6-Day Frontier Shanxi: Yanmen Pass, Wutai Mountain and Taiyuan

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 - north out of Taiyuan
The road runs up the spine of Shanxi through Xinzhou and into the hills, and the pass you are heading for is one of the geographical facts of Chinese history. The Gouzhu range runs across the province, and there is essentially one gap through it: Yanmen, the Wild Goose Gate. Armies, merchants, Buddhist pilgrims and imperial processions all came through this gap, and from the Warring States onward somebody was fortifying it. Zhao's general Li Mu held it against the Xiongnu in the third century BC; the Han, the Tang and the Ming all built here; Yang Ye, the Song general of the Yang family saga, fought and died in these hills in 986.

Lunch
In Dai county, below the pass. The town is known for its mulberry and for a黄酒 made from millet; the guide orders the local noodles and a Braised pork.

Afternoon - the pass
The site has two parts, and the guide will do the older one first. The Ming fortress - the gate, the walls running away up both ridges, the command platform, and the temple compound to the Yang family generals - is the part everybody photographs, and it was rebuilt heavily in the 2000s. Below and east of it, on the old road, is what is left of the earlier pass: the stone-paved track worn into ruts by two thousand years of cart traffic, the ruined gate, and the Great Wall running along the ridge in both directions. Walking the old road for half an hour is the part that stays with people, and it is the part that tour buses skip. Three hours in total, and there is real climbing: a stair of several hundred steps to the main gate, which we take at the group's pace or not at all. The park shuttle between the two sections is included; the shuttle from the car park is paid on site.

Evening
Back to Taiyuan or on to Datong, depending on the itinerary. Two and a half hours to Taiyuan.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Taiyuan.

Morning - the drive up
The road climbs out of the Datong basin and over into Xinzhou, and the country changes as it does: loess ridges, terraced maize, then the first larch and spruce as the altitude starts to bite. You come into Wutai over a pass; below you is the bowl of Taihuai at about 1,700 metres, with white dagobas and tiled roofs among the trees and the bare rounded summits of the five terraces above. Wutai is the earthly seat of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and it has been a place of continuous worship since the Northern Wei - Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism sharing the same valley, which is unusual and visible everywhere you look.

Lunch
On the road, in a town below the pass. Simple Shanxi road food: noodles, a stir-fry, and tea.

Afternoon - first temples
The entrance fee for the scenic area is paid and included; the individual temples inside it charge their own small admissions, which are paid on site and are not included. We start with the two that set the place up: Xiantong Temple, founded in the Later Han and the oldest monastery on the mountain, whose Hall of the Thousand Bodhisattvas and bronze hall are the core of it; and Tayuan Temple, whose white Nepalese-style dagoba of 1301 - some 50 metres - is the silhouette on every photograph of Wutai. Two and a half hours, at an unhurried pace, and you will hear bells and chanting at some point in the afternoon.

Evening
Vegetarian dinner is the local habit and most of the restaurants in Taihuai are vegetarian; the cooking is better than it sounds, and the guide will order accordingly. Early night - the altitude and the cool air make most people sleep well and wake early.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Taihuai, Wutai Mountain.

Morning - Foguang Temple
Foguang sits on a terrace outside the valley, and its East Hall was raised in 857. Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin reached it in June 1937 and dated it by an inscription on a beam, which made it the oldest timber building then known in China and destroyed the comfortable assumption that no Tang building had survived. The hall is seven bays wide, single eave, and what strikes you is the roof: an enormous, low, sweeping hip that overhangs by nearly four metres on brackets of a scale you will not see anywhere later. Inside is a platform of some thirty Tang painted clay figures, and on the gable wall a fragment of Tang mural. The hall is unlocked by the caretaker and you are allowed inside, without flash. An hour and a half here, minimum.

Nanchan Temple
Half an hour further on, in a village, stands a much smaller building that is older. Nanchan's main hall carries a beam inscription of 782 - seventy-five years before Foguang - and it is three bays, single eave, unpretentious, with seventeen Tang clay figures on its altar. It is the oldest dated timber building in China. The two of them together, on the same morning, are the reason anyone interested in buildings comes to Shanxi at all.

Lunch
A village restaurant near Nanchan, or back in Taihuai. Simple, and vegetarian by default.

Afternoon - the terraces above Taihuai
Back in the valley, the afternoon climbs. Pusading, on the spur north of the town, is the Tibetan monastery of the mountain - a hundred and eight steps up to a yellow-walled complex that the Qing emperors used when they came here, and the best viewpoint over the roofs of Taihuai. Below it, Wuye Temple is the busiest shrine on the mountain, and the one where local pilgrims actually come to ask for things; your guide will explain what is being asked for and why. If knees or time argue against the stair, we stay on the valley floor and do the Shuxiang Temple instead, whose hall holds a Manjushri riding a lion that is nearly ten metres of painted clay.

Evening
Dinner in Taihuai. If the group is interested, an early-morning chanting session the following day can usually be arranged through the hotel; ask the guide the night before.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Taihuai, Wutai Mountain.

Morning - the drive down
The road back down to the Taiyuan basin takes three and a half hours with a stop, and it drops nearly a thousand metres. By the time you are on the plain it is warm, hazy and busy - a different Shanxi from the one you left.

Lunch
On the outskirts of Taiyuan. The city is famous for tounao, a breakfast soup of mutton, yam and millet wine that is worth trying if the kitchen still has it; otherwise noodles, which in Taiyuan means the hand-pulled kind with a Shanxi vinegar dressing.

Afternoon - Jinci
Jinci is twenty-five kilometres south-west of the city on the slope of Xuanweng Mountain, and it is not a temple so much as a compound that grew around a spring for two thousand years. The core is the Hall of the Holy Mother, a Northern Song building of about 1023 with a double-eave hip roof and a dragon carved in wood around the porch columns - the earliest surviving example of its kind. Beside it stands the Fish Pond and Flying Beam, a cruciform bridge of the Song that is the only one of its shape still standing. The complex also holds a Jin dynasty Hall of the Sacred Mother's attendants with forty-three painted clay figures inside, some of them among the best Song sculpture anywhere. Add the Nanlao Spring, which has run without interruption for something like three thousand years, and the 3,000-year-old cypress that leans over the courtyard. Two and a half hours, and do not rush the sculpture hall.

Evening
Into Taiyuan. Dinner in the city; the guide will aim for somewhere near the hotel if the day has been long. If the group still has appetite for walking, the Fen River park front is lit after dark and is twenty minutes from most hotels.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Taiyuan.

Morning
Breakfast at the hotel. If your departure is in the afternoon, the guide will fill the morning with whatever is still open to you: Jinci if you have not been, the Shanxi Museum if you have a taste for more bronzes, or simply the Fen River park and a proper last bowl of noodles. Nothing is scheduled unless you ask for it.

Shopping, if you want it
The honest answer on souvenirs: Shanxi aged vinegar keeps well and travels well, and the six-year and ten-year bottles from the old vinegar works in Qingxu are the ones to buy. Pingyao beef is vacuum-packed and travels. The lacquerware of Pingyao is genuine hand work and heavy. The guide will take you to a shop with fixed prices rather than a commission shop, and will say which is which.

Transfer
Your private vehicle takes you to Taiyuan Wusu International Airport, about forty-five minutes from the centre, or to Taiyuan South station for the high-speed line - which is the better option if you are going on to Beijing, Xi'an or Shanghai, at two and a half hours to Beijing. The guide walks you in as far as the entry check.

Meals
Breakfast

Accommodation
None - onward travel.