5-Day Shanxi Merchant Tour: the Compounds and the Walled City

Arrival
Taiyuan is a city of some four million on the Fen River, and its industry is coal, steel and machinery. It is not a pretty city and it does not try to be. What it has is position: the north-south spine of Shanxi runs through it, and the sites people come to Shanxi for - Jinci, Pingyao, Wutai, Datong - are all reachable from here by road. Your guide meets you at the airport or the station.

The Shanxi Museum
The provincial museum is the right first stop and it is free with a booked slot. Its subject is the state of Jin, which is what Shanxi was called for most of the first millennium BC, and the collection runs from the Erlitou and Shang bronzes through the Zhou tombs of Quwo and the Northern Wei and Northern Qi Buddhist sculpture, into the Tang and the Liao. The Zhou bronze ritual vessels and the stone sarcophagi of the Northern Wei are the two rooms nobody should skip, and the labels in English are unusually good. Allow two hours.

Lunch
Taiyuan is the home of Shanxi aged vinegar and the cooking uses it heavily: noodles, a cold shredded chicken with vinegar and chilli, and a plate of guoyourou, the local pork stir-fry that every restaurant in the province claims to do best.

Afternoon - Tianlongshan
Half an hour west of the city, the Tianlongshan caves were cut into a hillside between the Northern Qi and the Tang - some twenty-five caves and around five hundred figures. The site is famous for the wrong reason as well as the right one: most of its finest heads were cut out and sold in the 1920s, and they are now in museums in Japan, Europe and North America. What remains on the cliff is still worth the climb - the Tang caves in particular show a modelling of the body that the earlier Northern Qi caves do not - and the site museum is explicit about the looting, which is the honest thing to say about it. Two hours including the walk up.

Evening
Dinner in the city. The guide can arrange a walk through the rebuilt old quarter at Zhonglou Street afterwards; it is a rebuilt street, not an old one, and the guide will say so.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Taiyuan.

Morning - the Qiao Family Compound
The Qiao mansion at Qixian was built from the 1750s onward by a family that made its money in tea, grain and pawnshops, and it is the clearest surviving statement of how Shanxi merchant money chose to live: six walled courtyards, nineteen lesser yards and some 313 rooms, arranged on a strict north-south axis, with the family's privacy increasing as you move inward. The brick carving on the gate towers, the roof ridging, and the sheer thickness of the walls are the point - this is a fortified house, and the banking families of Shanxi needed it to be. Allow ninety minutes, and use the rooms at the eastern end, which are quieter than the central courtyards everyone heads for first.

Lunch
In Qixian or on the road to Pingyao. Pingyao food is the best-known in Shanxi and the guide will start you on it here: Pingyao beef, the salt-cured beef that is the town's signature, and a bowl of wantuo, the buckwheat jelly.

Afternoon - into Pingyao
Pingyao was one of the three great banking centres of Qing China - the draft banks that moved silver across the empire started here - and the walled city of about 6.2 kilometres of circuit survived the twentieth century almost intact, which is why it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. You go in through one of the gates and the vehicle stops outside: the old city is closed to traffic and you walk it. The first afternoon is for the street plan itself, which is the thing to see - the axis of South Street with the county yamen, the temple and the market tower on it - and for the Rishengchang draft bank a few doors down.

Evening
Dinner inside the walls, in a courtyard restaurant. The lanterns go on along South Street about an hour after sunset and the city is at its best for the following hour; after ten it empties out and is very quiet.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Inside the walled city, Pingyao (courtyard guesthouse).

Morning - the wall and the yamen
The wall of Pingyao was built of rammed earth in 1370 under the Hongwu emperor and faced with brick in the following centuries. It runs about 6.2 kilometres, is some 10 metres high, has 3,000 crenellations and 72 watchtowers - the numbers are said to stand for the disciples and the sages of Confucius - and the wide, walkable top is the best place in the city from which to see how much of the old fabric is actually old. Walk the south-eastern stretch in the morning light, then come down at the county yamen: a Ming-Qing government compound of six courtyards where the magistrate lived, judged and took his taxes, and where there is still a twice-daily re-enactment of a court session that is tourist theatre and worth watching anyway for the layout.

Lunch
Inside the walls. Pingyao beef, a plate of kaolaolao - oat flour rolls steamed and stacked in a honeycomb - and the local Pingyao beef cold cuts with vinegar.

Afternoon - the money houses and the temple
Rishengchang, opened in 1823, is usually described as the first draft bank in China and it is the building that made Pingyao the financial capital of the Qing: from here, paper drafts could be cashed in twenty-odd provincial cities, and by the 1880s the town's banks were moving the empire's silver. The compound is small - two courtyards - and the accounts room is the interesting part. After that, the Confucian Temple, whose Dacheng Hall is a Jin dynasty building of 1163 and the oldest structure in the city, and the City God Temple across the way if time allows.

Evening
The through ticket covers some twenty-two sites and there is no obligation to see them all; the guide will cut the list rather than march you through it. Dinner in a courtyard on West Street, which is quieter than South.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Inside the walled city, Pingyao.

Morning - Zhangbi
Zhangbi looks from the road like a small walled village of loess and brick on a rise above the plain. What makes it strange is underneath: a tunnel system on three levels, perhaps ten kilometres of it in total, cut into the loess between the Sui and the Ming, with living quarters, stables, wells, grain stores and a command post, and with a vertical shaft that connects the lowest level to the village above. About a kilometre and a half is open to visitors and you walk it with a lamp - cool, low, and genuinely disorienting, and the guide will not let anyone go in alone. Above ground, the village has a Sui-dated temple, a Ming stage, and a stretch of the old wall. Two hours.

Lunch
In Jiexiu, on the way. The town is known for guanxiantang, a maltose sweet, and for a lamb stew cooked with Shanxi vinegar; the guide orders the stew.

Afternoon - the Wang Family Compound
At Jingsheng, in Lingshi county, the Wang family built on a slope above the valley from the Kangxi period onward: 231 courtyards, 2,078 rooms, arranged in two walled compounds - the Gaojiaya and the Hongmenbao - that step up the hillside and are connected by a bridge across a ravine. It is bigger than the Qiao mansion and less restored, which is either better or worse depending on what you came for; the brick and wood carving on the gates is finer, and the upper terraces give you the whole layout at once. The Wang were officials as well as merchants, and the difference shows in the restraint of the main halls. Two hours, and there is a lot of stair.

Evening
Back to Pingyao, about an hour. Dinner inside the walls.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Inside the walled city, Pingyao.

Early morning
If you can get up for it, the wall at six-thirty in the morning is worth it: the city is quiet, the smoke from the courtyard chimneys is flat in the cold air, and the light on the grey brick is the best of the day. Breakfast is at the guesthouse, and the kitchens inside the walls start early.

Transfer
Two options. The railway station of Pingyao Ancient City - a confusing name, since it is a modern station on the old Taiyuan–Jiaozuo alignment about fifteen minutes outside the wall - connects to Taiyuan, Xi'an and Beijing, and if you are going on to either of the first two it is the faster and calmer choice. If you are flying, the drive to Taiyuan Wusu takes about an hour and a half; we book it with an hour's margin because the road carries heavy coal traffic. The guide walks you in as far as the entry check.

Meals
Breakfast

Accommodation
None - onward travel.