Ancient City of Pingyao

1. The city wall and the south gate: a tortoise of brick and earth

The wall is about 6,163 metres long and about 12 metres high. Inside it is rammed earth; the brick is a skin. In 1370, the third year of the first Ming emperor, an older earth wall was given this brick face.

There are six gates, one each on the north and south and two each on the east and west. Every gate has a barbican, a walled yard in front of it. At the north gate the outer and inner doors are set at a right angle, so nobody could charge straight through.

Walls fall too. On 17 October 2004 a stretch of 17.3 metres collapsed at the south barbican. In October 2021 days of heavy rain damaged 61 places; repairs finished in November 2022, with loess and quicklime rammed in at seven parts to three. Look for a seam between new brick and old.

2. South Street and the Market Tower: the spine of the town

The Market Tower stands astride South Street, the only tower of its kind in the town. It was rebuilt in 1688 and is about 18.5 metres high.

Look at the roof. On the south and north slopes, yellow and blue glazed tiles spell two characters, 囍 (double happiness) and 寿 (long life). Inside, the gable walls carry Qing paintings of stories from the Three Kingdoms (220–280).

3. Rishengchang: the first draft bank in China

It is on West Street, and its door faces north, the opposite of an ordinary house. In 1823 the owner Li Daquan put up the money and the manager Lei Lütai ran it.

Why was a bank needed? The dye shop bought its pigments in Sichuan, and loads of silver had to travel with armed escorts, which was costly and dangerous. A draft let the paper travel and the silver stay where it was.

There are three courtyards: counters and accounts in front, remittances in the middle, living quarters behind. Wire netting hung with bells was stretched over the yards against thieves.

Rishengchang closed in 1914.

A few doors away the Xietongqing bank shows its underground vault.

4. The county office: local government in the old empire

This is the compound from which a Ming (1368–1644) or Qing magistrate governed the county. It is often called one of the largest and most complete to survive in China.

Walk the central axis: main gate, ceremonial gate, great hall, second hall, private quarters. Work and trials were in front, and the magistrate's family lived behind.

In the great hall, find the wooden block the magistrate banged on the table and the tube of bamboo slips beside it. What were the slips for?

5. The Confucian Temple: the oldest hall in town

The temple is in the south-east corner. Its main hall was rebuilt in 1163 under the Jin dynasty, and is often called the oldest main hall of any Confucian temple in China. It is two hundred years older than the brick of the wall.

The tower in the south-east corner honours Kuixing, the god of examinations. This is the part of town that speaks of study and the road to office.

6. The City God Temple and the old courtyards: ordinary Pingyao

Three temples stand together: to the City God, the Kitchen God and the God of Wealth.

Pingyao houses are courtyards of grey brick and grey tile, and many are now inns. Most roofs have a single slope that tips into the yard. Shanxi people explain it with a saying: good water should not run to a stranger's field.

7. Shuanglin Temple: two thousand painted figures

The temple is at Qiaotou village, about six kilometres south-west of the town. A brick-faced earth wall surrounds it, like a small Pingyao.

A Song stele in the temple says it was "repaired in the second year of Wuping", which is 571 under the Northern Qi (550–577), so it was founded earlier still. It was first called Zhongdu Temple and took its present name about the Song dynasty (960–1279).

Ten halls hold about 2,056 painted clay figures, from 30 centimetres to over 3 metres. The best known are the guardian Weituo in the Hall of a Thousand Buddhas and the "mute arhat" in the Arhat Hall.

In the Hall of the Heavenly Kings, find the four kings with a lute, a sword, a snake and an umbrella. Together they stand for good weather for the crops.

8. Zhenguo Temple: a timber hall more than a thousand years old

The temple is at Haodong village, ten to twelve kilometres north-east of the town.

The Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas was built in 963, under the Northern Han of the Five Dynasties (907–960). The year is written on a beam inside, and the county records and a stele of 1819 agree.

Only seven timber buildings of the Five Dynasties survive in China. Six are in Shanxi, and this is one of them.

Look up at the brackets under the eaves. They are enormous for so small a hall. The painted figures inside are among the few Buddhist sculptures of the tenth century left in China.

Why Pingyao survived

Two answers are given, and both are true. The town was too poor to rebuild. And in 1982 the county asked Tongji University for a plan, approved in 1985, that kept the old town and put new building outside the wall. In the same years towns all over China were pulling their old quarters down.

In 1997 about 50,000 people visited. In 2019 the figure was about 17.65 million.

Books, films and festivals

A Qing compilation says of the Shanxi banks: their methods are most exact, their people most honest, their credit the best known. Li Hongling, a Pingyao bank manager, wrote the story of their rise and fall himself. The German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen, who travelled in China in the 1860s and coined the term "Silk Road", praised the Shanxi people's gift for trade and finance.

The Pingyao International Photography Festival began in 2001. The Pingyao International Film Festival was founded in 2017 by the director Jia Zhangke, who comes from nearby Fenyang; it is held each October in a disused diesel-engine factory inside the wall. The show Seeing Pingyao Again has played since 2013 in a theatre outside the west gate; the audience walks through it with the actors.

The film Empire of Silver (2009) tells of two generations of a Shanxi banking family; the bank in it is invented. Do not confuse Pingyao with the Qiao Family Compound in Qi county, where Raise the Red Lantern was filmed.

Something to try: make a draft. You pay ten taels of silver in Pingyao and collect it in Beijing. How do you stop someone forging the paper? The banks used secret codes, hidden marks and special paper.