China Guide
The Yellow River
The old town
Opening time: Most museums 8am–6pm
Price: The inclusive ¥120 ticket covers nineteen of the city buildings, plus the walls; valid for 2 days
Just inside the arch of the West Gate on Xi Dajie are steps leading up to the Ming town walls (daily 8am–6.30pm), 12m high and crenellated, with a watchtower along every 50m of their six-kilometre length. You can walk all the way around them in two hours, and get a good view into some of the many courtyards inside the walls. It's also possible to climb the City Tower on central Ming Qing Jie, a charming little building that provides a fantastic rooftop view of the old city. The eave decoration includes colourful reliefs of fish and portly merchants, and guardian statues of Guanyin and Guandi face north and south, respectively.
At the western end of Dong Dajie, you can look around the Rishengchang (daily 9am–5pm), a bank established in 1824, the first in the country and one of the first places in the world where cheques were used. During the Qing, more than four hundred financial houses operated in Pingyao, handling over eighty million ounces of silver annually. After the Boxer Rebellion, Dowager Empress Cixi came here to ask for loans to pay the high indemnities demanded by the Eight Allied Forces. Soon after, the court defaulted, then abdicated, and the banks dried up. Hong Kong and Shanghai took over Pingyao's mantle, rendering the city an isolated backwater.
There are many, many other museums in town, but after visiting a few you'll find the exhibits are repetitive and nowhere near as interesting as the buildings themselves, which are probably much like your accommodation. Worthwhile exceptions include the Former County Yamen (daily 8am–6.30pm), a massive complex on Yamen Jie, which housed the town's administrative bureaucracy (the prisons were in use until the 1960s); the Former Residence of Lei Lütai (daily 8am–7pm), Rishengchang's founder; the ramshackle City God Temple on Chenghuang Miao Jie; and the large Confucian Temple, also on Chenghuang Miao Jie.