Zhengzhou

At the hub of downtown Zhengzhou, the Erqi Pagoda (daily 8am-5pm; RMB5) is a seven-storey structure built to commemorate those who were killed in a Communist-led strike of rail workers in 1923 that was put down with great savagery by the warlord Wu Pei Fu. As the exhibition of photos inside is badly maintained and has no English captions, the pagoda is best thought of as a landmark. The streets that lead off it are modern, store-lined boulevards, the largest and most interesting being Erqi Lu and Renmin Lu , which lead north to the east-west Jinshui Lu , the most exclusive district. East of the huge and complex roundabout at the junction of Jinshui Lu and Renmin Lu (and a host of smaller streets) is a string of classy restaurants and hotels. Just on the west side of the roundabout, a statue of Mao, whose view of the gleaming, foreign-owned luxury monoliths on the east side is fortunately obscured by a flyover, stands outside the old city museum, now closed. Most taxi drivers will bring you here if you ask to go to the museum and don't specify where it is. A giant glass pyramid at the end of Jing Qi Lu, the new Henan Provincial Museum boasts a good collection of Shang-dynasty relics.

The old city to the east is cut through by the Shang city walls , rough earthen ramparts 10m high, originally built more than two thousand years ago, though frequently repaired since. They were made by constructing a wooden frame, filling it with earth, pounding it down, then removing the frame, a technique that is still used in domestic architecture. There is a path along the top, and you can walk for about 3km along the south and east sections; the west section has been largely destroyed by development. The south section is open to the street, and you can scramble up anywhere. You have to descend to cross Nan Dajie, then walk through an alleyway to pick up the path again, and repeat the process at Shangcheng Lu. Planted with trees, the walls are now used by the locals as a short cut and a park, and in the early evening the path is full of courting couples, kids who slide down the steep sides on metal trays, and old men who hang their cagebirds from the trees and sit around fires cooking sweet potatoes. Some people grow vegetables at the wall's base, others throw their rubbish here. Indeed, the charm of the wall comes from the way it has been incorporated by the inhabitants - it doesn't seem to occur to anyone to treat the walls as a historical monument.

A short walk from the eastern wall, on the north side of Shangcheng Lu, the Chenghuang Miao (Temple of the City God; daily 8am-4.30pm; RMB6) is worth a look around. The attendants regard visitors as an interruption in their day's knitting and usually keep the doors closed; you have to shout through the gap to gain admittance. Though the temple has the look of an abandoned warehouse (which it probably is), with tumbled trees and odd boxes lying around and, outrageously, a toilet built right next to the Main Hall, it retains a glimmer of its past glory in the roof decoration. Well-observed images of birds decorate the eaves of the first hall, underneath roof sculptures of dragons and phoenixes. The East Hall now contains a small art gallery; upstairs is one of those exhibitions of African body art that the Chinese seem so fascinated by. The interior of the Main Hall is modern, with a mural on three walls whose style owes much to 1950s socialist realism. In the centre a sculpture of a stern-looking Chenghuang, magisterial defender of city folk, in a judge's costume, sits flanked by two attendants.