Pingyao is listed by UNESCO as a world culture heritage. This old yet thriving town is 100 km (62 miles) south of Taiyuan and 616 km (383 miles) southwest of Beijing.

The great majority of Chinese cities have histories extending back hundreds and often thousands of years, but few have anything outside of a museum to show for it. Pingyao is an exception. This 2,700-year-old city had its heyday during the late Ming and Qing dynasties, and the walled city that survives today was largely built then, though a few earlier structures also survive. Chinese and overseas travelers come to this area to see some of the best-preserved traditional architecture in China: gray-brick courtyard homes (siheyuan), extravagant family mansions (one of which was the set for Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern), a Ming city wall, Daoist and Buddhist temples, and China's earliest commercial banks. Visitors also get to stay in restored courtyards, and sleep on a kang (heated brick bed), which many western visitors find to be too hard. In this case, western style hotels would be good alternatives.

City Wall of Pingyao. There are so many cities and towns in China that have city walls, but the present city wall of Pingyao is one of the best examples of Ming Dynasty City Wall. The city wall is 6.2 kilometers (3.85 miles) long, 10 meters (32.8 feet) high, 8-12 meters (26-32 feet) wide at the bottom and 3-6 meters (9-19 feet) wide on the top. The shape of the city looks like a tortoise, a Chinese traditional symbol of longevity. In Nov. 1986, the city was put into the World Heritage List by UNESCO. For every Sixty meters around the wall, a stick-out structure enables the soldiers to shoot at enemies climbing the wall, without exposing themselves. It is called rampart. There are total 72 ramparts on the wall.

Grand Courtyards of Qiao Family. 70 km from Pingyao, this is the best-known Shanxi's merchant-family mansion, for it is where Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern was filmed. Containing six large courtyards and 313 houses, the compound was constructed in 1755 by Qiao Guifa, the first member of the family to strike it rich selling tea and bean curd in Baotou, a city beyond the Great Wall. Returning to his hometown, he built his dream home, to which successive generations added until it reached its present size. It enjoys the title of "Folk Forbidden City".