A victim of an earlier Asian financial crisis, the city of Pingyao is an ominous warning of what may become of Hong Kong if it loses its title of China's premier financial centre.
Pingyao is now a forgotten city deep in the heart of the Shanxi countryside, but behind its vast walls once flourished China's greatest bankers and merchant houses.
Somehow its grand battlement walls and mansions have survived invasion and revolutions intact and this year UNESCO declared it a world heritage site. Locals boast of how its merchant bankers helped China pay the reparations when the Qing dynasty was defeated during the Opium Wars.
After the Boxer Rebellion Empress Dowager Cixi came here seeking help to pay the eight powers the massive indemnities placed on China. 'She came and tasted my family's yellow wine,' boasted Guo Huairen, sixth generation descendant of the founder of a shop on the main street. 'Taste it! It is still good.' She was also able to borrow masses of silver - about 200,000 taels of silver from one family alone, the Qiao clan. Their sprawling complex of courtyards lies half an hour's drive away, just one of the many capitalist clans which flourished in Shanxi's heyday.
The Qiao family mansion, Qiao Jia Da Yuan, is now more famous as the setting for the Zhang Yimou film Raise the Red Lantern, which portrays the cruel rivalries of wives and concubines imprisoned within its claustrophobic walls.
While Zhang's successful film showed how the corrupt rich could exploit the weak in pre-liberation days, Shanxi province is now doing everything to overturn that image and trumpet their achievements.
'Capitalists? Capitalists?' said Pingyao's head of tourism when I ran into him in the museum of its first and biggest bank. 'Oh, you mean private entrepreneurs. We don't call them capitalists anymore.' For 30 years Shanxi took a leading role in the Communist Party's drive to wipe out capitalism and extol Dazhai, a mountainous Shanxi commune where the poor peasant class transformed nature by the honest sweat of their brow.