Mother River: a 5000 kilometre journey through China from the sea to the headwaters of the Yellow River - by Michael Woodhead

At the age of 62, Yorkshire-born Michael Woodhead took early retirement from his job in Sydney to make a journey through China that no outsiders have done before. Taking an electric bike from the Yellow River’s outlet on the Shandong coast, he spent three months following the course of the river up to the headwaters on the Tibetan plateau, some 5000 kilometres away.  

On the way he travelled through the cradle of Chinese civilisation on the North China Plain, across the grasslands of inner Mongolia, through the deserts of Muslim Ningxia and up through the loess landforms of Gansu into the highlands of Qinghai. He visited places frequented by Confucius and Lao Tzu and the ruined cities of lost civilisations such as the Tanguts, wiped out by Genghis Khan. 

Travelling slowly off the beaten track he was able to see the changing face of 21st century China, from the world’s largest solar power park in Qinghai to the craft beer bars set up by young entrepreneurs in the towns of rural Henan.

Reaching the headwaters of the Yellow River at almost 4000 metres altitude amid the swampy grasslands of the Tibetan plateau, he retraces part of the Long March route where modern Chinese engineers are building a high speed rail line and Tibetan nomads are switching from yak herding to glamping sites. 

Being able to speak Mandarin Chinese, Michael was able to meet and chat to many local people and hear their stories about life along the Yellow River in 2025.

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE.  North China Plain, Cradle of Civilisation

1.    Qingdao ist sehr schön                     

2.    Navy day at Weihaiwei              

3.    Delta departure: oil pumps and birdlife            

4.    Hotsprings and Jinan pancakes                

5.    Shandong scholars and sacred mountains            

6.    Kaifeng and the river opposing rhinoceros            

7.    Hanfu and broken spokes in Luoyang            

8.    The road that inspired the Tao Te Ching             

PART TWO. Looping Into Inner Mongolia

9.    Interlude in Xi’an: old capital, new bike            

10.    The missing bridge to Dragon’s Gate                

11.    Into the canyon and the Hukou falls                

12.    An old soldier on the road to Old Ox Bay            

13.    Pedalling the Hetao plain to Baotou             

14.    Punctures on the desert road                 

15.    Into Ningxia and a lost civilisation                

16.    Entering Gansu: loess is more                 

PART THREE. Up To The Headwaters On The Qinghai Plateau

17.    Visa run from Lanzhou                     

18.    Meeting the Mongolian Muslim knifemakers of Jishishan    

19.    Marmots on the closed road through Kanbula        

20.    Solar farms and fake salmon at Longyangxia         

21.    Gonghe cops send me to Qinghai Lake            

22.    Seeking a Plan B in Xining                     

23.    Craft beer in Little Mecca                     

24.    Reaching the First Bend in the rainy season            

25.    Epilogue: To Chengdu across the Long March grasslands

 

Postscript: final thoughts on my Yellow River cycling trip 

           

Mother River: Introduction

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 in China 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.

Stage 1 (click on image to enlarge)

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).

Stage 2 (click on image to enlarge)

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.

Stage 3 (click on image to enlarge)

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.

Stage 4: Original planned route in red vs actual route in blue (click on image to enlarge)

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.

 

Chapter 1. Qingdao ist sehr schön 青岛 德国老城

 After the balmy spring weather of Guangxi province in the south, Qingdao was cold. I only knew two things about this coastal city in the north east of China and they were its beer and its German colonial heritage, neither of which I had much hope for. I was not a fan of the rather bland Tsingtao brand lager that used to be the only beer you could get in many parts of China. And having been disappointed by Shanghai’s ‘French’ Concession and the old ‘legation’ parts of Beijing, I didn't hold out much hope for Qingdao’s German old town. How wrong I was.

While now only a small corner of a city of 10 million people, Qingdao’s German quarter comprises a remarkably well preserved and self contained area of European colonial era urban buildings. Like a distant cousin of the Hanseatic League Baltic cities, it was as if a little bit of Danzig or Konigsberg had been replicated in the East China Sea. And all the more remarkable given that it was created in just a few years of German colonial occupation of Qingdao, from 1898 to 1914.

I’d arrived in Qingdao by train in early April after an almost 2000 kilometre train ride from Guillin. The ten hour trip on a high-speed train had cost me 1000 yuan and had taken me from the warm climate of southern China through central Chinese cities such as Quanzhou, Changsha, Wuhan, and Zhengzhou, to deposit me in chilly Qingdao at 7pm in the evening. The taxi drivers outside the station looked on in scorn and then curiosity as I lugged my bike through the barrier, unpacked it from its bag and unfolded it, until I was ready to pedal away without the need for their services.

