A pretty Hafei Songhuajiang minivan, seen up in the mountains to the north of Beijing on an early spring day in 2010. The good Songhuajiang was painted in taxi-red and fitted with very early blue 京A·90085 license plates.
The mountains are dry, dusty, and beautiful. This area is intersected with sections of the Great Wall, and there are still quite some ancient fortified villages around as well. Some have since long turned into tourist traps, but some have not. The further you go from the main roads, the better the finds.
‘Songhuajiang’ was the name of a series of minivans manufactured by Hafei Motors. There were literally dozens of variants, each with its own designation.The designation is normally written on a badge under the wind shield, on the right side, but it was missing here.
But I could see that our red little Songhuajiang is a passenger-transport variant, most commonly designated HFJ6350. It could carry 7 passengers + driver. And the vehicle wasn’t even 3.5 meters long! They were light too, with a curb weight of just 840 kilo. Power came from a 0.8 liter four-cylinder petrol engine with 33 hp and 52 Nm, mated to a four-speed manual gearbox. They were very cheap, with a base price of some 35.000 yuan.
The Songhuajiang minivans once were everywhere in Beijing, and in the entire north and northeast of China. They were used to transport everything, from humans to chicken from wood to eggs. They were used as taxi’s too, in a semi-public transportation way, with semi-fixed routes. When I first came to Beijing in the late 1990’s I sat in many. In Beijing, these taxi cars were mostly yellow, but further north I have seen them in green and in this typical shade of red, like our Songhuajiang in the mountains.
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