The small town of
PINGYAO , 100km south of Taiyuan, and the Shuanglin Si nearby, two of the most impressive yet least visited places in the area, are certainly worth making an effort to visit. A town has stood here since the Zhou dynasty (about 770 BC), but it reached its height in the Ming, when it was a prosperous banking centre, one of the first in China. Its wealthy residents constructed luxurious mansions and square walls around the city to defend them. In the course of the twentieth century, the town slid rapidly into provincial obscurity, which has kept it largely unmodernized, and it's one of the few places in this part of China that has retained more than a token segment of the traditional infrastructure and buildings of its nineteenth-century glory. Nearby, the somewhat musty
Shuanglin Si has a hoard of wood and terracotta sculptures, some lifelike, some ghostly, some comical, which are unparalleled in the region.
The Town
Inside the town walls, Pingyao's narrow streets, lined with elegant Qing architecture - no neon, no white tile, no cars - are a revelation. Few buildings are higher than two storeys and many are over a hundred years old. Most are small shops much more interesting for their architecture than their wares, with ornate wood and painted glass lanterns hanging outside, faded paintings on their eaves, and intricate wooden lattice work holding paper rather than glass across the windows. This kind of street is what Liulichang, the fake antique street in Beijing, aspires to be. Zhang Yimou filmed the hauntingly beautiful
Raise the Red Lantern here, in which the rigid, ordered design of the town's Qing architecture is used as a visual complement to the stifling formality that rules the life of the main character, the fourth wife of a wealthy man.
The plan of the town is very simple. Square walls, each 1.5km long, enclose four main streets arranged along the compass points (which don't quite meet in the centre - Nan Dajie, South Street, is a little to the east), a typical design that the Chinese compare to the markings on a tortoise shell. In between the main streets, a lattice of even narrower alleyways links courtyards which are well worth exploring.
From the train station, outside the walls, head due south, straight down the unremarkable muddy street opposite. About 300m on, the first major left turn leads into a busy market street. Keep walking east and you come to the west gate of the old town walls; a map of the town's simple layout is printed on the wall here. Just inside the arch of the gate are steps leading up to the Ming town walls (daily; ¥15), 12m high, and crenellated with a watchtower along every 50m of their 6km length. You can walk all the way around them in two hours, and get a good view into some of the many courtyards inside the walls (and at an army training base outside them, where you can watch recruits practising drill and throwing fake hand grenades). At the southeast corner of the wall, the Kuixing Tower , a tall fortified pagoda with a tiled, upturned roof, is a rather flippant-looking building in comparison to the martial solidity of the battlements.
It's possible to climb the Bell Tower , on Nan Dajie, a charming little building, if you can find anyone to unlock the door; the shopkeepers nearby are eager to help, but have no idea who has the key. The eave decoration, which includes colourful reliefs of fish and portly merchants, is very fine. Also on Nan Dajie and a five-minute walk south of the Bell Tower is the Tian Ji Xiang Museum (daily 9am-5pm; ¥10), which holds a collection of coins, paintings and other artefacts from the town's history. At the eastern end of Dong Dajie, you can look around the Risshengchang (daily 9am-5pm; ¥10), a bank established in 1824, the first in the country and one of the first places in the world where cheques were used.
