Shijiazhuang

About Shijiazhuang

Locals call Shijiazhuang the city that trains built. A century ago it was a modest village on the North China Plain, until the Beijing to Hankou railway and a new line west to Taiyuan crossed here in the early 1900s and turned it into a junction town. It grew so fast that it became the capital of Hebei in 1968, and today more than ten million people live in its wider administrative area.

The city itself is young and practical, but the countryside around it holds some of the oldest treasures in northern China. The Zhaozhou Bridge has carried travellers across the Xiao River for some 1,400 years, and the walled town of Zhengding, just north of the centre, is crowded with temples and ancient pagodas, including the great bronze Guanyin of Longxing Temple.

Start at the Hebei Museum for jade burial suits and Han-dynasty bronzes, then spend a day in Zhengding. Further out, the Taihang Mountains offer the cliff-hung temple halls of Cangyan Mountain, the stone village of Yujia and the gorges of Tuoliang.