Qikou Ancient Town

National Famous Historical And Cultural Town; Qing And Republican Era Yellow River Transshipment Port With The Loess Cave Villages Of Lijiashan And Xiwan Above It · Linxian, Shanxi

Qikou existed because of an obstruction. A few hundred metres below the town the Yellow River runs over a shoal of rock that boats could not pass, so for two centuries everything coming downriver from Shaanxi, Gansu and Inner Mongolia had to be unloaded here and carried on by camel and mule train into the interior - and a small settlement on a loess bank became one of the great inland ports of northern China, with warehouses, merchant houses and a Black Dragon temple on the bluff above whose stage was built so that the singing carried down over the water. Then the railways came and the whole reason for the place evaporated. What is left is a stone town stacked on a hillside, largely unrestored, and above it two loess villages where people live in cave dwellings cut into the slope. The painter Wu Guanzhong came to one of them, Lijiashan, in 1989 and said it looked like a tomb from outside and a palace within.

Qikou Town, Lin County, Luliang, Linxian, Shanxi, China

The old town street is a lived-in riverside settlement and is walkable at any hour; a through-ticket covering Qikou, Xiwan Village and Lijiashan is sold at the entrance and the ticket office keeps roughly 8:00-18:00. DAY VISITORS ARRIVE LATE MORNING AND LEAVE BY MID-AFTERNOON - stay overnight in a yaodong cave room to have the dawn. Roads in are rural and slow, about four hours from Taiyuan, and are not advisable after dark. Loess paths become slippery and unsafe after heavy rain.

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