6-Day Southern Shanxi: Yuncheng, the Hukou Waterfall and Hongtong

Arrival
Yuncheng is the southernmost prefecture of Shanxi and it is not really Shanxi in feel: the dialect shades into Shaanxi and Henan, the crops are wheat and cotton rather than millet, and the town has been rich for three thousand years on one commodity - salt, evaporated out of the great lake south of the city. Your guide meets you at the airport, the station, or on the road from Linfen.

Lunch
In Yuncheng. The local dishes are wheat-based: a bowl of yangrou paomo - unleavened bread torn into mutton soup - and a plate of the fried dough twists the region sells as a snack.

Afternoon - the Guandi Temple
Jiezhou, twenty kilometres south-west, is the birthplace of Guan Yu: the third-century general who became, over fifteen hundred years of accretion, the God of War, the patron of police, of secret societies, of literature, and above all of commerce - which is why there is a Guan Yu shrine in almost every Chinese shop in the world. The temple here is the largest and the oldest dedicated to him, founded in the Sui and rebuilt under the Song, Ming and Qing into a walled complex of some 22,000 square metres on a north-south axis, with the hall of the imperial chariot, the Hall of the Martial Saint with a Qing emperor's inscription, and - the thing to look for - the Spring and Autumn Tower, where a Qing sculpture shows Guan Yu reading the Zuo Zhuan by candlelight with the door guarded. The complex was badly damaged in a fire in the Qing and rebuilt; the guide will say which parts are which. Two hours.

Evening
Into Yuncheng. Dinner, and an early night if the salt lake is on tomorrow's programme, because it is best in the morning.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Yuncheng.

Morning - Yongle Palace
Yongle Palace, at Ruicheng, is a Taoist temple of the Yuan dynasty, and its three main halls hold about 800 square metres of wall painting executed between 1320 and 1360. The Assembly of the Immortals in the Hall of the Three Pure Ones is the masterpiece: some 290 figures, life-size and larger, painted in a continuous band around the hall with mineral pigments on a clay ground, and in a condition that is close to miraculous. The reason it is here at all is more remarkable than the painting: in the late 1950s the whole complex was due to be flooded by the Sanmenxia reservoir, and between 1959 and 1964 all three halls were dismantled, the murals cut from the walls in panels, and everything moved some twenty kilometres and reassembled. It is the largest such relocation ever attempted in China and it worked. Two hours, no flash, and the guide will arrange the interior lighting.

Lunch
On the road to Yongji. The country here is wheat and orchard, and the food is heavier on bread and lamb than on noodles.

Afternoon - the Stork Tower
At Puzhou, on the west bank of the Yellow River where it turns east, stood a tower that Wang Zhihuan made immortal in eight lines: climbing it, he wrote, you see the white sun set behind the mountains and the Yellow River flow into the sea, and to go a hundred feet higher you climb another storey. The original was destroyed in the thirteenth century; what stands now is a modern rebuilding, completed in the late 1990s, of a tower of roughly Tang scale, six storeys and about 74 metres, on the river bank. It is a reconstruction and the museum inside is honest about it. The view west across the river to Shaanxi is the real reward, and the poem is carved inside. An hour.

Afternoon - Pujiu Temple
Two kilometres north, Pujiu Temple is where the Romance of the Western Chamber is set - the Yuan play in which a scholar and a girl, in a monastery, outwit her mother and the abbess and end up married after a siege. The temple is real, the monastery is a reconstruction of the Ming form, and the site has been arranged with the rooms of the story: the west chamber, the courtyard of the moon-watching, and the hall where the siege is supposed to have happened. It is the most-read love story in Chinese literature and the place keeps it lightly. An hour.

Evening
Back to Yuncheng, about an hour and a half. Dinner in the city.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Yuncheng.

Morning - the Li Family Compound
The Li family of Wanrong made its money in the Qing, in cloth, medicine and pawnbroking, and built a compound of eleven courtyards and 146 rooms between the Daoguang and the Republican periods. It is smaller than the Qiao and Wang mansions and it is the most interesting of the three, for two reasons. The first is that the Li were known for giving money away - famine relief, roads, schools - and the compound has a whole courtyard given over to the ledgers and the tablets recording it. The second is the architecture: the family traded as far as Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, and the later courtyards carry European and Central Asian detailing in the brickwork and glazing that you will not see in the Jinzhong mansions. Ninety minutes.

Lunch
Back in Yuncheng. Wheat food, a lamb dish, and the local wenxi zhubing, a sesame-coated fried pastry that keeps for weeks and is sold in tin boxes.