My destination was the Observatory Hotel located on top of Observatory Hill (观象山, Guanxiang Shan) overlooking the port. It took me a while to find but it was worth it. 

The hotel was located in what was once the astrodome annex of the Qingdao Observatory. Its history was a testament to the turbulent changing control of the city during the early and mid period of the 20th century. Originally built in solid granite by the German occupiers in 1905, the Qingdao Observatory was created to provide accurate weather and star observations for the Imperial German Navy using the port at the time. In less than a decade, control passed to the Japanese during the First World War, and a decade later they reluctantly ceded control of the Observatory to China’s new republican government.

The astrodome was added to the Observatory by Chinese astronomers in the 1930s, built to a French design. But again control was short-lived as the Japanese military occupied Qingdao in 1937 and the Imperial Japanese Navy took over management of the Observatory until their defeat in 1945. After four years back under control of the Kuomintang Chinese government, the Observatory was eventually taken over by the PLA Navy in 1949, who still maintain control of the building today. While the Observatory is not open to the public, the astrodome was run as a youth hostel until 2018. Again reflecting the changing trends of China and the move away from the budget backpacker tourist market, the building has recently been converted into a boutique hotel.

I found the hotel to have retained some aspects of its old world architecture: wooden floors and art deco window frames. The new managers had renovated the place in an ‘Asian chic’ style that I would find was common across Chinese designer hotels: light, airy, IKEA-style furnishings with modern paintings, bookshelves and house plants and a scattering of vaguely Eastern religious icons.

Gone were the ‘dilapidated’ and ‘mouldy’ dorm rooms and hard beds and basic showers that had featured in negative reviews of the old youth hostel.

The young couple who ran the place were friendly and welcoming: I was the only foreign guest they had seen for some time and they practised their seldom-used English on me. They unlocked the door to a spiral staircase that led me up to the rooftop deck area, with its sweeping views over the city. However when I returned to the foyer, they admonished me that I was not allowed to recharge my e-bike inside the hotel: this was a new national rule in response to fire incidents with e-scooter batteries, and I was to be reminded of it several times in other hotels in which I stayed. Fortunately, thanks to the ubiquity of electric scooters across China, public battery recharging stations are everywhere, and so that is where I took my bike.

On my first day in Qingdao I took my bike for a ride around the old town area. I’d expected to see a handful of preserved buildings from the colonial era, so I was surprised to see almost every house on the street down from my hotel was built in the traditional German style. Many had the classic hipped gable roof or a curved baroque facade, not unlike the Cape Dutch style seen in South Africa. Other streets had houses and apartments in a more generic western style from the early 20th century and reminded me of the colonial-style architecture in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. 

Riding down Jiangsu Road, which had once been Bismarck Strasse, I was amazed to see the well preserved Qingdao Christian (Protestant) Church amongst a row of opulent colonial era houses and public buildings. Turning the corner there were more mansions and then the road opened out into a public square dominated by a large neo-classical government building that had once been the centre of Germany’s Qingdao concession administration. It looked far too grand for what was effectively a local government building responsible for a population of less than 100,000 city dwellers. It was now home of the Qingdao People’s Consultative Committee. Around the corner was another government building that looked in style more like the town hall of a provincial German town - a modest Rathaus from a town in Munster. And yet now it had the CPC red star above the gatehouse.

I cycled back uphill through the old town to see one of the main landmarks - the Catholic St Michael’s Cathedral. Situated in an open square it looked very European and was the focus of many Chinese tourists and couples using it as a backdrop for wedding photos. I parked my bike up down a nearby lane and popped into a cafe on the corner of what once would have been Friedrich Strasse, now like many Chinese cities the main street was renamed Zhongshan Lu. But looking up the road to the cathedral and squinting a bit to ignore the Chinese language signage, it could still have been a German town centre.

The people of Qingdao also looked different to their counterparts in Guilin. They were northern Chinese, Shandong natives, and had ruddy complexions to match the brisk offshore wind and cooler climate of these higher latitudes. To me they also seemed a bit more reserved and composed compared to the brash and busy Guangxi locals.

My tour continued down past the old German-built Hauptbahnhof - still in use as a railway station, and down along the shore. There was the pier where the German military landing forces had first come ashore from their warships in 1897. There were no sunbathers or swimmers lingering on the sands of Qingdao Bay in April, but there were some hardy keep fit types doing weight lifting and other exercises on the beach. 

I pedalled round to the east and bypassed the monolithic PLA Naval museum to enter a different world of ornate European beachside villas and gardens. This was Badaguan (八大关), where in just a few years of the early 20th Century the colonists had lived a lifestyle to match those of Cap Ferret and Catalina Island. Many of the mansions were hidden behind walls, but it was possible to see their elegant designs and quirky mish-mash of features from the wide tree lined avenues.  The large gardens were filled with neatly-trimmed fir trees and blossoming plum branches, set amid landscaped gardens and lawns. 

