Pingyao

This past weekend, all of the IES students were put on a weekend trip to a nearby-ish destination. I went to Pingyao, an overnight train ride east of Beijing. I had been told beforehand that Pingyao was very touristy, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but I was going with my closest friends and figured I could handle the kitsch for three days. Boy, was I ever wrong. We set out Thursday night from Beijing’s train station (which has been designed to look like Tibet’s Potala Palace…oh, China).

Day 1: I Could Have Done That in Two Hours
Our sleeper train arrived at about 7:30 in the morning. We got our stuff and disembarked, expecting a bus to take us to our destination. However, what awaited us were not buses but…large golf carts! Apparently reputable vehicles are not allowed in the streets of Old Town Pingyao, so we had to take an alternate form of transit through a gate in the old city wall.
Pingyao is about in the middle of Shanxi province (not to be confused with Shaanxi province, where the terracotta warriors are), two provinces west of Beijing. It was historically a very important part of China, used both as a strategic point for various armies and as a center of commerce (Pingyao itself) and religion (the Buddhist Wutai Mountain, where some of my classmates went). Now, though, it kind of sucks. The economic changes in China have sort of left Shanxi behind – its climate is dry, dusty, and frigid in the winter/scorching in the summer, so farming is difficult – and most of its income comes from its large but rapidly dwindling reserves of coal. The pollution wasn’t nearly as bad as it is in Beijing, but the Shanxi residents’ persistent attempts at farming make for awful erosion in an already parched ecosystem, so the constantly dusty air meant my lungs didn’t get the respite I’d hoped for. In addition, it was cold, cold, cold. I lived in my commemorative Yunnan Trip hoodie the entire time, as did many of my tourmates,* which prompted us to frequently make wistful comments like “I bet Xishuangbanna is really nice this time of year.”
“New” Pingyao looks like pretty much any other place in China, but the Old Town is beautiful, at least at 8 am. It reminded me of a less-restored Dali, but more typically Chinese: all the buildings had the slanted, tiled roofs, the intricately carved wooden doors, and the paintings of traditional Chinese people in traditional Chinese clothes. Instead of being painted over and re-carved, though, all of these buildings had been left more or less untouched on the outside, which I liked. It lent the town an air of authenticity that I would be clinging to desperately in a couple hours. As we drove to our hotel, I thought of towns in the American Old West – dusty and wooden.
Our hotel, like all hotels in the Old Town, was in a converted one-story courtyard house. There was a restaurant in the front, and behind that was a courtyard lined with rooms. I was rooming with Becca again, and much to our delight, we got a room with a kang bed. Invented during the Qing dynasty (the last one before the nationalists took over in the early 20^th century, and the dynasty in which Pingyao was a thriving commerce center), the kang is a huge, huge bed (ours was maybe ten feet wide) on top of what was traditionally a fire pit but is now electrically powered stuff. At any rate, the kang is very big and very warm. I immediately knew why this was necessary; as previously stated, Pingyao in late October is not a warm place.
After settling in, we headed out in a group to explore two of commercial Pingyao’s most important sites. Almost immediately, we were joined by other tour groups, all led by flag-wielding young women frantically barking into microphones. This was about when Pingyao’s charms started wearing off. Although the Old Town was a beautiful place to explore when it was relatively unpopulated, it was a different world entirely when mobbed by tourists and souvenir vendors. Given my distaste for touristiness of any kind, I started becoming more and more irritated.
Our first stop was the office of a bodyguard company. Merchants were frequently coming in and out of Pingyao during the Qing dynasty, carrying huge amounts of goods and money, so bodyguards were needed to protect the businessmen and their cargo. This office not only handled the business side of the bodyguard operation (we saw the offices where companies reconciled their accounts, for instance) but also trained the bodyguards – we went to a courtyard filled with rusty weapons and paintings of people practicing Chinese martial arts. Apparently the bodyguards were very skilled: their salary was extremely high, and the company was so confident in their talents that they promised merchants that, in the event a robbery were to occur, the company would compensate them for the loss of their goods and “punish” the slacker bodyguards.
Our next stop was China’s first bank, also in a giant courtyard complex. Although the bodyguard operations were very successful in protecting goods and money, the system was still pretty inefficient, and so some smart people in Pingyao devised a system in which promissory notes could be written in one office and delivered to a branch in another city, whereupon the promised amount of money would be given to the person indicated on the note (this is actually more like a Western Union office than the banks we know and love/hate today, but the Chinese banking system developed from it). Each branch had a special watermark and a secret code used to indicate the date, recipient, and amount of money, and to prevent forgery. Since the robbers couldn’t collect on checks bearing someone else’s name, robberies dropped dramatically. The banking system was historically interesting, but aside from the architecture (lovely, but the same as everywhere else in Pingyao) the buildings itself weren’t that great – just offices furnished with mannequins in Qing clothes.
After the bank, we were given free time to get our own lunch and wander around until the late afternoon. The moment we stepped outside, we were immediately surrounded by mobs of Chinese tourists wanting to take pictures of us. This was a step up from Yunnan, where we had only been stared at, not photographed. Jackie, Becca and I thought quickly and started demanding that people pay for their “special souvenir photos.”** People were very taken aback, because we (myself especially) were quite loud, sharp, and insistent about it. Once we started speaking Chinese, demanding money, and pointing at people who still had their cameras out, the photos stopped, except for a few people who began fishing their wallets out before our chaperones, a teacher and a 23-year-old office assistant who spoke perfect English, assured them that although we didn’t like being gawked at, we were just joking. I wonder how much we could have made from that – probably enough to buy lunch.
Or so I thought. In a group of six or so, I wandered around looking for a cheap place to eat, comparable to Beijing’s $1.50 restaurants. We went through all the main streets, but every restaurant we found had the same food and was empty and expensive. After a wild goose chase through the side streets of Pingyao, which, we found, were strictly residential, we resigned ourselves to eating at a pricey but very nice hostel, where we sampled the local delicacy of kao laolao: thick buckwheat noodles fried with meat and green onions. We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling, shopping, and exploring a relaxing and lovely Confucian temple, which provided a peaceful respite from the touristy Old Town. The star of the day, though, was Pingyao’s freshly made peanut brittle, produced as follows:
1: Take a stump.
2. Spread some shelled peanuts and honey on it.
3. Hit it until it’s flat and looks like peanut brittle.
4. Let it cool.
5. Sell each IES student a kilogram of it for about $3.
It is impossible to overstate how delicious this was, especially when it was warm. It seemed like the only authentically Shanxi thing I was likely to find (true) so I got some for myself and some to bring back to Zhang Ran.
We met up back in our guesthouse’s lobby to get our scripts for the next day’s performance. We were set to perform a traditional Chinese comedic lawyer dialogue (yes, really) for Chinese tourists the next day. The four speaking roles were immediately snapped up by fourth-year students looking to brown-nose the language pledge section of their grade (the fourth-year teacher was one of our chaperones), while the rest of us needed only to dress up and stand on the sidelines. This was fine by me; I just wanted to escape the experience with as much dignity as possible, and memorizing five pages of lines in Chinese wasn’t my idea of a fun night.
We had a bit more success with dinner that night. The same group of people from lunch found a hostel that advertised apple pie. Although nobody ended up ordering it, the food was a bit cheaper and the owners were very friendly. We also invited a thirtysomething Chinese appliance salesman who was in town on business to join us for dinner, so we chatted with him for a while and gave him an English name (Thomas) at his request. Apparently some of the less studious students among us found some semblance of nightlife in Pingyao, but I chose not to waste $30 on drinks in a dump of a town with no ambiance or post-sunset activities. Instead, the dinner crew retreated to our giant kang and played a very intense and long round of Uno. I have never heard such insults as when Amy played one “Draw Four” too many on poor Elise, who bore the brunt of her wrath the entire game.

