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P E E K A R O U N D P I N G Y A O
IT’S 7AM
in winter, and the bone-
chilling air numbs my lungs and
burns my fingers. The cold takes my
breath away. Streets are empty but
the town is stirring. Wafts of smoke
from coal fires and the aroma of
breakfast vegetables frying with chili
and vinegar drift past. The occasional
bicycle rattles by, along with the
distant clip of a horse-drawn cart.
My steps along Pingyao’s main
thoroughfare, South Street, take
me both forward and back, through
decades and centuries of history. Like
Pingyao , s saving grace was that is was
forgotten...Somehow the town escaped much
of the changes brought by the last century
much of the city within these ancient
walls, the street has stood frozen in
time since the end of the 19th century,
when two millennia of trade came to an
abrupt halt as bankers and merchants
headed to burgeoning coastal cities,
such as Shanghai.
Pingyao’s saving grace was that it
was forgotten, or at least overlooked,
until the 1980s. Somehow the town
escaped much of the changes that the
last century brought about. In the midst
of the late 1960’s Cultural Revolution,
when countless historical treasures
were destroyed because they were
the products of “old ideas”, much
of Pingyao was overlooked. Despite
serving as a pioneering force in Chinese
capitalism, it was something of a “red
rag” to revolutionary Red Guards.
The city had reached a highpoint in
the mid-19th century when its savvy
businessmen established China’s first
draft banks to help wealthy merchants
make faraway, risk-free payments.
At one point, over half of all China’s
exchange banks were headquartered
within Pingyao’s defensive walls. But in
the 1960s it was a place of mud roads
and broken buildings.
Stepping back in time
I walk north to south, east to west
along the town’s four main streets.
They may be empty at this hour but
there are echoes from those long-gone
days of prosperity; among the most
telling signs of forgotten fortunes are
the grand, carved-wood facades of
sprawling courtyard mansions that line
either side of the roads.
Yet Pingyao is not a museum of
hollow relics. It is a busy, cluttered town
of 40,000 locals, some of whom earn
a crust from tourism and in factories,
others from restaurants and shops in
the new town sprawl that has grown
around the city wall.
From atop any of the wall’s six
huge gates — or, the highest point,
the central Market Tower renovated in
1688 —
Pingyao’s roofline bristles with
smoking chimneys and tin flues. It’s a
low-slung huddle of Ming and Qing-era
dwellings, dating from the 17th to 19th
centuries. But the walls were built
much earlier, in the 1370s, to protect
Walking through
the streets of
Pingyao is like
stepping back
in time
STORY & PHOTOS
MARK PARREN TAYLOR
