Shuozhou is a prefecture-level city in the north of Shanxi, bordering Inner Mongolia to the north-west and sitting on the upper reaches of the Fen River. Its site was the frontier town of Mayi, a trading post between China and the Xiongnu of the eastern steppe; in 133 BC Chinese troops tried to ambush the Xiongnu there. The land is mostly mountain and hill, over sixty per cent of the prefecture, with the Hongtao range to the north-west, the Guancen to the south-west, the Hengshan to the south-east and the Sanggan plain between them. Coal and power drive the economy, with dairy and ceramics alongside.
A timber pagoda of the Liao period read from the outside in: its octagonal plan, the fifty-four kinds of bracket set that hold the frame, the shelling of 1926, and a heritage status usually overstated.
A temple of the Pure Land school in a small northern city, founded in 665 and carrying three names: what the Jin halls of 1143 keep on their walls, and how much of that painting is original.
ReadA pass at the western end of the Ming wall, in Youyu County: the customs house that taxed timber and goods there, and the migration called walking out the western gate that made the name.
ReadThe oldest surviving timber pagoda in China: an octagonal frame 67.31 metres tall, five visible storeys with hidden ones between them, fifty-four kinds of bracket set, and a national monument that is not a World Heritage site.
A Pure Land temple on a Shuozhou street, founded in 665 and largely rebuilt in the Jin: an Amitabha Hall of 1143 with 327 square metres of murals and a Guanyin 4.68 metres high.
A pass at the western end of the Ming wall, in Youyu County: one of the gates through which Shanxi farmers walked into Inner Mongolia, and for more than a century a customs house on the timber road.
