The Ancient City of Pingyao is a World Heritage Site near Taiyuan. Once a great financial center of China, it is noted for its preservation of many features of northern Han Chinese culture, architecture, and way of life during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

The Pingyao Ancient City lies 100 km away from Taiyuan City. The county seat is rich in valuable and various cultural relics and historic sites, which has brought reputation to this county among so many county towns in China.

The Pingyao Ancient City was built in the year of Hongwu 3nd (1370 AD), Ming Dynasty with a girth of 6.4km as the early built and the largest scale ancient cities well preserved in Shanxi Province. Though it had been repaired in Ming and Qing dynasty, it has kept the original look of the early Ming dynasty. The whole city takes a quadrate shape with walls of 12 meters high. The city walls were built by laying rocky bricks and have a moat of 4 meters deep and 4 meters wide surrounding them to strengthen the defense of the city. It is said that there are 3000 battlements and 72 watchtowers on the top of the walls according to the number of disciples and elitist students of Confucius.

The Pingyao Ancient City is one of the four ancient cities well preserved in China and it was evaluated as the most outstanding heritage in the world by UNESCO in December 3 rd, 1997. The heritage council of UNESCO reported that the Pingyao Ancient City was a masterpiece of the city architecture done by the Chinese Han nationality. The city has kept all the ethical characters and has displayed an unusual complete picture in the development of the histories of culture, society, economy and religion in China. We are very proud to recommend this city to you and look forward to your contact for visiting this beautiful place.

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