10 Days in Sanmenxia

Settle in, then take the levee path north of town at sunset — barge traffic, willow banks and a first look at the river that shapes this city.

1. Yellow River levee walk

Whooper swans arrive from Siberia from November and stay into March; recent winters have counted over 10,000 along this stretch of the river. Out of season the reed boardwalks and bird hides still make an easy morning.

1. Swan Lake National Wetland Park

The courtyards are pits sunk six-odd metres into the loess, a dwelling style locals trace back some 4,000 years; at the Guo State Museum, look for the 2,800-year-old jade-hilted iron sword billed as China's earliest smelted-iron blade.

1. Shanzhou Dikengyuan underground courtyards
2. Guo State Museum

Some 75 km west of downtown, the pass where tradition says Laozi set down the Dao De Jing's roughly 5,000 characters; 20 minutes by high-speed rail to Lingbao West and a taxi, back for an evening in town.

1. Hangu Pass

Built between 1957 and 1961 as the first dam across the Yellow River, with a crest a little over 700 metres; the midstream Zhongliu Dizhu rock, the proverbial pillar, sits just downstream.

1. Sanmenxia Dam

Fifteen minutes or so by high-speed rail east to Mianchi; the village dig of 1921 opened modern Chinese archaeology, and the painted-pottery culture it named ran roughly 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. The museum beside the site wraps it up.

1. Yangshao Village site
2. Yangshao Culture Museum

The museum on the Miaodigou site, opened in 2021, explains the painted-pottery wave that swept prehistoric China; an easy afternoon and another levee evening close the loop.

1. Miaodigou Museum
2. Yellow River levee walk

An honest cross-province day, about an hour by car north across the Yellow River; the Guandi temple at Xiezhou, begun in 589 during the Sui, is billed as the ancestral temple of the war god, and the salt lake beside Yuncheng is nicknamed China's Dead Sea.

1. Xiezhou Guandi Temple
2. Yuncheng Salt Lake

Under an hour by high-speed rail east; the river-cliff grottoes hold some 100,000 Buddhist figures and were inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 — start early, walk the west bank first, return by evening.

1. Longmen Grottoes

A morning soak at the hot-spring resorts west of town, a snack-street lunch and the high-speed rail from Sanmenxia South — if you missed swan season, it runs again from November.

1. Wentang hot springs