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<\/a>It has what you\u2019d need to make it into a tourist destination–quaint Ming and Qing dynasty houses easily turned into ambient guest houses and restaurants and small shops.<\/p>\nOur day began with a made-for-tourist celebration that consisted of young ladies on parade dressed in Qing costumes, imitating women with bound feet (some emperor liked it, so for centuries rich women broke the toes of their daughters to make them more attractive\u2014only peasant women had regular-sized feet).\u00a0\u00a0The practice was not banned until the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century.\u00a0\u00a0The ladies were followed by jugglers, and the festivities culminated in a processional for the governor and his entourage.<\/p>\n We then walked along the wall, originally built in 1372, and relatively intact Among other visits in the city was one to China\u2019s first bank, here in Pingyao in 1823. It handled bank transfers in over 20 cities, including Calcutta in India and Kowloon in Hong Kong, and lasted until the 1930s or so.\u00a0\u00a0It sounded like the Hanseatic League, with \u201cinternships\u201d for young Chinese more interested in commerce (and wealth) than in government and Chinese classics. At one time,\u00a0\u00a090% of China\u2019s banking service was done by Shanxi financiers, and much of that in Pingyao.<\/p>\n If you were looking for temples, this had some 4 star attractions.\u00a0\u00a0One, close to the city, and named for an episode in the life of the Buddha, had some statues that date back to the Song dynasty, or almost 1000 years ago.\u00a0\u00a0Some In addition to the Buddhist temples, there was a city god temple, a Daoist celebration reconstructed during the reign of Qianlong, with a statue to the Guan Gong, my candidate to replace Tommy Titan.\u00a0\u00a0The Guan Gong is celebrated as the God of Wealth and the God of War, the Across from that, there is a Confucian temple that purports to be one of the best still extant in China (Confucius came in for a battering during the Cultural Revolution, as one of the \u201colds,\u201d but I\u2019ll have more to say about its revival before I leave China).\u00a0\u00a0There are some nice exhibits on the Confucian exams in the temple, which was one of the most serene places in the city.<\/p>\n There The other striking public building is the home of the governor, which is residence, administrative offices, and jail\u2014all in one place.\u00a0\u00a0The striking thing was the jail and prison, partly because in criminal court cases, the plaintiff and defendants both knelt down in a specific spot before the judge, who could use torture (the tools of the trade were there, including knuckle busters) to extract confessions. A red-colored piece of wood signified death, and we saw, in the prison, the various forms of punishment, which ranged from public humiliation to beheading, to the \u201cdeath by 1000 cuts,\u201d which consisted of having your body wrapped in a fishnet, squeezed, and the skin that protruded sliced.<\/p>\n I said this is the ideal model for what foreigners (and Chinese) think is a model Ming\/Qing city.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ve been to others which have rebuilt areas like this\u2014I think it was Kaifeng or Luoyang, former capitals. I know Xi\u2019an has an area near the south wall that has a reconstructed \u201cantique street\u201d that is no more antique than the last four or five years.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The difference is that Pingyao has an antique street that is an antique, and limits cars to the edges of the old walled city. It is a model\u2014but it is an original, not a copy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you were looking for a city built to be a caricature of a\u00a0 “Chinese” city, you wouldn\u2019t have to look far, at least not if you were in Pingyao, a world heritage UNESCO city of nearly 50,000 people in Shanxi province. Unlike the similarly-positioned Lijiang, in Yunnan, far from here, which had to be … Continue reading “Pingyao 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-last-trip-in-china-2012"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9422,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions\/9422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a>since then.\u00a0\u00a0It is about 6 miles long, but nowhere near as wide as the one in Xi\u2019an.\u00a0\u00a0Most of the buildings in it are Ming\/Qing, with some more recently built.\u00a0\u00a0There was one factory which the government evicted, and,\u00a0 as our guide noted, some of the land was given to developers for hotels, etc.\u00a0\u00a0Tourism, as I have been saying this whole trip, is the world\u2019s biggest business, and China has some of the best infrastructure in the world for the business.\u00a0\u00a0It is a big revenue generator.\u00a0\u00a0Ticket prices for attractions have gone up greatly; the city tour package is over 30$ US. The government is now developing the tourist trade for domestic Chinese.\u00a0\u00a0I am one of the few non-backpacking Americans here, and there was a BIG crowd this weekend.\u00a0\u00a0The guides have taken to using megaphones, even for groups of 3 or 4, which makes some places impossibly noisy. One year I saw there were 15 million tourists!<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>of the statues retained their original colors, and the 1000 armed Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy (who in the process of moving from India to China became more feminine than masculine) is particularly striking.<\/p>\n<\/a> former of which puts him pretty high in today\u2019s Chinese pantheon (socialism with Daoist characteristics?).<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>are even two Christian churches from the early 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century, one Catholic, one Protestant, which I understand are packed on Sundays.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n