Pingyao

In the morning I took the high speed train from Beijing to Pingyao.  We were travelling at 120 to 140 mph, but it was completely smooth and comfortable.

Often when I travel I see a few houses out in the middle of nowhere and I wonder:  who would live here?  From the train, I did not see individual houses in the middle of nowhere.  Rather, there would be nothing for miles and then a city in the middle of nowhere with rows and rows of identical high rise apartments.  There were a lot of these cities close to Beijing, but as we moved away, the cities were more spread out.  There were also factories with smokestacks and the air appeared to be worse than in Beijing.  My guide in Pingyao said that they still heat buildings with coal here.

Pingyao is a lovely, walled city with many original gates, towers, and buildings.  I guess we would call it medieval, although here it is Ming and Qing dynasty.  The walled city is deceptively large with over 45,000 people living in it as well as many hotels, restaurants, and shops.  Cars or scooters are not allowed in the central section, so the streets are full of tourists walking around, and at night the streets are lit with red lanterns.

Modern (19th century) Chinese banking began in Pingyao, and the city was the financial center of China for more than a century.  Geographically, it is between Xi'an, the eastern end of the Silk Road, and Beijing, making it a good place to be a financial center.

My guide keeps telling me how all the religions live in harmony in Pingyao.  We visited temples that combine elements of the Han (Chinese) with the Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucianists.  At one of the temples we visited, a group of actors put on a show for the tourists.

  

Since it was all in Chinese, I had no idea what they were saying, but it was impressive looking.  All of a sudden it began to rain and all the tourists ran for cover.  It turns out that the man in red is the City God and he is reading a proclamation from the people asking for rain.  So when he finished, he answered their prayers: they turn on the sprinklers and douse the tourists.  Ha ha.  The man in the blue shirt (modern clothes) with the camera is my guide.  He knows what is coming and is ready to catch me getting soaked.

The tourists are almost all Chinese here, mostly from the countryside.  Kasey had told me that people in Beijing and Shanghai are used to Westerners, but the Chinese tourists would not be.  I have been stared at by a few children but today was the first time that someone asked to take a picture with me.  Of course "countryside" is a pretty dubious description and seems to mean anyone not from Beijing or Shanghai.  But there are another thirteen cities in China with a population of over 10 million and  hundred or so with a million or more.  In fact, 350 million people, more than the entire population of the US, live in cities of over a million.  That does leave nearly a billion people who live in smaller cities or rural areas.  Pick your definition of countryside.

This impressive looking engraved wall in one of the temples is a 19th century donor list!  Each column is one family of donors.  On the far right, only one family gave the largest amount.  Similarly with the next few large amounts, but as you move to the left, more families gave the lesser amounts - which were still significant.  Their family names are permanently engraved and prominently displayed 150 years later.

On my second day in Pingyao we were scheduled to visit two different family compounds.  I pictured the Corleones and had no idea why we were going there.  But it turns out that a Chinese family compound is the equivalent of an English family manor or a Southern antebellum mansion.  A wealthy man would build a house and each generation would add new sections.  The Wang Family Compound, located on a hill about twenty miles from Pingyao, was built from 1760 to 1812 and housed over 200 families.



It is always fascinating to me that cultures independently develop similar crafts or buildings.  I knew that the Spanish copied the courtyard (hacienda) style of house from the Moors and brought it to the New World.  I didn't know that a traditional Chinese house is built around courtyards also although in a slightly different style.  A large compound is described by how many courtyards it has as each family has one courtyard.  The father's room is straight ahead with the sons on the right and daughters either on the left or upstairs.




It struck me after a while that a few potted plants in each courtyard were the only greenery that I saw.  Apparently the girls never left their own family courtyard and I'm not sure that the boys did either, so the compound began to feel like a prison to me.  I cannot imagine children growing up without ever going outside.

The Ma Family Compound is located inside the city walls of Pingyao and was more lavish although slightly smaller.

From this tower in the Ma Family Compound, you can see the walls of the city with the North Gate in the distance.  Next door a house is being renovated and you can make out the small size of the rooms around the outside of the courtyard.

In this town where virtually everyone is Chinese and no one speaks English (my guide is one of only five English speaking guides here), I found a store that sells those English language shirts that so mystify me.

And I still ask:  why?  You can't read the shirt and neither can anyone you know.  Seriously, no one in Pingyao, or most of China, speaks English and certainly no one can read English.  I am mystified.