The Hidden Cities of China's Past

Far from the Beijing Olympics and far from the Sichuan earthquake is another China -- one that hasn't been bulldonzed and rebuilt in anticipation of the Games and one that won't be transformed by their glamour. It's a China that is long past but glimpsed in three remote and astonishingly well-preserved historic cities.

For three decades China has been systematically bulldozing its heritage. Tall buildings,often faced in white lavatory tile, and glitzy shopping malls have replaced much of the narrow hutongs of Beijing,the mud walls from Silk Road days of Xian, and teh scenic canal houses of Suzhou.Kunming,capital of Yunnan province, has leveled narrow,winding streets, tile-roofed shops and centuries-old dwellings and put up featureless hight-rises in rectangular grids.

The Old City of LiJiang,also in Yunnan,may be China's best-known history city.But fame has extracted a price: The ethnic Naxi people who give Lijiang its character have been largely overwhelmed by Han Chinese hotel developers, tour operators and trinket sellers. We headed for three other historic sites -- Pingyao, in north-central China, which has been designated a Unesco World Heritage site; Fenghuang in Hunan province; and the old German quarter of Qingdao on the northern coast. While these cities get very few visitors from overseas, they are popular domestic vacation spots, and their pristine condition owes much to Chinese tourism.

PINGYAO

This town is almost perfectly preserved after 2,700 years.The road here starts in Taiyuan, the capital of impoverished Shanxi province,250 mules southwest of Beijing. After 90 minutes of monotonous driving west through langscape that is unrelievedly flat,gray and parched, ancient city walls suddenly loom, like a mirage.
 
  Over a restaurant dinner of local specialties, including beef stomach and noodles made from green-bean flour, Zhou Yujing Pingyao's 55-year-old now-retired director of tourism, reflected on how the town has managed to aviod the redevelopment so many other historic Chinese communities have gone through. It's was thanks to poverty that they didn't rebuild the city, Mr.Zhou says.'Our poverty proved to be a blessing in diguise.'

But what makes Pingyao worth seeing is its long history of wealth.From the late 1700s to the early 1900s, it was China's banking cneter, when affluent merchants created a sophisticated economic infrastructure for moving large sums of money;coded calligraphy on bank checks deterred counterfiters. In the 18th century, bank owners and merchants competed to flaunt their wealth, building houses with dozens of rooms opening onto multiple courtyards. Particularly impressive is the Rishengchang Financial House Museum, a courtyard home with more than 100 rooms and much of the original furniture. Mr. Zhou says by the 19th century, China's banks numbered roughly50; 40 were based in Shanxi, and half of those had headquarters in Pingyao.

The 20th century brought civil turmoil and then the Japanese invasion, and China's business activity moved to the east coast. The old courtyard houses fell into disrepair along eith Pingyao's banking industry.Mr.Zhou says a revival started only this decade with the mass domestic tourism during China's national vacation periods known as Golden Weeks.

Entreoreneurs have turned some of the most beautiful courtyard houses into hotels, preserving the architecture and introducing modern amenities such as air-conditioning and WiFi.Even so, as testimony to how remote and overlooked Shanxi province remains,the nicest of these hotels charges only about $50 a night, and $6 buys a lavish dinner.

A walk along the brick-paved streets of Pingyao, where almost 4,000 of the old courtyard dwellings have been preserved and 400 are considered of architerctural merit, it more akin to time travel than to a museum visit. Some of the city's major banking houses have been restored and now are open to visitors, with placards explaining what functions transpired in each room. The entire city is enclosed by a wall,dating back to the 14th century, that runs an unbroken four miles around the perimeter; outside is bleak, barren countryside.Visitors can walk the circumference on a brick road wide enough to caaommodate two of the horse-drawn carriages that used to make the trip around. People climb the wall's selaborate gatesand towers to get a view.

A visitor might not see more than a couple of Western faces, but there are throngs of Chinese tourists descending from the buses parkes outside the old city. That's a downside to Pingyao:the sojourn back in time is marred by guides shouting into bullhorns and by tourist shops selling T-shirts and the local peanut brittle.The lack of English may present a problem,too: Of more than 300 guides, only five are English-speaking.Hu Shengfeng, one of the five,explains that students who leave Shanxi province to attend college and learn English tend not to teturn.

