Up early -- we left the hotel at 7:30AM to catch the train to Pingyao. We probably should have travelled during the night, so as to have an extra day of sightseeing, but when we reviewed the travel agent's itinerary before the trip we didn't realize that "soft sleeper" was a class of travel that could be taken at any time of the day. However, since I have always enjoyed seeing a country from a train, I didn't mind much.
It took almost 8 hours to reach Pingyao, which is towards the southern end of Shanxi province (Datong being at the northern end). Now, Shanxi is big, but it isn't that big -- the train just wasn't that fast. Apparently the same journey can be done in 5 hours by car (but the train is much more comfortable). There is a growing network of high-speed rail lines in China, but they are spreading out from the coast and don't yet link most interior cities.
We went through some hilly and mountainous areas, but for the most part we crossed intensively farmed plains, dotted with grimy and dilapidated-looking villages and small towns. The uneven pace of modernization in China was very evident. In the countryside, except for frequent half-finished interstates (autoroutes / Autobahnen / motorways) there wasn't much sign of progress -- the villages looking like they hadn't changed since imperial times, and the small towns stuck in a gray, dispiriting mid-20th Century communist time warp. The few larger cities along the way, in contrast, seemed to be being developed at a breakneck pace, with forests of cranes throwing up modern buildings and roads in all directions. It is easy to understand why hundreds of millions of people have left the countryside to try their luck in the cities.
As to the land, it was thick flood-plain soil, primarily growing corn. We aren't quite sure what the Chinese do with it all, since it doesn't seem to play a large role in their cuisine as far as we can tell from eating in restaurants, but at least this year there won't be a shortage -- every field was full and green.
We arrived in Pingyao in the middle of the afternoon. Our Datong guide, Joan, had travelled with us (although in a different compartment), and she quickly identified our new driver. Before going to the hotel we visited the Shuanglin Buddhist monastery, which, like every temple and monastery we have seen so far seems to be devoid of monks and priests, and is now primarily being used as a storage place for wooden sculptures and friezes that are unfortunately falling apart. On the plus side there was a gaggle of art students making clay copies, some of them very good, as a way of learning sculpture and the Buddhist tradition in China. They had been there for a week, and perhaps one can hope that somewhere a seed was planted in an artistic temperament that will later lead to better care and maintenance of the country's religious heritage.
Pingyao is a small town of about 100,000, and its outskirts were like those of the small towns we had seen from the train -- dispiriting. Things perked up a little as we got closer to the old town in the center, which is surrounded by an impressive 7km long and 10m high Ming dynasty wall, and the old town itself seems to be being, for the most part, tastefully renovated, although the renovations don't yet seem to have penetrated more than a few steps off the main streets.
Our hotel, the Yide Guesthouse, was a renovated old village house with 18 rooms scattered around a few atmospheric courtyards -- a couple of categories lower than the hotels we had stayed in in Beijing and Datong, but charming and very clean. I took a nap while Lidia and Madeleine went for a short walk, then after a pleasant dinner in the hotel we went to bed early.
