China's largest stainless steel sculpture, an image of three noble workers with exaggerated angular physiognomies, stands outside Taiyuan train station, and sets the tone for the main city street, Yingze Dajie , beyond. New and gleaming, somewhere between a boulevard and a freeway, it has eight lanes and a metal barrier down the middle to prevent you walking across anywhere except at the pedestrian crossing point just east of Wuyi Square and at traffic intersections. Outside the centre, Taiyuan is a dull industrial sprawl, but along Yingze Dajie the city tries its best to live up to its status as provincial capital, with a sprinkling of neon, flashy new buildings and some garish statuary.

About 1km west of the train station, down Yingze Dajie, past numerous hotels and restaurants, you'll find Wuyi Square , a concrete plaza marked by a huge sculpture of a man playing a flute, a deer and a woman with pneumatic breasts, that is lit up in fluorescent green at night. Just west of here, the City Museum (daily 8am-6pm; ¥10) is housed in a grand Ming temple complex, the Chunyanggong, that has seen better days. The charming complex of small, multi-storey buildings accessible by steep stairways off small courtyards, once a place to offer sacrifices to the Taoist deity Lu Dongbin, seems ill-suited to its present function of housing a motley collection of stuffed birds and animals. There's even a couple of desiccated human specimens pickled in formaldehyde, whose internal organs are kept in separate cases. Best are the rooms at the back, which contain some fine examples of Buddhist statuary in bronze and stone, some of which is Sui in origin, though mostly Ming or Qing. Many of the statues have donations of paper money stuffed into the cracks between the panes of glass in their display cases, suggesting a popular resurgence of the building's original function. The many images of warriors and of Guan Yu, god of war, hint at the martial preoccupations of the city's previous inhabitants.

A second section of the museum, housed in the Confucius Temple (daily 8am-5pm; ¥10) east of here off Jianshe Bei Lu, comprises mostly displays of photographs and relics concerning Shanxi's modern history, as well as a few Shang bronzes and a large collection of Buddhist sutras. However, the attractive Ming buildings are more engrossing than the exhibits themselves.

Northeast of Wuyi Square, reached along alleys that grow shabbier the farther you go, the Chongshan Si (Temple of Veneration of Benevolence; daily 8am-5pm; ¥10) is worth the fifteen-minute walk - look for the fortune-tellers who congregate outside. Though there's nothing extraordinary about the architecture, the main hall is well maintained and full of the paraphernalia of worship: offerings, painted sheets hanging from the pillars and prayer mats stitched together out of discarded packaging, a genuine contemporary folk art. The temple also contains a display of scrolls and books - sutras printed in the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, some in Tibetan, and a number of woodcut illustrations. Directly south of the temple, with an entrance at its southern end, the monastery complex that it was once attached to has been converted into workshops and warehouses. You can poke around, but most of the buildings are fairly dilapidated.

The focus for a wander around sparse Yingze Park is provided by a Ming-dynasty library (daily 8am-5pm; ¥10) south of the park entrance on Yingze Dajie. You can't go inside, but there is some nice eave decoration, including images of pandas. A tour of the city's ancient buildings is completed with a look at the two fifty-metre-tall pagodas of the Shuangta Si (Twin Pagoda Temple; daily 8am-5pm; ¥10), south of the train station off Shuangta Bei Lu. These were built by a monk called Fu Deng in the Ming dynasty, under the orders of the emperor, and today have become a symbol of the city. You can climb their thirteen storeys for a panoramic view of Taiyuan.