Pingyao

Where it sits. Pingyao stands on the east bank of the Fen River near the south-western edge of the Taiyuan Basin, in central Shanxi, about a hundred kilometres south of Taiyuan and some 715 kilometres from Beijing. This is the eastern loess plateau: flat, dry, treeless farmland, with dust in spring and snow that rarely amounts to much. The old city is a compact rectangle of about 2.25 square kilometres inside its walls, and the modern county town has grown up outside them, which is the single most important fact about the place. Pingyao is the only walled county seat in China to survive with its Ming and Qing layout substantially intact, and more than twenty thousand people still live inside it.

Walls and money. The walls as they stand were built in 1370, in the third year of the Hongwu emperor, on much older earthen ramparts raised under the Zhou. They run 6,163 metres, stand about twelve metres high, and are pierced by six barbican gates: one each on the north and south walls, two each on the east and west. That arrangement — a head, a tail and four legs — earned Pingyao the nickname Turtle City. A moat about four metres wide and four deep runs outside. What paid for the city, and for the four thousand or so seventeenth to nineteenth-century shops and houses inside it, was finance. Pingyao was a regional financial centre from the sixteenth century and the effective banking capital of the late Qing empire, with more than twenty institutions inside the walls at its height — over half the national total. Rishengchang, founded on West Street in 1823 and generally credited as China's first piaohao or draft bank, at one point handled close to half the country's silver transfers. It failed in 1914, in the aftermath of the revolution, and Pingyao's decline is the reason its architecture survived: there was never money to rebuild.

On screen. Pingyao's screen life is unusual in that it belongs mostly to the present rather than the past. Since 2017 the city has hosted the Pingyao International Film Festival each October, founded by the director Jia Zhangke, whose own films are rooted in Shanxi — he grew up in Fenyang, about seventy kilometres away, and shot Platform and other early work in the province's decaying industrial towns. The festival occupies a converted diesel-engine factory inside the walls, remade as a cinema complex with several screening halls and an outdoor amphitheatre, and it has become one of the more interesting festivals in Asia precisely because of the setting: international premieres in a Ming walled town of twenty thousand people. Beyond the festival, Pingyao and the Shanxi merchant houses around it are the standing location for Chinese period drama about money — the piaohao sagas that Chinese television produces regularly. The most famous single production of that world, Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, was shot not in Pingyao itself but at the Qiao Family Compound, thirty kilometres north-east, which most visitors pair with the city.

What you actually see today. The plan is a grid, laid out on a bagua pattern, with South Street as the main commercial spine and the Market Tower rising over its middle. The unmissable set pieces are the walls themselves, which you can walk almost the entire way around; the Rishengchang bank museum, where the counting rooms, strongrooms and coded draft ledgers are laid out; the County Yamen, a large Ming administrative compound with courtrooms, a jail and a garden; the City God Temple; and the Confucian Temple, whose main hall dates from the twelfth century. Two temples outside the walls, Zhenguo and Shuanglin, were inscribed with the city by UNESCO in 1997 and hold the better sculpture — Shuanglin's painted clay figures are among the finest surviving anywhere in China. Between them, the streets are lined with vinegar shops, beef sellers, lacquer workshops and a great many identical souvenir stalls.

Practicalities. Pingyao Ancient City station sits on the high-speed line from Datong to Xi'an, putting Taiyuan around half an hour away and Xi'an and Beijing within a few hours; the older Pingyao station serves conventional trains and is closer to the walls. Cars are excluded from most of the old core, and electric shuttle carts do the ferrying. A single combined ticket covers around twenty sites inside the walls including the wall walk, and is valid over consecutive days. Accommodation is almost entirely in converted courtyard houses with brick kang platform beds; heating in winter is variable, so ask.

Seasons. Spring is windy and dusty, with an average annual temperature around ten degrees and most rain concentrated in summer. Summers are hot, humid and busy. Autumn is the best season — dry, clear and cool — and October brings both the festival and the national holiday crush, which do not overlap comfortably. Winter is genuinely cold, often foggy, and the old city at that time of year is close to how it must have looked. Stone paving, high thresholds and steep wall ramps make wheelchair access difficult.