HENAN
PROVINCE

Zhengzhou
Zhengzhou is a fairly nondescript central Chinese city with a population of just over one million and very little in the way of interesting things to visit. It is a major rail junction and has largely been built, or rebuilt, since 1949 with wide, tree-lined streets and featureless brick buildings of the functional, socialist style which, these days, tends to make all Chinese cities look much the same. But Zhengzhou does serve as an excellent base from which to see two or three interesting places nearby including the Shaolin Monastery, renowned as the Mecca of Chinese kung fu.

In Zhengzhou itself, there is a distinctive monument known as the FEBRUARY 7 PAGODA built in the early 1970s to commemorate a strike organised by workers building the Peking Wuhan railway line in 1923, which was bloodily suppressed. There is a small exhibition inside. (From the Zhongzhou Hotel, take a No.2 bus heading west and get off at the fifth stop.)

The HENAN PROVINCIAL MUSEUM (Renmin Lu) contains some interesting artifacts from the Shang dynasty, 3000 years and more ago. (From the Februaiy 7 Pagoda, take a No.2 bus heading northeast and get off at the fourth stop.)

There is also a YELLOW RIVER EXHIBITION HALL about a 15 minutes' walk from the Zhongzhou Hotel, which explains the efforts being made to control 'China's Sorrow'.

The closest excursion is to the YELLOW RIVER, 15 miles (24 kilometres) to the north. The road leads to the point, near the village of Huayuankou, where Chinese soldiers dynamited the dykes one night in April 1938 to stop the advancing Japanese army. The result: floods which killed nearly one million people and left up to ii million more homeless and starving. The dykes were dynamited on the orders of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, leader of the Nationalist Chinese government. The floods delayed the Japanese for a few weeks, but it is difficult to imagine the sort of man who could issue such an order, condemning so many of his countrymen to death at one stroke.

An American journalist, Jack Belden, was there when the dykes were breached and wrote of how the waters of the river flowed along their old channel for a moment after the explosion ripped a hole in the earthworks, then suddenly, with 'a terrible roar', surged through the breach and churned away across the low-lying countryside to the south. The floods re-occurred every year until the dykes were finally rebuilt in 1947 with American assistance.

Today, the Yellow River looks more peaceful. The point where the soldiers breached the dykes has been transformed into an irrigation sluice gate with a huge slogan-command from Chairman Mao etched into the embankment: 'Control the Yellow River.' But the river still has the potential to cause death and destruction. Its fast-running waters carry more silt than any other waterway in the world - 37 kilograms per cubic metre - and as the river bed has risen over the centuries, the peasants living along its banks have continually had to build the dykes higher to prevent it from overflowing. The result of this long process is the stupendous sight of the river flowing along an elevated channel one mile (1.6 kilometre) wide and up to 24 feet (7.3 metres) above the surrounding plain.

The best excursions from Zhengzhou are to Kaifeng, Luoyang and the Shaolin Monastery (all dealt with in separate sections). There are local buses to each from the bus terminus near the station.



How to get there and where to stay
Being a major rail junction, transport to and from Zhengzhou is no problem. There are direct trains every day to Peking, Shanghai, Canton and Xi'an. There are also flights to Shanghai and Peking, and buses to Luoyang and Kaifeng (the bus terminus is just outside the railway station). Most foreigners stay at the Zhongzhou Hotel, a large place far away from the centre of town (take a No.2 bus from the railway station, and get off at the sixth stop). Better located but usually closed to foreigners is the February 7 (Erqi) Hotel Jiefang Xi Lu; take a No.2 bus from the railway station, and get off at the first stop).

Kaifeng
This bustling market town, about 50 miles (80 kilometres) east of Zhengzhou, was once the capital of Henan Province and is a much more interesting city than the present one. It has retained much of its pre-1949 flavour, and walking round the streets past the old shops and houses is a pleasure. The city has a number of temples, almost all of them in an appalling state of repair. One has disappeared completely. Another, the XIANGGUO MONASTERY in the centre of town, was obviously once a magnificent structure, with an extremely unusual octagonal altar hall featuring a multi-armed Buddha. Some repair and restoration work is underway but, even now, part of the main altar hall is used as a sort of amusement parlour with oddly shaped mirrors, hardly a laughing matter considering the circumstances.

