Tang Warrior Women
Highlights From My Trip
to Niangzi Guan

By Andrew Ford

> Resources > Fanaticus

On Friday 11 November 2005, after bugging my wife about it for years, I finally got my opportunity to visit Niangzi Guan.  My wife and I were visiting her relatives in Langfang, a small town between Beijing and Tianjin, and we decided it was near enough for a day trip.

I travelled with a professor from Hebei University, a friend of my wife’s relatives.  He was asked to go along because my in-laws are paranoid that a lone foreigner will get mugged or at least ripped off, and my wife didn’t want to spend a whole day in a dirty place looking at old things.  We engaged a professional driver.  Neither of my companions spoke English, but my Mandarin turned out to be adequate for the day.

The trip began with a 4 AM start from Langfang.  We drove across most of Hebei Province via Shijiazhuang and across the border into Shanxi along modern motorways.  Turning onto a side road we arrived in the pass of Niangzi Guan itself around 8 AM.

The Hebei Plains are incredibly flat, except where the many rivers cut through.  These usually have dyked banks, with the water snaking in multiple braided channels along the bottom.  In spring flood season the water rises up often over the banks, while in low flow they can be completely dry.  In mid-November only the main channels had much water, with many brackish billabongs showing where minor channels were drying up.  Rows of trees along roadsides and field boundaries, plus a few plantations, and villages every few kilometres, were the only other visual relief from the flat, dry countryside.

This made the mountains surrounding Shanxi Province rather startling, especially as the pollution haze (particularly coal dust) in the air hid them until we were quite close.  The road to the pass leaves the main motorway from Shijiazhuang to Taiyuan (which bores straight through the hills as modern motorways tend to do) just inside Shanxi.  It then proceeds for about 20 kilometres of very bumpy rutted surface due to the incessant traffic of coal trucks.  The main railway uses the pass, requiring many tunnels due to the serpentine layout and narrow passage of the river valley.

The first place we visited was the fortress itself.  The current structure was built in the Ming Dynasty to guard ‘the Ninth Pass Under Heaven’ as the gate inscription calls it, (ie: the ninth major pass, in the Ming Great Wall, counting from Shanhai Guan on the Yellow Sea).  However, this strategically important location was fortified much earlier than that.  While the driver slept in the car, the professor and I engaged a local guide, who spoke a only limited English and was astonished to see a Westerner in this little-known corner of China.

The fort climbs up a strategically located knoll in several levels, with houses, a temple to Princess Pingyang for whom the pass is named, and several gates and defensive works.

We climbed the very steep stepped wall to the top of the knoll, where there was an old stone reservoir and some crop fields and trees of unknown age, which had supplied the fort when it was garrisoned.  The structure of the wall could be seen where it was under repair.  From the knoll you can look down at the small river that created the gap in the hills.  Two small covered waterwheels (horizontal as with most Chinese waterwheels I have seen) are used to grind incense for the temple.  The locals claim that during a Ming Dynasty civil war, the pass proved so impregnable that the attacking army went all the way north to Datong to enter Shanxi.

The highlight of the trip, from a Fanaticus point of view, was the visit the Temple of Princess Pingyang.  There are statues of the princess, and a couple of her female lieutenants standing to her right and left, all in Tang period armour.  On the wall are paintings of Tang warriors including women.  Some of the art was damaged during the Cultural Revolution.

We then drove to the waterfall.  Once again our driver caught up on sleep while the professor and I climbed down into the narrow river gorge that cuts down about 20 or 30 metres (60 to 100 feet) from the flat floor of the pass just downstream of the knoll.  (Type 6 river anyone?)  The falls are fairly small, pretty rather than spectacular.  Having paid at the gate for a tour boat ticket, we continued to follow the path past the falls until we reached a jetty.  Within a few minutes a 20 seat boat pulled up to take the two of us (and nobody else on this nearly tourist-free day) on the half-hour trip to the lower end of Lake Pingyang and back.  Although it was about 15 degrees centigrade (60 degrees in silly scale) in the pass above, and we were warm from all our walking and wall-climbing that morning, we still found it so chilly sitting in the boat in the shadowed gorge, with the wind whistling through, that we had to put our padded jackets back on.  As the floor of the pass above descended to meet the gorge around the lake, there were houses right down to the water’s edge in places.

I have found some references to the pass as “Niangzi Xiao Guan (Maiden’s Smile Pass)” on tourist web sites.  At no time did any person, sign, or book that I heard or saw in the area, in Chinese or English, ever refer to Niangzi Xiao Guan.  All references were to Niangzi Guan, including the inscriptions over the gates.

We were back in Shijiazhuang not long after midday for lunch, and back home by 5 PM, making this a long day trip from the vicinity of Beijing.  Due to a lack of accommodation that can legally accept foreigners in the area, and the constant haze of coal dust, it is better done as a day trip than a stay-over.  Of the two closest big cities, Shijiazhuang seems (from the little I know and from what Lonely Planet says) to be less interesting than Taiyuan, and you could reach Niangzi Guan in an hour or two from either.  Passenger trains are few and awkwardly timed, and bus tours seem to be mainly for Party Cadres on “Red Training” patriotic tours, but taxis and hire cars are cheap in China.  The whole day only cost me about A$150.

So, does anyone want to cast Tang Warrior Women figures?

> Top of Page > Resource Page > Fanaticus

Last Updated: 20 March 2007
Questions, comments and input welcome.
Send them to Chris Brantley at brant@erols.com.