Shenyang

Nurhaci and Hong Taiji's palace, World Heritage alongside Beijing's. In the east compound ten pavilions flank the octagonal Dazheng Hall, seating the Eight Banner chiefs as they once sat. Start in that east yard, not the central axis, for a thinner crowd.

Nurhaci's tomb, on a wooded hill east of the city, which is why it also goes by Dongling. The approach climbs 108 stone steps, steep enough that coming down calls for more care than going up. The grounds are a park, good for half a day under the pines.

Hong Taiji's tomb, inside Beiling Park at the city's northern edge. From the south gate a lake and a long spirit way lie between you and the mound, more than twenty minutes on foot. On weekend mornings locals dance in groups and fly kites by the entrance.

Home of the warlord Zhang Zuolin and his son Zhang Xueliang. Behind the traditional courtyards stands the Western stone block called the Big Green Building, so two styles run on in one house. Fifteen minutes' walk from Mukden Palace, it pairs with it in a day.

It covers the Mukden Incident, set off by the 1931 rail blast at Liutiaohu, in a building cast as a desk calendar open at 18 September. Each year at 9:18 that morning air-raid sirens sound across the whole city. A passport is shown at the door.

A standing Mao fills the centre of the circle, a ring of sculpted crowds around his plinth. Several buildings round the square went up as banks and hotels under Japanese occupation. One of them, the old Yamato Hotel, still takes guests as the Liaoning Hotel.

Ethnic Koreans settled this street, so signs hang in Hangul and Chinese side by side. Cold-noodle houses, barbecue rooms and Korean grocers crowd a few blocks, and the lights stay on deep into the night. Many shops take orders in Korean.

A market street since the Qing, now closed to cars, running along the north side of Mukden Palace. Department stores mix with old shop buildings, and on winter evenings stalls down the middle sell candied hawthorn and roast sweet potato.

A museum kept inside an old foundry in Tiexi district. The casting floor where iron was poured and the giant machines stay where they stood, so the factory years that grew the city are there in metal. It lies apart from the central sights; take the metro.

A Tibetan Buddhist temple Hong Taiji completed in 1638, also called the Yellow Temple for its tiles. Half an hour is enough for the compact grounds, and with Xita Koreatown so close it slots into the same walk.

Dozens of steam locomotives line an old engine shed in southern Sujiatun. The star is the streamlined engine of the Asia Express, the South Manchuria Railway's 1930s flyer, and it is shut on Mondays, so plan another day.

A big new museum in Hunnan, famed for old painting and calligraphy such as the Tang scroll Court Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses. The rarest scrolls go up only for limited spells in rotation, and separate halls cover Liao dynasty ceramics and metalwork.

A Gothic church first built in 1878, burnt during the Boxer uprising in 1900 and rebuilt in 1912, its front crowned by a pair of spires. Red brick and grey towers look best under snow, and the forecourt fills with worshippers at Sunday Mass.