An ancient, walled Chinese city opens its gates to prosperity

PINGYAO, China — Nearly three millennia ago, the fractious kingdoms battling over what would become China laid down a rigid architecture of defense. Palaces, cities and towns were ringed with walls, each a set height depending on the rank of its feudal lord.

While those barricades collapsed over time, the concept endured. Until the 1950s, walls of gray brick and brown earth surrounded many Chinese communities, even Beijing. No more. What invasion and internal strife didn't destroy, dizzying economic development and urban sprawl have.

Pingyao survives as a rare exception to this march of time. Its 650-year-old walls rise 35 feet high from the arid north China plain, enclosing a compact town of grid-like alleys, one-story shops and grand mansions seemingly little changed from previous eras.

In a China hurtling toward a superpowered destiny, Pingyao offers a rare glimpse into the sweep of one of the world's most enduring civilizations.

Inside its walls, artisans make traditional cloth shoes by hand. Swallows with forked tails dart under arched gateways. Fortune tellers and spirit mediums work from back-alley shacks, their services advertised by small signs or pennants.

Outside, the chaos of present-day China bustles in a charmless, soot-covered new town of potholed streets where commerce and small factories grind on.

Smell the money — and sewage

Pingyao (pronounced ping-yow) is all atmosphere. To climb the three-story pagoda in the center of town at first light and peer over the town is to be transported into an era when China set a world standard for a creative and productive society. The sloping, gray-tiled roofs look like a gently rolling sea frozen in place.

It's not a sterile re-creation of the past like Colonial Williamsburg. It's a place struggling to remain a viable community even as it becomes a tourist attraction. All sides of life are on display: lavish weddings, celebrated with the crack of fireworks, and solemn funerals, marked by outsized multicolored paper wreaths and mourners in white.

In the early morning, horse-drawn carts creak through the streets, their drivers stopping at homes to collect buckets of human waste. It's a sight once common throughout China but rare now. The lack of a modern sewage system gives Pingyao a sickly, slightly sweet odor.

But the most pervasive smell in Pingyao is money. The town was a prosperous center of banking and merchant houses 150 years ago. Their restored mansions and banks, filled with expensive ornate wood carvings and furniture distinctive to Shanxi province where Pingyao is located, bespeak an elegant and richer past.

Chinese tourists by the busload come to bask in this past of capitalist glory, reviled in Mao Zedong's times as unfair and corrupt. At the former Xie Tong Qing bank, tourists nudge for space to look at a dungeonlike basement vault, with ingots of silver and gold piled high behind its iron-barred door and window. "They're fake," the guide says, deflating their excitement.

Entrepreneurial Chinese, however, are finding real money in the town's revival. A few have moved into town to renovate the dilapidated mansions of defunct banking families, turning them into charming hotels and restaurants.

Pingyao's prosperity was fleeting. The banks, which lent at high interest and settled in silver and gold, collapsed early in the last century, outpaced by more efficient, modern lending institutions.

The transience of that moment is captured in the manor homes the rich built in the countryside outside town. The best known, the Qiao family mansion, was the setting of Zhang Yimou's Oscar-nominated "Raise the Red Lantern." It's now a gaudy tourist trap. Better is the Cao family manor. Partly restored but still dilapidated, its musty halls offer a romantic sample of rise and decline.

This waxing and waning of fortune makes Pingyao an apt vantage point for considering the China of today: once rich, suddenly poor and now striving to regain past glory.

Emblem of past

More lasting for Pingyao than the wealth has been the wall. A general built the first version 2,700 years ago on order from the Zhou king to fortify the area against attacks from tribes to the north. The current wall, nearly 4 miles in circumference, resembles the one erected during the Ming dynasty.

At the south gate that was once a main entrance to the city, the paving stones are rutted from centuries of travel by cart wheels. Fu Youyi, a pedicab driver with wispy, thinning gray hair who grew up and still lives 100 yards from the gate, points to them fondly as an another emblem of Pingyao's past.

Charles Hutzler is The Associated Press bureau chief for China.