Taiyuan

Taiyuan's ancestor was Jinyang, founded in 497 BC on the west bank of the Fen River by the Zhao clan of the state of Jin. Its walls held out through a famous siege in which the besiegers diverted a river against it, and the Zhao went on to become one of the three states that divided Jin. For the next thousand years the city guarded the approach from the northern steppe to the plains.

Its highest point came under the Tang. The dynasty's founders rose in revolt from Taiyuan in 617, and the city was made the Northern Capital, one of the empire's three great cities. That status ended violently: in 979 the Song emperor Taizong took Jinyang from the Northern Han, then burned the city and flooded its site so that it could never rebel again. A new town was laid out to the north-east a few years later, and it is that settlement, walled again under the Ming and given a princely court, that grew into the modern city.

The 20th century made Taiyuan an industrial capital. Yan Xishan, who governed Shanxi for most of the years between 1911 and 1949, built an arsenal, ironworks, railways and schools here and ran the province as a near-independent domain. Japanese forces took the city in 1937 after the campaign fought in the surrounding passes, and the civil war ended with a long siege in 1948 and 1949 that destroyed much of what remained. Coal, steel and heavy machinery rebuilt it under the People's Republic, at a heavy cost in air and water quality; since the 2000s the river has been dammed into parkland and the built-up area has spread far to the south.

Taiyuan is the cultural capital of a province that thinks of itself as the cradle of Chinese antiquity, and the Jin identity runs through daily life. Jin opera, or Jinju, is the local form of Chinese opera, sung in the Shanxi dialect to clapper percussion, and amateur singers still gather in the parks to perform it. Shadow puppetry, paper-cutting and New Year woodblock prints belong to the same tradition, and the provincial museum sets them beside the bronzes of the Jin state.

The merchant past shapes local pride as much as the imperial one. Shanxi bankers ran China's remittance houses in the Qing period, and their courtyard compounds in the countryside south of the city are treated as a regional monument — thrift, contracts and family firms are part of how the province describes itself. Taiyuan also remembers Fu Shan, the 17th-century scholar, calligrapher and doctor who refused to serve the new Qing dynasty and whose name is attached to the city's best-known breakfast.

Religion is visible in the hills around the basin: Buddhist grottoes and monasteries from the Northern Qi and Tang, Daoist halls, and a long connection to Wutai Shan, the sacred mountain in the north-east of the province, for which Taiyuan is the usual starting point. Manners are northern and direct, hospitality is generous and insistent, and a guest who admires the vinegar or the noodles will be served a great deal more of both.

About 5.3 million people live in the Taiyuan municipality, most of them in the string of districts along the Fen River. The city is overwhelmingly Han Chinese, with a small Hui Muslim community centred on the old mosque quarter. Housing has moved steadily south and east into Xiaodian and the development zones, leaving the old northern lanes with an older population and a steady turnover of small shops.

Coal built the local economy and still underpins it, through mining companies headquartered in the city, coking plants, power stations, and the Taiyuan Iron and Steel works that is one of China's large stainless-steel producers. Heavy machinery, chemicals and, more recently, materials science and software cluster around the universities — Taiyuan University of Technology and Shanxi University among them. The province's dependence on coal has made the local economy swing with commodity prices, and diversification is a constant subject of official plans.

The day starts early, with tounao or noodles from a stall, a metro or bus ride along the north–south axis, and the shared bicycles that pile up at every station. Evenings belong to the river: the embankments fill with walkers, kite-flyers and squares of dancers, and the restaurants of Liuxiang and Shipin Street stay busy late. Winter air quality, traffic on the wide avenues and the cost of new housing in the southern districts are the complaints heard most often.

Shanxi is the noodle province of China, and Taiyuan eats accordingly. Daoxiao mian, knife-cut noodles, are shaved in thick ribbons from a block of dough straight into boiling water and served with a meat sauce, with tomato and egg, or simply with vinegar and chilli oil. Around them sits a whole family of wheat and other grain foods: maoerduo, "cat's ear" pasta pinched into curls; youmian kaolaolao, rolls of oat-flour noodle steamed upright in a honeycomb; tijian, dough pressed through a press into long strands; and jiupian, shaved dough flakes stir-fried with vegetables.

The city's own dish is tounao, literally "head and brains", a thick, faintly sweet mutton soup with lotus root, yam and rice wine that is eaten for breakfast in the cold months, with a sesame-topped flatbread for dipping and pickled leeks on the side. It is credited to Fu Shan, who is said to have devised it as a tonic for his mother. Other local staples include guoyou rou, pork slices fried with vinegar and garlic, mutton and cabbage hotpots, and steamed buns in every shape the province can devise.

Aged vinegar is the seasoning that defines Shanxi cooking. Lao chencu, brewed from sorghum and matured through a cycle of summer sun and winter freezing, is poured over noodles, dumplings and cold dishes, and bottles of it are the standard gift taken home. The drink to go with a banquet is Fenjiu, the clear sorghum spirit distilled at Xinghuacun, in Fenyang south-west of the city, one of the oldest named liquors in China, and sweet, dark date and jujube products from the province's orchards fill the snack shops.