Pingyao

A settlement has stood here since the Western Zhou period, and the town was given walls of rammed earth early in its life. The present rampart dates from 1370, in the third year of the Ming Hongwu reign, when the earth wall was rebuilt and faced in brick, and the grid of streets inside it was laid out on the pattern that survives: a main cross of four streets, eight lesser streets and seventy-two lanes, with the county offices, the Confucian temple and the city god's temple in their prescribed positions.

Pingyao's fortune came later, and from finance. Shanxi merchants had grown rich on the trade in salt, silk, tea and cotton between the interior and the northern frontier, and moving silver across the country was slow and dangerous. In the 1820s a Pingyao dye firm, Rishengchang, began issuing drafts that could be cashed at its branches in other cities. The piaohao, or draft banks, that followed were run largely by men from Pingyao and the neighbouring counties, and for much of the 19th century they handled remittances for merchants and for the Qing government itself.

The system did not survive the arrival of modern banks, the fall of the Qing in 1911 and the wars and disruption that followed; the last draft banks closed in the early 20th century, and Pingyao became a poor and unimportant county town. That poverty preserved it. Without money to rebuild, the walls, the temples and the courtyard houses stayed as they were, and when demolition threatened in the 1980s the town was protected instead. UNESCO inscribed the old town, with Shuanglin and Zhenguo temples, as a World Heritage Site in 1997, and tourism has been its main business since.

Pingyao's identity is bound up with the Shanxi merchant tradition — thrift, long apprenticeships, family firms and a reputation for keeping one's word across a thousand kilometres of road. The old banking halls display the ledgers, cipher systems and partnership rules of that world, and local pride in it is considerable; the Qiao and Wang compounds nearby are shown as proof of what the trade paid for.

The town's architecture is a culture in itself. Houses are built of grey brick around narrow courtyards, often with a barrel-vaulted room at the back in the loess-country style that stays cool in summer and warm in winter, and gateways, screen walls and roof ridges carry carved brick decoration meant to bring luck or ward it off. Paper-cutting, lacquerware finished with a polished surface, and painted clay figures are the local crafts, and the lacquer workshops still sell boxes and screens along the main streets.

Shanxi opera, or jinju, is performed on festival days, along with drum troupes, stilt walking and the noise of the Spring Festival, when the town is at its most local. Since the late 1990s an outside culture has arrived with the visitors: the photography festival each September occupies old factories and courtyards, and a film festival founded in 2017 brings screenings to the town. Residents are used to strangers in their lanes, but the courtyards away from the main streets remain private homes.

Around half a million people live in Pingyao county, of whom only a small fraction — a few tens of thousands — live inside the walls; the rest are in the modern county town outside and in farming villages on the plain. Many families who once lived in the old town have moved to flats beyond the ramparts, where the schools, hospitals and supermarkets are, and rent or run their courtyard houses as guesthouses instead.

Tourism now sets the rhythm inside the walls. Mornings begin with deliveries by electric cart and shopkeepers sluicing the stone in front of their doors; the streets fill in the middle of the day and again after dark, and empty sharply out of season and in deep winter. Outside the walls the economy is agricultural and industrial — maize and wheat on the plain, coal and heavy industry in the wider province — and a good many younger residents work in Taiyuan or further afield.

The pressures are those of a protected town. Restoration rules limit what owners may change; ageing timber, damp and winter heating are constant problems in the courtyard houses; and the balance between a living town and a visitor attraction is argued over, especially when a lane turns entirely to shops. Part of the southern wall collapsed in 2004, a reminder of how vulnerable rammed earth is.

Shanxi is the noodle province of China, and Pingyao eats accordingly. Daoxiao mian, shaved with a curved blade straight from a block of dough into boiling water, arrives with a sauce of tomato and egg, minced pork or mutton; maoerduo, small 'cat's ear' curls of pasta, and youmian kaolaolao, rolls of oat flour steamed upright in a honeycomb, are country staples. Flour here means wheat, oats, buckwheat and sorghum rather than rice, and much of it is eaten in soup.

The town's own specialities are two. Pingyao beef is cured in salt, simmered slowly and served cold in thin slices, sold in every shop on South Street and taken home as a gift. Wantuo is a cold jelly of buckwheat or wheat starch, cut into ribbons and dressed with vinegar, garlic, sesame paste and chilli oil — cheap, sour and eaten standing up. Guotuiba, a layered baked wheat pastry, and steamed buns shaped for festivals fill out the local list.

Aged vinegar, lao chencu, is the flavour that ties it all together: dark, faintly sweet, poured over noodles, dumplings and cold dishes in quantities that surprise visitors from elsewhere in China. Tea houses in the old town serve local jujube and chrysanthemum infusions, and the provincial spirit is Fenjiu, a clear sorghum baijiu distilled at Xinghuacun in Fenyang, north-west of the town and drunk at any meal that counts as an occasion.