Datong

Knight wrote that after several days in Guizhou, our hosts transported us by air to Shanxi Province.

His group visited Taiyuan and Datong before continuing to Beijing.

His account does not identify who paid for his international travel, lodging, meals, or other expenses, or which institution issued his individual invitation.

The CCP International Department's account identifies the organizers of the Guiyang forum but does not name Knight or disclose expenses provided to individual foreign participants.

They come here, they experience not only the megacities, such as, uh, Beijing and Shanghai, where they can see, uh, lots of modern buildings and also, uh, the modernity of the Chinese, uh, you know, megacities.

But they also go to many, uh, historical, uh, countryside or medium-sized cities, such as Datong, uh, such as Luoyang, such as, uh, you know, Xi'an, and the typically emerging cities, such as Chongqing, which theoretically is the most populous, uh, you know, megacity in China, have a population of, of over thirty, uh, million people.

So for foreign visitors, there are so many things, uh, for them to see and for them to explore.

And, um, you, you know, these kinds of message, messages is sent back or taken back to their home and passed to their friend and neighbor, and more and more people are coming to China.

And this ma- makes things very, very different.

Mm.

And we're also seeing international tourists move beyond big cities like Beijing and Shanghai to smaller cities like Luoyang and Datong, as you mentioned earlier, and also in, uh, Shantou and Chaozhou in southern China.

So what unique appeal do these lesser-known cities have for international visitors?

Right.

The other incident is in 1997 in Datong, Shangzi, which is near a military facility, a former soldier called Wei Guao.

This is an account published by a Chinese ufologist called Zhen Yiping, published around 2017.

He claimed a silvery disc crashed during a thunderstorm on a military compound.

He declared himself ruler and began to put together his dynasties.

The Tuoba's originated from around northern Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, and only three years after former Qin's defeat at this obscure Fei River in the Huai River Corridor in Anhui, Tuoba Gui founded his northern Wei Dynasty with its capital in modern-day Datong, Shanxi Province, then called Pingcheng.

Unlike the former Qin rulers, Taobao didn't attempt to carry out a rapid takeover of the north.

After filling most of the vacuum left behind by the sudden and unexpected fall of former Qin, he took his time and was very methodical.

so thoroughly had Grand Empress Dowager Feng stabilized Northern Wei economically, politically, and socially, by the time she died in 490 and after Emperor Xiaowen came into his majority, everything was all ready to be taken to the next level.

And where this emperor was concerned, his big picture thinking was to transform his dynasty into a Chinese-style centralized empire.

And to show that he was serious, in 493, after Luoyang had been rebuilt, Xiaowen removed the capital from Pingcheng, modern-day Datong, and set it up in one of the most important and culturally significant cities in Chinese history.

And if the nobles didn't like it, having to pick up and move to Luoyang, they grumbled even more when Chinese became the official court language and everyone at the imperial court started dressing in the Chinese fashion.

We did a sort of a road trip last summer, but it's a very short one.

We only traveled to Datong, which is about one day away.

One day on the road.

But we did stop at different stops along the way to travel to different smaller counties.

And then we made a circle.

Because Datong, we were traveling to Datong from Beijing.

We're sort of traveling a little bit of southward.

And then we're making that circle back to the north to another city called Zhangjiakou.