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 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.
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| Stage 1 |
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).
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| Stage 2 |
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.
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.
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.
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