The other historical site on the official tourist route is the so-called 'IRON PAGODA', which is, in fact, made of normal bricks and faced with specially coloured tiles to make the structure look like iron. Built in the eleventh century when Kaifeng was the capital of the southern Song dynasty, it also shows some scars dating from the Cultural Revolution - many of the Buddhist images on its surface have been mutilated. The 177-foot (54 metre) high pagoda was once open for visitors to walk up the winding stairs inside, but the doorway is now barred. One local resident told me that it had been closed after some visiting school children inside panicked and charged back down the stairs, killing and injuring some of their number. A guide claimed that the top of the pagoda is lower than the bed of the Yellow River only a few miles away, which seems impossible, but may be true given the height of the dykes along the river in Henan.

The two most interesting things about Kaifeng are rarely mentioned in guidebooks, and one of them has almost become a state secret: Kaifeng was the home of China's largest community of Jews, and was also the place where the country's President, Liu Shaoqi, died in horrifying circumstances in prison in 1969, the most prominent victim of the Cultural Revolution.

The story of how a wandering band of Jews came to settle in this city is one of the mysteries of Chinese history. No one knows for sure when they came or by what route, but their ancestors are still here and regard themselves as Jewish, even though the religion and almost all the social practices associated with it - such as the ban on eating porkhave disappeared.

The last synagogue in Kaifeng reportedly collapsed in the 1860s and has never been replaced. 'There is no one left here who believes in the Jewish religion,' one old Chinese Jew, Mr Shi Zhoingyu, told me during my visit to the city. 'My own parents were Buddhists, but my mother used to tell me stories about Abraham and other Jewish things. In every way, we are just like the Chinese around us. We look the same, we eat and dress the same, but I still consider myself to be Jewish. When I fill out forms on which I have to state my race, I put "Jew"

The best historical research can do is to suggest that perhaps the ancestors of the Kaifeng Jews came to China by sea from Jewish communities in India. Another theory is that they made their way from Palestine overland via the Silk Road. Perhaps the fact that they gathered in Kaifeng indicates that they arrived in the tenth or eleventh centuries when Kaifeng was the imperial capital. No one will probably ever know.

The synagogue was located on Beitu Jie, on a site now used as a hospital. Not far away is a narrow street called NAN JIAO JING, which was the main Jewish area in town. In one of the courtyards along the street are a number of steles (inscribed stone tablets) telling the history of Kaifeng's Jewish community.

The story of the death of Liu Shaoqi, President of China, in a secret prison in Kaifeng, was revealed in 1980 for use as ammunition by Deng Xiaoping, the present leader, in his campaign to oust the former Communist Party chairman Hua Guofeng. Having served its purpose, Chinese officialdom now apparently wants to pretend that his death never happened, or at least not in Kaifeng.

The People's Daily, in an article on Liu in 1980, said that he died in the vault of the former Kaifeng branch of the Golden City Bank. I asked city officials to show me the building, but they said it was impossible. 'There is a directive,' they replied. 'We cannot help you.' Liu had been the second-most powerful man in China after Chairman Mao, but by the mid-19605, Mao began to see Liu as an opponent and worked to engineer his downfall. The removal of Liu appears to have been one of the reasons why Mao started the disastrous Cultural Revolution. In 1967, Liu was confined to his living quarters in Peking and was 'struggled' by Mao's fanatical Red Guards ('struggling' was a form of psychological and sometimes physical torture used to break a victim). He wrote to Mao protesting that the charges against him -that he opposed the Communist Party and wanted to restore capital-ism - were entirely false, but there was no reply from the Great Helmsman. In mid-1968, having been deposed from power, Liu fell ill and spent the rest of his life bed-ridden. Mao had him expelled from the Communist Party in October 1968, but Liu was not informed of the decision until his birthday on 24 November.

A year later, in October 1969, Liu was close to death from pneumonia, and according to the official story, Mao's 'comrade-in-arms', Defence Minister Lin Piao, ordered Liu to be transferred in extreme secrecy to Kaifeng where it was apparently thought that there was a better chance of keeping his death a secret than in Peking with its well-oiled romour mill. He was flown to Kaifeng in a special plane at the dead of night and, according to the People's Daily report, placed in a 'special prison' in the former Golden City Bank building where he died on the morning of 12 November 1969 which, by coincidence, is also the birthday of the father of modern China, Sun Yatsen.