Who, I wondered, had the wealth and taste to build and enjoy living in such residences in those brief early years of the 20th Century? Were they German citizens? And if so, what was their future after the Japanese took over Qingdao? Did they stay on or have to return to the turmoil of Hitler’s Third Reich? In modern day Qingdao, there was no information provided about the former residents of these villas - nor of their modern day occupants.

Badaguan marked the boundary of old and new Qingdao. Beyond the mansions and gardens lay another beach that provided the foreground to a wholly different city of glass and concrete skyscrapers, highway bridges and shopping malls. Just another new Chinese city. I cycled into the downtown area of this new city and used my map app to locate a bakery. Ironically European-style bread was not available anywhere in the old German section of Qingdao, but I found schwarz brot, pretzels, fresh baguettes, ciabatta and Galette des Rois for sale among the trendy boulangeries and coffee shops of Zhangzhou Erlu ( 漳州二路).

Foodwise, Qingdao was my first taste of the culinary culture shock that I was to experience in northern China.  I was accustomed to a southern Chinese rice-based diet of spicy dishes that included many kinds of fresh vegetables, as well as meat. When it came to lunchtime in Shandong, I could find no rice dishes. Everything seemed to be based around noodles, steamed bread and large quantities of meat. And in Qingdao in particular, seafood and beer. At lunchtime I settled for simple beef noodles, without the usual ‘lajiao’ chilli flavour that I was used to. But for subsequent dinners, I could not get around my perception of noodles being only a lunch item.

With its German heritage, I fancifully imagined that Qingdao might have retained some elements of teutonic cuisine. If the Vietnamese had adopted baguettes from the French as Banh Mi, might not the Shandongers have kept the German wurst sausage as part of their diet? I should have done my research.

In the evening I took my bike down the hill (I was becoming grateful for its electric motor to help get me up and down the many inclines of Qingdao) towards the massive Tsingtao Beer factory. I had heard there was a nearby beer street where I could enjoy some local dishes washed down with freshly brewed local ale. I was right in one respect, but the food was all seafood. And I don’t eat seafood. The street opposite the Tsingtao brewery was lined with restaurants, all advertising their beer on tap, combined with various combinations of seafood meal deals. There were prawns, lobster, crab, locally caught fish and squid … and little else. 

To make it worse for the individual traveller, the restaurants were geared up for group dining: they offered a smorgasbord range of dishes and hotpot or barbecue cooking at the table. All a bit much for the solo diner. I had to walk a couple of kilometres down the road to find the night markets where I was able to get a simple fried rice meal.

I returned to my hotel up the hill, opting to finish the day off with a Kronenbourg 1664 beer from the local minimart after having missed out on trying the famous local brand fresh from the brewery. So no Tsingtao in Qingdao, but a French brand beer made in China under license from the Danish-owned Carlsberg. The marketing manager for Kronenbourg must surely have earned their annual bonus because this beer was to be the main foreign brand available at every supermarket I would visit throughout my China cycling trip.

I enjoyed my time in Qingdao so much that I opted to linger in the city for another day before setting out towards the start point of my cycling trip.

The next morning I took my newly recharged e-bike out for another spin around the streets of the old German town. At the bottom of Observatory Hill I went past another church and followed a street of German-style houses to the base of a similar looking hill about one kilometre away, which from a distance had what looked like a retro-futuristic space station domes on the summit. This was Signal Hill (信号山, Xinhao Shan: formerly Diedrichsberg), which as its name suggested had been the location of the old signal tower used for communicating with shipping in the port. 

The streets such as Qidong Lu (齐东路) leading up to the top were lined with European colonial houses and apartments that reminded me of the Montmartre area of Paris. One of the space station domes in the park on top of Signal Hill housed a cafe that was both cosy and offered panoramic views of the city and its harbour, as well as more distant landmarks such as Jiazhou Bay (胶州湾) to the southwest and the hills of Laoshan (崂山, where Tsingtao beer spring water is sourced) to the north east.

More immediately in view, just below the hill was the roof of an ornate building that I identified as the residence of the former German governor of Qingdao. After finishing my coffee I went down to have a look. It was an extravagant three-storey yellow mansion built in an extraordinary turn-of-the-century style that my guidebook told me was Jugendstil art nouveau. 

The granite and wood structure had been designed by leading architect Werner Lazarowicz and cost an absolute fortune to build. Legend says the Kaiser was furious when he learned of the exorbitant expenditure on the house by the governor Admiral Oskar von Truppel, and recalled him to Germany to sack him. However, there is surprisingly little information in English about this episode. 

