Just 40km north of Shantou on the banks of the Han River, CHAOZHOU is one of Guangdong's most culturally significant towns, yet manages to be overlooked by tourist itineraries and government projects alike - principally through having had its limelight stolen last century by its noisy southern sister. In response, Chaozhou has become staunchly traditional, proudly preserving the architecture, superstitions and local character which Shantou, a recent, foreign creation, never had, making it a far nicer place to spend some time.

Founded back in mythology, by the Ming dynasty Chaozhou had reached its zenith as a place of culture and refinement, and the originals of many of the town's monuments date back to this time. A spate of tragedies followed, however. After an anti-Manchu uprising in 1656, only Chaozhou's monks and their temples were spared the imperial wrath and it's said that the ashes of the hundred thousand slaughtered citizens formed several fair-sized hills. The town managed to recover somehow, but was brought down in the nineteenth century by famine and the Opium Wars, which culminated in Shantou's foundation. Half a million desperately impoverished locals fled Chaozhou and eastern Guangdong through the new port, many of them emigrating to European colonies all over Southeast Asia, where their descendants comprise a large proportion of Chinese communities in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Humiliatingly, Shantou's rising importance saw Chaozhou placed under its administration until becoming an independent municipality in 1983, and there's still real rivalry between the two.

For the visitor, Chaozhou is a splendid place. Among some of the most active and comfortably scaled street life in southern China, there are some fine historic monuments to tour, excellent shopping for local handicrafts , and a nostalgically dated small-town ambiance to soak up. Chinese speakers might also note that Chaozhou's language is related to Fujian's minnan dialect, radically different from both Mandarin and Cantonese, though both of these are widely understood.