Day 2: I Also Could Have Done That in the Same Two Hours
The morning started with the same unsatisfying breakfast as the first day: lukewarm porridge and cold buns. I ate and ate but never felt full, which surprisingly never happens to me with Chinese food.
Then we regrouped in the lobby for a lesson in Chinese paper-cutting. We weren’t expecting to make anything brilliant, but were a bit disappointed when we were all required to make butterflies. Then the guy who was teaching us did it wrong, so we ended up with two halves of a malformed butterfly instead of a whole malformed butterfly. At the end he confessed that it was his mom who made the beautiful paper cuttings he’d been trying to sell us the whole time.
We had free time until the afternoon, when we toured Pingyao’s old courthouse and jail. After walking through an interesting array of torture instruments, we watched some professionals in fake costumes put on a court dialogue similar to the one we would be performing, at which point we were ushered into a back room and shoved into ill-fitting polyester robes and hats that had covered I-don’t-even-want-to-know-how-many heads, then shoved back out to an exceptionally giggly band of tourists. I halfheartedly yelled at them to pay for the pictures they were taking, but this was ineffective, and there was no way I could complain about them taking pictures because this time, we actually were the tourist attraction.
We were put into position onstage and started the dialogue. The crowd was pretty rude – I overheard them saying snotty things about the speaking abilities of the students who had lines, which I shushed a couple times by hissing “How’s your English?” at them – and the play had all the flow of a pile of bricks. Some of the jollier students stayed behind when it was over to take pictures with the tourists, but I fled back to the changing room, threw the clothes off, and found a quiet corner to be alone in. All the staring had started to make me almost physically uncomfortable, and I wanted a few moments to myself. The whole experience was without a doubt the nadir of my time in China so far.
We had more free time for the rest of the night, so we were led up to the supermarket by another group. Thankfully, there was a nearby restaurant that had our coveted $1.50 bowls of noodle soup, so Becca and I filled up and called it an early night.

