Xinxiang is a medium-sized city in northern Henan straddling the southern edge of the Taihang Mountains, close enough to Zhengzhou to be part of its metropolitan orbit but distinct enough in character to merit its own visit. The city's name dates to the Sui dynasty, when officials combined the characters from two older county names, and it has spent the fourteen centuries since as a quiet agricultural and trading centre. What draws visitors today is not the city itself but the mountain scenery immediately to its north, where Huixian County rises abruptly into the Taihang escarpment.
The Guoliang Tunnel, carved into a cliff face by hand in the 1970s by the 300-odd inhabitants of Guoliang village, is Xinxiang's most famous sight. The village sits on a high terrace of the Taihang range with no road access — for centuries the only way up was a series of hand-cut steps. In 1972, the villagers decided to carve their own road through solid rock, and thirteen men spent five years doing it with nothing but hammers and chisels. The resulting tunnel, 1.2 kilometres long and just wide enough for a single vehicle, with windows cut through the cliff wall to the canyon below, is a genuine feat of determined human ingenuity. The surrounding Wanxianshan Scenic Area (¥80) provides the canyon setting and access to the village above.
The Baligou gorge, also in Huixian County, offers the most dramatic waterfall scenery in this section of the Taihang — a series of cascades culminating in the main fall, sometimes marketed as the Taihang Heavenly Waterfall, which drops into a deep, narrow canyon. The Taihang range here has been dramatically carved by water, and the combination of vertical limestone cliffs and clear streams makes the gorges some of the best hiking terrain in central Henan. Bigan Temple, in the county of Weihui north of the city, marks the tomb of the Shang-dynasty official Bigan, a figure of legendary moral courage who remonstrated with a tyrant king and was executed for it; his descendants scattered across China and gave rise to several surnames.
Xinxiang connects easily to Zhengzhou and Beijing by high-speed rail from Xinxiang East Railway Station on the main north-south corridor. The city has no airport of its own — Zhengzhou's Xinzheng Airport is about an hour away — but the rail links are fast enough that this rarely matters.