Guangzhou , once known to the Western world as Canton , leaves many people with the unfavourable impression that China dwells in relentless chaos and that the city is simply a bad caricature of Hong Kong. Guangzhou is indeed very much modern China pushed to the limits: the traffic and pollution are horrendous, bridges and crumbling flyovers which seemed ludicrously over-ambitious when built in the mid-1980s now groan under the weight of vehicles and shelter the homeless during wet weather, and the city seems not so much to be booming as blowing apart at the seams. Buffeted by the crowds, travellers tend to stay only long enough to tackle a couple of temples and museums before organizing a ticket out, hoping that the rest of the country will prove less overwhelming.

Solidly geared to business rather than tourism, it may seem in any case that Guangzhou has little to offer the casual visitor. In purely practical terms, however, while the city is expensive compared with some parts of China, it's considerably cheaper than Hong Kong - particularly in regard to shopping and onward travel . Airfares into China from Guangzhou are about half what you'd pay south of the border, allowing big savings even after you factor in transport from Hong Kong and a night's accommodation. You'll also find that, having mastered the initial shock, Guangzhou is a city you can learn to enjoy. Compared with Beijing's bureaucratic aloofness or the image-conscious populace of Shanghai, the city's inhabitants are immediately upfront, and pleasantly indifferent to foreign faces after two thousand years of contact with the outside world. They're also compulsively garrulous, turning Guangzhou's two famous obsessions - eating and business - into social occasions, and filling streets, restaurants and buildings with the alternately guttural and musical sounds of Yuehua , the rhythmic Cantonese language. Guangzhou has also traditionally been the first place where foreign influences have seeped into the country, often through returning Overseas Chinese, and this is where to watch for the latest fashions and to see how China will interpret alien styles. The sounds of techno, Canto-pop, and punk fill the night-clubs here, not karaoke and Chinese folk tunes, and youths in leather and blue-tinted, wraparound sunglasses ride Japanese Harley-Davidson clones. Although the city lacks any great sights, you can easily ditch its Western veneer by wandering into the maze of flagstoned back lanes, in search of monuments and busy markets hidden away from casual observers.

The City

Depending on your mood, Guangzhou can be compulsively energetic or disturbingly intense - either way, not somewhere to come for peace and relaxation. Commerce is its lifeblood, a religion inspiring everybody from train station pickpockets to company directors and, with this in mind, it's one of the most vibrant cities in China. At times there doesn't seem to be enough room for all the wheeling and dealing: markets completely block alleyways, and the need to set up shop wherever there's space has caused some strange bedfellows - where else would you find a store selling mining drills and laser theodolites sandwiched between a florist and a nightclub? Yet there's another, more community-orientated side to the city, rarely farther away than the nearest alley. With a fair sense of direction, the best way to get to grips with Guangzhou is to make your way around on foot, taking every available back lane. It can be a real surprise after the main streets to come across older residential districts with their flagstones, tiny collectors' markets, laundry strung on lines between buildings, and homes screened away behind wooden doors with heavy swing gates.