Fengxian is a small provincial town in the West of West-China's Shaanxi Province. It is located due South of Baoji City on the Gansu Province border and the edges of the Qingling Mountains.
Before being renamed Fengxian, the village was known as Shuangshipu. Not long ago, during the years of the second world war and China's War of attrition with Japan, Shuangshipu, was nothing more than a small farmers village, a collection of small houses, sheds and cave dwellings hidden away in a hollow in the mountains of Shaanxi, only some 80 kilometers away from the millenia old Silk Road path between the West and Chang'An (Xi'An), the Han- and Tang Dynasty Capital.
Fengxian lies on the border with neighboring Gansu Province only a short distance North of the so-called Moon Canyon. In this border region two forms of landscape come together. To the North-West and North lie the green terraced Loess Hills and dust filled Ravines of the Loess Plateux of the Yellow River Basin and to the South and South-East are the Bambooed and Granite QingLing Mountains of South Shaanxi Province.
At the Time Shuangshipu for some Time became the home of Rewi Alley, a Man among things known as the most famous New Zealander ever to dwell in China. Others know Rewi Alley for his most famous cause, the establishment and running of Indusco, a writer, educator and reformer, a friend of the early revolution in China. Rewi Alley was a friend James Bertram, Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, as well as many of the Communist Party Leaders and later went on to become a member of the Communist Party in China.
Rewi Alley lived in China for Sixty Years of which several at the small Town of Fengxian, which was then known as Shuangshipu.
He died in Beijing, where a small house was reserved for him along the North End of Former Rue Marco Polo aka Customs Street in the Legations Quarter, living near adjacent the Communist Party Headquarters of Beijing. There Rewi lived out his Life, near friends such as Agnes Smedley (lived nearby) and Ma Haide, doctor George Hatem.
Alley was the front and field man for the Indusco movement, hence he traveled throughout China (often hiking and bicycling, or traveling by any means) eventually winding up far away from the Frontline in Fengxian somewhere in the summer of 1942. Alley stayed for a year, leaving Fengxian with Joseph Needham in August? 1943 AD, in order to re-establish the Baillie School in a safer environment, further away from Japanese Air attacks and Nationalist forces looking for new recruits.
The headmaster George Hogg however was less fortunate, and eventually embarked with the children of his school on an epic journey that made him famous.
(See Book: The Inn of the 6Th Happiness, by Gladys Aylward or the Film: The Children of Huang Shi, 2008, director George Spottiswoode, starring Chow Yun-Fat)
His initial job was Teaching some 60 students, lecturing on Indusco, setting up small industrial cooperatives but at Fengxian Rewi Alley merely functioned as a Teacher at the local school for Indusco apprentices. Head master was George Hogg, a famous Brit in China.
A so-called Baillie School. Stood behind the towns "gas works". Other structures: a cotton-spinning cooperative and a machine shop.
All temporary.
It was at Fengxian that Rewi Alley lived in his famed Cave House, a wildly romantic place described by many Foreign visitors as a great Joy and resembling Alibaba's Cave, withouth the treasure.
He had been demoted after a political scandal involving Indusco products ending up in Communist Party and Army hands.
A Satellite image of China and East-Asia, with a super-imposed schematic Map of the location and Path of the Great Wall as constructed during the Reign of the Ming Dynasty. Included for reference are City names, geographical features
of landscape, Names and locations of Passes on the Great Wall on the Great Wall of China.