Day 3: The Deepest Pits of Smell
We awoke for a bus (a real bus this time) ride to the Qiao family mansion, which had been home to one of Shanxi’s most prosperous merchants, about an hour out of town. A couple people said they would have liked to stay in Pingyao, but most of us agreed that we’d seen all the town had to offer, and the group as a whole was happy to get out.
I hadn’t seen any of Shanxi’s countryside on the train ride in, since I’d slept the whole way there. As I looked out the window going to the mansion, I was struck by the poverty I saw. The highway was flanked on both sides by what seemed like miles after miles of auto repair shops, and what little arable land was behind them was used for cornfields irrigated with dirty, sludgy water. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a depressing place.
As we pulled up to the mansion, I let out an involuntary groan. The tour bus parking lot alone was, I kid you not, the size of the Northwestern campus. We shuffled out of the bus through countless rows of souvenir vendors, although I did stop for a grilled yam, one of my more beloved street foods, especially in the cold weather. The mansions themselves were about a twenty-minute walk from the bus lot and were infinitely worse than anything I’d seen in Pingyao; I could barely see the walls or hear our guide due to the overwhelming crush of tourists. The buildings were indeed beautiful (the complex was used to film Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern,” for those acquainted with the greatest hits of Chinese cinema) but impossible to appreciate among the masses of people. Tourist groups notwithstanding, my throat was also getting hoarse from yelling “TWO KUAI!” at people trying to take pictures of us, so I was happy to leave.
We then got back on the bus and went to the provincial capital of Taiyuan for lunch. Although the ride in showcased more depressing poverty, the city center of Taiyuan was surprisingly very nice. It was clean and modern, with a lovely town square in the center that reminded me of the courthouse square in Portland. We got a good, cheap lunch, complete with dumplings (although the restaurant didn’t have rice, mysteriously) and then toured a vinegar factory. A lot of people complained about this, but I actually really enjoyed it. Chinese vinegar is made from fermented sorghum, not grapes or apples or whatever is used in the Western world, and we came in close contact with the machines that cleaned the grains and the pots in various stages of fermentation. As the distilling process continued, the pots became smellier and smellier, and the rooms hotter and hotter. By the time we reached the final room, my eyes and nose burned from the stench. Nonetheless, I always like seeing how food is made, and the factory used pretty traditional methods to make their vinegar; it was sitting there and bubbling of its own accord in big clay pots just as it had been doing for hundreds of years (and some of it smelled like it had been sitting out for a hundred years, too).
After that we had three or so hours of free time before our train left, which most of the group used to watch a Chinese horror movie (in the movie theater, you could rent a private room). Even with Josie, the office worker, there to translate, the movie made little sense – it was something about a girl going through all the levels of hell in an abandoned dorm building, but the hells were really just a figment of her imagination created by her evil psychologist. About halfway through, Josie admitted that even she didn’t know what was going on, so we all just laughed about it.
At the Taiyuan train station, we met up with the group from Wutai Mountain, which included excellent people like Dan and Michael. We had a nondescript train ride back and got into Bei Wai this morning at about nine, at which time I had two jianbings for breakfast despite my roommate’s protests.
The entire time I’ve been here, I’ve been on this hunt for “real” China – something without the modernity of Beijing, but also without the fakeness that hordes of tourists bring. I sort of came to the realization on the Pingyao trip that “real” China doesn’t exist. Real Chinese people don’t wear conical hats and farm rice. They live in cities like Taiyuan and go on big group tours to places like Pingyao. Even if they do farm rice, they have satellite TV and wear jeans. Like it or not, China is modernizing rapidly, and the longer I spend looking for some semblance of ancient China, the more and more it will disappear and become Westernized. Considering some of the Shanxi toilets, this is a good thing. Really though, I was probably a little overzealous in expecting as much Chinese-ness as I did. Now that I’ve gotten this into my head, I feel like I’ll enjoy my remaining time here a little more.

Dumpling Tally: 139

*All of Yunnan Trip’s best ladies were back: Amy, Jackie, and Becca, plus a superb young woman named Elise whose father worked for the US Embassy. As a result, Elise has lived in excellent places like Denmark and Greece. None of the dudes were with us this time, though.

**Around town, there were various opportunities to pay and get your picture taken – with the monkey in costume, with the guy in Qing clothes, in the “traditional” bridal sedan, etc. – so I can’t pretend this was an original idea.