Wǔ'ān

Wu'an lies in the Taihang foothills of southwestern Hebei, on the border with Shanxi. It was already a town of the Zhao state in the Warring States period and a county under the Han, long before the fourteenth century. The hills hold some of the richest iron ore in northern China, and the old furnace sites at Guzhen and nearby towns show that smelting went on here for centuries, while the villages below grew wheat, persimmons, walnuts and wild jujubes and raised the local Wu'an sheep. The Cishan site on its slopes holds traces of millet farmers who settled the foothills thousands of years earlier.