I’m off on another student trip, this time a weekend visit to the historic city of Pingyao in Shanxi province. I’ve always wanted to go and with spring finally hitting the North China Plain, it looks to be a lovely weekend.
Apart from the lovely architecture and a well-preserved set of city walls (Pingyao is one of the few cities in North China to have survived successive rounds of KMT, Japanese, and CCP attempts to remove walls and defensive structures), Pingyao also has many sites and artifacts left over from its days as a financial center in the Qing Dynasty. Last month I posted about an IHT story on “Pingyao as case study in financial crises,” the story itself was not great, but be sure to check out this insightful comment left by a fellow history buff who completed a school thesis on the Qing banking system.
It’s sounds perfet spending a weekend in Pingyao on such a traditional Chinese festival~