Blogs from Shanxi, China, Asia - page 29

For the weekend, I visited the ancient city of Ping Yao with five other people. Ping Yao is a city enclosed by a city wall. It is use to be the center of all financial transaction. The city wall that surrounds the city protected the city from intruders and enemies that wanted to rob the city of its wealth. All of the ancient architecture is still perserved so you are able to see how the Chinese in the ancient days lived. A lot of the Kung Fu movies are filmed here. Ping Yao is a 5 hours train ride from Beijing. From Ping Yao, went travelled to Taiyuan which is the city next to Ping Yao. Taiyuan is famous for its twin Pagodas. These Pagodas are identical and stand 55 meters. We were actually able to ... read more

Pingyao was our favourite place in china so far..we arrived and walked past street vendors and markets and inside the city walls which is the only complete city wall in china. the difference from everywhere else we had been was amazing...it has all its old traditional architecture, no pollution as cars are not even allowed in the city and is full of winding streets leading to nowhere in particular full of laterns, pedicars and markets..we got to our hotel which was a traditional courtyard house and then explored..we walked around most of the wall..looking into the hutong and able to see the entire city, and to the bell tower ect.. and also to some of the museums there which were brilliant; a national postcard museum, national newspaper museum..great comedy value. there were poeple playing chess and ... read more

With not long left in China we started our bounty hunt. Instead of seeing the sights of Pingyao; a small chinese town of old, we spent a couple of days perusing the 'antiques' stalls. With all of them selling the same wares and hawkers haggling for prices five times of real value, we had to search well to find decent goods, after some perserverence and hard bargaining we came away with a decorative screen and a set of dragon dishes for a decent price.... read more

Jerry and I arrived in Pingyao 24 hours after leaving Guangshui! The overnight sleeper was fine and we spent 11 hours on the first train. We travelled hard sleeper. There are 10 compartments within one train carriage. Each compartment has 6 bunks and a small table with a thermos flask. Boiling water is available from a big urn at the end of each carriage. The compartments have no doors so there is no privacy and each bed has a thin sheet covered mattress, a doona and a pillow. The linen is not changed after each person uses it so you get a clean towel to spread over the pillow. We took our own pillow cases! We shared our compartment - we had a lower and middle bunk - with three young men and a mother ... read more

This entry records the later parts of our travel in Inner Mongolia and Shanxi. Our first stop in Shanxi Province was Datong (大同), once the capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty which was founded by the Turkic-speaking Tuoba people. Indeed, Datong has long been the border town between the normadic cultures of the Steppe and the agricultural one in central China, and thus it was once a strategic location. The Great Wall just passes north of Datong. The main attraction in Datong is the Yungang Caves (雲崗石窟), a site of huge Buddhist statues which dates back to the Northern Wei Dynasty. This means that the caves have a history of over 1500 years. We were greatly excited about seeing things that old, and had enjoyed our visit there. However, one unfortunate thing was that, not ... read more