Qingming Riverside Garden (清明上河园)

Why Go

A Picture You Can Walk Into

1. The painting, and why there is a park of it

Along the River During the Qingming Festival is a handscroll a few metres long, painted in the early twelfth century, showing the Northern Song capital going about an ordinary day: porters, camels, shopfronts, a wine house, boats on the river, a crowd on a great timber arch bridge, a man losing control of a horse. It is the painting every Chinese schoolchild sees, and its subject is a city working rather than an emperor or a mountain.

This park is that scroll built at full size. Halls, towers, streets, a lake with ships on it, staff in Song costume. The picture at the top of this page is the whole thing from the air in winter: red and gold roofs packed around a branching lake, white balustrades, a grandstand for the evening show, and modern apartment blocks and a building site immediately outside the boundary.

The obvious objection is that a replica is worth less than the real thing. It is worth knowing why there is no real thing to visit. Kaifeng sits on the flood plain of the Yellow River, the river has buried it repeatedly, and the Song city lies several metres down under silt and under the modern town. There is no Song Kaifeng to excavate and walk through. Given that, building the painting is a more honest response than most: everybody knows what the source is and the source is a picture.

2. The city in the painting did not last

The scroll shows a prosperous, crowded, commercial capital in the early twelfth century. In 1127 the Jurchen armies took Kaifeng, carried off two emperors, and ended the Northern Song. The court fled south and the dynasty continued from Hangzhou as a smaller thing. Within a generation, the world in the painting was gone.

That gives the scroll a second life it did not start with. A few decades after the fall, a man who had lived in Kaifeng as a young man wrote a memoir of it from exile in the south: the markets, the festivals, what was sold on which street, what people ate. It is one of the great books of urban nostalgia in any language, and it was written by somebody who knew the city would not come back. The painting and that book describe the same lost place, one in pictures and one in lists.

So the park sits on a genuinely strange foundation: a full-size reconstruction of a city that was destroyed nine hundred years ago, built above the buried remains of that same city, from a painting made shortly before it fell. The lasers and the costumed staff are the surface. What is underneath is a long argument about memory, and it is more interesting than the ticket suggests.

Orientation

Afternoon In, Evening Out

The park is compact and walkable, arranged around a lake with the halls and towers on its edges, a street of shops and workshops, a ship at a quay and the grandstand for the evening show at one end. Costumed performances run through the day at fixed times and are posted at the gate.

The shape of a visit is therefore an afternoon inside, dinner, and the show after dark. Arriving in the morning and leaving before the evening means paying for the park and missing the thing it is built around.

Context

The City Under the City

Kaifeng was among the great cities of the eleventh-century world, the capital of a dynasty that ran on commerce rather than on land, with paper money, night markets, restaurant culture and a merchant class with money to spend. The scroll is evidence of that: it is a picture of shops and traffic, painted with the kind of attention usually reserved for landscapes or emperors.

Then the Yellow River. Kaifeng sits on a plain the river has repeatedly flooded, sometimes catastrophically and sometimes deliberately, and each flood left silt. The consequence is unusual among great Chinese cities: the successive layers of Kaifeng are stacked underneath the modern town, several metres down, and the Song capital is not somewhere you can go. Excavations reach it in trenches. Nobody walks through it.

That absence is the strongest argument this park has. A replica of a surviving place is unnecessary and usually worse than the original. A replica of a place that no longer exists in any visitable form, built from the best single piece of evidence about it, is a different proposition. It is closer to a reconstruction drawing at full size than to a fake, and the honest response is to judge it on how carefully it reads its source rather than on whether the bricks are old.

Where to Base

Kaifeng (开封)

Kaifeng is a mid-sized Henan city with a Song reputation and very little Song fabric, for the reason given above. What it does have is a walkable centre, a celebrated night-market street and food that is worth planning around, plus an iron pagoda and a Song-era observatory site that did survive.

It is about half an hour from Zhengzhou by high-speed rail, which makes it easy to reach and easy to underrate. One night here rather than a day trip is the difference between seeing the park and seeing the city.