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Province of Kunming:

Basking 2000m above sea level in the fertile heart of the Yunnan plateau, KUNMING does its best to live up to its English title as the City of Eternal Spring. However, until recently it was considered a savage frontier settlement, and authorities began to realize the city's promise only when people exiled here during the Cultural Revolution refused offers to return home to eastern China, preferring Kunming's more relaxed life, better climate and friendlier inhabitants. Today, the city's immediate face is an ordinary blend of broad, monochrome main roads and glassy modern office blocks, but beneath this there's an air of satisfied well-being in the crowded restaurants, bustling streets and markets supplying year-round fresh produce. The people, too, are mellow enough to mix typically Chinese garrulousness with introspective pleasures, such as quietly greeting the day with a stiff hit of Yunnanese tobacco from fat, brass-bound bamboo pipes. There are other novelties - clean pavements enforced since 1987 by on-the-spot fines, and a low-profile but sizeable gay community - suggesting that Kunming's two million or so residents enjoy a quality of life above that of most urban Chinese.

Historically the domain of Yunnan's earliest inhabitants and first civilization, Kunming long profited from its position on the caravan roads through to Burma and Europe and was visited in the thirteenth century by Marco Polo, who found the locals of Yachi Fu (Duck Pond Town) using cowries for cash and enjoying their meat raw. Little of the city's wealth survived the 1856 Muslim rebellion, when most Buddhist sites in the capital were razed, or events some forty years later, when an uprising against working conditions on the Kunming-Haiphong rail line saw 300,000 labourers executed after France shipped in weapons to suppress the revolt. (The line, designed by the French so that they could tap Yunnan's mineral resources for their colonies in Indo-china, was only completed in 1911.) Twenty-five years later, war with Japan brought a flock of wealthy east-coast refugees to the city, whose money helped to establish Kunming as an industrial and manufacturing base for the wartime government in Chongqing. The allies provided essential support for this, importing materials along the Burma Road from British-held Burma, and, when that was lost to the Japanese, through the volunteer US-piloted Flying Tigers , who flew in supplies over the Himalayas from British bases in India. The city consolidated its position as a supply depot during the Vietnam War and subsequent border clashes, though during the Cultural Revolution buildings that missed the attentions of nineteenth-century vandals perished at the hands of the Red Guards. Virtually all that remained were cleared when the city centre was rebuilt in its current "modern" style to impress visitors attending the 1999 World Horticultural Expo . Survivals include a couple of temples, the long-established university and a Minorities' Institute set up in the 1950s to promote mutual understanding among Yunnan's multi-faceted population.

Since the mid-1980s, Kunming has also enjoyed snowballing tourism and foreign investment. Neighbouring nations such as Thailand trace their ancestries back to Yunnan and have proved particularly willing to channel funds into the capital. The city has become ever more developed and accessible as a result, an easy place to experience the bustle of a healthy Chinese city, with good food, warm summers and tolerably cool, bright winters. It's also just a short hop to temples and landscapes surrounding the sizeable lake, Dian Chi , and the celebrated Stone Forest .

The City
Kunming's public focus is the huge square outside the grandiose Workers' Cultural Hall at the Beijing Lu-Dongfeng Lu intersection, alive in the mornings with regimented crowds warming up on hip pivots and shuttlecock games. Later in the day it's somewhere to consult a fortune-teller, or receive a shoulder and back massage from the hard-fingered practitioners who pounce on passers-by; you might also catch weekend amateur theatre here, too. Rapidly being modernized, the city's true centre is west of here across the Panlong River , outside the modern Kunming Department Store at the Nanping Lu-Zhengyi Lu crossroads , a densely crowded shopping precinct packed with clothing and hi-fi stores. In getting here you'll pass beneath plenty of new high-rises, while the river itself, though black and oily, is at least nicely landscaped - the general impression is that, unlike many Chinese cities, some time, trouble and planning is behind these modernizations. The centre itself is an area of importance to Kunming's Hui population, and Shuncheng Jie - the last old street in the city, and an essential wander for as long as it survives - forms a Muslim quarter , full of wind-dried beef and mutton carcasses, pitta bread and raisin sellers, and huge woks of roasting coffee beans being earnestly stirred with shovels. Rising behind a supermarket one block north off Zhengyi Lu, Nancheng Qingzhen Si is the city's new mosque , its green dome and chevron-patterned minaret visible from afar and built on the site of an earlier Qing edifice.

Running west off Zhengyi Jie just past the mosque, Jingxing Jie leads into one of the more bizarre corners of the city, with Kunming's huge pet market convening daily in the streets connecting it with northerly, parallel Guanghua Jie. At least at weekends, this is no run-of-the-mill mix of kittens and grotesque goldfish: rare, multicoloured songbirds twitter and squawk in the wings, while furtive hawkers display geckos, monkey-like loris and other endangered oddities illegally "liberated" from Xishuangbanna's forests. There are plants here, too, along with antique and curio booths - this is somewhere to find dirt-cheap coins and Cultural Revolution mementoes, bamboo pipes and prayer rugs - from where backstreets continue up through to the city's northwest. Heading this way, it's worth pausing in the small grounds of Wen Miao (¥1.5), a vanished Confucian temple off the western end of Changchun Lu: there's an avenue of pines, an ancient pond and pavilion, and beds of bamboo, azaleas and potted palms - a quiet place where old men play chess and drink tea.