From our mid-city hotel in Dandong we took a tour upcountry following the river road (S319) into Hushanzhen and beyond. At the northern outskirts of the city we stopped for our first glimpse at the Korean side of Yalu Hé. The spot we stopped at contained a memorial to the Korean War sacrifices (two statues of heroic Chinese servicemen) and a stall hawking the usual military-themed momentos and souvenirs. The crossing point here to North Korea was fairly narrow and was marked by the barely existing remnants of an old wooden bridge (the bridge itself was long gone with a few rotting planks visible where the posts of the bridge once stood). Little could be seen on the other side, a wasteland of grasses and vast meadows.
At various stretches of the river road we were face-to-face with the barbed wire fence that demarcates the border between the two different communist countries. At some points the two states were separated by only about 30-40m of Yalu water (especially on the Binhai Highway stretch).
After a mandatory stop at Tiger Mountain to see the Hushan Great Wall (see separate blog), we ventured on to lunch at a pleasant roadside restaurant, one that specialises in the tourist trade, shuffling bus loads of lunching tourists in and out swiftly to capitalise on high turnover profitability.
Further up the river we stopped again at another bridge, this one with stronger historical overtones of the Korean conflict. This bridge bore some similarities with the famous Dandong Broken Bridge in that it was also a disconnected structure. From the Chinese shoreline it looked like a normal bridge, but once on it you soon realised that it jutted out only about two-thirds of the way to the opposite mainland, ending suddenly and abruptly in the middle of the Yalu river! Many, many Chinese tourists took the stroll along the length of the abridged bridge reading the Korean War information boards on the side as they went. Having reached the point where the bridge ended, it was obligatory for all to pull out phone cameras and take photos of themselves with the North Korean remote countryside as a backdrop. 
In what seemed almost conspiratorial, the North Koreans on the other side had truncated their bridge in a similar manner (although what there was of it was not as long as the Chinese one). I have no notion as to why these two sides of the bridge don’t connect or why they were at some stage severed, but I’m sure there’s a back story to it, if I could avail myself of the necessary Mandarin.
The site has plenty of tourists stalls, as well as an amicable fellow dressed in Korean War era uniform with a blackened face and a rifle who provided ‘atmosphere’ for the historic site, making himself available to tourists for ‘authentic’ looking photos. Next to the bridge there was a wharf from where we took a long boat trip out into the river. The boat charted a course around the waters veering into North Korean territorial waters…we got close enough to the Korean mainland to make out farms, the occasional building, a handful of motor vehicles, but saw precious few actual North Koreans.
Our boat passed a desolate fishing boat reeling in its net in the windy waters and eventually disembarked at an another point down the river where we were entertained by an all-female music concert which included both Chinese singers in traditional costumes and a girl pop band with members dressed in a kind of retro-Sixties’ outfit. Back at the wharf we returned to the bus for the long drive back down the S319 through Kuandian County, reaching the outskirts of Dandong just in time to join the afternoon gridlock on Binjiang East Road.
Dandong in China’s North-eastern Liaoning province is 541 miles from Beijing, but only some 105 miles from Pyongyang, North Korea’s seldom seen capital. But Dandong is much, much closer to North Korean soil as a visit to the most eastern city in China’s Dong-Bei will confirm. From Dandong’s shoreline on the Yalu River, the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Korea (PDRK) is just the distance of one short bridge away. 
We, like millions of Chinese visitors from other parts of the vast country, paid the admission fee (¥30 per head) to tour the bridge open to the public
At night the Broken Bridge is at its most visually striking as the bridge cascading into a revolving spectrum of colours. Climbing on to the bridge itself (draped in Chinese flags) during the day allows visitors, some in guide-led tour groups, more opportunity to study the bridge’s intricacies in detail. The swing bridge signage contains detailed information explaining its unusual engineering specifics, a “Unique Horizontal-Opening Beam Bridge” (a special thrill for civil engineering tragics and graduating Lego enthusiasts alike). 
The bridge was very well attended on the afternoon/evening we visited, everyone making their way to the famously truncated section of the bridge to survey the damage close-up. The end-point, with people jostling for prime position, is also the best spot to peer into the “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea, home of the colourfully unstable President Kim. Just across from here is the “ghost town” like city of Sinuiji…at night bereft of lights, and during the day scarcely little to be seen, a scattering of seeming abandoned grey old buildings, a strange orange dome-shaped structure that catches the eye and a dilapidated Ferris wheel, and precious little else. Eerily it is seemingly also bereft of observable human life. An added nationalistic touch for very many of the Chinese visitors was to snap a selfie with both the red Chinese flag and the Sinuiji “still-life” backdrop.
Of course back in Chinese Dandong you can find a North Korean presence right here. Several of the restaurants in riverside Binjang Middle Road are North Korean (run perhaps by economic refugees who had once taken the chance to hop over the Yalu at some point to find more profitable trade and opportunity on the Chinese side).