Are we still in China?
Trip Start
May 28, 2006
1
86
162
Trip End
May 17, 2007
Pingyao,
China
Sunday, November 26, 2006
03 Great Chinglish
We only opened our mouths to say hello when it started. We were immediately quizzed as to what our Chinese birth signs were - through sign language we worked out that Jim's a Dragon and I'm a Rabbit - and then it progressed (painfully) from there. At one stage we thought he was telling us he'd played the guitar since the age of five - it turned out he's father to a 5 year old girl - his sign language was really quite impenetrable!
01 Typical Pingyao street
Taking my lead from the other guy in our cabin, I climbed onto the top bunk and tried to doze off - leaving Jim to fend of another hour of questions - only when he got up to use the loo, did Jim seize his opportunity and feign sleep in a desperate escape attempt. At one stage we didn't think he was going to let us continue our journey alone, but instead insist on taking us under his wing.
07 Eggs for sale
This touching, if slightly unnerving, concern for our welfare continued when we reached the provincial capital, Taiyuan, at 5:30am. We were planning to get to the bus station to catch a ride onto Pingyao - a really helpful English-speaking Chinese man from the train took us in a taxi to the station and refused to let us pay the fare. He deposited us and within minutes we were befriended by a young female doctor from Beijing who told us in Chinese / very broken English that she would help us buy tickets. 
02 Inside a typical building complex
As it turned out we waited over an hour for the ticket window to open, before we decided to sod the bus and share a taxi with her and another man to our destination. The driver's opening offer to take the two us had been 300 Yuan (about $40) - this dropped to 200 Yuan without us even asking, but we decided this was too much, so Liu Ling set to work. She negotiated a fare of 100 Yuan for the two of us. I think this is a tactic we may employ again as it turned out we were paying less per head than the other local passenger for the same journey! He signed to us that we were getting a very good deal.
16 Incense
After so much excitement we were surprised to see it was only 9am, so after checking into our gorgeous (but cheap) hotel we had breakfast and headed to our inviting Kang style traditional heated brick bed. When we got out to do some sightseeing we were able to appreciate why Pingyao is becoming increasingly popular with foreign tourists. Neither of us thought places like this still existed in modern China. It's a really atmospheric walled Ming era city with no neon and minimal ugly Communist style architecture (in the old city at least). The streets are lined with picturesque one or two storied buildings - many of them traditional shops with red lanterns hanging from the eaves.
18 Another tower
Believe it or not, Pingyao used to be the financial capital of China. In 1824 the first bank in the country was opened here - it was one of the first places in the world where cheques were used. At its peak, during the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911) there were more than 400 financial houses in the city - handling over 80 million onces of silver annually. All this changed when the Dowager Empress Cixi came to Pingyao to secure loans to pay reparations to the Allied Powers after the Boxer Rebellion. The court defaulted on the repayments and as a result the town effectively went bankrupt. Trade moved to Hong Kong and Shanghai; it's not all bad news though as it's probably for this very reason that the town's still intact and relatively unmodernised.
17 Kids
We spent the best part of two days exploring the city, a nearby temple and walking the walls to get a different perspective - it was very strange seeing pigs and some very grey looking sheep housed in people's backyards. Because we're here off season (and the weather's very cold!) we were practically the only tourists wandering the streets (although we did bump into John, Craig and Helen from Datong again), which helped make our stay even more special. 
