Inside the Walled Streets of Pingyao

Pingyao stands on the east bank of the Fen River, near the southwestern edge of the Taiyuan Basin, and the walled town is the seat of Gutao in Pingyao County, administered from Jinzhong. The walls were raised in 1370, the third year of the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming, and the plan they enclose can still be read from them. Six barbican gates lead inside: one on the north wall, one on the south, two on the east and two on the west. The arrangement is said to resemble a turtle, with a head, a tail and four legs, and the town has carried the name Turtle City since. The county was once called Pingtao; it was renamed in the Northern Wei, when officials avoided writing the personal name of the emperor then reigning.

Begin in the middle. A Chinese town of the Ming and Qing period was laid out on the eight-trigram pattern, and Pingyao follows it: the main thoroughfares run straight, the lanes that serve them cut across at right angles, and the result is a grid a visitor can learn to walk. Between them the streets hold several thousand shops and houses built between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, most of them still standing in their original plots. The county around the town counts 1,075 registered immovable cultural relics, 143 of them protected at national, provincial, municipal or county level, and 20 of those protected at the national level. Among the national entries are the city wall, Zhenguo Temple, Shuanglin Temple, the Shili Lou, the old premises of Rishengchang and the former home of the banker Lei Lutai.

Preservation here is a habit rather than a recent decision. Organized restoration has been carried out at intervals since the fifteenth century, and the most recent phase of that work began in 1979, which means the roofs and walls a visitor walks past have been mended by generations of hands instead of restored once for tourists. The town was also named one of the country's historical and cultural cities. Then, in 1997, the settlement together with the outlying temples of Zhenguo and Shuanglin was inscribed as a World Heritage Site. The inscription covers the old town and two sites outside it, a reminder that what is protected here is a landscape of several parts rather than a single wall.

In the city's financial heyday more than twenty financial institutions operated within it, more than half of the total in the whole country, and the premises of those firms are still standing on the old streets, several of them protected in their own right and two of them at city level. Rishengchang, the first of them, is on the national list. The town did not empty out afterwards: Pingyao County counted 450,697 permanent residents in the 2020 census, and its economy rests on two plain things, tourism and farming. What the county is known for beyond its walls, Pingyao beef and the tuiguang lacquerware, is still made here. This is a working town with a stock of protected buildings inside it, not an empty stage set.