Taiyuan is a city with a plain for a floor and mountains for walls. Its name means 'great plain': the two characters point to the place where the Fen River leaves the mountains and enters a relatively flat plain. Mountains ring the city on three sides - north, west and east - and an open Fen valley fills the middle and a corner of the south. The river runs north to south through the whole municipality for about a hundred kilometres, roughly a seventh of its length. That position was strategic long before the city was a provincial capital: its first walled city, Jinyang, was built in 497 BC, and the state of Jin held its capital further down the valley, near today's Houma.
From the journal
The Fen River Runs Through the Provincial Capital
The Fen gives Taiyuan its name and its economy: the article follows the river from the northern mountains to the reservoirs and riverside park that now hold its water inside the city.
In the same city · Taiyuan ↗A city built in a valley
The Fen and its flood control
The river that shaped the city has also been tamed by it. The Fen rises in the Guancen Mountains of Ningwu County in the north-east of Shanxi, runs south-east into the Taiyuan basin and then down the middle of the province before turning west to join the Yellow River below Hejin; the English account measures it at 694 kilometres and the Chinese account at about 710, and either figure makes it Shanxi's longest river. Dams upstream cut the flow to a trickle and left the bed dry. From 1949 the government built reservoirs on the Fen and on tributaries such as the Wenyu and Hui rivers, securing Taiyuan's industrial water and enlarging irrigation in the Taiyuan and Linfen basins. Before the 1950s the valley carried 133,400 hectares of flood area and 66,700 hectares of saline-alkali soil; waterlogging is now almost non-existent.
The river inside the city today
Today the Fen inside Taiyuan is largely a made watercourse. In the 1990s the municipal government set artificial, removable structures across the river at several points to hold water for landscaping; their surface area amounts to 1.7 million square metres, and with 1.3 million square metres of new planting on the banks they form the six-kilometre Fen River Park, where the trees and shrubs are counted in 183 species. The largest reservoir, the No. 1 Fen River reservoir, was built in 1960: fifteen kilometres long, five wide, thirty-two square kilometres in all, with a capacity of 720 million cubic metres. A second was added in 2000, fifty kilometres downstream. The arrangement has its cost: sewage discharged into the riverbed below the two reservoirs has made pollution a serious problem.