Pingyao

Pingyao escaped demolition because it was too poor to modernise: its 1370 walls, four thousand courtyard houses and grid plan stayed in place. In 1823 the Rishengchang house invented the Chinese draft to spare merchants from convoying silver; some thirty piaohao banks followed and ran the empire’s financial flows from this street until the Qing fell. The town has been World Heritage since 1997.