Halfway between Guangzhou and Zhuhai but slightly off to the west, JIANGMEN was formerly a pleasant town on the busy Jiangmen River, birthplace of the Ming poet Chen Baisha , and later dressed in cobbled streets and rows of nineteenth-century European-style mansions. Sadly, these have all but vanished, and the city has well and truly sold its soul to the ugliest side of urban development, retaining only its reputation for gymnastic excellence. You'll pass through if you're on the bus between Foshan and Zhuhai; keep your eyes peeled along the way for an English banner across the highway bizarrely proclaiming South China's "Furniture Castle" - a fifteen-kilometre stretch of wholesale warehouses displaying chairs, beds and tables of every possible shape, style and colour along the roadside.

While Jiangmen itself holds little appeal, the surrounding countryside might inspire you to stop off long enough to pick up a local minibus from beside the bus station on Jianshe Lu. There are a few very dilapidated Ming villages in the vicinity, some sporting two-storey towers built early this century by returning Overseas Chinese to parade their riches. About 15km southwest, via the town of XINHUI , flocks of cranes and waterfowl roost in the huge sprawl of a five-hundred-year-old fig tree in the middle of the Tianma River, known locally as Xiaoniao Tiantang, the Little Birds' Paradise . There are walkways around the tree, and paddle boats for rent. DUYUAN , 10km west of Jiangmen, sits at the bottom of Guifeng Shan , a nicely formalized mountain offering a day's pleasant hiking between temples, trees and waterfalls on the way up to the windswept Chishi Crag .