leaving civilisation.
And so it was that Laozi set down two volumes of the Tao Te Ching (道德经, Daodejing), comprising 81 verses of observations and advice about how to live life. After that legend says Laozi continued his journey westward. and was never heard from again.
This is the story told in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) around 100 BC, but it’s unclear how much any or all of it is based on real events.
What is known is that the Tao Te Ching became an enduring guide on how to live a good life and understand the way of things. Much of the Tao wisdom is based on paradoxical ways of doing nothing, or rather non-action, as in going with the flow rather than fighting against the tide. Or in finding strength in apparent weakness, such as ‘being like water’
As I looked around the modern Hangu Pass I saw it had a high-speed rail line running through it. The walls of the small village beneath the wind turbines were covered in murals depicting ‘Xi Jinping Ecological Civilization Thought’ themes.
One slogan said: ‘Preserve the green mountains, let the clear waters flow forever, and the air stay fresh’.
It was a variation on another slogan that I was to see everywhere in China: ‘Clear waters and green mountains are [also] mountains of gold and silver.’ The message was clearly that the old days of development at any cost are over: ecological assets are also economic assets that can generate wealth through eco-tourism, green agriculture, and sustainable technology.
Once over the top of the hill looking west, I could see the last few kilometres of the Yellow River before it turned to the north. I would be going that way, but first there was the matter of Xi’an and the bike swap.
That afternoon I crossed from Henan into Shaanxi province and pedalled into a headwind towards the former capital city of ancient China.
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| Mianchi to Hangu Guan (click on image to enlarge) |
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