A Market Town: Yuci Old City

Yuci was the seat of a county for as long as this part of the basin had a county, and in 1999 it became Yuci District of the new prefecture-level city of Jinzhong. Around 2000 the old county town on the site was opened as a tourist attraction, and the walled area was cleared to make room for a large pseudo-antique street, with only a few buildings singled out for protection and kept: the City God Temple, the Qingxu Pavilion and the Confucian Temple. Most of the houses and lanes of the old town went with them. A second walled enclosure, the outer town, once stood just outside the south gate, with walls on three of its sides. The written account of the old city names it, and the new district now stands in its place.

What the old town was for is written in the county's position rather than in its architecture. Yuci sat in the western plain of the prefecture, on the ground that the Chinese description of Jinzhong calls the Fen River valley, along the lines that cross the basin, among them the Daxi and Zhengtai high-speed lines and the Shijiazhuang-Taiyuan, Tongpu and Taiyuan-Jiaozuo lines of the older network. The city has since grown into the Taiyuan urban area, and Yuci District is increasingly joined to it, so that the two are largely one conurbation. A county seat of this kind stood between the field roads of the plain and the long-distance routes of the basin. Its trade was ordinary commerce, the everyday business of a town with a market and a magistrate, not the monumental building that Pingyao kept.

The Yuci that visitors walk today was built after 2000. The clearance was deliberate: the officials of the time took down the dwellings and the lanes of the old county town, leaving the protected buildings standing, and raised a scale pseudo-antique street in their place. That street is used for tourism and, for the most part, as a setting for film and television shooting. The written account of the old town is unusually blunt about the result. Most of the old buildings and old lanes in that area have disappeared through the demolition that came with the attraction, and what remains is a handful of heritage structures together with a few main streets, the East Street, the South Street and the North Street. It is a good place to see how a Chinese old town is reconstructed: the reconstruction is recent, and the account of it is plain.