With local officials unwilling to guide me towards the Golden City Bank, I went out on the streets and asked a few old men, and quickly found one who remembered its location, on Nantu Jie opposite the Kaifeng Opera House. Outside the old, deserted bank building, its windows still covered with bars, were some men playing dominoes and I asked if this was the former Golden City Bank.

'Yes,' they replied.
'And is this where Liu Shaoqi died?'
'No, he died down the road on the left,' they said.
Following their directions, I came to the entrance of a courtyard now used by the Kaifeng City People's Government. The doorman confirmed that Liu had died inside and said the building was now used as an office.

But there is no plaque to Liu, no sign of the role that the courtyard has played in the history of modem China.

How to get there and where to stay
Kaifeng is on the main east-west railway line from Zhengzhou to Shanghai, but to travel north-south you have to return to Zhengzhou. The train services are good, and there are also buses between Kaifeng and Zhengzhou about every 30 minutes from outside the railway station. The main hotel in Kaifeng is called, logically enough, the Kaifeng Hotel (take a No.3 bus from the station, get off at the third stop). A double room costs 18 yuan.

Luoyang
This ancient town has, at one time or another, served as the capital of the Chinese empire under nine different dynasties, and was for centuries an important centre of culture and of Buddhism. Today, it is another large, grey, industrialised Chinese city, but there are still a number of places in and around the town which hint at the glory of Luoyang's past. The first Buddhist temple to be built in China after the religion's introduction from India was the Baima Si (white horse temple) near Luoyang, and it was here that the first Chinese translations of the Buddhist sutras were done. When Luoyang was capital of the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534), there were supposed to be more than 1300 Buddhist temples operating in the area, and at the same time, work was begun on the magnificent Longmen (dragon gate) Caves, one of the best examples of Buddhist rock carving in the country. Luoyang ceased to be a place of political importance almost 1000 years ago, but it remained the capital of Henan Province until after 1949 when the provincial administration moved east to Zheng-zhou and industrialisation began.

The one tourist 'must' is the LONGMEN CAVES complex, about ten miles (16 kilometres) south of the city. Construction of the caves began in about A.D. 500 and continued for four centuries, filling the cliffs on either side of the Yi River. Even now, there are still more than 1300 caves and grottoes still in existence as well as 40 pagodas and more than 100,000 images of the Buddha in one form or another, the biggest of which is more than 55 feet (17 metres) tall.

As with other similar sites in China, the Longmen Caves have suffered from the chaos and lawlessness which has cursed China for the past century, from the acquisitive European adventurers who hacked heads off statues to take home, to the iconoclastic Red Guards hoping to gain political points through some wanton vandalism. One of the best of the Longmen murals is now displayed in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Further vandalism has occurred during the past few years. The People's Daily reported in an outraged article that vandals had chopped the heads and arms off more than 60 Buddhist statues in 1981 alone.

The oldest and largest of the caves is the Guyang Cave begun in the Northern Wei dynasty about 1500 years ago. Other caves worth visiting are the Yuefang (medical prescription) Cave, the Lianhua Cave and the Wanfuo (ten thousand buddhas) Cave, which lives up to its name. Outside the Medical Prescription Cave are a number of stone blocks on which are carved the remedies for more than 100 diseases. (CTS will be pleased to arrange a taxi to take you to the caves, but there are cheaper ways of getting there. A local tourist bus reportedly leaves from the train station at 7.00 a.m., 9.00 a.m. and 1.00 p.m., but check first. An even cheaper method is to take a No.8 bus from near the Friendship Hotel to the bus terminus outside the west gate of the Old City and then take a No.3 bus from there all the way to the end of the line. Alternatively, take a No.10 bus heading east on Dongfanghong Lu, one block south of the Friendship Hotel, which also terminates at the caves.)

The BAIMA SI (white horse temple) is about eight miles (13 kilometres) northeast of Luoyang, and although the original temple was built almost 2000 years ago, the present buildings date from the Ming and Ching dynasties. In front of the temple are two Song dynasty stone horses, while to the east there is a 13-storey pagoda built in A.D. 1175. (For those on their own, take a No.8 bus from near the Friendship Hotel to the bus terminus outside the west gate of the Old City, then take a No.6 bus to the end of the line.)

