Pingyao is what every walled city in China is measured against: a complete Ming-dynasty county town, walls and all, listed by UNESCO in 1997 together with two temple compounds outside the gates. Its fortune was made by the Shanxi merchants who invented China's first draft banks here in the 1820s and moved the empire's silver from courtyard counting rooms; its preservation is the accident of poverty that kept the modern city from building over the old one. Come for a night, stay on a kang bed in a courtyard inn, and let the tour groups drain away after five.
