Qikou: A Trading Port on the Yellow River

Qikou sits in Linxian, in Lüliang, on the Yellow River in western Shanxi, and in the Ming and Qing it was the water-and-land transport hub and trading town of that part of the province. The work of the place was the change of carrier: cargo that came by water went on by road, and cargo that came by road went on by water, boats and carts meeting at the same quay. What is walked today is the shape that trade left. The street is known as the Five-Li Long Street, the shopfronts stand packed along it, and the Black Dragon Temple looks down from Wuwu Hill. In 2006 the whole group entered the sixth batch of national key cultural relic protection units.

The street is the monument. Its name gives the length: five li, roughly two and a half kilometres, and the shops are packed close along it. Four of the old trading houses keep their names in the record, Yongyu, Yongshun, Tianjuyi and Xinyiyuan, and those four names are almost all the record says about the business they did, so the street has to be read as a row of fronts rather than a set of explained interiors. Above it, on Wuwu Hill, the Black Dragon Temple is the main temple of Qikou, with a main hall and a stage. Street, temple and houses were listed together in 2006 as one group of buildings, not as separate monuments.

The record names the shops but not their cargoes, so the goods that paid for Qikou have to be read from what was built. The complex covers the town and seven clusters of dwellings, at Qikou itself and at Xiwan, Gaojiaping, Zijishan, Yuanshang, Zhaizishan and Lijia Shan, and the structures range from earth and timber to brick and stone to cave dwellings cut into the slope. That range is the trace of a mixed economy, port, yards and households held in one fabric. Two of those villages, Xiwan and Lijia Shan, are separately rated as traditional villages, which keeps them inside the town's frame while marking them as places where people still live.

The river traffic that made the street belongs to the Ming and Qing, and the town has since settled into the ordinary work of a Linxian township. Qikou governs a community and several dozen villages, from Gaojiaping and Gaojiashan to Lijia Shan and Heishuigou, spread over the hills above the water. What the old port left is still the reason the place is known. In 2023 it was named among the second batch of China's hundred cultural towns, a listing that puts the street and the temple in a national frame rather than a local one. The houses are lived in, the villages keep their names, and what is protected is a working town.