Discover Datong
Datong old city streets and Drum Tower
大同古城与鼓楼
Inside the rebuilt walls the old city has been laid out as a grid of low grey-brick streets around a Ming drum tower, with temple quarters, courtyard hotels and night-lit lanes. Free to walk, and the base for every other sight in town.
The story
What makes this place special
The Drum Tower stands on Da Nan Jie, the old city's main north-south street, and is a Ming structure - a three-storey timber tower on a masonry base that once held the drums used to mark the city's hours and curfew. The streets around it were comprehensively rebuilt during Datong's old-city reconstruction programme of the late 2000s and 2010s, in which large areas of actual old housing were demolished and replaced with new buildings in Ming-Qing style. The Drum Tower itself is genuine; most of its surroundings are not.
What you’ll discover
A grid of broad, clean streets of grey-brick two-storey shopfronts with timber detailing, lit up at night, with the Drum Tower at the central crossing and the restored Huayan and Shanhua temple quarters at either end. Shops sell Shanxi vinegar, knife-cut noodles, paper-cuts and souvenirs. It is pleasant to walk and almost entirely new, which is the thing visitors are not told.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Walk it in the evening when it is lit; in daylight the uniformity of the new brickwork is hard to ignore.
- Eat here. Datong knife-cut noodles, youmian oat noodles and sliced donkey meat are regional specialities and the noodle shops off the main street are the real reason to be in these streets.
- Know that almost everything except the Drum Tower is a 2010s reconstruction. That does not make it bad, but it explains why nothing feels worn.
- Use the streets as the connector between Huayan Temple, the Nine Dragon Wall and Shanhua Temple - all three are a walk apart along this grid, and doing them on foot in one loop is the efficient plan.
- The side lanes off the main streets still hold some pre-reconstruction housing and are quieter and more interesting than the main axis.
When to come
Evening, after dark, when the lighting is on and the food streets are busy. Spring and autumn; the streets are wide and shadeless in summer, and wind-blasted in winter.
Getting around
Very good by Chinese old-town standards: streets are flat, newly paved, wide and largely traffic-free, so a wheelchair can cover the whole grid and a bad knee will have no difficulty beyond distance. Shops have single steps at their doors. The Drum Tower itself is steep internal stairs and cannot be climbed with a chair or a bad knee, but it is a building to look at rather than enter.
Worth knowing before you go
Much of what looks ancient here was built after 2008 under a sweeping reconstruction programme - knowing which buildings are genuinely Liao (Huayan, Shanhua) and which are new makes the walk far more interesting.
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