Niangziguan at the Jingxing Pass

The pass stands at the foot of the Mian Mountains in the north-east of Pingding County, Yangquan, on one of the main routes between Shanxi and Hebei across the Taihang, 55 kilometres west of Shijiazhuang. Its older name was Weize Pass; the castle seen today was rebuilt in 1542, the twenty-first year of the Jiajing reign, with a garrison commander posted to it, and it keeps that form. It is called the Ninth Pass on the Great Wall, standing at the southern end of the inner Three Passes. It faces Jingxing Pass across the mountain, the two together holding the Jingxing mouth, one of the few ways between the two provinces. Its defence mattered in the Battle of Xinkou.

A pass in the Taihang is usually a place of dry stone and wind, and this one is not. The Tao River, a tributary of the Yellow River, twists through the valleys below the pass, and springs break out at several points around the walls. Water is the reason the site could be held: a garrison needs it, and so does anyone living inside the walls. The springs are not one feature but a set, and they have given the place a second identity alongside the military one. Several springs are recorded, and the one on the north-west side is the best known of them.

The best known of the springs is the Xuan Spring, on the north-west side, and it is also called the Niangziguan waterfall and the Shuilian Dong waterfall, names that tie the water to the pass and to a cave. It is the point where the springs stop being a convenience and become a sight: water leaving the rock in a fall, on the north-west side of the pass. The name Niangziguan waterfall attaches to the spring rather than to the wall, and that is worth noticing, because it puts the water, not the fortification, in the name visitors carry away. The record gives the spring, its two other names and its position on the north-west side, but no measurement and no season.

The name is a story. Legend says that the army of Princess Pingyang, a daughter of Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang, was once garrisoned here, and that her troops were called the lady soldiers, from which the pass took the name Ladies' Pass. The tradition is attached to the old name Weize Pass, and the lower gate carries the claim in stone, inscribed as the place where Princess Pingyang of the Tang stationed troops. The military record is separate and later: on the night of 20 August 1940, in the Hundred-Regiment Campaign, the main force of the Eighth Route Army forced its way into the pass.