3-Day Southern Shanxi: the Guandi Temple, the Yongle Palace & the Guanque Tower

Morning - the Guandi Temple at Haizhou
Guan Yu, the third-century general who became the god of loyalty and one of the most widely worshipped figures in Chinese religion, was born in Changping and killed at Haizhou, both now villages inside Yuncheng. The temple built at Haizhou from the sixth century onwards is the largest martial temple in China, and it is laid out like a palace because it was treated as one: gate towers, courtyards, a central hall with double eaves, and a rear tower four storeys high.

The complex was founded in 589 and what stands today is largely Ming and Qing rebuilding, but it has been maintained continuously and the craft is exceptional - carved beams, glazed roof figures, and cast and wooden figures of the general and his attendants. The rear tower, the Spring and Autumn Tower, is the one most visitors remember: it is said to be where Guan Yu read the Spring and Autumn Annals, and its upper storey is a floating timber platform with no visible support at the corners. Your guide walks you through the halls and explains why a soldier came to be worshipped by soldiers, merchants, policemen and triads alike.

Lunch
Lunch in Haizhou or back in Yuncheng - southern Shanxi cooking, which runs to wheat noodles in many shapes, lamb, millet and vinegar. A mild table is ordered as standard.

Afternoon - the family shrine at Changping
Changping village, a few kilometres away, holds the Guandi family temple - the shrine of the Guan household rather than the imperial cult, first built in the Sui and rebuilt in the Ming and Qing. It is smaller, quieter and in some ways more interesting: the tombs of Guan Yu's ancestors are here, the temple keeps a stone tablet recording his family line, and the atmosphere is that of a village temple rather than a state monument. It is also where visitors come to make the connection between the man and the province he came from.

If the group wants it, the afternoon can end at the Yuncheng Salt Lake. The lake is one of the great inland salt lakes of China, an unusual sodium-sulphate body of water with a concentration high enough to float in, and the bathing and black-mud treatments on its shore are a local institution; it is packaged locally as the Dead Sea of China. It is an optional addition, paid on the spot, and needs about two hours including changing.

Evening
Dinner in Yuncheng. The city is known in Shanxi for its noodles, and the guide will order a table of them.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yuncheng, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the road to Ruicheng
Ruicheng sits on the northern bank of the Yellow River where the river turns east towards Sanmenxia, right against the Shaanxi border. The drive from Yuncheng takes about an hour and three quarters, past villages built of rammed earth and brick, and there is time on the way to explain the strangest thing about the site you are going to see: it is not where it was built.

The Yongle Palace was founded in the thirteenth century as one of the three great ancestral temples of the Quanzhen school of Daoism, on its original site some twenty kilometres away, near the river. When the Sanmenxia reservoir was built in the 1950s, that site was going to be flooded. Between 1959 and 1965 the four main halls were taken apart piece by piece, the murals were cut into numbered blocks and packed, and the whole complex was rebuilt where it now stands - a piece of conservation work that took longer than the building of the dam.

The murals
What makes the palace famous is the painting inside the Hall of the Three Purities: the Chaoyuan Tu, or the painting of the audience, a processional mural covering about 403 square metres in which some 280 deities and attendants move in ranks towards the central figures. It is the largest and best-preserved Yuan-dynasty mural cycle in China, painted in the mid-fourteenth century, and it is unusual in showing the ranks of Daoist heaven as if they were an imperial court arriving for an audience - the costumes, the horses, the banners and the faces are all drawn from life. Two further halls hold narrative paintings of the lives of Lu Dongbin and Wang Chongyang, the founders of the school.

Lunch
Lunch in Ruicheng town - Yellow River fish, wheat noodles and a vegetable soup. Mild cooking on request.

Afternoon - the Guangrenwang Temple
A short drive from the palace, in a village behind the town, stands the Guangrenwang Temple: a small hall raised to the Dragon King in the ninth century, with a timber frame that has survived more or less intact since the Tang dynasty. It is one of a very small number of Tang wooden buildings left anywhere in China, and it is visited by almost nobody. The proportions are simple and enormous, and the interior is bare except for a handful of later figures - the point of the building is its frame, not its decoration.

Evening
Return to Yuncheng for the night; dinner at a local restaurant.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yuncheng, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the Guanque Tower
Almost every Chinese child can recite the quatrain written at this spot: "the white sun sets behind the mountains, the Yellow River flows into the sea; if you want to see a thousand miles, climb one storey higher." Wang Zhihuan wrote it in the Tang dynasty about the Guanque Tower at Puzhou, on the east bank of the Yellow River where the river bends from north to east.

The original tower was destroyed centuries ago; what stands on the bank now is a reconstruction completed in 1997 and opened in 2002, six storeys and about 74 metres high, in the style of an Tang pavilion. From the top you can see the character of the country the poem describes - the river, the terraces, the Zhongtiao mountains and, on the far bank, Shaanxi. Below the tower, on the riverbank, the site of the Pujin ferry crossing has been excavated: four enormous cast-iron oxen, each weighing tens of tonnes, which anchored the Tang-dynasty pontoon bridge here. They are outside the current ticketing system and are paid on the spot.

Late morning - the Pujiu Temple
A few kilometres away, the Pujiu Temple is the setting of the Yuan-dynasty play that every Chinese family knows, the Romance of the Western Chamber, in which a student lodging at the monastery falls in love with a girl whose family has taken refuge there after her father's death. The temple has been rebuilt and rearranged many times; the pagoda in the courtyard is older and is engineered with an acoustic trick that returns an echo from the far side unlike any normal reflection, which the monks used to call the frog's croak.

Lunch
Lunch in Yongji, or at a Yellow River fish restaurant on the road to Wanrong. Mild cooking on request.

Afternoon - the Li Family Compound
Wanrong, an hour away, holds the courtyard house of the Li family, who made their money in cloth and shipping in the nineteenth century and built themselves one of the largest private compounds in Shanxi. What makes it different from the better-known Shanxi merchant houses is its eclecticism: alongside the standard Chinese courtyard sequence are Gothic windows, Roman columns, a European bell tower and Japanese detailing, added by a family that bought abroad and built at home. Forty-six courtyards and more than 140 rooms survive, and the family's charitable granaries and schools are part of the visit.

From Wanrong the vehicle takes you back to Yuncheng or straight to the high-speed station for the onward leg. Your guide confirms the train or flight timing the evening before.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
No hotel night included - Yuncheng hotel or onward departure. A Yuncheng night can be added on request.