7-Day Shanxi: Taiyuan, Wutai Mountain and Pingyao

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 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 - 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.

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.