Kaifeng

Kaifeng's greatness came from water and was ended by it. A canal town on the Yellow River plain, it became the capital of several short-lived states in the tenth century and then, from 960, of the Northern Song, who called it Dongjing, the Eastern Capital. Linked by canal to the rice of the south, it grew into a commercial city without precedent: markets that stayed open all night, restaurants and theatres, and a population put at six or seven hundred thousand at its height. Its life at the end of that period is recorded in the scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival and in a memoir written by an exile after the city fell.

Fall it did, in 1127, when Jurchen armies of the Jin took Kaifeng and carried the imperial family north — the event known as the Jingkang incident. The Jin later made it their own southern capital, and the Mongols took it in 1233 after a long siege. From then on the Yellow River, running above the surrounding land between raised dykes, repeatedly destroyed the city. Floods in 1642, during the war at the end of the Ming, and again in 1841 buried the streets in silt; the Song city now lies several metres below the modern one, with successive capitals stacked beneath the same site.

Kaifeng remained the provincial capital of Henan until 1954, when the role passed to Zhengzhou, which had become the railway junction. The city has lived since as a smaller place with an outsized past, and since the 1980s has rebuilt gates, temple courtyards, the drum tower and whole quarters in Song style, capping building heights in the old town so that the pagodas stay visible.

The Song inheritance is the city's chief cultural asset and is presented very deliberately, from costumed performances in the themed parks to the woodblock New Year prints made at Zhuxian, the old market town south-west of the city. Chrysanthemums, cultivated in the city for many centuries and at their height under the Song, are the civic flower, and the autumn displays are a genuine local tradition rather than a tourist invention.

Kaifeng also held the oldest lasting Jewish community in China. Jewish traders, probably from Persia, settled here and a synagogue was established in 1163; the building did not survive the nineteenth century, but families in the city still trace descent from the community, and stone stelae recording it are preserved. Since 2015 that heritage has been treated warily by the authorities. The Hui Muslim quarter in the east of the old city is larger and more visible, with working mosques and halal kitchens.

Daily culture is that of a small Henan city: Yu opera sung in the parks, storytelling and drum ballads, morning exercise on the wall, and a night-market habit that brings families out to eat in the street rather than at home. Martial arts and acrobatics have a following. Residents are conscious of living in a place that was once the centre of the world and is now a provincial town, and the comparison comes up often in conversation.

About 4.8 million people were counted in the Kaifeng prefecture at the 2020 census, about 1.7 million of them in the five urban districts. Life inside the wall is compact and old-fashioned: low buildings, narrow lanes, bicycles and scooters, small shops open onto the street, and enough green space in the lake parks that the city feels quieter than its size suggests. The newer districts west of the wall, towards Zhengzhou, are where most of the recent construction and the university campuses have gone.

The economy is modest. Farming remains significant on the surrounding plain — wheat, maize, groundnuts and vegetables — alongside food processing, chemicals, light manufacturing and a growing tourism sector that peaks sharply in autumn. Kaifeng has become steadily more tied to Zhengzhou, which is half an hour away by train, and a good number of residents commute or have moved there for work, part of a deliberate policy of integrating the two cities.

Daily rhythms are early and outdoor. Markets and breakfast shops open before dawn; older residents exercise on the wall and around the lakes; the afternoons are quiet; and the evening belongs to the night markets, which pull crowds into the centre until late. The recurring concerns are those of many inland cities: young people leaving for larger ones, an ageing population, the cost of maintaining and rebuilding historic quarters, and water management on a plain where the river runs above the rooftops.

Kaifeng eats well for a small city, and it does so at night. The markets around the drum tower are the stage for the local repertoire: guantang baozi, soup dumplings whose thin skins hold a scalding pork broth; huangmen chicken and stewed noodles; barbecued skewers; sesame-coated flatbreads; and xingren cha, a thin sweet almond tea stirred with dried fruit and ladled from a brass urn. Peanut cake pulled into fine white threads is sold as a local sweet.

Wheat is the staple, as across Henan. Breakfast is hulatang, a thick soup sharp with white pepper, often combined in one bowl with sweet fermented-rice soup — a pairing Henan people call two-in-one — eaten with fried dough sticks or steamed buns. Hand-pulled huimian noodles in mutton broth are the standard lunch, and braised or stewed dishes of the Yu cuisine tradition, which claims Song court cookery as its ancestor, appear in the older restaurants.

The Hui Muslim quarter in the east of the old city supplies much of the city's beef and mutton cooking, from clear peppery soups to grilled skewers, and its halal bakeries make dense sesame breads. Local produce includes the watermelons of the sandy soils nearby and the chrysanthemum tea sold everywhere in autumn, when the flower appears in cakes, wine and infusions as well as in the parks.