The Bricks That Went to the Capital

Linqing is a county-level city of Liaocheng, and it owes its position to a junction. The Wei River meets the Grand Canal here, in the far west of Shandong, 380 kilometres from Beijing on the railway line to Kowloon. About 955 square kilometres of land lie within the county, running from 29 to 38 metres above sea level, and the year averages 12.8 degrees with 205 frost-free days. The canal did not merely pass Linqing; it made the town the place where goods changed hands between the north China plain and the waterway, and the toll house that stood here was built to take a share of every one of them.

In Ming and Qing times Linqing was a great centre for the distribution of textiles, grain and bricks, and it is famous for one thing above the others: it is the place where the tiles of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City were produced. The bricks were shaped from the clay of the plain, fired, and then carried by water, which was far cheaper than hauling them over the hills to Beijing on carts. The same water carried grain for the capital and cloth in both directions. The trade made the town rich enough to build, and the wealth shows in what it left behind: the Sheli Pagoda near the canal is the best-known landmark in the county.

The old town keeps four things worth the walk. Two Ming-dynasty Hui mosques stand in the town, the northern and the eastern; the ruins of the customs house where the canal tolls were collected survive under the name Chao Guan; the city museum is housed in the building group called Aotouji, which means turtle-head promontory; and the Sheli Pagoda rises beside the water. The town also remembers people: the Ming poet Xie Zhen, the Ming general Zuo Liangyu, the general Zhang Zizhong and the scholar Ji Xianlin were all born here. In 1927 the Catholic church made Linqing a mission of its own, and Matteo Ricci had visited the town centuries before.