changing. But, with the exception of several years during World War II, when Chiang Kai-shek blew up the dikes to drown the invading Japanese – and Communist sympathizers – it had emptied into the sea at its present location since 1855. And that was where we headed.
The mouth of the Yellow River
From Lintzu, we drove north eighty kilometers to the town of Tungying. Forty years earlier, the entire Yellow River Delta was one of the most unpopulated areas in China – nothing but mudflats and swamps. Then oil was discovered in the 1960s, and the town of Tungying became the base of operations for the Shengli Oil field. Shengli meant “victory.” It was a name the Chinese gave to all sorts of things during the Cultural Revolution. In this case, Maoist propaganda promised a place in the sun to those pioneers who heeded the call to produce oil for the country’s industries. Of course, this was also an excellent place to send bourgeois elements for re-education. In less than thirty years, the town’s population had grown from a few thousand to 300,000 at the time of my visit in 1991.
Fortunately, the area wasn’t closed to foreigners, but visitors were required to register with the Tungying Foreign Affairs Police and arrange the necessary permit. While I was inside the police station, the officer in charge told me that Tungying was also the hometown of Sun-tzu, author of the Art of War. There were, however, no sites to visit: no home, no grave, no place where he heard his first martial harmonies. I thanked him for the information and for the permit and proceeded to the Victory Hotel, which was the only hotel open to foreigners. It was a huge, drafty place, and we decamped as soon as we could the next morning.Except for those in the oil business, few foreigners visited the area. The only thing to see was miles upon miles of oil wells. And oil was all anyone cared about. But as we drove closer to the sea, I soon realized that reaching the river’s mouth was going to be a lot harder than I thought. No one we met along the way had ever been to the actual mouth, though they all agreed the best access was from the north side. Fortunately, there was a bridge just north of Tungying.
Other than a few floating bridges, this was one of the first permanent bridges built across the river. The local officials were justifiably proud. They had hung a huge banner over the roadway at the beginning of the span announcing this as the first bridge on the Yellow River. Halfway across, I asked my driver to stop in the middle so that I could get out and take a photograph. There was so little traffic – maybe one car every minute or two – he also got out, and we both looked at the river beneath us. It was about five-hundred meters wide and the color of chocolate milk.
Once we crossed the bridge, we turned off on the first paved road that led east and began asking directions. We must have stopped to ask directions a dozen times. But we persisted – or my driver did at my urging. Four hours and a hundred kilometers of ever-changing roads later, the ruts that passed for a road finally merged with the mud. We had finally managed to work our way to the last stretch of mudflats separating the river from the sea. I shouldn’t have been surprised that no one knew the way. So much silt was carried down the Yellow River each year that the land near the mouth had been growing at a rate of fifty-seven square kilometers per year since 1855, which was when the river chose the present location to empty into the sea.
As I walked toward the river’s mouth, the mudflats were barren, except for the tall, dry grass of the previous year. But oddly enough, I wasn’t alone. There were several teams of workers using high-pressure hoses and pumps. When I walked over to see what they were doing, the foreman explained that they were turning the mud back into muddy water and then pumping the water back into the river. They had tents set up nearby and worked in shifts twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. It was a never-ending battle, he said, to keep the river from silting shut and flooding the countryside.
A worker turns mud into muddy water to be pumped back into the river.
In the past, a flood near the river’s mouth would not have been cause for alarm. The river would have simply wandered around until it found a new exit to the sea. That, in fact, was how North China was formed over the past 10,000 years, with the Yellow River oscillating like a loose firehose, as it swung north and south and filled in what once was the ocean. But the Shengli Oilfield was one of the biggest oil fields in China, and salt water and mud would have devastated the wells, and thus a major part of China’s petrochemical industry. Nor would it have been welcome in the grasslands that have since covered most of the delta and that supplied pasture for more than 10,000 horses.
The foreman said that during the winter, the air force had to bomb sections of the river to keep ice from blocking the river’s flow. But it was March, and the temperature was above freezing. I thanked him for the information and trudged on another couple hundred meters to the river’s last hurrah. I looked out on the sea that had been silting up with Yellow River mud for the past million years, ever since the river broke through the mountains west of Loyang. Extracting my feet from the mud, I took one last look and headed for the river’s source, 5,000 kilometers away.
CITY OF SPRINGS
From the Yellow River Delta, I returned to the main highway near the ancient site of Lintzu and flagged down the next bus headed for Chinan, the capital of Shantung. If it had been fall, I might have stopped in Tzupo. Every fall the north wind blew away the polluted air from the city’s petrochemical plants long enough for kite aficionados to test their creations and skill at China’s biggest kite festival. But it was the end of March and too cold for kites. In fact, I arrived in Chinan in what the bus driver said was the biggest snowstorm of the winter, and my feet were frozen.
The moat and old city wall of Chinan
The English-language travel guides that I had looked at dismissed Chinan as not worth visiting. But snow covered its blemishes, and the city looked quite lovely in black and white. After checking into the old Chinan Hotel, I spent the afternoon sipping hot tea beside my open window, watching the snow fall and warming my frozen feet against the radiator. By the next morning, my feet were ready to walk again, and they took me to see the sights. Chinan was known as the City of Springs – until recently there were seventy-two of them, and I trudged through the snow and slush to see the most famous of them all. It was called Paotu Chuan, or Ever-Gushing Spring, and it was just inside the southwest corner of the old city wall. The spring was in the middle of a pond, and the pond was in the middle of a park. But the spring was dry, and water was being pumped in from somewhere else to fill the pond. A man who was sweeping snow from the path near the spring said the excavation and construction of building foundations nearby had stopped the flow, and the same thing had happened to most of the city’s other springs. Efforts to reestablish their flow had failed, and Chinan was the City of Springs in name only.
I sighed a sigh I’m sure was sighed by the city’s own citizens and entered a memorial hall just beyond the spring. It was built in honor of China’s most famous poetess, Li Ch’ing-chao. That part of town was where she lived in the eleventh century, both with and without her husband. She was married to a scholar-official. But when the nomadic Jurchens invaded North China and sacked the Sung dynasty capital of Kaifeng 300 kilometers southwest of Chinan, her husband, being an official, fled south with the government. And since it was not customary for officials to take their families with them on such distant assignments, Li Ch’ing-chao stayed in Chinan and wrote poems:
Year after year I’ve gazed into my mirror
rouge and skin creams only depress me
one more year he hasn’t returned
