A Park Built From a Scroll: Crossing Hongqiao Bridge Twice

Start by being explicit about what this is. The park's own words are that it was built in Kaifeng, the capital of eight dynasties, as a large-scale Song-dynasty history and culture theme park reproduced at one-to-one scale from the Chinese transmitted scroll painting Qingming Shanghe Tu, and it has been open to the public since 1998. It is a modern construction, not an archaeological site, and its internal visual language is borrowed wholesale from the painting rather than from surviving Song buildings. The scale figures come from two places and they differ slightly: the park gives over 540 mu of land, 150 mu of water, more than 400 imitation ancient buildings and over 30,000 square metres of classical garden architecture, while the Henan provincial government describes the site as about 600 mu with 180 mu of water, including an old Bian canal, the Hongqiao Bridge, a folk street and royal gardens.

The park's core landscape is a single structure, and it is worth the climb. The park quotes the Dongjing Menghua Lu on the spot: seven li beyond the east water gate was the Rainbow Bridge, its piers absent, built entirely of great timbers and painted to look like a flying rainbow. In the park the bridge spans the canal on a two-level design, with pedestrians and horses on the upper deck and goods and boats passing below, which is what makes it different from a single-level arch. A bronze relief of the whole Qingming Shanghe Tu stands nearby, 33.32 metres long and 2.23 metres high, and the eastern gate, the Yingbin Gate facing Dragon Pavilion Lake, opens at nine in the morning to a ceremony in which an actor playing the magistrate of Kaifeng receives a procession of officials.

The park changes register after dark, and the food is the reason most people stay. The Dongjing food street is described as full of variety in flavour, with the night market running until the third watch and reopening again at the fifth, so the stalls turn twice before dawn. The formal side of the programme is a large royal amusement zone built with technology in the style of guofeng, completed and opened to the public in July 2023, which stages the legends and tales of old China for visitors. What the park cannot do is pretend to be old. The provincial government's own description calls it a large-scale Song cultural theme park reconstructed on the model of Zhang Zeduan's painting, and that sentence should travel with any photograph taken here.