(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-04-29 11:03

  Government building of Xinxiang city

Xinxiang is a modern city with an impressive skyline. The city is 360 miles south of Beijing and 48 miles north of Zhengzhou. Xinxiang covers 2940 square miles. Under its administrative control are ten cities, six counties, four districts, 153 townships, and 3,546 villages. It has a population of 5.2 million of which 700,000 live in the city proper. The city has a long history of some 1,400 years when it was established by the Sui Dynasty.

The city is a rail junction and industrial center at the head of navigation on the Weihe River. The river, made navigable for small vessels by river improvements in the 1950s, links the city with Tianjin, the main port for Beijing. Later, due to heavy industrial chemical pollution, the river course had been totally cut off and got filled up. After recent dredges, it is still no more than a man-made lake.