Five hours by train southwest from Beijing, China but at least five years behind in progress, the capital of Hebei, SHIJIAZHUANG , is a major rail junction that you may find yourself passing through if you're heading south to the Yellow River. At the beginning of the century Shijiazhuang was hardly more than a village, but the building of the rail line made it an important junction town, and by the 1920s it had a population of ten thousand. Having industrialized rapidly, it's now an unglamorous, sprawling place that seems uncomfortable about its provincialism. A distinctive feature of its rather grey streets are large billboards with political slogans, in English as well as Chinese, such as "Build economy up by millions of people all of one mind." Home to China's largest pharmaceutical factory, it's known as a centre for medicine and is reputedly a good place to study traditional Chinese medicine.

For tourists, the grave of Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune and the city museum are worth a look, but the best sights are all out of town. The main reason to stopover in Shijiazhuang is to pick up a connection to Zhengding's Longxing Si , the Cangyan Shan Si and Zhaozhou Qiao . All are accessible by tourist minibuses which leave in the mornings from a park about 100m northeast of the train station.