Jìn

The Jìn culture is the people of the Shanxi plateau, the loess country east of the Yellow River's great bend, walled by the Taihang and Lüliang mountains. In the Spring and Autumn period it was the heartland of the state of Jin, whose partition into Han, Zhao and Wei in 403 BCE opened the Warring States era. The Xianbei Northern Wei later kept their early capital at Datong before ruling northern China.

Under the Ming, Shanxi took its present borders and became a military frontier facing the Mongol steppe, Datong among its chief Great Wall garrisons. Peace and border trade raised its merchants into the great Jin merchants of Ming and Qing, whose caravans carried tea and cloth to Mongolia, Russia and Central Asia and whose draft banks handled inter-provincial tax remittances.

The first of these banks, Rishengchang, opened at Pingyao in 1823. The people's language, Jin Chinese, alone among northern China's major speeches preserves the old entering tone.