We spent the day walking around Pingyao with our guide, Joan. Pingyao, both Joan and our guidebook told us, is one of the best preserved old towns in China, and, if you can ignore the profusion of souvenir stores and hotels and restaurants along the main streets, I suppose that it is, in that there are very few modern buildings within the old city walls. But well-preserved doesn't mean attractive... unless you are attracted (or at least not bothered) by grime and mess and people spitting, and children pissing in the street and the omnipresent reek of coal smoke!
Soooo... this is probably a good moment to give an interim answer to the key question to be posed about anywhere one visits: would you go there again? And for now, for me, the answer for China is no. I didn't much like Beijing as a city, Datong was objectively pretty ugly, and now I'm not exactly loving Pingyao. The Great Wall and the Temple of Heaven were impressive, and I'm glad I have seen them, but I'm generally not interested in seeing sights a second time. Landscapes such as the American West, the Alps, and the English country-side draw me back time and again, as do beautiful and/or fascinating cities such as Paris, London, or San Francisco. But I haven't yet seen any such beautiful landscapes or cities in China. Early days of course -- we are only a third of the way through -- so let's hope it gets better!
Back to Pingyao: the early bank was quite interesting, especially the map showing the network of branches across China... and further -- they even had a branch in London by the mid-19th Century. The Daoist temple was also amusing, because in contrast with the low-key, no-pressure approach of Buddhist temples it seemed much more, well, Chinese. Incense sticks were pressed into my hands, after lighting them I was led through a triple bow in front of the cult figure, and my fortune was read from a book (in Chinese and English) where I was invited to riffle the pages, choose one, and then was shown how that page contained a good fortune while the pages before and after did not. Nice bit of sleight of hand, whose effect was slightly diminished by being repeated... perhaps to show me that it wasn't chance? And then I was invited to sign a guestbook that listed next to each guest's name the amount they had donated :-).
The town god's temple was interesting, both because I hadn't realized that every town in China had a local god to protect it, and also because there was a small shrine to one side dedicated to the architect who had, during Ming times, designed most of the major town structures (wall, administrator's complex, etc.). A very pragmatic people, the Chinese.
And, at times, quite brutal. The town administrator's complex had three main functions: to store taxes, mete out justice, and house the administrator himself. There was a rather unpleasant display of corporal punishment tools and techniques, kindly divided into two sections -- one for normal crimes and one for those meriting the death penalty. They were, apparently, not content with simply killing the condemned... no, they had various ways of almost indefinitely prolonging agony (one panel proudly told us that they could inflict more than 3000 wounds with a knife before the prisoner succumbed). The jail was in use until the latter part of the 20th Century, although one hopes that punishment techniques had become more humane by that time. One last interesting thing: if judgement went against you in a non-capital case, soldiers would beat you with heavy sticks shaped like oars. If your relatives bribed the soldiers, they would beat you with the flat sides, if not, the edges. As said above, a very pragmatic people, the Chinese.
Lunch was good, dinner was better, and once again we went to bed early.