According to the Chinese language history of the mansion, von Truppel  had been responsible for the massive public building works program in Qingdao, so it is perhaps no surprise that he went a bit over the top for his own residence. The Chinese sources said von Truppel had not been fired, but had returned to Germany because of the sudden death of his 13-year old son. He can’t have been in the Kaiser’s bad books for too long because he was awarded a hereditary aristocratic title six years later, on the eve of the First World War.

As with many of Qingdao’s colonial era buildings, the Governor’s Residence was to go through a rapid series of ownership changes and functions in the next few decades. It was taken over first by the Japanese in WW1, became an official guesthouse and Qingdao mayor’s residence in the interwar period and was again a Japanese military governor’s residence in WW2 before becoming a Chinese government state guesthouse housing visiting dignitaries including Mao and Ho Chi Minh. It is now officially a museum and is open to the public, with the interiors reminiscent of some UK stately homes.

After a pleasant hour swanning round the swanky residence and its peaceful gardens, I took off down the hill to explore that last bit of old German Qingdao. I walked my bike down Longshan Road (龙山路) to the junction with Longkou Road (龙口路) - the view at the crossroads was quintessentially middle European: the clocktower and spire of the church on the hill above, with the yellow painted half-timbered frontages of houses and their red tile roofs in the foreground around the square with its old cinema building and a pedestrian crossing. Continuing down Longkou Road the colonial houses and apartments again reminded me of the similar tree-lined streets in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill. 

Turning up the narrow Longjiang Road (龙江路) was more reminiscent of an Old German town, something not lost on the many local tourists snapping photos of the facades now converted into cafes and craft shops. Down a side street was the former residence of writer Lao She. It was an unremarkable building but the European milieu was perhaps not an unusual location for a man who had spent some of his formative years in London, where he based several of his early works on those of Dickens. Lao She had been a lecturer at the nearby Shandong University, whose campus was now the Institute of Oceanography. Running alongside it, University Avenue was another tree-lined road whose residences and shopfronts would not look out of place in western university suburbs.

Back at the hotel on Observatory Hill, I took a walk around the park area that overlooked the city. In the mornings it was the haunt of groups of retired residents who came here to do tai chi or practice their dance moves. At dusk however, there were just a handful of younger people here to savour a few moments of the sunset.

I said ‘ni hao’ to one guy standing nearby and told him I was impressed with the preservation of the old town of Qingdao.

“The buildings are well looked after because Shandong people like old things - we like to preserve historical and cultural items. Did you not see the many antique and retro shops selling old objects?” he said.

I asked him what it was like to grow up in a city with such a European heritage, and whether locals felt differently to people from other Chinese cities. He looked at me as if I’d asked a stupid question.

“The foreign influence in Qingdao was brief, just a few years in the last century, and the government does not want to promote foreign influence in China,” he replied.

“I never saw any foreigners when I was growing up except some Russians. That’s why I cannot speak English to you, I never had a chance to practice,” he added.

He asked me what I was doing in China and I told him about my plans to cycle along the Yellow River.

 “Shandong is the province where Chinese history and culture is strong - we have scholars like Confucius, and we have thousands of years of history of Buddhism and Taoism. You should visit the Confucius mansion.”

They were already on my itinerary, I told him. But first I had to see one last remaining bit of recent colonial history in this part of the world - the former British naval base at Weihaiwei. 

 

Chapter 2. Navy day at Weihaiwei 威海, 刘公岛 旧英国海军基地

It’s 1973, a dull Tuesday afternoon at St Thomas Aquinas Grammar School in the northern outskirts of Leeds, and Form 1R are having History. One 11-year old pupil is gazing out of the window over the school playing fields, daydreaming about anything except the interminable lists of dates and treaties being reeled off by the history master, Mr Bourne. Something about 1896 and the Treaty of Shimonoseki … blah … blah … and access to the ice-free naval ports of Port Arthur and Weihaiwei …. “WOODHEAD are you paying attention, boy?!” Obviously not.

Half a century later, Woodhead is paying attention as the Chinese announcement on the high speed train informs passengers that we are now arriving in Weihai (威海) North station. 

I had been drawn to visit Weihai because in the intervening years I had served in the Royal Navy Reserve and read with interest the accounts of British sailors who were stationed in the Far East as part of the so-called ‘China Station’. 

I was fascinated to learn that within living memory there have been sailors who served on HM ships that exercised the UK’s extra-territorial claim to sail up China’s rivers in the name of defending British interests in the country. The British film The Yangtse Incident tells the story of how one such ship, HMS Amethyst, was attacked and disabled by artillery fire from shore batteries of the PLA in Jiangsu province in 1949.

I was aware that Britain had naval bases in Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as stationing ships in Shanghai, but knew little about the Royal Navy’s additional base in north China. 