In the city itself, the WANGCHENG PARK on Zhongzhou Lu contains two subterranean tombs dating from the Han dynasty, which can be visited. The OLD CITY area with its old buildings and the remains of its wall, is well worth walking round.

A sensible way to take in all the sights of Luoyang in one day would be to take a No.10 bus out to the Longmen Caves in the morning; then take a No.3 bus back to the west gate of the Old City; have lunch at a local restaurant there and walk round the streets; then take a No.6 bus out to the Baima Si in the afternoon.

How to get there and where to stay
Luoyang is accessible by train from Yichang in the south, Xi' an in the west and Zhengzhou in the east.

The hotel most people stay at is the Youyi Binguan (Friendship hotel) on Anhui Lu. If you're on your own, take the No.2 bus from the railway station and get off at the seventh Stop. Walk back to the first intersection, turn right, and right again into Anhui Lu, and the hotel is on your right. A normal room costs 30 yuan a night, and there are dormitory beds for four yuan.

It is also possible to get a bus from Luoyang to the Shaolin Monastery, about a four-hour ride to the southeast. The round trip from the railway station takes in the Shaolin and the Zhongyue Temples (see next entry for details).

Shaolin Monastery
This monastery, about 50 miles (80 kilometres) west of Zhengzhou, is one of the most famous in China due to its connections with Chinese kung fu. Replicas of the monastery have featured in literally hundreds of second-rate kung-fu flicks produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan over the past decade or more, and a Communist-made film produced recently which actually used the real Shaolin Monastery as a film set became, as a result, an instant box-office hit in Japan and Hong Kong. Unfortunately the film was little better than the standard run of 'fake' Shaolin movies.

A wealth of legend and myth surround the Shaolin Monastery, which became famous more than 1000 years ago for the martial arts fighting talents of its monks. A special style of kung fu was developed there which has since gained a huge following among martial arts devotees in Japan. Stories are told of how the monks fought against invaders and led rebellions against non-Chinese dynasties. Partly as a result of this tradition, the monastery has been burned down three times in its long history, the latest occasion being 1928 when a local warlord decided to leave his mark there. Restoration work has begun recently, and in a couple of years time, the Shaolin Monastery will be a sparkling, freshly painted tourist attraction. But in many ways it will still be little more than a shell of its former self.

The heart of the Shaolin legend is its great martial, religious and medical traditions, but little is being done to restore them in the way that the buildings are being restored. Only a few of the original monks are left, including the venerable old abbot, De Chen ('moral meditation'), who was born in 1907 and doesn't look a day over 150. The monks who used to be kung-fu experts are mostly too old and decrepit to perform the complex moves any more, let alone teach anyone. For more than two decades, they have been forbidden from accepting any young apprentice monks, and so when they die, most of the Shaolin traditions will die with them. Under new regulations governing religious affairs, all Buddhist monks must be trained under the centralised authority of the Chinese Buddhist Association and the Communist Party.

A revival of interest in Chinese kung fu has been underway in China itself during the past three years or so, and dozens of young men from all over the country have made their way to the Shaolin Monastery in the hope of being taken in and trained in the secret art, but they have all been turned away. The temple was first founded in 495 by an Indian monk who allegedly Spent several years sitting in a cave staring at the wall while meditating. The 1928 fire destroyed most of the monastery's buildings, and the Maoist Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution vandalised the place further. But there is still plenty to see, particularly the martial arts practice hall, which has regular depressions in the stone-flagged floor, allegedly caused by the monks as they drove their heels downwards during training. Also impressive is the 'forest of pagodas' (or stupas) just outside the monastery walls, each one built in remembrance of a monk and inscribed with the names of all his disciples. Some of the pagodas date back to the seventh century A.D. Close by the Shaolin Monastery is one of only a handful of Taoist temples open in China, even though Taoism is China's only indigenous religion. The ZHONGYUE TEMPLE is a massive, sprawling place which shows the marks of the serious vandalism that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. It features a number of huge cast-iron statues which are very impressive.

How to get there
Individual tourists can rent a car from either Zhengzhou or Luoyang through CTS. The charge is expensive (perhaps 100 yuan for the round-trip), but is not so bad if divided two or three ways. For budget travellers, local bus tours leave from outside the railway stations in both Luoyang and Zhengzhou.