Weishan sits on the eastern shore of a very big lake, and the lake changes everything about the place. Weishan Lake is the southernmost of a chain of shallow lakes in south-west Shandong, forming a long strip of water that links the Huitong Canal with the Grand Canal further south. In summer the shallows are covered with lotus flowers, in pink and white, and reed beds stretch for kilometres along the shore. Fishing boats move through the channels, and the air smells of water and mud.
The canal here is one of the great engineering stories of the Ming dynasty. In the early fifteenth century, the emperor wanted to bring grain to Beijing along an extended Grand Canal, and the difficulty was the high ground in western Shandong, where the water had to be shared between north and south. The engineer Bai Ying solved it at Nanwang, well north of the lake, by building a dam and diverting the Wen river into a channel that split the water, sending about thirty percent south and seventy percent north, a ratio memorised by later generations. The clever hydraulic hub at Nanwang, along with the Huitong stretch, is part of the UNESCO site.
Weishan was also a theatre of the Second World War, when railway workers and local guerrillas fought the Japanese army along the Tianjin-Pukou line, an episode that inspired a popular film. A small memorial to the Railway Guerrillas stands on the lake. In the countryside, the farmland is flat and rich, with fields of wheat, corn and vegetables, brick villages and long straight roads between rows of poplars.
Riding conditions are straightforward but the paperwork is not: foreign visitors who want to ride in China must follow strict rules on licences and permits, which change often, so check before you go. The nearest town with services is Yucheng, about twenty-seven kilometres away, and the larger city of Jining, nearly forty kilometres, has fuel stations, hotels and restaurants. For a meal, try fresh lake fish, boiled and spiced, or a plate of lotus root. The best months are May to October, when the lotus is in flower and the weather is warm.