Anyang 3-Day Shang Dynasty Tour: Yin Ruins, Red Flag Canal, Character Museum and Yue Fei Temple

The ruins straddle the Huan River northwest of the city, twenty-five minutes out. Arrive at eight for the museum.

Oracle bone pit YH127 is the essential exhibit. Excavated in the 1930s, it yielded more than seventeen thousand bone fragments, of which around 160 carry complete inscriptions recording questions and answers. China's earliest mature writing comes from here.

Lady Fu Hao's tomb is the second centrepiece. Buried with over 400 objects, particularly rich in jade, she was herself a general — her name appears on a bronze axe in the grave.

A short walk from the museum leads to the ancestral temple and palace zone, where rammed-earth platforms and postholes of Fu Hao's temple still lay out the original plan.

Spend the afternoon at the Chinese Character Museum, the only one of its kind. The wall of different scripts at the entrance, from oracle bone to regular, makes the evolution of the characters easy to read.

Stay downtown; Anyang is known for flat vermicelli soup.

The canal lies in Linzhou, ninety minutes from Anyang. It was cut by hand between 1959 and 1968 — ten years in which the people of Lin county cut a channel into the Taihang cliffs and brought the Zhang River water up the mountain.

Start at the diversion garden, the original distribution hub where the main canal, branch canal and field channels split. Three channels emerge from the rock and fall from the sluice gates, the most direct view of the whole project.

Then the Youth Cave. Halfway up, the canal turns into the mountain and runs 200 metres through a tunnel known locally as Tiger's Mouth. It is dark inside; stepping out puts you on a plank road above the cliff, channel on one side, void on the other.

In the afternoon go to Luositan, a thirty-metre fall where the canal water drops from the cliff. In high summer the spray reaches the viewing platform.

Stay in Linzhou town, known for its stewed vegetables and skin-crust dishes.

The temple is in Tangyin, Anyang's home county and Yue Fei's birthplace — conveniently on the way back from Linzhou.

It divides into a shrine and a tomb. The shrine holds his seated statue, a stele corridor and the Jingzhong Cypress. The cypress carries a local legend: Yue Fei's mother tattooed the words for loyal service on his back; at the third character he fainted from the pain and she finished with pigment. The marks are said to remain in the bark, and visitors can feel the hollows by touch.

The tomb complex behind it is Song-style, with stone figures and horses from the Southern Song along the approach. The spirit-way stele is Ming.

Finish at ten and head back. Anyang East and Zhengzhou East are both about an hour.