Two traps, first
These are the two things that ruin Shanxi trips, and both are avoidable.
1. Yungang Grottoes is online-booking only. Since 1 January 2025 the on-site ticket counters have been abolished. There is no gate counter. Turn up without a booking and you do not get in. Book up to 7 days ahead through the official channel, real-name.
2. The Hanging Temple has a two-part ticket. ¥15 lets you look at it from across the river. A separate ¥100 ticket lets you climb onto it. People buy the ¥15, walk up, and discover they cannot go on. If you want to walk the boardwalk, buy both.
A second thought on that one: the boardwalk is narrow with low railings and dense crowds. If you dislike heights, the ¥15 view takes about ten minutes and is honestly the better purchase.
Pingyao
¥125 for the combined ticket, covering 22 sites inside the walls — the city wall itself, the Rishengchang exchange house, the County Government Office, the Confucian temple and more.
It is valid 72 hours from first use, which is the planning fact: Pingyao rewards two nights, not a day trip. Ticketed sites close at 17:30, or 18:30 in summer.
Buy online through the official WeChat platform, which is faster, or at any of the six gate offices, which take Alipay and WeChat.
Wear shoes you can walk cobblestones in — the wall circuit alone is 6 km.
### The courtyard houses nearby
- Wang Family Courtyard, about 35 km southwest, ¥55. A fortified hillside of courtyards, far larger than the Qiao compound and much less crowded. Allow three hours.
- Qiao Family Compound, about 40 km north, ¥115, famous as the set of *Raise the Red Lantern* — and heavily commercialised.
If you only do one, make it the Wang compound. It is cheaper, bigger and quieter.
Datong
- Yungang Grottoes — ¥145 in peak season (1 April – 31 October), ¥125 low season. UNESCO World Heritage, about 16 km west of the city. Caves 5, 6 and 12 are the highlights, and photography inside is restricted. Remember: book online, there is no counter.
- Hanging Temple — see above. About 4 km south of Hunyuan, roughly 65 km from Datong.
- Huayan Temple — ¥40–50 depending on source, and reportedly free during morning chanting from 06:00 to 07:30. The Liao-dynasty Mahavira Hall is one of the largest surviving timber Buddhist halls in China.
- Datong city wall — free to climb by day, ¥10 for the evening light show. It is a modern reconstruction of the Ming circuit, but a good lit evening walk.
Getting there
This is the easy part, and the reason to go.
Beijing North or Qinghe to Datong South takes about 1 hour 45 minutes on the fastest G trains, with roughly 43 services a day between 06:44 and 20:17. Datong to Taiyuan is about two hours, and Taiyuan is the usual gateway for Pingyao.
A clean three-to-four-day loop: Beijing → Datong (two nights) → Pingyao (two nights) → Xi'an or back to Beijing.
One honest gap
We could not find a reliable source on the best and worst months for Shanxi, so we are not asserting any. It is a continental climate with cold winters and hot summers; check a forecast rather than trusting a guess.