Known officially as Port Edward, Weihaiwei was something of a remote outpost that was leased by the British from China until 1930 as part of a strategic move to keep tabs on the German and Russian presences in nearby Qingdao and Port Arthur (Dalian, 大连), respectively. 

The navy base at Weihaiwei was actually located on a small offshore island called Liugong and was used as a ‘summer training establishment’. It was a port that British ships visited for rest and recreation purposes, favoured because of its mild climate compared to the heat of Shanghai and Hong Kong. 

After the Weihaiwei lease expired in 1930 the British navy maintained a token presence on Liugong Island under a temporary 10-year agreement with the Chinese government. The few remaining personnel departed in 1940 and the base was taken over by the Japanese military soon afterwards.

I was intrigued by these descriptions of a little corner of north China under the Union Jack, and since it was only two hours away from Qingdao I decided to pay a visit to see what remained of Weihaiwei. I’m sure Mr Bourne would have approved.

On the way to Weihai the train passed through the port city of Yantai (烟台). I had considered stopping there too because of its status as one of the first winemaking places in China. But the city looked a bit too industrial, and I had not been impressed with previous tastings of the local ChangYu wine brand - so I gave it a miss.

Weihai was one of those ‘small’ towns in China that have a sprawling hinterland. After disembarking at the new North Station I faced a 16 kilometre ride into the centre through a drab 'new town' landscape. Once I arrived on the seafront, however, it was like Surfer’s Paradise. The seafront was lined with new high rise apartment blocks and a promenade had been landscaped with artificial trees and featured cafes, viewing platforms and changing rooms featuring marine motifs. The Costa Del Shandong.

After spending a bit over my budget on the hotel in Qingdao, I opted to try the cheap youth hostel advertised in Weihai. Being off season, I found I was the only resident in the empty building tucked down a side street two blocks from the beach, next door to a Spar supermarket. And like all too many youth hostels it had an over-officious manager, who reeled off a list of rules and regulations that I must abide by or risk losing my 100 yuan deposit. 

He made it clear that my e-bike was not allowed in the hostel, and I had to leave it outside on the street among the other electric scooters.

My woeful preparation and lack of background research for this trip became apparent when I went for a walk around Weihai and learned that it was just across the water from the Korean peninsula. The large ferry docked at a jetty was the daily service from Incheon, only 380 kilometres away over the Yellow Sea. I also noticed that most of the shops and restaurants on the main street were bilingual in Korean and Chinese characters - and many of them were offering Korean products and speciality dishes.

The hostel receptionist later explained to me that Weihai was the closest point to Korea in China, and the city was a regular feature on tourist itineraries for South Koreans who came over to sample the markets and buy up cheap products. She pointed me in the direction of nearby Hanlefang (韩乐坊) where I would find the Korean Night market. It was a revelation - I arrived just as it got dark and the market was a bustling mass of people in an outdoor plaza illuminated by neon signs advertising all kinds of dishes. I opted for bulgogi and rice - which I noticed when translated into Chinese was simply ‘barbecue beef’.

The next morning was a brisk clear April day and I had a pleasant ride on my bike along the beachfront. Weihai was a holiday town and the beach was dotted with sea-themed sculptures, and sunbeds. The local authorities had installed a wooden deck walkway along which were gift shops and restaurants, but few were open this early in the season. They had also put a rustic thatched roofed house on the waterfront as a tourist information centre.

There were quite a few locals fishing from the promenade - some using weighted nets that they flung  into the clear waters. I’d been expecting the sea here to be the same mucky brown that I’d seen when visiting the coast in Xiamen, but the water seemed clean. Further on was a small harbour full of leisure craft and some powerboats being used for fishing. A woman from one of these called me over, inviting me to buy some of her fresh catch of prawns, lobster, flatfish, squid and crabs being displayed in plastic bowls on the dockside. 

After a couple of kilometres I had arrived in the centre of Weihai, and it looked like Miami. The seafront was dominated by a shiny new community of high rise condos, which could only be reached by a bridge closed off by a barrier and security guards. On the landward side was a  prominent viewing platform centred around a fancy bit of modern art sculpture. There was also a swish ’cafe and bistro’, in which I got a latte and planned my excursion across to the former naval base at Liugong Island (刘公岛). My map app showed me there was a ferry service across to the island which ran every 30 minutes. It even offered me the option to buy tickets online, but I thought I would try in person, in case there were any restrictions on foreigners visiting a military facility.

I found the ferry terminal another kilometre along the seafront, in a massive new building and car park complex billed as the ‘Liugong Island Passenger Transport Centre’. In the ticketing office the price for the ferry across the island was listed as 160 yuan (US$22), but I noticed that there was also a concession price of 30 yuan for people aged 60 and above. I qualified! After showing my passport I got a ticket that allowed me through the barrier to the wharf - and they even allowed me to take my folded up bike with me.

