Datong

Once a blossoming frontier town on the cusp of the Great Wall between China and Inner Mongolia, the Datong of today is now clinging tenuously to its ancient roots. At its heart, a haphazard conglomeration of slanting tiled roofs and hutong houses dominate, crumbling at points, reconstructed at others, oozing Ming authenticity here and troubled by botched rebuilding projects there. Just on the peripheries of town, however, sit some of the most coveted cultural attractions in the People’s Republic as a whole: The Hanging Monastery, the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda, the UNESCO-attested Yungang Grottoes where countless Buddhist statues belie the artistic traditions of millennia gone by – all of which are best visited in the company of a knowledgeable Datong tour guide. Unfortunately, Datong is also a prime example of an industrial boomtown of the capitalist age. A city of bustling blue collar neighbourhoods, the air here is suffocated with coal pollution and the belching fumes of sprawling industrial complexes, making Datong at once enticing and unpalatable, interesting and irksome.