THE RIVER bridge between China and North Korea at Tumen is about a kilometer long and just wide enough for two small trucks to pass each other, which is a rare occurrence as there is almost no traffic these days.
On the Chinese side there is a little promenade with tree branches adorned with artificial flowers. There are souvenir shops and restaurants with extensive menus offering noodle soup and sauteed prawns, and a shabby hotel with a roof top cafe and blue and white Pepsi umbrellas.
The signs are almost all in Korean because most of the population in this part of north eastern China are ethnic Korean. Several hundred South Korean tourists come here every day on their way to the Changbai mountain park to the west.
They spill out of big tour buses armed with cameras and binoculars to look across the border into the hermetically sealed country where their kinfolk live. The best vantage point is from the top of a massive concrete gateway which straddles the Chinese entrance to the bridge.
For 20 yuan (£2) visitors can climb the 49 steep metal steps inside one of its columns - pausing half way up at a little Chinese souvenir shop specialising in Kim Il Sung badges and stamps - and peer through a fixed telescope powerful enough to bring into focus the slogan etched in stones on the hillside opposite, "Strive for a Better Harvest".
By lowering the telescope they scan see the North Korean immigration post in the centre of a little village at the end of the bridge dominated by a mural of the former "Beloved Leader", Kim Il Sung. By moving the telescope a little to the right they can see the starving North Koreans.
On Friday, a cold, raw day, there were about 150 people gathered along what would be the river bank if the Tumen river was in full flood rather than a sluggish stream in a wide bed of reeds and pebbles as it is at present. Some were standing, others were sitting, or squatting or lying on the ground. They didn't appear to talk much or move around.
Crowds of people have appeared here every day for many months. They face the bridge, silently watching in the desperate hope that relatives on the Chinese side will appear with food.
Some of these wretched people remain here for up to n month, sleeping at night in the village railway station. They have come to the border to give letters to Chinese passportholders going to Tumen. These contain heart breaking pleas for help from their cousins on the Chinese side. But they never know if a letter gets to its destination. The North Korean border guards do not allow them to cross into China or receive replies.
Some die here in view of the tourists of the famine. An old man passed away on the river bank on Thursday evening, said a Chinese Korean after walking back along the bridge, passing a group of visiting Chinese army officers taking photographs of each other on the line marking the border.
South Korean tourists took pictures of the activity on the Chinese side, where several local people arrived with sacks of grain and rice which they loaded onto carts and wheeled to a customs post by the gateway, and then onto a ramshackle bus which eventually set out across the bridge.
A lorry driver said he brought back 36 letters last week. It took him four days to deliver. Some responded in despair that they could do no more. They had already used up all their money to get food to their relatives, and under Chinese emigration rules could not cross the bridge for another year.
A middle aged ethnic Korean woman with silver teeth told me how her 45 year old sister had travelled to the river bank to wait for her in April. This meant hanging on to an outside door handle on an overcrowded steam train for 15 km. The food she brought had been too late to save her sister's husband. Now the sister herself was sick and had no medicine.
I spoke to her in the family apartment in Tumen. People are reluctant to talk to foreigners at the bridge. They say that North Korean secret police are in town, looking for refugees who have fled across the river. I was told those they find are taken back and executed. My Chinese Korean guide, a post graduate researcher in Yanji University, pointed out a well known North Korean agent in a trench coat and owlish glasses, watching the tourists.
On the top of the Chinese gate way, a South Korean man in wind cheater asked me in English where I was from. He said at first he himself was a sightseer, then pulled me aside and confided, "Actually I'm a journalist but I'm pretending to be a tourist. The officials don't like South Korean reporters here."
The ethnic Chinese Koreans don't like the day trippers either. When my guide spoke to a man hauling a leaking bag of maize from a taxi, he retorted angrily, "You're just looking for news about the famine for nosy South Korean tourists, aren't you. Go away from here."