Pingyao ancient city.[Photo by Kok Mun How/For chinadaily.com.cn]

We started off from Pingyao, a well-maintained city that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Everything was as I expected, with ancient architecture and modern photography exhibited on the walls of very old structures.

We visited many ancient temples and sites with histories of more than thousands of years. One of the sites that left me feeling amazed was the Taosi relics site in Linfen city.

We were told that scientists and researchers just recently, in mid-2015, confirmed that the site was where Emperor Yao founded his empire, about 5,000 years ago.

Different classes of residential buildings, temples and pottery-making workshops have been found during excavations at the site.

The most eye-catching was a structure found to have been used at the time to mark the seasons. The structure consists of 13 pillars with 12 gaps between, and a viewing point to observe in which gap the sun rises, to define the 12 Chinese seasons of the year.

The site was said to be the center of the world at that time, thus it was where Yao built his empire, and relates to why China was named Zhong Guo, or center kingdom. The best thing about the Taosi relics site was that we were privileged to be among the first visitors as it is not yet fully open to the public.