Located in rural Dongle County in the northern tip of Henan province on the lower North China Plain, Da Fo village was settled by migrants from Shanxi's Hongdong County in the first century of Ming rule. A day's journey from Beijing, six hundred miles to the northeast, Da Fo is far from the center of national power. After a seven-hour train ride from Beijing to the Anyang station in Henan province, the contemporary traveler continues eastbound by automobile into rural Anyang County. Once past the drab market stalls of Chu Wang town, in Neihuang County, the color of the earth begins to fade from light brown to pale yellow, showing traces of the acute salinization that ruined the fertile croplands of villages positioned along the old course of the Yellow River in the early twentieth century, when its tributaries flooded frequently.

Here the civilization of urban China rapidly gives way to the eternal rhythms of rural life. Within less than an hour the traveler is moving along a broken tarred road where red and yellow oxen compete with young Chinese driving jeeps and trucks. Across the Dongle County line, the fields display the products of dry zone agriculture. This agricultural zone is distinguished by its wheat, corn, and millet production; little rice is grown in this area of the North China Plain.