Check out my new chapter! This story is grounded in 1998, but today, retracing my route on modern maps, I've been able to identify several places I passed through without knowing what they were. Why? Because I couldn't read the signs, and because in many cases, the places didn't yet exist in any official sense. I've learned a lot about where I was, what it's like now, and the geography. This story takes place along the Tanghe River and Lingqiu County in Hebei Province.

The dramatic canyon where I spent my first night lost in the mountains, ending up at what turned out to be a brothel, was the Tanghe River canyon on the Hebei-Shanxi border. In 1998 it was simply a backwater: a narrow road, a loud river, sheer cliffs, and people living rough in villages with no particular designation or signage. Nobody was calling it scenic. There were no ticket booths, no trail markers, no tourists. Just the canyon, the river, and whatever was happening there in the dark.

The next morning I crossed the Tanghe River where it broadens into the Lingqiu Basin, over a bridge so new the concrete was still pale. A market had set up on the far bank. I stopped there without knowing I was on the edge of Lingqiu town, a county seat with roots in the Warring States period. I couldn't read a sign. The place felt like the edge of the world.

In the tourism sense, it was, but China was changing fast. After decades of near-total isolation, the country had come to understand it could no longer exist apart from the global economy. Trade deals required opening up. And internally, a new middle class was beginning to accumulate enough wealth and leisure time to be curious about their own country. The old two-tier tourist pricing system, which had charged foreigners many times more than Chinese citizens for the same entry ticket, had just been abolished, a small signal of a much larger shift.

My friends in Beijing had gotten me there in the narrow window just before all of it arrived: the cars, the roads, the designated scenic areas, the ticket booths, the tour buses. I'd imagined the Chang Jiang might help me blend in. It was, after all, a Chinese motorcycle. But nobody rode them anymore. Among the little Japanese 100cc ag bikes and scooters that puttered along these roads, my 650cc sidecar rig was enormous, loud, and utterly conspicuous. There was no blending. There was only the foreigner on the giant antique motorcycle, passing through a China that was about to be transformed almost beyond recognition, and knew it, and was both ready and not ready.

The Tanghe River canyon, where the brothel used to stand, is a rafting destination now. The loess villages have mostly emptied as their young people moved to factories on the coast.

The small coal operations I passed, men crawling in and out of holes cut into the loess cliffs, one man with a wheelbarrow moving among them, were informal small-scale mines that dotted this corridor in the reform era. Most were gone within a decade, consolidated into larger state operations or simply exhausted.

Datong, China's self-styled coal capital, is itself now grappling with declining reserves, falling prices, and the long hangover of a single-industry economy.

The monastery above the fresh black parking lot was built around 491 AD by a Taoist monk named Liao Ran who chose the cliff deliberately: high enough that floodwaters couldn't reach it, sheltered from rain and snow by the mountain's overhang, and far enough above the ground to muffle any distracting noises.

The idea, as one Taoist master who inspired its construction put it, was to invite celestial guests above while severing worldly clamor below. Monks did live and pray there, across multiple dynasties. Today there are no monks or living quarters remaining in the structure, and no river in the canyon below. A dam built upstream after 2000 finished off what deforestation and drought had already started. I don't remember a river there in 1998 but having crossed a lot of arroyos, I expect it had dried up, at least temporarily.

The monastery outlasted its river, and then its monks, and is now crowded with tourists on walkways never designed for crowds. So perhaps it's just as well I couldn't get up there after all. Anyway, later I'll come upon another hanging temple with caves and a monk who actually lives there. Stay tuned!

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