A city never far from shifting frontiers,Taiyuan, or Jmyang as it was original- ly called, sits in a valley next to the Fen River in the invasion corridor between the barbarian lands to the north and the Chinese heartland around theYellow River to the south. As a result it has suffered even more than most Chinese cities from invaders and the strife that accompanies dynastic collapse. The Mongolian Huns invaded first in 200 BC, ousted when the Tobas, a nomadic Turkish people, swept south in the fourth century and established the Nortbern Wei dynasty. During the Tang dynasty, the city enjoyed a briefperi- od of prosperity as an important frontier town on the edges of Han Chinese control and the barbarian lands, before beconfing one of the major battlefields during the Five Dynasties (907-79), a period of strife following the Tang’s col- lapse. In 976 the expanding Song dynasty razed the city to the ground. In more recent history, the city was the site of one of the worst massacres 0f the Boxer Rebellion (see p.1183), when all the city’s foreign nfissionaries and their families were killed on the orders of the provincial governor. This was- n’t enough, though, to put otT the English, French and Russians, who over the next two decades stepped up their exploitation of the city’s mineral reserves begun at the end of the eighteenth century. A habit of playing host to warlike leaders continued when Taiyuan was governed byYan Xishan between 1912 and 1949. One of the Guonfindang’s fiercest warlords, he treated the city as a private empire. According to Carl Crow’s contemporaneous Handbook for China, Xishan’s city was a reform-minded place, well known for the suppres- sion of opium and its anti-foot-binding movement. His rule did not stop the city’s gradual development by foreign powers, however, and extensive c0al mines were constructed by the Japanese in 1940. Industrialization began in earnest after the Communist takeover and today it is the factories that domi- nate, relentlessly processing the region’s coal and nfinerai deposits.

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