The small ferry had only a few tourist passengers and was not dissimilar to the boats that run on the Sydney to Manly route. Standing outside the cabin at the stern under the flapping Chinese national flag, among bobbing and swooping seagulls, it took a leisurely 20 minutes to cross the few kilometres to the small island of low-lying hills.

As we docked at the wharf on Liugong Island there were signs in Chinese stating that this was a military restricted area, but no signs of the PLA Navy other than a small patrol vessel. The island still looked like the training establishment it had once been under the Royal Navy. There were a couple of distinctly British-looking barracks with white facades and mock-Tudor black beams, now topped with a red star and the ba-yi (八一, 8-1) symbol of the PLA. I wheeled my bike off the jetty and found myself surrounded by warehouse buildings that could have been from Chatham or Rosyth naval dockyards. 

The only modern building was  a brutalist concrete structure that was a museum commemorating the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, something I knew nothing about. I should have paid more attention to Mr Bourne in 1973 when he was explaining the Treaty of Shimonoseki. 

The Chinese displays in the museum told of how the northern fleet of the Manchu Qing dynasty’s navy had been established on Liugong Island before it was defeated by the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Yalu River.

The battle had been the culmination of Japanese expansion in the region, which saw them defeat the Chinese and occupy Korea then move into Manchuria and take over Port Arthur (Dalian, 大连). The Chinese navy had been outclassed by the well trained and modernised Japanese fleet: the Chinese ships were obsolete, poorly armed and maintained, and the crews lacked discipline and training in modern naval warfare.

The displays in the museum came with a not-so-subtle propaganda message that the western colonial powers had been responsible for China’s defeat.  They implied that European countries had worked to keep China weak by preventing  it from building up a modern navy, whereas the British had provided strong support to build up the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The museum made little mention of the subsequent British acquisition of Liugong Island and its development as a northern base for the Royal Navy’s China Squadron. But the rest of the island was like an open air museum for the British colonial naval base. A road along the southern coast of the island led from the site of the old British naval barracks and sailors’ canteen and featured the Fleet Commander’s Residence, a 1920s style detached house. Further along there was an elegant beachfront bungalow described as “The Johnston Villa”.  This is presumably the summer residence of Weihaiwei’s British Commissioner, Sir Reginald Johnston.

Johnston was a notable senior diplomat and sinophile, and at one time the personal tutor to the last Emperor Pu Yi in the Peking (as portrayed by Peter O’Toole in The Last Emperor). When Pu Yi was expelled from the Forbidden City, Johnston returned to the Colonial Service and in this capacity served as the final British Commissioner at Weihaiwei until 1930.

The Commissioner’s residence was next to a golf course, which appeared to be still in use by the PLA Navy. A map of the island also showed tennis courts and swimming pools, all built by the British for when Liugong was a training and recreation facility. In more recent times the Chinese had added a sailing and windsurfing centre on the beach below the villa.

Back in the centre of the naval administration block there was still the old Masonic Hall and even the remains of the British-built church. However, much of the centre and western sections of the island were off limits and presumably still in use as military facilities for the Chinese navy.  There was a decommissioned Chinese submarine alongside that was open to the public - but when I tried to go inside I was told that entry was not allowed for foreigners.

Having seen everything there was to see on this small island, I took my bike back to the ferry wharf to wait for the next boat back to Weihai. An older Chinese man sitting opposite me was eyeing my bike with interest and gave me the thumbs up. He told me he was an engineer and looked over my e-bike with a professional eye, asking some technical  questions about its function and performance. When he learned that I was from the UK, he asked me if I had visited the museum about the Sino-Japanese War. 

“That was when China was weak, but not any more,” he said. “Now we have a strong navy. We need one to resist America.”

He gestured out over the bay: “America is surrounding China. They have bases just over there in Korea, and (pointing further south) in Japan and in the Philippines, and they are still in Taiwan … America is trying to contain China from all directions,” he said.

I grew wary of which direction this conversation might be going, though the man wasn’t hostile, just giving me a little lecture.

“China is a peaceful country and always welcomes foreign guests with good intentions,” he went on. “A lot of Koreans come here for the seafood in Weihai. Have you tried it? It is very fresh, the best in China …”.

I was relieved when the ferry docked and I was able to leave,  carrying my folded-up bike on board the boat  to head back across the water.

There wasn’t much else to see in Weihai of what had once been Port Edward. It was hard to imagine this had once been a British leased territory with its own courts, postage stamps and even a Weihaiwei Regiment of Chinese soldiers serving under the British Crown. As if in rebuke and to assert its Chineseness, the seafront now had an array of statues of Chinese cultural and historical figures, most of whom I had never heard of. I turned my bike around and pedalled back to the youth hostel, to ready myself for the next day’s train trip to the mouth of the Yellow River.

