The ancient city is the birthplace of Chinese banking. It is also a test case for the country’s new-found interest in its rapidly vanishing heritage
China’s modern banking industry was born nearly 200 years ago in a small town in the middle of nowhere, a place where today ordinary people still live in the midst of extraordinary architectural splendour. Other Chinese cities have been more than happy to bury their history under skyscrapers but Pingyao, the original Chinese Wall Street and perhaps the best-preserved ancient city in China, chose not to.
No one quite knows why: maybe it was just too poor after the Pingyao banks went bust in the early 20th century along with the Qing dynasty that they bankrolled. Maybe – stranded more than 350 miles southwest of Beijing – it was too remote or just too unimportant to pave with parking lots. Yet now it is places such as Pingyao that are helping China rediscover the value of preserving what little is left of the country’s ancient buildings – not least because there is so much money to be made from them.
For decades China despised the old and idolised the new but when countries get rich, their citizens always wax nostalgic. Pingyao, which was declared a Unesco world heritage site in 1997, is a perfect vehicle for the burgeoning middle class’s new-found love of the past. The city was founded in the 14th century and has hundreds of Ming and Qing dynasty courtyards where people live much as they did in the time of emperors. Ask middle-aged residents how the city has changed since their childhoods and they often say “not much”: ask the same question in any other city in China and residents may struggle to point out anything that remains the same.
Travel agents happily promote Pingyao’s 6km of intact city wall, 12m tall and wide enough to take a horse and cart. But no dry statistic can capture what is really so special about the place – the fact that history is still alive in it. A young girl does her homework atop a stone wall in a courtyard virtually unchanged since China was feudal; a middle-aged man shows off the upstairs room where the maidens of his family, their feet bound, lived before marriage in a kind of Chinese purdah; the nonagenarian woman who sleeps on the same brick kang – a bed heated from inside by coal – that she has used for 50 years in the same Qing dynasty courtyard where she was married decades ago.
Asia has fewer than 10 intact ancient cities like Pingyao, according to the US-based Global Heritage Fund, which is helping to preserve life in the ancient city. China, perhaps the oldest continuous civilisation on earth, once had thousands of such cities. But only a handful remain and even those with a claim to architectural longevity – such as Lijiang in China’s far west Yunnan province – have been over-restored and over-commercialised to the point where they are more theme park than cultural relic.
But historic preservation experts say that China’s attitude to ancient architecture is not merely a case of greed colliding with pragmatism. Tearing down old buildings has a long pedigree in the middle kingdom: “China is different from Europe in terms of the way it looks at old buildings,” says Ruan Yisan, a professor of urban planning at Shanghai’s Tongji University and a consultant on the preservation of Pingyao. “Throughout history, whenever a new dynasty replaced an old one, everything built by the former dynasty would be destroyed and replaced by new buildings.”
But now all that is changing, says Wood. “They used to just pick the most iconic building [and preserve that] but now they realise the urban fabric also has historic value. They have moved to a more sophisticated assessment of historic artefacts.” Today’s cities are realising that profit lurks in those filthy, crumbling old structures – and in the living culture that exists within them.
Pingyao certainly thinks so. Wei Mingxi is the city’s Communist party secretary and probably the most powerful man in town – and his business cards bear the Unesco logo rather than that of the Communist party, showing how seriously he takes historic preservation. Pingyao’s motto is “to renew and beautify” but, says Wei, “That does not mean tearing down old things and building up new things, it means preserving the ancient city with a new creativity.”
The challenge of Pingyao is the challenge of authenticity. The real stuff sometimes is stinky or ugly or unkempt or unresolved. Like reality
- Vince Michael, Global Heritage Fund
The 1.5 million tourists who visit Pingyao each year, most of them mainland Chinese, can see the physical evidence of a simpler global financial system. They can also contemplate a banking industry built on trust (rather than collateral): for many of its earliest years, Rishengchangbank drafts would only be honoured if handwritten by the manager of the Pingyao head office himself. EveryRishengchang manager in the country needed to be able to spot a forgery. Today, the Communist party may have declared war on corruption but the Chinese media have accused the Pingyao local government of using a large part of the town’s tourism receipts to pay for lavish dinners for government officials.
“The challenge of Pingyao is the challenge of authenticity,” believes Vince Michael, executive director of the Global Heritage Fund. “One of the ways you can distinguish between Disneyland authenticity and real authenticity is that the real stuff sometimes is stinky or ugly or unkempt or unresolved. Like reality.” And like many of Pingyao’s loveliest courtyards.
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