Once the banking capital of the Qing China, Pingyao was abandoned in favour of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Left behind the industrialization and other novel fads, it has preserved an almost unnatural museum-like feel to it. Painstakingly maintained nowadays, it offers an amazing plethora of sightseeing spots tucked away in unassuming nooks and corners. Most guidebooks merit the town only as a night-over destination, probably because the best sights are not so obvious and take time and patience to discover.
Stately rows of 19th- century shops and mansions line mostly pedestrianized streets. I became simply infatuated with the hand-carved eaves elaborately decorated with exquisite paintings and lanterns - a sort of Qing nouveau-riche chic, even if nouveau here refers to the dust-covered 1850s. Enter one of the vintage townhouses to see the understated luxury that surrounded the high and mighty financial tycoons of the yesteryear.
Or, you can choose to see it all from the above - on a walk along the 8-mile-long mint-condition city wall affording you a peek in people's yards or sweeping vistas looking like an antique painting. Every cobblestone on the wall wide enough for a squadron to march on bears an engraved seal of the maker - what a feat of industriousness! 
There are many more star attractions apart from the Banking Museum touted in most guidebooks as the only tourist draw. The supremely photogenic Taoist temple is still in a very active use. Right across the street, the Confucian temple is the proverbial oasis of tranquillity with cypress trees said to be 1,500 years old. Its flamboyantly ornate entrance gate is well worth admiring for a while. For a few coins, you are allowed to toll the bell or bang the ceremonial drum - all supposed to bring certain types of luck, depending on the number of strokes you make.
Pingyao also boasts a superbly restored traditional city hall - a whole executive compound in fact, complete with a gaol, dressed up attendants and stagings of Qing court hearings. Traditional theatrical performances in a beautifully decorated pavilion could be of great interest to a foreign tourist but are advertised only in Chinese. The town derives most of its tourist traffic domestically and the Chinese must probably think that Western tourist do not care for quaint old-fashioned Oriental towns that look straight from a 19-century travel magazine. What a fallacy!
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