Pingyao

Adam, Alison, and I went to Pingyao this weekend, a small town in Shanxi Province east of Beijing.  Pingyao's claim to fame during the Ming and Qing dynasties was its banking, the first draft banks in China.  Today its famous for still being stuck in the Ming and Qing dynasties, as it was deemed too small and insignificant for the government's mass modernization programs, and thus managed to keep its old architecture and city walls intact.  

One of the main streets of Pingyao Old Town

A Ming dynasty courtyard and room

In some ways, there is value to being old, or to representing the past in how you look or how you do things, so that people can learn from and about the past.  Certainly trying to purge everything old and start anew, as Mao tried to do in China with the cultural revolution, risks losing many valuable memories and lessons from prior peoples and customs.  At the same time however, its impossible not to move on, people can't live in the Ming dynasty and in 2010 at the same time, so some of the juxtapositions are quite strange.  Gigantic 5-star glassy hotels just outside the ancient brick and earthen city walls…barefoot people whizzing around on electric bikes right next to horse-drawn carts…incredible dust and palpable coal soot in the air due to rampant coal heating…dirty children playing in the dust with chickens instead of being in school…grotesque religious imagery in a place devoid of fervour and filled with tourists...

Some statues which can only be representing hell...shudder

In some ways it would be good for Pingyao to move into the future a little - certainly better for the lungs of the inhabitants - after Pingyao, Beijing pollution looks sunny!  Its hard for me to see how the children of a village so stuck in the past can plan to move onward into modern things and ideas, but perhaps it was just hard for this foreigner to see past the coal dust to the true heart of 21st century Pingyao.

The back of the Wang Family Mansion outside Pingyao

Pingyao at its prettiest - at night, with lanterns flanking the shopfronts