Seventy-Two of the Hundred and Eight

Yuncheng lies in the southwest of Shandong, under Heze, with Liangshan county along its eastern border and the Yellow River to the north. The county runs 44 kilometres from north to south and 36 from east to west, and its seat stands 150 kilometres southwest of Jinan. The river crosses the county for 28 kilometres, and the water is the basis of the farming: grain, cotton, Luxi cattle and two kinds of sheep are what the fields support. The town was walled in 587 BC, and in 598, under the Sui, Wan'an county was renamed Yuncheng. The 2020 census counted 1,120,854 residents.

The county calls itself the birthplace of the Water Margin stories, and it has a line that does the work of a whole tourist office: of the hundred and eight heroes of Liangshan, seventy-two are from Yuncheng. The claim cannot be checked and does not need to be, because it names the thing the county is proud of. The Water Margin is the novel of outlaws who resist authority, and its heroes are among the best-known characters in Chinese literature. Heze is where Song Jiang's uprising is placed, and Song Jiang is also counted among the men born here, which is how a county of farmers became a county of heroes.

What the claim built is a place to walk. The prefecture lists the Yuncheng Water Margin site among its attractions, and the county's own list of sights runs from the ancient cultural site at Xiaogudui and the mass grave of the rebel army at Wanrengudui to the Huangni ridge site, the Song Jin river, Song Jiang's home village and the Tang pagoda. The title the county uses is China's home town of heroes, and it was named among the first group of strong tourism counties in Shandong. None of this is a reconstruction of the novel's world. It is a county that found, in a book, a story large enough to hold its own landscape.