Taiyuan and the Shanxi History Museum
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Taiyuan is the capital and the industrial heart of Shanxi Province.
The menu in the Jinjiang Inn Yingtze Park restaurant. Check out the English descriptions. (All three of the Jinjiang Inn hotels that I stayed in were clean, comfortable, friendly, and reasonably priced. Too bad they haven't yet set up an international bookings system. It's a nationwide chain of over 400.)
Residence neighborhoods off the glistening main streets aren't attractive. When the venerable hutongs that developed so nicely over centuries were replaced over a couple decades by willy-nilly development, this urban clutter is the result. Citizens complain about the income gap, which is growing ever more serious.
The Art Museum of Shanxi Province is housed in the old Taoist temple Chun Yang Gong. Take a look inside here.
The Shanxi Provincial Museum. More photos here.
Outside Taiyuan: the road to Pingyao
Welcome to the world's ugliest town, Jinzhong City. But the two-hour drive that takes you from Taiyuan to Pingyao is actually more unsightly; the road goes through large industrial developments and is bordered by strip malls like this but in worse condition, filthy and decrepit, their apparent desertion a question only because of the occasional truck or bike parked in front.
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