Long before the Manchus took Beijing, they had a home, and it was in the green, hilly country east of Shenyang, where the Hun river comes out of the Changbai foothills. Yongling, the Qing dynasty's earliest imperial tomb, stands there in the county of Xinbin, built at the start of the seventeenth century and expanded afterwards to house the ancestors of Nurhaci, the chief who united the Jurchen tribes and founded the line that would rule China until 1912. It is an old-fashioned ceremonial complex, with walls, a stone bridge, spirit-way sculptures and a tomb mound behind, set against a wooded hillside, and it makes a clear point: before they were emperors of China, these people were mountain chieftains.
The tomb belongs, with the Ming tombs near Beijing and other Qing tombs in Shenyang and Hebei, to the World Heritage group of the imperial tombs of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The ride also takes in Wunu Mountain City, a mountain fortress built by the earlier kingdom of Goguryeo, a thousand years before the Manchu era, high on a flat-topped cliff near Huanren. Together the two give a picture of how this north-eastern borderland has always been a place where powers met.
I should be honest about the riding. Taking a foreign motorcycle across China requires permits, a guide and temporary licences, and few visitors manage it independently, so most riders here will use a local rental or a tour. The reward, for those who do, is a countryside of forested hills, maize and rice fields, small Manchu villages and winding river roads, with the whole area beautifully red and gold in October. Summers are green and humid, and winters are bitterly cold, with snow and ice, so the best months are May, June and September.
Fushun, the nearest big city, is an old coal and industrial town, and Xinbin has a few fuel stations and restaurants of its own, but facilities thin out in the hills, so fill the tank when you can. Northeastern Chinese cooking is hearty: pork stewed with pickled cabbage, dumplings with thick wrappers, and river fish from the mountain streams, washed down with a local beer. In the villages, drying corn hangs in golden strings from the eaves, a bright detail on a grey autumn day.