Afternoon - the Salt Lake
The lake south of the city covers about 132 square kilometres and is a sodium sulphate brine, not sodium chloride: you cannot eat what comes out of it, but for three thousand years it was the source of the salt that made the region rich, and the state monopoly on it funded dynasties. Salt has been produced here by solar evaporation since at least the Shang, and the dykes, the windbreaks and the crystallising pans are a working landscape rather than a sight. In high summer the brine in different pans turns different colours - red, green, orange - as halophilic algae bloom at different salinities, which is why it is now marketed as the Seven-Colour Salt Lake. It works best in bright midday light; in winter and on overcast days it is a grey industrial lake and the guide will say so rather than pretend. Access to the viewing area is free; the floating and black-mud spa facilities are commercial add-ons, paid on site and not included.

Evening
Dinner in Yuncheng.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Yuncheng.

Morning - across the plateau
This is a four-hour drive and there is no way round it. The road runs west out of the Fen valley and up onto the loess, and the country is the reason the Yellow River is yellow: soft windblown silt, cut into terraces and gullies, farmed wherever a flat surface can be made. You cross into Linfen and drop towards the river.

Lunch
On the road, in a town short of the falls. Simple northern cooking: noodles, a pork dish, and the flatbread the region eats with everything.

Afternoon - Hukou
Hukou is not a high waterfall. It is about thirty metres of drop at the point where the Yellow River, having come south through the Jin-Shaan gorge, is squeezed from several hundred metres wide down to twenty or thirty and pours into a slot cut in the bedrock. The noise is the thing, and the spray: the falls generate a mist that stands over the gorge and wets everything within a hundred metres, which is why there are railings and why the rock is polished. The Shanxi side, at Ji county, gives the better angle and has a lower viewing platform close to the water; the Shaanxi side opposite is higher and further back. Two hours, and there is a cave below the water level that you can walk into on the Shanxi side when the river is not high. The park shuttle is included; the river level and therefore the force of the falls depend on the season and on upstream releases, and the guide will tell you what to expect before you go down.

Evening
Drive on to Linfen or to Jixian for the night. The road out is two hours to Linfen.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Linfen or Jixian.

Morning - the Great Locust Tree at Hongtong
Between 1370 and 1417 the early Ming government moved something like a million people out of the crowded north China plain and into the counties that had been depopulated by war and plague, and Hongtong was the assembly point: families were registered under the locust tree beside the Guangji Temple and sent out from here. Ask a Chinese family where their people came from and there is a fair chance the answer is the Great Locust Tree. The site is now a memorial park with a genealogy hall, reconstructed registers, and the descendants of the original tree; the third-generation tree on site is genuine, and the park is honest about which parts are reconstruction. It is a place that means a great deal to a great many people and almost nothing to anyone who does not know the story - the guide tells the story.

Lunch
In Hongtong. The county is known for its steamed buns and for a clear-soup lamb; the guide orders both.

Afternoon - Xiaoxitian
Two hours north-west into the hills, on a ridge above the town of Xixian, stands a temple of about 1,100 square metres that holds one of the strangest and finest interiors in China. Xiaoxitian - literally the Little Western Heaven - was built between 1629 and 1640. Its Great Hall of the Heroic Treasure is the size of a large living room, and every square centimetre of its walls, beams and ceiling is covered in painted clay: some 1,977 suspended figures of buddhas, bodhisattvas, apsaras, birds and buildings, mounted on wires and brackets so that they hang in the air inside the hall, with the largest about three metres and the smallest the size of a thumb. It is Ming work of the highest order and it has never been restored, because nobody has dared. You are allowed in with a caretaker, no flash, and about twenty minutes of quiet. The drive is two hours each way and the hall takes twenty minutes; it is worth it, and the guide will say so plainly.

Evening
Back to Linfen, or on south to Yuncheng if the itinerary continues that way.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Linfen.

Morning
Breakfast at the hotel. If you are coming up from Linfen, the road south takes two and a half hours and there is one stop worth making on the way: the Guandi Temple at Jiezhou, if your itinerary did not already cover it, or - if it did - the Yao Temple at Linfen, whose Hall of the Five Phoenixes and whose wider temple complex record the legendary sage-king Yao, who is supposed to have ruled from this plain.

Lunch
On the road, in Yuncheng or at the airport if the flight is early. A bowl of 羊肉泡 and the flatbread of the region.

Transfer
Yuncheng Zhangxiao Airport is about forty minutes south of the city and has direct flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu. Yuncheng North station is on the Datong–Xi'an high-speed line: Xi'an is about an hour and a half to the south-west and Taiyuan is about two and a half hours north. The guide walks you in as far as the entry check.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
None - onward travel.