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.