9-Day Shanxi Architecture Tour: from the Northern Wei Caves to the Qing Banks

Morning or midday - arrival
Datong sits in a basin at about 1,040 metres, with the Great Wall running along the ridges to the north and the coal country of Shanxi to the south. It was the capital of the Northern Wei dynasty between 398 and 494, and that century is the reason the city matters: the caves at Yungang, ten kilometres west, were cut while Datong was the capital, and the monasteries inside the walls were rebuilt under the Liao and the Jin. Your guide meets you at the airport or the station and drives you into the city.

Shanhua Temple
Shanhua is the quieter of the two great monasteries and the better place to start. Its main hall, the Daxiongbao Hall, is a Liao building of the eleventh century: seven bays wide, single eave, and remarkable for the way the interior has been left open - the bracket sets and the ceiling are the decoration, and there is very little of the painted fuss that later dynasties added. The Thirty-Three Heaven Hall beside it is Jin, and the sculptural group inside is among the finest surviving Jin work anywhere. The courtyard is a working temple yard, and in the afternoon the light comes in low across the stone.

Lunch
Shanxi is noodle country and Datong is the northern end of it. Your guide orders knife-cut noodles in lamb broth, a plate of the local yellow cake made from millet flour, and something green, because the northern Shanxi diet is short on vegetables and the kitchens know it. A mild table is arranged alongside for anyone who wants one.

Afternoon - Huayan Temple
Huayan is the larger and more formal of the two, and its Thin Scripture Hall is the one that architects come for: a Liao hall of 1038, five bays, with a coffered ceiling and, around the walls, the wooden scripture cabinets that give the hall its name. The hall also holds a set of Liao painted sculptures. The monastery is laid out on an east-west axis rather than the usual north-south one, which is a Khitan habit and a small, physical reminder of who was ruling here in the tenth century.

Evening - the city wall
The Ming wall of Datong was rebuilt between 2008 and 2016 on the original footings, and walking a stretch of it at dusk is the cheapest and clearest way to understand the shape of the old city. Dinner afterwards inside the walls; the guide will pick somewhere within walking distance of the hotel.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Inside or beside the walled city, Datong.

Morning - Yungang
Yungang is a kilometre of soft sandstone cliff on the north bank of the Shi Li River, and between about 460 and 494 the Northern Wei court cut into it: 45 principal caves, some 252 niches and around 51,000 carved figures. The scale of the five Tanyao caves at the western end is the thing nobody expects - the colossal Buddha in Cave 20 is 13.7 metres high and stands, because the rock in front of it collapsed, in the open air. This is Buddhist sculpture at the moment when it is still looking west: the drapery is Gandharan, the faces on some figures are unmistakably Central Asian, and the Hellenistic and Indian elements have not yet been absorbed into a Chinese manner.

How we run the visit
Your guide takes the caves west to east, which is the chronological order and the reverse of the crowd. Caves 16 to 20 first, while the light is on the stone and the group is fresh; then the paired caves 9 and 10 with their wooden-fronted facades; then the dense, heavily carved middle section. The site museum near the entrance is worth twenty minutes for the architectural fragments recovered from the cliff face. Allow three to three and a half hours in total, and note that photography is permitted in the open but flash is not.

Lunch
Near the site, then back into the city. Your guide orders a Datong mixed grill of lamb and offal, a bowl of mutton soup with hand-pulled noodles, and the local buckwheat noodles.

Afternoon - the Datong Museum
The new municipal museum on the west bank of the Yu River is one of the better city museums in China and it makes sense on the same day as the caves, because much of what it holds came off that cliff: architectural fragments, Buddha heads, and the painted and gilded woodwork that the dry climate preserved. There is also a strong Northern Wei section on the finds from the tomb of Sima Jinlong, a Northern Wei prince whose burial furniture came out of the same workshops that served the court, and the museum explains, in English labels, the sequence of the caves. Admission is free with a booked slot; your guide handles it.

Evening
Dinner in the city. If the group has the energy, the Drum Tower quarter is worth an hour after dark.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Datong.

Morning - the Hanging Temple
Xuankong Si was built, according to the inscription, in 491, and rebuilt in the Ming and Qing. It is a monastery of some forty halls and pavilions pinned to the west face of a cliff above the Jinsha Gorge, held up by crossbeams socketed into the rock and by wooden posts that do most of the visual work and less of the structural work than they appear to. The whole complex is forty metres or so of vertical spread on a face that keeps the sun off it for most of the day, which is why six centuries of wind and flood have not taken it down. Entry to walk the plank walkways is limited and released in timed slots; we book for you and, if the slots are gone, we re-order the day rather than stand in the queue.

Lunch
In Hunyuan. The town is known for its cool noodles - liangfen, a starch jelly cut into strips with chilli oil, vinegar and a topping of fried broad beans - and for a cured donkey meat that the region eats cold. Your guide orders both, plus a hot dish.

Afternoon - Hengshan
Hengshan is the Northern Peak among the Five Sacred Mountains of China, and the temple that matters on it is the Beiyue Miao at the top: a hall and a terrace on the cliff edge at about 1,700 metres, reached by a stair of just over a hundred steps from the car park, or by cable car. The mountain is not high, but it is the northernmost of the five and the setting is dry, grey and austere rather than lush. Two hours is enough for the temple and the terrace. The cable car, if taken, is paid on site and is not included in the tour price; the walk up takes about forty minutes.

Evening - back to Datong
The drive back takes about an hour and a half. Dinner in Datong, or a late, light meal at the hotel if the day has been long.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Datong.

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.