Travel in Datong Ancient City, Experience Beauty Lasting for a Millennium

Snow scenery of Datong Ancient City [Photo via the Publicity Department of the CPC Datong Municipal Committee]

The ancient city wall of Datong, restored on the basis of the city pond built by Xu Da, a great general of the Ming Dynasty, is a 4A-level scenic spot in China and a provincial cultural relic protection unit in Shanxi Province. After restoration, the wall is 7,153 meters in length and almost a square in shape, with an area of about 3.5 square kilometers inside the city wall.

The traditional chessboard style layout is a distinctive urban feature of Datong Ancient City. Four streets towards the four gates of Datong Ancient City in four different directions have divided the city into four districts, and each district is divided into four blocks by sub-cross streets, and each block is then divided into a number of small blocks by two layers of cross streets.

Datong Ancient City [Photo via the Publicity Department of the CPC Datong Municipal Committee]

You can see on the city tower that there are four tall and lofty buildings in the middle of each four streets respectively and on the opposite of the four gates. At the intersection of the four streets in the center of the city, a wooden gateway combined with four decorated archways is erected, which is quite exquisite.

There are a large number of cultural relics and monuments in Datong Ancient City, and the scenic spots now open to the public, including Ancient City Wall, Huayan Temple, Guandi Temple, China Sculpture Museum, Liang Sicheng Memorial Hall, etc.

Datong, an ancient city with a long history, has both charming appearance and remarkable strength, which can be appreciated thoroughly and is also worth reading carefully.