Pingyao, China: September 2004
Three coworkers and I took a weekend trip to Pingyao, a Chinese town made famous by the trading and banking systems that wealthy merchants in the area set up. The main attractions in Pingyao are the well-preserved city wall and the old merchants' houses, huge and indicative of Pingyao's past wealth. In fact, Pingyao has so many old merchants' houses that enterprising Chinese today have converted some of them into "hotels" complete with Ming and Qing-style rooms and beds. Although "Ming and Qing-style beds" translates into "really hard," it was interesting to get to stay in the same rooms that ancient Chinese families had once occuppied. From our hotel, we were able to rent bicycles and ride around the city, which turned really interesting when we found out, after renting the bikes, that the oldest member of our party didn't know how to ride one.
Probably the most famous of the area's houses is the one used to film the Chinese movie "Hang the Red Lanterns." If you haven't seen it, you should as it tells the story of a young, educated woman who is forced to become a rich merchant's concubine when her father dies and her family is unable to send her to school any longer. The entire movie takes place within the confines of their home, where the merchant has four concubines. It details the struggles between the women--and servants--for the affections of the master of the house and the power that came with gaining his favor as well as the consequences of falling out of his favor.
On this trip, I was finally able to take a sleeper car on a train, and that was a pretty cool experience since I had never done that before. Obviously, the people I was traveling with had better connections than I have for getting sleeper car tickets. (You can read about my first ticket buying fiasco in the Xian post.) We also had a really interesting experience on a separate one and a half hour train ride we took to get into Pingyao. As I've described before, you can only buy train tickets at the departure station, so we weren't able to purchase seats; it was standing room only. We pushed our way through the groups of people standing in the aisles as we looked for a good place to stand and finally arrived at a clear spot. The men sitting in the seats in front of us were obviously workers commuting home after a long morning's work (it is not uncommon for the Chinese to begin their days at 5:00 a.m.). They were toothless and chainsmoking and some of the friendliest people I've had the chance of randomly meeting in China. When they saw us standing there, they squished together and offered us the ends of their seats. In typical Chinese tradition, they greeted us by asking if we had eaten and offered us some of the ramen noodles they were eating out of paper bowls. Even though it was VERY difficult for all of us to communicate--they couldn't understand our foreign accents and we couldn't understand their Shaanxi Province dialects--they were very interested in talking to us and didn't think of it as frustrating at all. It became a round-table game where one turns to the next until someone can decipher what the others have said and make a reply and where every successful bit of conversation is punctuated by triumphant laughter. It felt like a slice of "real life' outside of the mad rush for modernization that is Beijing.
There's some pictures in the photo album at the top, and there's some Pingyao info at this website: www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/shanxi/pingyao/index.htm