 

Chapter 3. Delta departure: oil pumps and birdlife 黄河口生态旅游区 - 东营

In its lower reaches, the Yellow River meets the sea on the Shandong coast, but it wasn’t always so. Over the years, the river has changed course many times due to being blocked by accumulation of silt and flooding. Until the 19th century the river ran further south, emptying into the Yellow Sea south of the Shandong peninsula. But in 1855 there was a flood-driven breakage known as an ‘avulsion’, which saw the Yellow River’s course shift dramatically, creating a new outlet 400 kilometres away to the north of the peninsula, into the Bohai (渤海) Sea.

It was at this estuary that I arrived in April 2025 to start my bike journey along the Yellow River. The nearest town was Dongying (东营), some 70 kilometres from the coast, to which I travelled by train from Weihai, changing at a town called Zibo (淄博). 

Dongying was an unremarkable petroleum industry town that sat on top of the second largest oil field in China. After a night in a cheap hotel I put my folding bike into the back of a taxi and told the driver to take me to the closest place to the river outlet that I could find on the map: the Yellow River Estuary Ecological Zone.

After an hour’s driving across a flat plain of marshland and canals, the taxi dropped me off outside a large new visitor centre. Like many of China’s natural sightseeing spots, the Yellow River estuary zone has been turned into a tightly regulated tourism operation in which visitors are required to buy a ticket and then transported on shuttle buses along a set path of sightseeing stops. 

This put paid to my plans of starting my bike ride at the exact spot where the Yellow River empties into the sea. When I wheeled my bike up to the park entrance barrier to ask if I could cycle through to the mouth of the river, the security guard shook his head and pointed me in the direction of the ticket office. I would have to travel the first nine kilometres of the Yellow River like everyone else, on a shuttle bus. At least I got a half price ticket because I was over 60. 

So I chained up my bike in the carpark and climbed aboard an electric buggy that carried me and two other passengers along a service road over a treeless plain of wetland mud intersected by canals. There was plenty of birdlife to see along the way: pheasants, ducks, gulls and storks nesting on top of telephone poles, but the river remained elusively out of sight. 

A strong breeze was blowing over the estuary and I was almost shivering by the time the bus driver announced: ‘xia che!’ [下车, ‘get off’] at the last stop.  A modernist glass cube building that was the ‘estuary zone management centre’ stood alone in an otherwise featureless flat landscape.

I leaned into the wind and walked over to a concrete platform that provided a view over the final stages of the Yellow River. It was disappointing to find that even here it was not possible to ‘see the sea’. The river was a few hundred metres wide at this point and flowed off into the distance between low banks lined with grass and bushes. The Bohai Sea was somewhere over the horizon. 

The white-capped waters of the river were a creamy brown colour, reflecting its high silt content. The sediment had been carried here from far inland China, where erosion of the loess plateau deposited fine particles of sand and clay into the river. Over time huge amounts of this silt had washed up on the sides of the river and accumulated to form embankments. When the river levels rose in spring and overflowed these dykes, the subsequent flooding caused devastation across the surrounding plains, hence the river being known as ‘China’s Sorrow’. 

At the end of the viewing platform was a jetty where a couple of motor launches were bobbing vigorously on the choppy waters. They were offering sightseeing tours along the river, but I decided this was far enough for me. The handful of other visitors must have shared my reluctance because we were all soon getting back on to the waiting electric buggy to trundle back to the park entrance. 

With a day’s cycling ahead of me I also opted to skip the Bird Museum at the visitor centre, and at the exit I was relieved to see that my bike was still where I’d left it in the car park. It was now joined by two other touring bikes with panniers. The riders were a pair of older Chinese guys who told me they’d just arrived at the estuary as part of the long-distance trip they were making down the coast from their home in north-east China. When I told them I was aiming to cycle along the length of the Yellow River, they looked at my folding bike with scepticism and said: “Too small!”

I responded by saying I was confident the Dahon should at least be good enough to get me across the plains of northern China, as far as Xi’an. Once there, I could reassess what kind of bike I would use for the more challenging route up into Inner Mongolia.

 After an obligatory selfie and adding each other as contacts on WeChat, they gave me the thumbs up and wished me: “Yi Lu Shun Feng!” (一路顺风, ‘have a nice trip!’). And so, with a feeling of trepidation, I set out on the first part of my Yellow River cycle tour. With a wave from the security guard, I exited the car park onto a long straight road heading back in the direction of Dongying.

