Pingyao
— — the walled town the Ming left intact.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Shanxi city held inside a six-kilometre rammed-earth wall built in 1370. Pingyao is the most complete Han Chinese walled town surviving in China: four streets, eight side streets, seventy-two alleys, and four thousand courtyard houses laid out as the Ming planners drew them. The first Chinese draft bank opened on its main street in 1823. Most of it still operates.
Pingyao, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Pingyao sits on the Fen River plain in central Shanxi province, about 90 kilometres south of Taiyuan and 600 kilometres southwest of Beijing. The walled town covers 2.25 square kilometres inside a six-kilometre circuit of rammed-earth walls faced in brick, built in 1370 under the Hongwu emperor and largely intact. UNESCO inscribed the Ancient City of Pingyao in 1997 as the most complete surviving Han Chinese county town of the Ming and Qing periods. Roughly 50,000 people still live within the walls.
The wall itself is the artefact. It rises about twelve metres above the moat, runs six kilometres around the town, and carries seventy-two watchtowers and 3,000 crenellations, a count chosen, the gazetteers say, to match Confucius's disciples and the worthy of his school. Inside the wall, four main streets, eight side streets, and seventy-two alleys hold roughly 4,000 surviving courtyard houses. The Confucian temple in the southeast quarter, dating in part to 1163, is older than the wall around it.
A single multi-site ticket covers the wall, the former Rishengchang Exchange Shop, the Qing-dynasty county yamen, the Confucian temple, and most of the courtyard merchant houses. Rishengchang, opened on West Avenue in 1823, was the first Chinese draft bank, a piaohao that let merchants move silver across the empire on paper, and its restored counting halls anchor the old commercial street. Two outlying temples, Shuanglin and Zhenguo, sit within a short drive and hold some of the finest surviving Tang and Song polychrome statuary in north China.