Taiyuan City, the capital of Shanxi Province, located in the middle reaches of the Yellow River in North China and is surrounded by hills in its west, north and east. It is an ancient city with over 2,400 years of history, and was called “Jinyang” in ancient times.
    With an area of 6,998 square kilometers, Taiyuan City lies in the valley basin of both mountains of the Mountain Taihang Ranges in east and Mountain Luliang in west. The Fenhe River, a key tributary of the Yellow River, runs through the territory of Taiyuan City with a long distance of 100 kilometers. It had been called “Splendid Taiyuan City” since ancient times.
    Taiyuan City is one of the super cities in China. At the end of 2004, the city had a population of 3.4138 million. Now it governs one city, six districts and three counties, with 51 subdistrict offices, 488 urban community resident comnfissions, 54 town- ships, 1030 rural resident commissions and 1794 villages.
    The streets in Taiyuan City are very canonical, where the north-to-south streets are called “road”, and the west-to-east “street”.
    Taiyuan City has continental climate in north temperate zone, no bitterly cold days in winter and no broiling hot days in summer, with a quite temperature difference between day and night and a long frost-free period and plenty of sunshine hours in a year. With a moderate temperature in summer, it is an agreeable place for people to visit and stay in summer.
    In the early founding of the People's Republic of China, Taiyuan was an industrial base. After more than 50 years, it has been built to possess a complete industrial system with various of industries as the pillars of energy, metallurgy, machinery and chemical, and other industries as textile, light industry, medicine, electronics, food, building materials, precise instruments, etc.