It was a chilly spring day and I was pleased to note that I had the wind on my back, coming off the sea. I was also glad that I’d brought warmer clothes with me from Guilin. The route initially took me down a long straight treeless road through reedy marshland. There was little other traffic on the road and I was able to continue my bird spotting with sightings of avocets and hoopoe, which were common here but rare species by UK standards. 

After a few kilometres the bike route diverted away from that of my earlier taxi journey, down a minor road that my map showed would run alongside the Yellow River. In reality, I only got occasional glimpses of the river because it was hidden beyond rough farmland, with the view blocked by dykes and lines of trees.

The terrain was completely flat, and I got my first real experience of how the Dahon e-bike performed in long distance use. In theory, a fully charged battery would provide a range of  up to 80 kilometres according to the manufacturer’s manual. But my previous experience with e-bikes made me sceptical of any such claim. A more realistic daily range would be about 60 kilometres on one battery, I guessed. And with plans to cycle up to 100 kilometres a day, that meant I’d have to find ways of conserving battery power, especially for when I really needed it, such as on hills. 

On the flat I was able to coast along at 25 km/hour using the lowest ‘economy’ mode of the bike’s power levels. And with the wind still behind me, I found I could pedal quite easily at around 20 km/hour without any power assist. This was when travelling light with just a couple of panniers on the back of the Dahon, carrying what I considered to be the minimal amount of kit needed for a bike tour when staying in hotels rather than camping. 

For clothing I was using what had worked well for me on my previous China bike trip in Yunnan. Over a base layer of a T-shirt I wore a lightweight long-sleeve hiking shirt that was baggy and had plenty of vents. The ‘loose and lightweight’ philosophy also applied to my trekking pants and a pair of old Scarpa walking shoes.

For an outer layer I had a windproof Fjallraven Skogso jacket. It wasn’t waterproof, but previous experience had taught me that Gore-Tex 'breathable’ waterproof shells were just too sweaty and uncomfortable for cycling. Since I’d be cycling in dry weather most of the time, I brought a waterproof cycling cape to use in the rain. 

I didn’t have a cycling helmet but instead wore a broad-brimmed hat because I worried more about the sun than a skull fracture. Being from Australia, I was all too well aware of the risks of exposure to UV rays (having had two suspected melanomas excised from my skin) and hence I also covered my face with a neck muffler. I would later add a pair of gloves after the backs of my exposed hands turned deep brown within the first week of cycling.

This first day on the road saw me adopt a variety of techniques for bike travel that would become a routine for the next three months. For navigation I used the Gaode Map (高德地图) app, on which I set Dongying as my destination and selected the ‘cycling’ option. The app showed me a couple of route options, with details of the distance, uphill and downhill sections, and also highlighting features such as tunnels and bridge crossings. I had the phone mounted on the handlebars and once I’d selected my preferred route it was simply a case of following the route on a GPS-type display. It was so easy and convenient it felt like cheating.

After an hour or so of pedalling alongside irrigation channels and empty fields, I stopped at a small village to find a restaurant that offered a bowl of beef noodle soup for 12 yuan. Back on the road, I became nervous when I realised I was passing an army compound, inside which soldiers were drilling in formation and yelling out “sha!” (杀! ‘kill!) slogans. I pulled my scarf up to cover my face and hastened my pace in case someone suspected me of being a foreign spy.

There were a couple of long concrete road bridges that spanned the Yellow River before I eventually reached the outskirts of Dongying. Suddenly the road merged with another and became busy with traffic and I had to pay attention to the cars and vans now rushing past me.

At a third bridge I turned south and headed away from the river, towards the centre of Dongying. It was a raw industrial town with the local economy based on oil extraction and processing. A huge oil refinery covered several blocks and filled the air with acrid sickly fumes. Beyond it I came across the first of many backyard ‘pumpjack’ oil installation stations that I’d later see dotted about the region. Located incongruously in front of an apartment block, the pump’s horsehead beam was bobbing slowly up and down like a dinosaur bird pecking at the ground.

By late afternoon I was pulling back up to the door of the Jufeng Hotel, where the reception staff welcomed me back like an old friend. 

“We don’t see many foreigners in Dongying, you are our first foreign guest,” beamed the young manager. “If you need anything let me know,” he added, giving me his business card.

After my bad experience with the e-bike-hating hostel manager in Weihai I was careful not to draw attention to it at this hotel. I simply folded it up and carried it as discreetly as possible to the lift and up to my room. 

When I started to charge the battery in the room,  I was startled by a sudden knock at the door. In a panic I pushed the charger out of sight under the bed, before opening the door a fraction. Outside in the corridor stood a female hotel clerk, smiling and proffering a bowl of fruit. “Ni hao - compliments of the manager,” she said.

I sighed with relief and hoped the rest of my tour would be as easy as this. 

Route map: Yellow River Estuary to Dongying (click on image to enlarge)