The charming ancient city of Pingyao—whose massive 14th-century defensive wall is one of the best preserved in China—dates back about 2,700 years. Architectural Digest

IT IS DAYBREAK IN PINGYAO. Along narrow dirt lanes and behind steep courtyard walls, one of the last vestiges of Old China awakens. A watermelon vendor bikes down Ming Dynasty streets, his rotund wares balanced precariously on his handlebars. In the gray shadows of the ancient crenellated city wall, rebuilt in 1370 and one of the few intact city walls left in China, an intrepid band of ladies is engaged in Chinese hip-hop aerobics, their frenetic whirl barely noticed by fellow early risers doing tai chi.

	A lacquerware shop in the heart of the city. Because cars are restricted, bicycles are a main source of transportation. Architectural Digest

This is not the China of the headlines: the China of six-lane ring roads, Trump-like shopping plazas and Olympian architectural aspirations executed by international gold-medal architects. But in a country that is reinventing itself more rapidly than any other in modern history, whisking away thousands of historic buildings in the process, the precarious survival of Pingyao, a rare repository of Ming and Qing vernacular architecture and urban aesthetics—much of it, sadly, in poor repair—may be the most novel development of all.

In a sense, the entire city is a living hieroglyphic. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1997, Pingyao was for a brief flicker in time the Wall Street of China, located midway between the imperial Xi'an and what is now Beijing. Travel across China's northern plains was treacherous, requiring armed escorts. So in the early 19th century Pingyao merchants savvily introduced paper remittances, liberating traders from carrying silver and gold. The city bustled with establishments like the Rishengchang Exchange Shop, now a museum. Wealth from trade had given rise to fortresslike manor complexes such as the 313-room Qiao family compound outside Pingyao, the setting for Zhang Yimou's acclaimed 1991 film Raise the Red Lantern. It is now a Gracelandesque tourist mecca, complete with souvenir stalls—an ironic fate for a residence that was viewed by Communists as an embarrassing symbol of capitalism and served as a local party school.

But history is fickle: The arrival of Western banking hastened Pingyao's decline. To walk the city's streets today, or, better yet, one of its more than 100 zigzagging lanes, is to be caught in suspended animation between the old and new China. Noodle men tend sidewalk woks, and dusty Lhasa apsos sun themselves on Qing bricks. In Pingyao, the sorry preservationist known as poverty conspired with a dry climate to embalm one of China's last largely unspoiled urban streetscapes.

Red laterns, ornamental friezes and long courtyards are traditional to siheyuan, or family residences, many of which have been converted into “folk hotels.” Architectural Digest
The Market Towers rises from the city center. Architectural Digest
Beyond the city walls is the Shuanglin Temple, known for its painted clay statues. Architectural Digest
Ming and Qing Dynasty houses crowd the old town. Architectural Digest

This is not the China of Six-lane ring roads, Trump-like shopping plazas and Olympian architectural aspirations

The city's location in Shanxi province, the epicenter of the country's coal industry and one of the earth's most polluted places, presents a compelling paradox: In the heart of darkness, where a scrim of gray deadens the soul and often obliterates the sun and moon, many of China's most significant buildings reside. The province, one of the country's poorest, is home to more pre-1300 structures than in all the rest of China. Among them is the East Hall of Foguang Monastery, a superb Tang Dynasty temple erected in 857 on Wutai Shan, a lush, mystical 2,000-vear-old cradle of Chinese Buddhism. Farther to the north lies the so-called Hanging Monastery, or Xuankongsi, a vertiginous feat of architectural engineering improbably attached to a sheer cliff face by plank rods and suspended bridges.

In Pingyao, the family residences, or siheyuan are architecturally distinctive, with steep roofs angled inward toward elongated courtyards. Their placement still echoes strict feudal mores: Peasant houses face onto internal side lanes, and gentry houses face wider streets. Of the city's 5,000 or so residences, about 450 are considered historically and architecturally significant, though many languish. It is virtually impossible to walk down Pingyao's narrow passageways without encountering the extraordinary—300-year-old timber doors with decoratively arranged studs indicating status; quotes from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book in faded calligraphy; stone wall niches smashed in the Cultural Revolution; a centuries-old coal-heated kang bed glimpsed through latticed windows.

Poverty conspired with a dry climate to embalm one of the country’s last largely unspoiled urban streetscape

Pingyao is said to resemble a tortoise, its head the southern gate. Despite modern intrusions, the plan remains basically true to Confucian doctrine, with the main north-south street terminating at city gates. The adage "left ritual, right civil" still holds: The west side is devoted to civic structures, the cast to ritual buildings like the Confucian Temple, rebuilt in 1163.

The challenges for historic preservation in Pingyao, however, are immense. Over the past decade dozens of courtyard residences have been converted into "folk hotels" geared toward newly affluent Chinese tourists. A new superhighway links Pingyao to Beijing via Taiyuan, and the Olympic torch will pass through the city. The threat of a "ye olde" inauthentic-feeling Pingyao increases with every passing month, with every new curio vendor from outside of town hawking phony daggers and your-name-written-on-a-grain-of-rice.

In the 1950s individual residences were converted into shared housing for up to eight families, resulting in unsightly concrete-block additions. Since then the population has ballooned to about 30,000. (Cars have largely been banned from the ancient city since the World Heritage listing.)

A typical shopping street in Pingyao, which was the center of China’s banking industry –and the site od the country’s first bank—in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Architectural Digest
Map of Pingyao Region. Architectural Digest
The dramatic Hanging Monastery, a five hour drive from Pingyao, was found about 1,400 years ago; it was most recently restored in the Qing Dynasty. Architectural Digest
The Nepalese-style Big White Pagoda is a symbol of nearby Wutai Shan. Architectural Digest

Shanix province is home to more pre-1300 structures than in all the rest of China.

A recent decision to move some people to new Pingyao, a freshly built satellite city outside the ancient walls, has triggered controversy. Many residents, especially younger ones, would gladly choose a new apartment with clean tap water, plumbing and access to automobiles over the constraints, however picturesque, of the ancient city. But those who live in the ancient city are, of course, its natural curators.

There is a growing concern that the intangible qualities that make Pingyao Pingyao—vendors selling noodles in the shape of cats' ears, for instance—may succumb to economic development and
"a tsunami of tourism," in the words of Jeff Morgan, the executive director of the Global Heritage Fund, a Palo Alto, California-based organization. The GHF recently cosponsored a conservation plan for Pingyao with Shanghai's Tongji University. The Chinese, notes Nancy Shao, director of the university's urban planning department, "have pride of big monuments, but urban conservation is just beginning."

Once, virtually every Chinese city had a wall. Pingyao guidebooks are fond of reciting the vital particulars—the 3,000 crenels, the 72 towers, the parapet walls measuring about 32 feet high. But in going-going-gone China, what lingers in the mind is not the details but the city's intimate embrace.

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