Hukou Falls from the Shanxi Bank

The fall is not in one province. Hukou lies where the Yellow River runs through the Jin-Shaanxi gorge, and the two banks belong to different administrations: the east bank is in Ji County, in Linfen, below Fenghuo Hill at the southern end of the Lüliang range, about twenty-five kilometres south-west of the county seat; the west bank is in Yichuan County, in Yan'an, Shaanxi, below Huanglong Hill. Standing on the Shanxi side, the far bank is another province, and the water between them is the border. The approach from Ji County crosses the plateau, and then the ground drops away to the gorge.

Above the fall the river is wide. The Chinese account has it more than five hundred metres across before it is suddenly confined by the two banks; the name Hukou, flask mouth, comes from that narrowing, the neck through which the whole stream must pass. The fall itself is given as thirty metres wide and about fifty metres deep, with a maximum surface of thirty thousand square metres, and the drop is put at fifty metres. The English account measures differently: where the river is squeezed to twenty or thirty metres, it drops over a fall fifteen metres high and twenty metres wide, and the whole fall is usually thirty metres across. Either way a wide river is forced into a channel and made to fall.

The fall changes with the season. In the ordinary run of the year it is about thirty metres wide; in the flood season it widens to fifty, and the height is given as more than twenty metres. The place is protected as well as measured: the national geological park was unveiled on 5 September 2006, and the scenic area around the fall covers a hundred square kilometres, from Mafentan in the north to Xiaochuanwo in the south, the gorge in the west and Renzu Mountain in the east. The fall stands at 448.1 metres above sea level, at 36 degrees 8 minutes north and 110 degrees 26 minutes east.

Below the fall, the Qilangwo bridge crosses the river and joins Shanxi to Shaanxi, the point where the two provinces meet on a bridge. The fall has also been a national image: in 1991 it was listed among the '40 Best' scenic spots in the country, and a picture of the falls appeared on the older fourth series of the fifty-yuan note. The visitor figures record the change - twenty thousand in 1994, forty-seven thousand in 1995, a hundred thousand in 1996. Those numbers are thirty years old and the place has grown since, but they mark the moment when a remote gorge became a destination.