Kaifeng sits where the Yellow River's old courses spread out across the eastern plain, and water still organises the place: a reconstructed canal and bridge run through a theme park built from a Song scroll, and the old gardens on the south-eastern edge still fill with chrysanthemums each autumn. The oldest continuous craft here is a woodblock printing tradition, born in the Song capital's street market and now concentrated in the village of Zhu Xian Zhen to the south, where the technique was listed among the first group of national intangible cultural heritage items in 2006. What you see in the centre of town is largely modern, and worth labelling as such.
Kaifeng's large theme park is a modern construction, opened in 1998 and laid out at one-to-one scale from the Song painting Qingming Shanghe Tu. Its best feature is a two-level bridge you can walk in both directions.
In the village of Zhu Xian Zhen south of Kaifeng, a printmaker still picks the wood, carves the block and boils the colour from plants. The craft entered China's first national intangible heritage list in 2006.
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Daxiangguo has been destroyed by a river, turned into a market and rebuilt in the Qing, and it still keeps a Buddhist repertoire of more than 200 pieces.
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Kaifeng's soup dumplings are lifted like a lantern, set down like a chrysanthemum and eaten through a window torn in the skin.
ReadA modern Song-themed theme park in Kaifeng built at one-to-one scale from the painting Qingming Shanghe Tu, with a reconstructed canal, a two-level arch bridge and evening food streets.
A Song-dynasty origin street-print tradition from the village of Zhu Xian Zhen south of Kaifeng, carved in woodblock and printed in plant-derived pigments, listed among the first national intangible cultural heritage items in 2006.
A major Buddhist temple in central Kaifeng whose chanting and instrumental music, drawn on court, monastic and folk repertoire, was listed among the second group of national intangible cultural heritage items in 2008.
