6-Day Shanxi: Taiyuan, Pingyao, the Hukou Waterfall and Linfen

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 - across the plateau
This is a four-hour drive and there is no way round it. The road runs west out of the Fen valley and up onto the loess, and the country is the reason the Yellow River is yellow: soft windblown silt, cut into terraces and gullies, farmed wherever a flat surface can be made. You cross into Linfen and drop towards the river.

Lunch
On the road, in a town short of the falls. Simple northern cooking: noodles, a pork dish, and the flatbread the region eats with everything.

Afternoon - Hukou
Hukou is not a high waterfall. It is about thirty metres of drop at the point where the Yellow River, having come south through the Jin-Shaan gorge, is squeezed from several hundred metres wide down to twenty or thirty and pours into a slot cut in the bedrock. The noise is the thing, and the spray: the falls generate a mist that stands over the gorge and wets everything within a hundred metres, which is why there are railings and why the rock is polished. The Shanxi side, at Ji county, gives the better angle and has a lower viewing platform close to the water; the Shaanxi side opposite is higher and further back. Two hours, and there is a cave below the water level that you can walk into on the Shanxi side when the river is not high. The park shuttle is included; the river level and therefore the force of the falls depend on the season and on upstream releases, and the guide will tell you what to expect before you go down.

Evening
Drive on to Linfen or to Jixian for the night. The road out is two hours to Linfen.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Linfen or Jixian.

Morning - the Great Locust Tree at Hongtong
Between 1370 and 1417 the early Ming government moved something like a million people out of the crowded north China plain and into the counties that had been depopulated by war and plague, and Hongtong was the assembly point: families were registered under the locust tree beside the Guangji Temple and sent out from here. Ask a Chinese family where their people came from and there is a fair chance the answer is the Great Locust Tree. The site is now a memorial park with a genealogy hall, reconstructed registers, and the descendants of the original tree; the third-generation tree on site is genuine, and the park is honest about which parts are reconstruction. It is a place that means a great deal to a great many people and almost nothing to anyone who does not know the story - the guide tells the story.

Lunch
In Hongtong. The county is known for its steamed buns and for a clear-soup lamb; the guide orders both.

Afternoon - Xiaoxitian
Two hours north-west into the hills, on a ridge above the town of Xixian, stands a temple of about 1,100 square metres that holds one of the strangest and finest interiors in China. Xiaoxitian - literally the Little Western Heaven - was built between 1629 and 1640. Its Great Hall of the Heroic Treasure is the size of a large living room, and every square centimetre of its walls, beams and ceiling is covered in painted clay: some 1,977 suspended figures of buddhas, bodhisattvas, apsaras, birds and buildings, mounted on wires and brackets so that they hang in the air inside the hall, with the largest about three metres and the smallest the size of a thumb. It is Ming work of the highest order and it has never been restored, because nobody has dared. You are allowed in with a caretaker, no flash, and about twenty minutes of quiet. The drive is two hours each way and the hall takes twenty minutes; it is worth it, and the guide will say so plainly.

Evening
Back to Linfen, or on south to Yuncheng if the itinerary continues that way.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Linfen.

Morning
Breakfast at the hotel. If you are coming up from Linfen, the road south takes two and a half hours and there is one stop worth making on the way: the Guandi Temple at Jiezhou, if your itinerary did not already cover it, or - if it did - the Yao Temple at Linfen, whose Hall of the Five Phoenixes and whose wider temple complex record the legendary sage-king Yao, who is supposed to have ruled from this plain.

Lunch
On the road, in Yuncheng or at the airport if the flight is early. A bowl of 羊肉泡 and the flatbread of the region.

Transfer
Yuncheng Zhangxiao Airport is about forty minutes south of the city and has direct flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu. Yuncheng North station is on the Datong–Xi'an high-speed line: Xi'an is about an hour and a half to the south-west and Taiyuan is about two and a half hours north. The guide walks you in as far as the entry check.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
None - onward travel.