If there's a province of unequaled contrasts in China, it must be Shanxi. On one hand, Shanxi Province is China's industrial heart, with over two-thirds of the energy China's devours each year being produced there, mostly from pollution-intensive coal.

Visitors crossing the province by train are treated to an often hauntingly beautiful, if ultimately monotonous, treeless brown landscape, shading into yellow in many spots where the Gobi desert encroaches, and lined with smokestacks spewing toxic-colored palls of smoke into the sometimes barely breathable air.

On the other hand, Shanxi is home to some of the best preserved historical sights in the entire country, so much so that it has been called "the museum province." Many hail from dynasties unrepresented anywhere else in China. Visitors to the province can also take in breathtaking vistas from holy mountains and visit a UNESCO world heritage site. Though pollution deters some visitors, Shanxi is taking big steps to brighten its smoggy skies. Nowadays, when breezes come through and skies turn blue, Shanxi becomes an incredibly rewarding place to visit.

Most visitors usually limit themselves to Datong's Yungang cave temples, a spectacular collection of Buddhist statuary crowding the hollows of over 1,000 caves, but they're missing out. Stepping foot into Pingyao, a Ming-era financial hub surrounded by walls over 6 meters high, is like going back in time, nearly the entire city's Ming-era glory has been preserved. Wutai Shan, another holy mountain in the northeast, offers ancient temples hidden in forests and jaw-dropping mountain scenery.

Tourists crossing the folds and fissures of the dry loess plain of northern Shanxi are often faced with a perplexing sight: multiple columns of smoke seeming to rise directly out of the ground in farmer's fields. These are evidence of cave dwellings, a traditional form of housing with over 2,000 years of history behind them, in which about 80 million Chinese currently reside. Built into the sides of hills terraced for agriculture, they are easy to make, cheap, naturally insulated and long-lasting. Amazingly, some of those extant today hail from the Tang dynasty. The chance to spot these hardy tributes to the old way of doing things is just one of the reasons visiting the province by rail (easily done from Beijing) is better than flying in.

True, Shanxi isn't exactly popular, but that should not deter you from putting the Hanging Temple or other Shanxi attractions on your itinerary. As any visitor quickly finds out, Shanxi is full of surprises.

 

Ever since Emperor Huang Di established Huaxia, the first nation on the Eurasian continent 5,000 years ago, Shanxi has been a strategically important bastion territory against northern tribes as well as dozens of fractured dynasties vying for power across China's vast landmass. For thousands of years after Huaxia took shape, Shanxi's people would migrate across Asia, it's civilization helping to shape societies across East Asia, including Japan.

As a result, Shanxi has always been a region fraught with conflict, but also served as the cradle of many of China's most successful dynasties. The Tang Dynasty, considered the golden age of Chinese civilization for its unprecedented wealth and the advent of Neo-Confucianism, had its origins in Taiyuan.

However, the region was always contested. The Later Jin, constantly harassed by the Khitan yet requiring their military aide, ceded a large section of northern China to their rivals, a move that would prove strategically ill-advised as it gave the Khitan a foothold within the Great Wall and the means to threaten China for the next 100 years.

Shanxi, the center of trade and banking, later became the richest province in Zhongyuan, or "Center China," evidence of which still exists in the well preserved city of Pingyao, ancient China's own Wall Street. Alas, these great riches were coveted by enemies both at home and abroad.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Japan, determined to control Shanxi's rich coal reserves, pummeled the poorly-armed Chinese with tank and artillery fire in the Battle of Taiyuan. In defense, the Eighth Route Armyled a series of successful guerrilla attacks, destroying planes and inflicting large numbers of casualties. NRA soldiers put up stiff resistance while holding the high ground on Wutai Shan, but the Japanese eventually prevailed to control much of the province.

Nowadays, coal is still just as important to Shanxi's economy. Unfortunately, lax regulations which made owning a coal-fired plant a de-facto license to print money, also caused massive environmental damage. Severe criticism also arose when it was found that CCP officials were involved in a slave labor scandal involving children, which earned China heaps of international criticism not to mention creating civil unrest within its own borders.

Fortunately, the government cracked down on both with scores of arrests and thousands of coal industry closures. After years of dirty development, it appears that, for Shanxi, the promise of bluer skies is finally becoming a reality.

 

Though Shanxi's climate is classified as continental monsoon, it is rather on the dry side. Winters are long, dry sunny and cold with temperatures averaging 0 °C, spring is dust storm season, while summer gets warm and humid and sees the majority of yearly rains, making early fall the best time to go.