The Sand Slope Where the Tiger Was Killed

Jingyanggang is not a mountain. It is a field of low sand dunes in Zhangqiu town, in Yanggu county, in the flat west of Shandong, and the scenic area covers 33.3 hectares. The sand rolls across it in small ridges, and one temple stands on the ground, dedicated to Wu Song. Beneath the sand there is more than a story: the site of a walled town of the Longshan culture has been found here, which places the hill among the very old settlements of the province. It is one of the few places in Shandong where the landscape of a novel and the landscape of an excavation are the same piece of ground.

The Water Margin tells of outlaws who resist authority, and it is one of the best-known books in Chinese literature. Critics have been nearly unanimous in their praise of the work, which introduced readers to Shi Jin, Lu Zhishen, Lin Chong, Wu Song, Li Kui, Yan Qing and Song Jiang. The novel's Shandong is a country of marshes, posting stations and county towns, and Yanggu is one of the county towns. What the book did to Jingyanggang was to give the slope a single scene: one man, one tiger, and a fight that ends with the tiger dead. Everything else about the place, the sand and the temple and the buried town, is what the story is attached to.

The story has been remade so often that the slope has a second life on screen. In 1972 the Shaw Brothers studio released Delightful Forest, directed by Chang Cheh and starring Ti Lung as Wu Song; ten years later Li Han-hsiang made Tiger Killer, with Ti Lung playing the same hero again. Hong Kong producers returned to the book through the 1970s, and the characters reappear in other novels, in operas and in television. For a visitor the effect is layered: a sand hill with a temple, a printed page, and a film. The county keeps the site as a scenic area, and the name on the map is the name in the book.