FENGHUANG

  In south-central China, Hunan province -- home of fiery food, birthplace of MaoZedong -- offers something many tourists find irresistible: the thrill of discovery, in an age when everything seems already to have been discovered. Hunan's old city of Fenghuang isn't even mentioned in some popular China guidebooks. But it is reason to make the trip to China -- and even more so if paired with a visit to the national Wulingyuan Scenic Area,150 mules away.

Wulingyuan is China's Yosemite Valley, with soaring mountain peaks and 3,000 sandstone spires rising spectacularly from the valley floor. Trails along the creek at the bottom of the gorge take hikers past waterfalls and lush vegetation and offer bottom-up views of rock formations and steep cliffs; trails carved on the cliffsides thread their way around the spires,offering heart-stopping vistas of the drop to the valley floor. Moving about on top via free shuttle buses, you can choose from several hiking routes or break for lunch at rustic peasant farmhouses.As at Pingyao,hundreds of Chinese tourists -- and guides with their flags and ubiquitous bullhorns -- detract from the nature experience, but it's a marval nonetheless.

One of the many taxis that hang out in the Wulingyuan parking lots will make the trip to the city Fenghuang. It's a beautiful four-hour ride through terraced rice fields.Initially,Fenghuang may seem like another charcterless, somewhat grimy Chinese city. But for a couple of mules along the Tuo River, which cuts through the heart of the city,Fenghuang moves back to previous centuries. A jumble of flagstone-paved streets go past stone houses and temples dating back to the 17th century. Wooden houses perched on stilts lean precariously over the river.At one end of a covered bridge is a food market, which opens in the evening to sell dozens of grilled-to-order meats,fish and vegetables.Boatmen offer rides up the river in samll, ancient-looking wooden craft.Red lanterns hang everywhere,At night vendors sell candles,each anchored to a base that will float in the river.

The old section is a functioning city populated mainly by the Miao ethnic minority. Most of the centuries-old houses are occupied; some have converted their ground floors to restaurants. Women wash clothes at the riverbanks; almost no one speaks English. But just a few English words, from a bellhop at the Government Hotel, were enough to get us into a taxi to visit Hongxing, a village half an hour away, where half the 1,000 residents still live in original houses with tile roofs and dried-mud walls, surrounded by rice fields.It's as picturesque as China gets.

QINGDAO

Old China and the Olympic Games will meet in this sprawling city on the Yellow Sea. The site of Olympic sailing events,Qingdao has made news recently as thousands of soldiers have been mobilized to clear out the bright-green algae invading the water.

Pronounced 'chin-dao'--and, in its old spelling, recognizable as the birthplace of the famous Tsingtao beer -- Qingdao is a rarity in China: a huge metropolis(population, eight million)that is beautiful and actually livable.Mile after mile of oceanfront presents parks, beaches, promenades and old mansions;the restaurants are famous throughout China for their seafood. Beijing's polluted air and blaring auto horns will become a distant memory for sailing fans who venture here during the Games.

The old German quarter gives Qingdao much of its charm.Germany occupied Qingdao from 1897 until World War I,when Japan seized the city.The German occupiers left wn indelible mark:cobblestone streets shaded by flowering European trees,European-style housing with red-tile roofs, and monumental edifices such as St.Michael's Catholic Church and the Governor's Mansion.Qingdao has preserved all this, and its residents continue to embrace a European lifestyle.Streets surrounding the German quarter are filled with cafes and boutiques.New buildings adhere so strictly to the German architectural style that it is often hard to tell the old and new apart.

Qingdao is walking city.It is also an eating city: At high-end seafood restaurants with 'live' menus, patrons walk through vast displays of fish, shellfish and vegetables in the company of a waitress and pick what they want.Event the most expensive seafood dinner at the best restaurant will cost no more than $15 a person.

As an added bonus, there's the holy mountain of Laosahan.Most of China's holy mountains are isolated,but Laoshan is less than an hour's driver from the center of Qingdao.It's a serene place filled with Taoist temples, hiking trails and waterfalls -- a relaxing day in a nation where that word rarely applies.