Shahu Fort on the Frontier Wall

A line of wall runs through Youyu County in the north-western corner of Shuozhou prefecture, and Shahu, or Shahukou, is one of the gates set in it. The county is large and thinly held: 1,965 square kilometres, a seat at Xincheng town, and 88,212 residents counted in the 2020 census. Two national highways, the 109 and the 241, cross it. Its township list reads like a register of small fortifications, with Youwei, Weiyuan and Yuanbaozi among the towns and Niuxinbao and Gaojiabao among the townships, the character bao, a walled earthwork, recurring through the names. That is the country the pass sits in: the corner of the province that turns towards Inner Mongolia, with the wall line running through it.

What survives as a record of Shahu is a record of a gate and its office rather than of masonry. The Qing state kept a customs house at the pass, and from 1662 it was staffed by Manchu officials appointed for the duty. Tax was taken at a series of posts: the south gate, the river mouth, the Huangfuchuan border crossing and the town inside it, the four gates of Shuoping prefecture city, and the horse market. The annual quota was a little over 15,414 taels of silver, and anything collected above it went to the Board of Revenue as well. Read that list and the shape of the place appears: a pass whose business spilled out of its own gateway and into the gates of the towns behind it, much of it resting on timber from the Daqing Mountains.

The pass is best known through a migration. Zou xikou, walking out the western gate, names the movement of farming families from Shanxi, northern Shaanxi and Hebei into western Inner Mongolia between the Ming and the early Republic, when land at home was short and people crossed the wall without permission to break new ground. Zhangjiakou in Hebei was the eastern gate and Shahu the western one; but the term is not fixed to Shahu, and the location of Xikou is disputed, since every pass along the wall where north Shanxi, north Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia meet could carry the name. What is not in doubt is that Shahu was the road people from central and northern Shanxi took towards central and western Inner Mongolia.